Thirty years

Sometimes being nine was hard
But when I saw your beige van—
My chariot—in our driveway
Nine was right where I wanted to be
And everything about you
Was just right:
Your white shoes
Your white belt
Your Old Spice
Your pink shirt
Your Frank Sinatra eight tracks

But most of all
It was your way of announcing
My entrance:
“This is my granddaughter”
With an implied
With whom I am well pleased
And your way of proclaiming,
Affirming my desires:
“Give her whatever she wants”
She deserves whatever she wants

You were the one
Who thought I was perfect
And deserved donuts for dinner
And to stay up past Johnny Carson
And to dip my French fries
In whatever I wanted
“You’re Number One,”
You would whisper
“No one else is.
No one else could be.”
It was just you and just me.

A few years ago
Thirty-nine was really, really hard
And I mourned the possibility
Of your van in my driveway
And felt deeply, truly sorry
For myself
But then I ruined the moment
By looking at your picture
And then looking in the mirror
And seeing the lines of holy obligation
Running over your face
And then mine
“This is my granddaughter,”
You whispered.
Now get up off the floor and start acting like it.

This was in response to readwritepoem's prompt #117.

Perhaps

Perhaps it is just
A remembering
Of our birth
The warmth of dark waters
Their tides pushing out and drawing back
And then the breach
The departure
The severing
From what tethered us
To the womb
Or to the earth

Perhaps the folly
Is the focus
On the when
The chronic need for timepieces
The turning back and forth of anxious pages
The distraction
The cleaving
To the notion that
Death comes later
And birth was then

Readwritepoem prompt 116 gave us this compelling image by h. koppdelaney to work with.

A little haiku about the hubby's latest creation...

Sculpting the Metal's Edge

What Is

Last week's readwritepoem prompt gave me a lot to think about, as it asked me to consider what I believe and what I do not believe. It was quite an experience for me, and I think I will actually have several short poems as a result of the exercises. Here is the first:

I am the Little Spokane
Forced to flow and push
My cold waters against
Unforgiving shoulders of land
And He is the colorless Winter Grass
Who consents to the flattening
Of snow and mud and lays
Himself down alongside me
And remains.
And rustles hoarsely in
My watery ears:
I know, I know…

Wound

Hello to anybody who might still be popping in to this blog to check for new poems. I've had a lot on my plate lately, and this blog has been a bit lost in the shuffle. However, I am remembering that the more I write, the better I feel...So, I hope to have much more to offer in the near future!

The wound loves the knife
More than stitches
One made her
The others saved her
Her affections are
Torn but then
She can’t deny
Her origins
Or the reason
She was born

Stripping Down

This week's readwritepoem prompt asked us to be inspired by the idea of "mental wallpaper." I found myself thinking about the wallpaper in our first house.

Our first house was papered inside,
A cavernous nightmare
Of interior design disasters
Every surface—walls and ceilings,
Cupboard doors—covered
In at least three layers
Of other people’s perceptions
Of pretty and cozy

Nothing about that paper was right
The stems and vines
Of the floral patterns
Seemed to fight for release
While the little farmhouse prints
In the kitchen seemed
Too small and suspicious
Of each other

And I worked like hell to rid myself
Of that paper,
Like a madwoman from a
Charlotte Perkins Gillman story,
I hunched and sprayed and scraped
And even gouged
The very walls I sought to rescue
From those layers of ugly

Oh, I know that the paper was once
Someone’s vision of home
But you can’t paper yourself
Into domestic tranquility
After a while, the paper turns
Into a sponge
Absorbing all the nasty smells
Of your past

I’d like to say I learned my lesson:
I’ve never papered over
A wall, never over committed
To a pattern but still
I’ve had to spray and scrape
And rip my way clear
When I found myself knee-deep
In my own domestic mistakes

Uprooted

This week's readwritepoem gave us this great photo by Sepulture to ponder. I loved this photo, and fussed over this poem for over a week. I'm still not happy with it, but here's what I have so far...

My position, precarious
My tenure, untenable
Where I imagined myself
Firmly planted
In deep soil, rooted
Where I fancied myself
So perfectly suited
Wasn’t there
Was a throne made of sand,
And a home made of air.
Was an anthology of stories
I wrote in my sleep
And recited like a catechism
Until they turned to beliefs
So I finger the beads
Of my sorrowful brain
And dig in the dirt
And hope for the rain