Marie Anzalone - 2
Salted CaramelsToday was a good day,
and I loved you in it, from afar. I did not love you because it was a good day; nor was it a good day because I loved you. The love was incidental, a by-product of things. Yet it made the day wider and gladder, extended its hand to me. Not the commanding type of love, more the sit by my side and make me watch clouds build into thunderstorms type. I ate the second-to-last plastic wrapped little square caramel in the house today, sprinkled with smoked salt and served on a sliver of green mango. The tastes melted like poetry, and I wished you were there, I wanted to feed you some, with my fingers, directly to your mouth to linger and caress, your tongue- it was THAT kind of love, that kind of day. Instead I sat in new terraced soils, alone under tropical sunlight pondering what crossing borders on some maps really would do to the natural order that documents freedom of thought in places of low latitude. I rubbed massage oil between my palms, and thought, I should probably buy more caramels; I may get brave enough on your next visit to tell you the wisdom of which the clouds informed me today. Written for a Living Poet 5: A Field Guide to Dragonsfor all that we have been told
of roses and hearts and glittery rainbows the act of writing poetry is still a man's domain by and large; women write of "female interests" and men define the laws, morals- ask the toughest questions are known as the new epithet: "wow so Smart!!" [add a couple of hearts and smiley faces in there for effect] for being clever. but there is a defining edge cleverness and art sometimes, not always cross paths and purpose. There are shores we all wallk alone, riptides we do not put our toes in, knowing how quickly one will get simply sucked under. there are dragons none of us, men, women or otherwise, ever slayed. The reason is deceptively uncomplicated. We have trained our eyes not to see them- neither the scales they leave scattered on breakfast tables in-between marital silences; nor the snot they leave in endlessly filthy drains in bathtubs and kitchen sinks; nor the scorched places in the conjugal bedclothes. these are the reptiles of our dysfunction, the worms of discontent. Like Blake's unnamed pestilence, they gnaw at the heart of all we once believed, was true and good. Very few men venture into their lairs, even by accident. and here you come, respresenting "the fairer sex" walking in beauty, acquainted with the night armed with a ruler, weighing device, watercolors inks and pens, spectrophotometer. Walking among us, walking shorelines, mapping the feeding places of animals; dipping whole legs, not just toes, into undertows, studying the riptides of the North Atlantic. the unarmed Poetess, the knight in humble rags. Examining the way the sun glints just so after a household tempest, reflecting off the spines of dinosaurs, roses, and books. Sketching from the places where "real life" intersects with "might-have-beens," dissecting the internal anatomy of the disillusioned heart. Creating nothing less than our own "Illustrated Field Guide to the Dragons of New England." (for Linda. because it was far past time that someone wrote something, for you. Happy Birthday, 2014.) That thing that they never
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The Light as Seen Through a Screen of Ferns
I.
My friend I beheld the limitlessness of possibility in your hands that day. It had the trappings of nostalgia. I saw the peach colored skies and extended twilights of long drawn-out July days of my youth. I was again counting wingbeats of tiny kinglets in the fir trees; the clean taste of sweet birch bark and teaberry graced my tongue, and I tracked foxes through unspoiled miles of snow to far-off interior destinations. Crystal castles of hoarfrost crept inspired into my tales. Your embrace just makes me remember something about a time before life's betrayal- the surety of convictions. You are the part of me that recalls dancing barefoot in alpine meadows; the lost little girl in me that hid in giant Pennsylvania ferns when life got too real... and stayed there. II. And she shyly comes forward, taps the woman I have turned into on the shoulder- she says that you are to me the stillness of winter's hushed brooks flowing under layers of trapped ice; you are the orgy of spring's passion, the productivity of summer; the bounty and wistfulness of fall harvest and migration. She wants me to lay you down under ferns and gaze naked, with you at the world tinged green by a screen of ancient chlorophyll, patterned by fronds dappled in sunlight and dew with cool moss supporting our supine forms. I imagine your mouth tastes like the joy of clear water sprung from granite ridges with ravens doing barrel rolls overhead. III. I know- nothing in reality of daytime will ever compare to those secret night rides, in my mind, of my own dark heart- on a black horse, unsaddled, my inner thighs soaked and clenching as you and I barreled over moors those times under the watchful gaze of the Seven Sisters each one a sin more deadly than the last and I awoke thinking the dawn was actually twilit, on fire; for a moment I thought of nothing more than green dampness in your hair and my own unclothed wetness. I thought I might accept that ride for real if and only if night were not going to be interrupted by the searing glare of the next dawn's reality. Surrender still beckons just beyond the limits of my own awareness. I close my hand around a puff of oysterflower trying to protect it but it disperses a little at a time each time the wind shifts to a new direction. IV. Red shale has turned to pumice and obsidian; and your eyes are lined now but I remember you clearly- you walked me through a limestone maze 12 years ago and showed me a cold blue star; you told me its light was in me, and that the passing of songbirds, kinglets, that fly south in darkness can only be heard by those whose ears are attuned to the whispers of fern dreams. Did I follow their halting journey to your trees, then? If you were to hone to a surgeon's edge a blade of volcanic glass, slice your palm and the space above my heart, and let our red cells mingle- maybe we would commit to dreams from childhood. Do friends still make blood oaths? V. I cannot promise you: the wind, the stars, the rain nor an unbroken line of snow tracks. Our spheres simply do not coincide. And I still wander lost in yesterday's fieldstone maze. But maybe, some tomorrow- I could gift you one single perfect today. I don't know what on earth you would do with it- perhaps work it into a gemstone, for me; as fine and pure and fragile as a single dewdrop capturing morning sunfire. You could suspend it on spider silk and we could gaze on it as a recalled vision of naked childhood innocence. If the horses are not afraid one day of morning light; we could heal the scars on our hands and hearts and relive the beauty of starlight before waking from a dream beneath ferns. black hair and sapphire
You were cruel, but not in ways
more measurable than our peers and, well, cruelty was a code of living anyway. You were the only one then I wished had seen past my uncoolness, my non-cruelty, an absence where a cigarette should be, legs too long and clothes nowhere near anything resembling style, and a mind too interested in the content of books for anyone's friends. Would it have been different had it been you, not the football player my dad wanted me seen with, that took my virginity? I wanted you more. How does an invisible girl speak, even now? You should have left that place, too. Anger is too high a risk factor for those of us drawn with too much to fill the stingy space allotted on a page that expectation has already outlined for us in shades of dull mining town desolation gray. we bled outside of the lines. when do those roles of "too good" and "not good enough," reverse? I smiled to learn that you became a bodybuilder who loved ABBA. Yes, I thought, that fits the fuck you world Paulie I knew. I wished I had told you the lead in my first novel, the one I grew too ashamed to finish- she had your black hair and sapphire eyes. It was the only voice I ever knew how to speak to you with. for Paul, 1975-2013
The problem is my heart,
you see. It just plain refuses to hard boil, no matter what I do to it. I have tried full immersion in roiling hot seas pickling spices, microwaved depravity, open flame, abdication of duty. And I tell you... after these decades, still if you pried off its shell, pricked it with your fork, sliced its midline with a sharpened knife- you would find the center liquescent, golden running into the shadows of your life's serving plate; and utterly unprotected. A Galaxy Was Seen Dying Today
The world's most beautiful butterflies die every day
by the millions, unnoticed. In today's news- astronomists capture images of an entire galaxy undergoing Little Death. throwing off fireballs like missiles as it loses its energy unable to create anew, they say- stars, planets asteroid belts. It just kind of gives up. Living. it dies... and takes out everything in its path with it: a suicide mission of old age crisis. there are billions of us, billions of them, but most of us simply don't always think to look around and notice them Law of averages says there is life, maybe, in its path- would they have known to look for its coming? Say last prayers? Get the hell out of there? was Van Gogh's Starry Night perhaps painted on other canvases by other hands, protected as a pinnacle of achievement by someone else's sensibilities? How long did they manage to protect it, from themselves, from negligence, before dying too alongside their greatest works, unfinished? was it something they thought to take with them where and when they went? Could they? Their fleeting perfection goes unmourned, unnoticed, a flower set to wind dance stilted swirling in the skies of our limited days. why bother, then, any single act of great beauty, created in a dispassionate universe where fireballs of mindless passage can obliterate them? Which loss would be keener- mourning the treasured things, robbed, or not comprehending the gifts while they sat in our hands, fleetingly? can an act of beauty grace a soul forever, if it comes back as someone else's stardust, os does it become annihilated, forever? Do we celebrate knowledge, or its opposing force? Today, I stopped to rescue a single dying fritillary, placed her out of harm's way, where she could drink in safety; she was gone when I returned. Maybe she only existed for me to write this poem for you. Job's SaplingBut I tell you, this tree planting
is awful patient work and it all seems provisionary, at best- considerations for terrain and inclination nourishment without and within energy transfer the stubbornness of some roots and fragility of others. there is a community waiting to define all limits. and I, I circle warily, measuring: projected branch spread, depths, tapping straight lines into crooked fields addressing property rights the wants of children, anticipating. Then, revelation. A job, hard under best circumstances; infinitely more frustrating if one does not even know what kind of tree one is invited to plant in the first place.
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