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Marie Anzalone - 2


Salted Caramels

​Today 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 Dragons

for 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 
taught us
                               ~for Tara

Someone informed us once, we could only ever
stand so tall. 
Naive children, we believed it-
held yardsticks against 
our own potential
ensuring we grew not one inch more of height
than our allotted presence; to have more was,
we believed, to rob from others. And
that damned always unspoken, always present
more deserving after "others," like a threatening 
afterthought.

What blasphemy 
against a childhood ruled by tape measures
would I speak if I tell you what I know now: 
you were always permitted to grow 
to hold galaxies in the palm of your hand 
if you so desire; more if you do, others
are also freed from small-heartedness? Only
one small thing- the fertilizer for growth
is only found by throwing your self 
blindfolded off a cliff. That thing they never 
taught us? Flying feels a hell of a lot
like falling...
until you know better.

In the Flesh

I saw a prayer on Sunday.
  It was sitting on the sidewalk
hand beseeching me


the scent of madness in its eyes,
  the calculation of a
survivalist mathematician
      on its mouth.


presence strips desire
  to its basest element:
light-skinned people
    have money to spare.


he was angry that I did not;
   lips turned to snarl,
the 5th such, that day


and I wished to know his poem,
  but more, I wanted
   there to be a way
to share mine, too, with him


not a walking bank card
  that already, 3 families
   take what little I can spare:


often, there is not enough
  for me, that shadows cut deep
all ways, in all directions.

I saw a prayer, and in my honesty
  I could not be its answer
    that day- and what hurts most


is the not knowing
  where and how to direct
a wellspring of righteous anger-
  by rights, his-


the prayer turned to poetry
  the poetry was lost in dust
  and the day’s refuse
and maybe, indifference won
      another prize.

Magical Thinking

If only I could stop biting my nails
he would notice me,
When I lose another 10 pounds
I'll get another chance,
A new pair of shoes, and they
will not overlook me for the position,
If I can just look young enough, always,
they will stop leaving me for others,
if I make my presence less powerful,
they'll all stop excluding me,
and I prove often enough that I really am
a good person, he'll stop believing
all of the terrible things he's worked up
in his mind, about me.

If I learn to believe the correct words
God will always provide,
If I start the love affair under the auspices
of the new moon, he will always be
powerless against the charms of the more beautiful
than me;
if only I could get this job, my mother will believe
that all the sacrifice, was worth it,
If I practice saying the right positive affirmations
I can banish all of my discomfort,
God has a reason for everything, especially
the punishment for being born in poverty,
and if I run far and fast enough, I can pretend
it wasn't really rape, all those years ago.

If only I had been more accommodating,
he would have stopped screaming at me,
If I carry this cross on my bosom,
nothing can get to me,
If I can write beautifully and importantly enough
the work will speak for itself- I will not need popularity
to get read,
If I could only get someone new to love me,
I will no longer be vulnerable to old rejection,
if I could speak convincingly enough,
she would finally believe I tell the truth;
When I am smart and talented enough,
I will finally be loved,
and if only I could learn to walk tall enough,
it would all magically stop hurting me.

Mended

“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.” ~American writer Barbara Bloom
 
Today started with a sigh.
  An admission?
     this sky is slate. Blank.
        the ground, tilting-
   rain-washed and windblown
      with the realization
        everything changes. perception.
 
many things are broken. some
        cannot be
    repaired; some others: well
we will shall see those results
       when the sealer sets,
     annealing what was sundered
         in order
       to re-create the whole.   
 
  and we will try using the thing again.
 
one goal attained. the vaster,
    always- a work in progress.
   I hold this bowl, this fragile thing,
 spent some time on its cleaning,
      restoration. underneath-
 it is carved.
   jade. delicate but tough.
translucent.
 
empty. but not the hollow
  kind of empty. more the
    expectant kind- the empty
sacred room in which
    the crib has been placed.
 
and ready or not
   I guess... a decision was made
       for me.
 This vessel will be put on the market
     again. Items always
   were happier
      when in a state of use.
 
maybe there is someone
  who appreciates
      the cracked and imperfect.
   the mended.
Picture

Go to page 3 of Marie Anzalone's poetry
Marie Anlalone's Profile

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

unprotected

                     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 Sapling

But 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.
Picture
Go to Page 3 of Marie Anzalone's Poetry

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