Margaret Diehl
CandelabraThe March trees in the city park
look like tarnished candelabra. I need to collapse for a season into the village of poetry. Last night you confessed you adore someone else. My heart burrows like a whiskered fish in sticky clay. Shadows climb my neck. I turn to work—research on climate change—and digress into Wikipedia entries on the Euphorbia Candelabra of the Serengeti and Southern California. The leaves exude a toxic milky latex. Even breathing the fumes burns. “Someday—” I once said “—we’ll be dead,” you interjected driving too fast, cursing. You didn’t love her yet. You were rehearsing. It’s used to kill maggots in the open wounds of cattle. As I worked on my project thinking that loneliness is like being in jail run through a chemical shower machines banging all night, I was completely aware of my privilege—the incarceration metaphor-- and not trudging hours for water through barren scrub or sand nor swept away in flooding. Hurt only by love prickly succulent cultivated in gardens. It is sparsely spined. The trees flesh out and green. My grants get their funding. I don’t salt the damp pillow. Old friend, I’ll bring out and polish my mother’s silver candelabra fitted with beeswax candles, honey-scented as your skin. It changes sex with time. It gets missed for many reasons. The Prize Winner
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I Dreamed I Married a GhostI dreamed I married a ghost
and she said, “Don’t.” What kind of doctor is that? Like a terrier dragging my skirt as I try to walk through the wardrobe to Narnia. My ghost was no lion. More of a womanizing scotch-drinking sharp guy. But golden from tip to toe. That glow. I wanted to—“Don’t,” she said. I dreamed my car sank in the mud. I started digging, found a box-- this must be bones--and it was, white and lacy, neatly hung, a manly skeleton. It did its stuff rising up, leering and flapping, then crawled inside my bed humping itself under the covers. A pair of girls came by fifteen-year-olds in tight wool sweaters so I made it stop with a good shout. The bed went flat and the girls pouted. “Don’t start,” I said, waking. “It's about your father,” she began and I tuned out, in a slouch, knowitall everypoet, thinking of fathers as material to be worked, mere stuff of nightmare, legend, nothing real, not lunch or lessons not Goodnight, Moon, not birthday wishes, wisdom or old jokes. Not here. He took himself out like a severed limb or aborted goat left on the path, ghastly smear of organic matter that was once the man who courted and won my beautiful, reluctant mother. The doctor wanted me free of dream direction. In the light of the unexpected, just me, unwinged by the maladjusted couple. She was not wrong and I’m not all right. TrystLately I have come to believe only
in matter and death, universe of randomness, without meaning for the primate brain, however philosophical we grow, charmingly synapse-rich, so congress with the spirits holds no risk of karmic interference. * Welcome to my bedside, man-shade. I like those one-color eyes of yours that flicker like an obsessive counting the tiny panes of a bathroom window. Regale me with your centuries of sport-fuck-- beggar maids and queens-- dispel my melancholia with your nonexistent prick. I'd Rather be a Drunken Chinese PoetDays like a crayon drawing
Square house, stick people, sun a lump in the sky. I go out late, snarl at the lovers in the park pinch off a bit of that toxic passion you left me with, coal-black, jammy. I drop it on the path in front of them. They won’t notice since they look only at each other. His arm is slung around her shoulders-- he’s telling the world! She says the same thing. Time to go home. |