Magpie 310/Grapes

(image courtesy of Magpie Tales)

Grapes

There comes a time, early, when toast and jelly are a sacrament,
Peanut butter and jelly, too; you are too young for wine
But know your prayers by evening and table, young enough
To see the morning in all its stages: bed to car to school.

Grape juice, too, reminds you of ties that bind, cold grape soda
Sacralizes summer on the cusp of the driveway, bare feet warm
Against the concrete stubble and bicycles circling the block,
You remember yours, blue and white, flying you home.

Now, you hope that those days, that belief, stain you well,
Far faster than purple dye on cotton; that once for all works
In life as well as prayer, because you haven’t tasted grape juice
Or flown with angels and mosquitos since you lived there.

Magpie 308/Vacation

It was the one image I couldn’t slice into the collages. Aunt Louise put in it the pile, so she didn’t object to its going under the knife, but this woman? Maybe just a little older than me, kissing a message into the future? She’s not my Grandma the Great, and I can’t. Even if I was part of the future she’s kissing.

I stick a push pin in one of the porch posts and hang the picture with a binder clip to the pin.

I make sure the tissue boxes aren’t packed. I bring all of them to the porch and arrange them around the card tables Aunt Louise helped me set up. Dad flipped, but we manage to avoid the porch while we’re cleaning and you can’t just pack up a house all day and night. I work on the collages in between sorting and sleeping. We’re close enough to watch Houston come awake from the porch and we manage to eat and watch the lights without damaging the paper. Neither of us want to use the kitchen.

These collages would be the last pieces I could do in her house, standing on the back porch watching the wisteria bud out in the warm Houston spring. Aunt Louise has a single chair she brought out from the kitchen and she sits nearby, watching the yard while I slice old fliers, photos, and magazine pages onto five large sheets of paper I stole from the art room the last day of school. I’d planned to turn them into posters of my best friends, since none of us are going to the same college in the fall.

Usually, Louise and I come out in the afternoon, when the light mimics that of the photo. I don’t know where it was taken—somewhere in Europe?—Grandma-the-Great’s kissing the letter she’s about to mail and someone snapped a picture with the sun gilding the entire street, casting her eyes into shadow. She could be happy or hopeful or sad; Grandma the Great never talked about those trips with me. Even Aunt Louise avoids talking about them. Louise used to work for a gallery in the city and liked to ramble around all weekend, just letting Houston ‘settle into her bones’ while it floated above the gumbo soil. She told me she used to imagine herself one of those elegant cow birds, just stalking through the grass, looking for the best frogs. She knew the best places to eat at the bases of the skyscrapers and in the remnants of the underground mall and she makes sure we have good takeout for packing.

When Grandma the Great died just before high school graduation, my dad invited Aunt Louise to come live with us out in the burbs. He let us pack up the house—it was his job, really, but maybe it was more our lives—so we went through the rooms and the memories with Clorox and trashbags and two suitcases for Aunt Louise.

We’re more or less done with the house and I’m starting to think this is the last afternoon I’ll have with these collages. They look flat to me, like ruined vacation shots. It’s like I’m putting all my summers in a box like a dead parakeet. Aunt Louise glances across the yard, her eyes flicking to the picture hanging up and then to my collages. “I’m going to pretend she’s letting us know it was a beautiful day,” she says.

“I’m going to pretend that she’s telling us that it’s a great vacation and we should enjoy every bit of it.” I shuffle the scraps to one side, setting them under a rock I found a few days ago in the garden, and let myself relax against the house. Houston glimmers in the dusk.

Lunatic Surface

De-memed memes, given forward by headless anatomies, by wordless balloons.
Everyday empty heroism--her words, for those pieces.

Maybe they meant what congealed, years later, from summers
Spent in her house on the edge of the city; green cracking sidewalks
That smelled of candy-sweet mimosa and exhaust, like cola's acid sugar.

Your collages stumble through old arguments
Pinned like venomous butterflies to those years
In the house that took you three days to clean out,
Five canvasses to explain.

He hoped your inspiration into being
Sometime in the last century, in a city studio
Standing on a table, condiment bottles of paint
Slinging the past forward until it fractured,
Splinters lodging in your fingers and memory;
You, who never read a comic or quarreled naked
Except in the ordinary, underneath way.

Magpie 307: I Asked for Music

image courtesy of Magpie Tales

I asked for tubes of lipstick, pots of eye shadows, boxes of faces;
He gave me old tubes of oil paints,
Blue gas flames blooming orange
Spitting through rain in an umber grey forest,
Fat black rabbits bending from horsehair.

I asked for lace gloves and bubble skirts, for chandeliers for my ears;
He gave me a tent and a SpoonForkKnife,
A bed that smelled of attic and plastic,
A room that unzipped on Texas clay
Where the javelinas rooted by the water.

I asked for hot dreams, hazy streets; for music like Mezcal;
He gave me sunny roads melting
Into lakes, roads dreaming of asphalt
Angels rising toward neon spires
Until evening flashed viridian.

I paint my own bare skin but can't find the lovely ruins
Of old dreams, only the shadows of trails
Hiked and streams waded, bare
Like the walls of the room,
After everything was packed.

Magpie 306 - Soft

(image courtesy of Magpie Tales)

My hand strokes the deep blue wall, soft as fleece,
Blue as the curls of the woman five pews up.

Is He counting my prayers or my sins?
My hopes or my days, my fears or my pride?

Religion was a good seed in season,
But it broke like the light against the brick.

But He's soft in Spencer's sight,
Fat and soft as Santa, not burning in holiness.

I remember the touch of the back wall,
Glass walls and warm mornings, soft as faith.

His house, but not Him.

Magpie 304 -- City Shadows

Photo courtesy Magpie Tales

We built them tall, for the shadows. Oh, we knew, from the time we spent beneath ones we didn't design, that shadows were swarming, just a breath away. Too many, too full. So we built these, thinking we were building places for us, believing these interiors are for our needs and the exterior for some lordship of artistry. But we were building our own massive shadows, our own obelisks that marked the boundaries of our space and our time.

And we did gain those spaces, banishing all we could. Even light had to be bound within our shadows. When the shadow of the building falls across me as the afternoon advances, I relax. It points toward the street, to the space that moves like water but is metal and tar and crushed gravel, dangerous but governable. I have yet to go down that street, have yet to feel the edges of those buildings, to check for the kind of rot I've felt along the streets behind me, however massive their buildings might be.

This kind of rot grows from sunlight, from water and light and the weakness of concrete. Sunlight calls down to the soil beneath the sidewalks.

I follow the generous shadow, promising myself I won't weaken these edges any further. Not this time. Not here.

Magpie #303: Irina's Books Has Closed

image courtesy of Magpie Tales

Irina's Books Has Closed

Parking lot's empty, the heroes flown to the city, fairy tales vanished anon.

Before the rain, angels roost in the eaves; clouds wick the sun behind me.

My soul's ragged with bluster, with braggarts; their words follow me round:

We locked the door; your sign's already fading; who remembers to read?

Dust devils are dancing (I hear their hooves scrape) all up and down the street.

No nib parries this sword at my throat, evening's ink is already spilled--

Dissolving Irina's, last princess, last print--it whirls away with the wind.


So this week's poem came out of a trip my husband & I took this weekend, searching for a used bookstore we had discovered online that, as it turned out, was no longer in business. This involved dodging construction and trying to remain civil while debating directions while navigating unfamiliar (narrow) roads. If we'd been more familiar with the area, we might have just parked and hiked around, although it wouldn't have led us to a bookstore. There were several empty storefronts along the way and between the tension and the emptiness, the uncanny seemed to wait nearby.