THE MAP OF LANGUAGE


"Ma!" you say
"DA!' you say
your words create us

"BA! BA! BA!"
she tells the mirror
just who she is

she follows
the map of language
arriving at a new word

unable to discover
a word
she invents her own

uses words
to map
her universe

words
the how of what
is

like everything else
she puts it in her mouth
tastes the word

...SI PUÒ VIVERE IN QUESTO FUOCO

After the war
we returned

ourselves
(but not)
our selves

to Our Country
right or wrong

that was like a life sized
replica of what

we had left

only alien
to us now.

We were guilty
(guilty as hell)

of surviving
this hell

that made ghosts
of so many

& we these
ghosts of flesh and blood

haunting the living
envious of them

and their ability to forget
by remembering.

We hoarded
our tears

we couldn't cry

went on living
because...because

we didn't know how
to die

each moment
a battle

we could never win.

LOOKING JUST LIKE MY PHOTO

I look just like my photo
(impersonating my self)
even have me fooled

I walk around in a blaze of grief
pretending to be the me
I can no longer be

even my reflection
can't look me in the eye
my shadow tries to escape me

your death is as
everywhere as weather
is

your birthday arrives
without you
the night is hollow

your death alters the
world...changes it &
puts it back in exactly

the same place
(an exact copy)that
doesn't fool me

the season of loss arrives
the leaves flee before me
the world no longer knows me

UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO HIGH

The three Blind Mice.

The Three Blind Mice.

They didn’t tell  ya  the same thing twice
(&             they wasn’t             very nice) .

And they wasn’t blind...see? ..that was just a blind.
(They wore shades to hide their eyes)      
Maestros with a switch - blade knife.

They ran all the vice
& any opposition had already lost their lives.

But fk it...lately... the farmer’s wife
(it was rumoured that she had done
the old man in... taken over everything)      
and was now muscling in on  

their  territory.

They didn’t like it

They  weren’t used to being told
what they could ‘n’ couldn’t do.

Confrontation & respect was due.

Both ***** bore a tattoo
that proclaimed in Latin:  

“Trouble & strive! ”
& “F* you! ”

Her other tattoo(just above her ***** hair)      
stated in mock Gothic script:

”Abandon hope all ye who enter here! ”

One night the Farmer’s wife decided
to  separate   the men   from    the mice

Had ‘em: -  rubbed out

courtesy of a ****** known locally only
as “Slasher Gore.”

Now the three blind mice don’t see so good no more.

See...

...being dead ain’t good for the sight.

Ain’t dat right...?

Meanwhile back at the ranch
meet the new big Mama of Vice

T H E    F A R M E R ’ S    W I F E

just like it spells out in nasty neon light

twinkling...twinkling

  
   obscuring the starlight.

FAIRYTALE

I sit by your bedside
watching your dying.

Only Love
nails me to this pain.

I unable to escape
your dying.

I tell you
Irish legends
& Hans Christian Anderson

as you become
again

(if only for a little while)

the child
you used to be

once upon a time

when wonder & delight
were new
as daylight.

“Tell me Lir! ”

“Tell me the Children of Lir! ”

I tell
of how

they are turned into swans
& the loneliness of eternity.

I too knit nettles
to break the spell

throw the garment over
your cancer’d body

so you can
return again
to being

the human
I have known.

This dying is cruel
beyond belief.

An insult
to your life.

I love you so much I would **** you
if I could **** you
but I...can’t.

I want every breath
of you

not to be your last.

You journey to your death
dancing with your pain

my little mermaid
my little ballerina

I guard
your dying

a Constant
Tin Soldier

as you become
foam

foam
on the sea.

Just a day ago
******* a sultana

I held
on the tip of my fingertip

telling me to call your name.

“I love
living in your voice! ”

“So nice...so nice! ”

And I a blind Prince

wandering now
lost in the fairy tale

of your Death.

I close
your eyes.

kiss the last warmth
of your lips.

FALLING INTO THE PAST

the tick tick of the bike
a dog barks
letter on a Welcome mat

the midnight tick of time
the house sighs
Dad's whistle

ambushed by the smell
of honeysuckle
I fall into the Past

red barn
blue sky
a summer to last forever

Caruso 78
I listen to the scratches
like Time trying to sing along

I kiss the whorl
of a fingertip then
the all of you

your body
drifting away from me
on a tide of hurt

'I don't like the way
your eyes
touch me! '

starlings fly up
I walk upon close bitten grass
a sheep laughs

a car rusts on the beach
the roofless house
looks out to sea

the sea is sleeping
I watch it breathing
wonder what it's dreaming

the house hunkers down
its window eyes
gaze upon the coming storm

crouching under a cloud
a mountain
frightened by the storm

walking upon
the meniscus of sleep
unable to dive in

& here you are
years later looking like
an out of focus photo of your self


*


I was going on with the details she told me about...the break up with her husband and all the things she saw when it was happening and burned themselves into her mind. Then years years later I discover the photograph of her then and the photograph contains some of those details. She is out of focus because she doesn't want to be in the photo and moves away just as the shutter is clicked. So we too step out of the poem and her life. All the details mean something to me as I can still hear them all in her voice....the little details that she observed through her tears. Now when she has died and the photo turns up I can tie together all she told me and all what the photo contains and marry them together to tell more of her story. He had cheated on her and she was heartbroken and couldn't stand his presence. Meanwhile the ordinary world still goes on despite her heartbreak and her life about to change. She was kissing his fingertips and then kissing him more and more when he suddenly blurted out that he had had an affair but that it was all over now and it didn't mean anything. But she couldn't live with that. When I came to write it I mostly remembered all the details she told me about rather than the complete whole story and that is what my mind latched onto. If I wrote it today I would probably come in on a different trajectory and it would be a completely different poem and made entirely different choices. But I like what I have captured here and it is more closer to her perception of how it all panned out. It was her voice and I only shaped it into the poem trying to retain her sense of it all. The last verse is my discovering the photograph and all the grief I experienced on seeing what was once only a voice talking to me in the night and crying and crying as she went over all the details again and again.

HERE I BE!

South of the buzzing
of a hairy bumble bee

North of the big dog’s bark

West of the breeze
tickling  cherry blossom trees

East of the sunlight
stealing over the fields

that’s where

you will
find me.

*

I ESSERE QUI!

Sud del ronzio
di un peloso bombò

A nord del grande cane abbaia

A ovest della brezza
il solletico alberi di ciliegio in fiore

Est della luce del sole
rubare i campi

ecco dove
troverete me.

*

"Where were you Tilly?" I asked innocently. "I was by the big cloud pretending to be a tiger beside the worm...look!" And with that she produced the worm she had been hiding behind her back. So she had gone to the bottom of the garden...hopefully not to eat 'em.

So I thought I also would get my bearings the three year old Tilly way! I was singing Ariel's "Where the bee ***** there **** I..." so I guess this got cross-pollinated with where and who I was. It takes a little girl to teach one how to live in the world in the rightest of ways.

My little girl's sense of where she was...as if it were written in the sky and the world was simply there to do her bidding. She used her own personal co-ordinates to bring in a thought to land.