A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

Departures and Arrivals.
The dust hasn't yet settled on the torn up trail behind me.
Particles still linger in my hair, my teeth and in the air
around me like they own me.
I wonder, even though it seems like I've dearly departed, if it
will ever settle and  I don't necessarily expect it to because
maybe it has to sock it to me
so no sweet amnesia can shew away the memories of what it was
that got me here to this place of growing respect for all the
potholes and all the unpaved roads.

Driving in the dark tree monsters slide bye one after the other,
their silent dialogue giving me the shivers like so many other
things in the world do,
cold sweat running down my face as the  car rattles and  the
music stops and there's only the sound of dripping rain. Tears,
like rain aren't separate  from  sweat.
They're constanly recycling  and bleeding into one another like
night bleeds into day. I get that and I even love that because where
does hardship go if  not to tears?

Stuffing grief into the cracks of the bodymind is a recipe for sick. I get
that too. People may tell ya to take a pill, have a swig, do anything to
bully your discomfort away but you sense
and you know that you sense and only you can sense what it is you
have to do. So you keep on going because what has drinking  the
sweet numbing  Koolaide ever done for ya anyway?

And it's a relief to come out of the comatose to watch the rose-gold
sunrise coming up over your landscape as your gears shift on the
broken hill of this awakening;
laser sharp beams of light gutting the nonsense out of ya, your feet
touching down onto solid  ground  and you feeling shaky but all
aglow in your skin
and this departure is telling every cell in your body that you have arrived.
There will be other departures and other arrivals, other days and other
nights but for now,
in this moment you have arrived and you don't give a **** about and
you're almost grateful for the dust and the  particles and the freaky
and the the not so freaky  fallout hovering over ya like a halo

1/2020

time is
the space in which we grow
   without awareness
   in our early years
structured by meals
   arrivals and departures
   light and dark
   hot and cold
   school   studies  play  adventures
   celebrations
and by waiting
   anxiously or not
for things to happen

time is
that feeling
that we may not have enough of it
in our later years
busy with jobs and family and travel
covering long distances in order to
achieve and educate and care

time is
what starts to rush by us
with increasing speed
in our final years
making us wonder
what it really means

that space
by which we measure
our lives
   our universes
      our worlds

time is

In the supermarket airport
There are arrivals every day.
The departures in your trolley
Come to you from far away.

Those brightly coloured vegetables
Have sat around for days
In what we’re told are
such hygienic backroom bays.
They’re obviously picked and packed by well paid sprites and elves!
Then magically appear on your supermarket shelves.

Here every carrot is straight and clean
And every lettuce crisply curled
Then gassed in plastic packets
That are filling up our world!

Take a glance inside your trolley
And if what I say is true
Then I guarantee the food within
Has seen more of the world than you.

Like the picture on the packet
Of your frozen ready meal
The colour of this far flown food is great
The taste experience, surreal.

Those ripe tomatoes in their reddest skins
We should dye brown, to match their taste
Those vivid orange carrots are a mystery of flavour-
What a waste!

A plate of vibrant promising hue
Can taste of packaging and glue.

The supermarket tells you you’re in clover
But its goods have all the texture of an old pullover.
Your supermarket says that it is catering for you
But if you’re honest do you really think that’s true?
If you don’t then there is something you can do.

At the supermarket airport
All the money’s in departures
So put that trolley back
And just depart.
If you're wanting to be vocal
Then shop seasonal and local
And hit these psuedo airports at their heart.

Autumn Angel, bring in fall,
see me, like me, text me, call.
Connection made is strong and now,
life comes quickly, she comes how?
Traveling vessels far and near,
planes and ferries bring us here.
Walking, waiting I grow eager,
business first before I meet her.
In the district lounge I perch,
finding me will end her search.
Her approach was my delight,
for now, we can begin our night.
Strong and vibrant she is ample,
allure and wares for me to sample.
Pints and chatter, Blue Ribbon prize,
my glare is locked into her eyes.
Her exchanges are so charming,
pleasant, light and not-alarming.
Time has come to find our way,
joined departure, plans to play?
Lodging and rides arranged by phone,
She knows her way, away from home.
5th floor shoe box, now our lair,
pajamas, toothbrush I’m prepared.
Netflix and chill is common trend,
Hulu and hold is our new friend.
I lay beside her, still not sure.
She watched her show, as I watched her.
I longed to kiss her neck and ears,
doubtful hindrance of my fears.
Surely right, it must be so,
She wants me here, and this means go.
I slowly start to kiss her lobes,
Her standing neck hairs brush my nose.
My mouth, it waters, for her kiss,
She turns to me and grants me this.
Her constellations are so bright,
Her moles like stars, I count tonight.
Her lips transport me to this place,
where there’s no time but only space.
I’d live here for a thousand moons.
sadly, departures come too soon.
Our time is short, not long enough,
I touched her face, she felt my scruff.
Constant contact, senses aflame,
I want her more, she feels the same.
Her essence sweet like summer flowers,
I found the center of her powers.
Far inside, my fingers reach,
while I explored her weeping peach.
Touching, tasting, and some teasing,
Her satisfaction, was my pleasing.
I want to give her more of me,
the part that daylight never sees.
I gave myself the best I could
& tried to make her feel so good.
My comfort lies in her content,
She understands, our needs were met.
Lying by her was so free,
I love the way she feels by me.
Alongside slumber was so grand,
snoozing blissful, hand in hand.
Several times I would awake,
was so pleased with my evenings fate.
When light began to fill the room,
we knew that we’d be going soon.
We didn’t want to leave this place,
I planted kisses on her face.
Once again we shared in pleasures,
in life, these are important treasures.
The final moment had arrived,
we packed our bags, prepared to drive.
The sun shone like no other day,
as we drove down towards the bay.
I sadly had to disembark,
but kissed her more while we were parked.
We said goodbye and rightly so,
our faces had a special glow.
This magic evening, all a blur,
more vessels take us where we were.

Time apart makes all things
New - a nervousness
An excitement
Needy and naive
The memory of your touch
Fades - but not the intensity
Of my love

Checking like clockwork
The departures and arrivals
Heart thumping
My poor vision
A true handicap
Scanning the masses
For the most familiar face
In the world
Of whom I know
The span between my thumb and index
Is the same as your chin to earlobe
And my finger could trace the shape of your lips
From memory alone.

When my eyes
Settle upon your face
My hard heart beat
Hits slow motion
And stops -
Everything runs through my mind
But I think nothing at all
Reach out.
Kiss.

ARRIVALS & DEPARTURES

( for Bud on his birthday that was never to be )

Never to be
met by you again

at the airport
with a hastily scribbled sign:

"WAITING FOR GOD...
KNOWS WHO!"

Or telling me you were
expecting the Cat in the Hat.

One year a tip-top topper...
...the next a battered bowler.

Always. . .
your smile

my gold coin

your laughter
my treasure.

"Ahhhh Jaysus, Bud...tears?"
cries the ghost of you.

"It's all I get these days!
Dying is so...annoying!"

"Oh, before I go. . !"
the ghost of you smirks

before fading away
into an EXIT sign.

"I love the purple
fedora!"

Moored to the same ring:
The hour, the darkness and I,
Our compasses hooded like falcons.

Now the memory of you comes aching in
With a wash of broken bits which never left port
In which once we planned voyages,
They come knocking like hearts asking:
What departures on this tide?

Breath of land, warm breath,
You tighten the cold around the navel,
Though all shores but the first have been foreign,
And the first was not home until left behind.

Our choice is ours but we have not made it,
Containing as it does, our destination
Circled with loss as with coral, and
A destination only until attained.

I have left you my hope to remember me by,
Though now there is little resemblance.
At this moment I could believe in no change,
The mast perpetually
Vacillating between the same constellations,
The night never withdrawing its dark virtue
>From the harbor shaped as a heart,
The sea pulsing as a heart,
The sky vaulted as a heart,
Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
Above a discovery:
"Emptiness.
Emptiness!  Look!"
Look.  This is the morning.

Our hands rise
and the street leaps.
Our eyes lower,
the heavens collapse.

From our unspoken pain,
a tulip tree grows
mysteriously behind us.

From our cherished wishes,
a star rises
just beyond our reach.

Do you hear the bullets
whizzing around our heads
guarding our kisses?

The sweetness
of your glance
never ends.

No birds fly south
from your eyes;
no avalanches slide
from your *******.

In the paradise
of your sight
the sun never sets.

These are your lips
I return to your neck.

Your blood
burns in my heart.

Everything remains.

Isn't it sad
How we
Can spend
A lot of
Time together
Yet know
Next to nothing
About
Each another.
This though,
Is not the time
To reminisce.
Earlier this
Morning you
Told me that
You were leaving.
It came in not
As bomb that
Levels cities,
No, it was more
Like a baseball
That broke through
The stained-glass windows
Of my heart.
This does
Not **** me,
But day in
And day out,
I am burdened
By the gaping
Hole in me.
I pick the
Shards of glass,
Stained with
Memories and
Mysteries.
I only ask
To know you more.
I try to put
The shards together
Enduring all
The cuts to my
Fingers.
Cuts of different
Sizes, some are
Deep and some
Are shallow
But all draw blood
The same.
I Persevere
through the pain
To rebuild
That perfect
Picture.
To see the
Mystery
Unravel before
Me.
To put together
The pieces of
Your identity.
Isn't it sad
How we
Can spend
A lot of
Time together
Yet know
Next to nothing
About
Each another.
I only ask
To know you more.
Someday perhaps,
I would see
your hands,
Whose scars
Would gladly
Open again,
And help me
Fix this broken
Memory.

What are fingertips but pulses and pauses?
A spinal sigh---a cradle to all existence?

The punchline of all sensory implications,
the culmination of our tangles and departures?

All flesh is ephemeral, soft to shards in hours;
Touch is but a ****** tendril in memoriam for desire.