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Wadded Up

Crumble you up  

Like a mistaken sheet in a sketch book,

Drain its wayward color from my life 

To puddled hues 

On the floor,

Toss the wad to the heap

Of misguided lines and realities,

What I want and what is there

Don’t meet in the width of  pencil lines,

Perspective a-kilter-ed,

not meeting the horizon line,

Not even a study in abstraction

But a distillation of the red of the heart

Seeping into the fibers of the paper

Rendering it failed and destroyed

And utterly useless

Except as filler in a hole.  

Mustard and Teals

Oh, I don’t know,

Mustard and teal was never my thing

Until she brought the ivy in                                       

And placed it on the hall table and said,

We’ve arrived.

The branches of oak outside

Filled the foyer window as we peeled the paper

From the walls.

Layer and layer,

Peel by peel,

Until, we arrived, as she said,

Clinging to the lath and plaster

The last and original

Shred of

Yesteryear

In mustard and teal green.

It has to go, I said.

I know, she said.

But wait, and with watercolor and brush

Dug from the sewing room box

She reproduced it on the back

Of a housewarming greeting card

In Yellow Ochre and Vermillion Green

As I peeled the mite soaked paper

To its demise.

When all was done

She snapped a photo of our shaker style hallway

Fit for a contemporary architectural digest

Framed it with the wallpaper watercolor

Hung it on the wall

Near the window with the oak branches peering

Through the window of the hall watching,

The ivy on the entry table,

Sitting

That said,

They’ve arrived.

Wood and Severed Heads

It was a morning of sorts

Made of wood and

Severed heads.

They'd walked along the canal

That night and spoke

Of witches’ tales and

Genealogical unveilings,

That he was a son of a Jew

Living in silence of his birthright,

Heads rolling and a

Crucifix attached to stone walls.

The day at noon couldn’t compare,

So they made love

To ease the pain.

Why did you reach out then,

Speaking of your lost maturity?

Why did you break

Your silence?

Hearing a deeper thought than your own

It manifested and malignified

In your heart to

Bring the disconnected head

Down to the air around your life.

Speak, do it and frighten it off.

Sonorously, the echoes of the caravan

Vibrate so intensely

You organize in shame,

And disappear again above the canal

Bobbing with corpses and body bags,

Deep depravity knows deep despair,

To keep-yourself-alive feelings,

Stubbed life, on the corner of failure,

Heaped in piles of excrement.

It was a morning

Of severed heads

And wood.

He Said I Shared

He said I shared the color of his mother’s eyes,

And would I like to see?

A photo by chance, 

  from under his bed,

I thought,

A walk to the shelf 

  for an album of dust?

Perhaps. 

No, the eye,

  that was made for,

    and worn by, the her

That bore him.

The Italian side, 

  of brown eyes,

    gone to hazel with age.

The one lost in an accident,

  to be found

    in her son’s closet

Decades and eons later,

Following her demise. 

I declined.