if i smile as you reach above the climbing bars to see the stars--you are my love, child, my love

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Still Life in Landscape"
( trigger warning: violent death, bodily harm, car accident )

--Sharon Olds


"Salt"
( trigger warning: addiction )

--Nick Flynn


"Glory"
The autumn aster, those lavender ones,
and the dark-blooming sedum
are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth
with the remote intensity of a dream. These things
take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up
on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see,
everything I can think of. I want ordinary men and women,
brushing their teeth, to feel the ocean in their mouth.
I am going to glorify the sink with toothpaste spat in it.
I am going to say it's a stretch of beach where the foam
rolls back and leaves little shells. Ordinary people
with a fear of worldly things, illness, pain, accidents,
poverty, of dark, of being alone, of misfortune.
The fears of everyday life. People who quietly and secretly
bear their dread, who do not speak freely of it to others.
People who have difficulty separating themselves
from the world around them, like a spider hanging
off the spike of a spider mum, in an inland autumn,
away from the sea, away from that most unfortunate nation
where people are butterballs dying of meat and drink.
I want to glorify the even tinier spiders in the belly of the spider
and in the closed knot of the mum's corolla, so this is likely
to go on into winter. Didn't I say we were speaking of autumn
with the remote intensity of a dream? The deckle edge of a cloud:
blood seeping through a bandage. Three bleached beech leaves
hanging on a twig. A pair of ruined mushrooms. The incumbent
snow. The very air. The imported light. All autumn struggling
to be gay, as people do in the midst of their woe.
I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one's mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That's when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw.
Something that would have no meaning in the astral realm.
One doesn't want to glorify everything. What might I actually say
when confronted with the view from K2? I'm not sure
I would say anything. What's your opinion?
You're a man with a corona in your mouth,
a woman with a cottonball in her purse,
what's your conception of the world?
--Mary Ruefle


"The Passing of Time"
My mother has been dead six months
when my father remembers, as if for
the first time, that she is dead
and pads out across the deck
to lower the flag to half-mast.
Seeing that it already hangs midway
on the pole (snapping at the wind,
collapsed in damp heat, as if it were
her hair) he is startled and asks
Who died? I say Mother and after a while
he says Ah! then let it fly a little longer.
--Mary Ruefle


"Furtherness"
An oak coffin covered with vines
carried on moss in a farm cart

A dusty coffin in a yellow wagon
with bright red wheels going down
the painted road

A glass coffin stifled by roses

Raining, and in the film version
an unknown god stood at a distance
watching, got in his car and left

The little black urn before
a spray of orchids in the alcove

They laid a bunch of violets at her throat
closed the white coffin
carried it out the rear door
through buttercups down to the grave

The musicians are drunk and play
loudly, stumbling down the street

Six men with sore arms

The family in a rowboat:
the coffin inhabiting the mind

Or ashes streaming like a scarf from the convertible

Or, the chorus breaks out in excelsis

Or, the soloist sang like a dilated eye

Stunning din of a sob

Salt pork on a wound

Is it ordure to speak of the widow's grief?

Who drags herself back
through a field so thick with vetch
it gives a purple tint over two or three acres
You could run through them for hours
but one thing is certain from her face
she does not want you to

Furthermore, there are pies on the table waiting
--Mary Ruefle