Shards of songs cut into
The cricket-tide of night
Sobbing sirens accompanied by
The howling refrain of ever-nearer canticles
I awake
And wonder if
The discordant aria
Will play for me
My ears like the salivating dogs
Smelling blood on the wind
How dark the melody is.
And how near.
Without touch
We are a dead sea
Where tides rise and fall
On a barren shore
Without family
We are the last white rhino
Of a nearly extinct sub-species
Waiting in vain for a mate
That never comes
Without love
We are but hollow shells
Exoskeleton crustaceans
Branded by the noonday sun
Alone
We are but specimens in a zoo
We pace before the bars
Of a hundred onlookers
Searching each face
In despair.
As I look back
And view
The 1963-RCA-wide-screen-color-t.v.
It flickers on.
Before me lie
Cousins, brothers, sisters
Splayed on low ply carpet
Fidgety chins drilling holes into their fists,
Eyes wide
Elbow to elbow
“Hey! Scoot over! I can’t see! Grandma!?”
Her voice
A scratched phonograph record
I continue to dance to.
“Now, now you kids get along,”
She soothed,
And we did.
I change the channel
Grandma’s toast
Waiting in the warming oven
Golden edged butter rays
Radiating like mini-suns.
I watch them melt and disappear.
“It’s ready!”
I hear my child-voice cheer.
Commercial time
Cousin Davey giving a testimonial
“Round steak and Grandma-Gravy on top of white bread taste better than Sizzler’s any day.”
Back to our program
Bernice kneeling in a stunted strawberry patch
Sturdy hands grasping an unfortunate dandelion.
“This hard pan,” she mutters
As her harrow-hand cuts rows
Into the brick
That was her stretch of land.
I wonder what’s on Channel Three?
Children lie on either sofa
A-bed for the night,
Watching her,
Watching
That RCA-wide-screen-color-t.v.
Johnny Carson’s handsome face
Flirting through the glass,
Her head tossed back in laughter
Course-grey hair bouncing
And catching the dim light.
We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin.
“Yahtzee!” thrice she shrieks.
Aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers chuckle
As kids mumble, “I wanted to win.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Grandma’s arms
Kneading pie dough or pulling fabric
As she bent over the antique Singer sewing machine
Making secret gifts we all knew about.
Were draped velvet
For small hands to brush.
Each one of us
Would pet
The softness of she
As tender whispers called in our minds,
“Those arms are just for me.”
We live in an age of love’s corporeal metamorphoses
Where butterflies are banished back to chrysalides
Veiled in pupal gowns
They emerge as larva crawling and devouring
Ever younger and greener shoots
Until the garden is denuded
And it is time to call upon corporeal lust
To nourish an emptying sky of butterflies
And as the wind is hushed from the beating of astral wings
And skyriders descend into the venery of a mucinous desert
Gypsy moths dance on their aborted souls
Laurie Woodward 