Interlopers
The little dog sleeps nestled.
No elbow room, even though
just two of us in this big bed.
A truck’s roar from the road
a mile away. Last night’s near
partiers now gone to bed, but
at 5 AM, the strains of music
from below, Sounds lifting up the mountains
like clouds to float above my bed.
For 15 years, I surrendered
my side of the bed to you.
23 years after, I still
sleep on
the
other side.
The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting
First thing in the morning, when I’m fresh from dreams,
your memory cuts so sharply through the day’s beginning that I wake.
Once, in that long dream of childhood, days were not over half so soon.
Early in September, below the slippery slide,
the steady beat of dribbling basketballs.
So many acts of bravery lost—
“Annie I Over” and “New Orleans.”
Way back in our salad years,
it was so very easy to trap wonder in a box.
The dominoes going head to toe.
All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire.
More in the air than possibility.
You would think there would be some remnant left.
Enough, I say!
It was the beginning of the end.
I’m counting steps from one to ten across my heart, then back again.
What you blindly get into in youth can be the end of you.
I must ask, is it me alone—
this bald horizon line, the teeth of far-off cliffs?
The tide comes in each morning.
That isn’t my heart beating with wild abandon.
I scream, I cry, I moan, I curse.
The rain is falling drop on drop.
All day long, the rain comes down,
writing this poem with water on cobblestones.
The moon like an animal hovers over and around our houses.
My life catches in its static house.
I am an ally of the truths that lie the whole world over,
though some of them are ill-begotten.
Since it is true, I must report.
Every day since birth, I have been emptying the cup.
My past drifts away from me.
I seem to fit my life now. I’m cozy in my skin.
Is it gain or loss to feel contentment?
A woman should be shrouded, silent, pregnant, dumb.
You crane your necks and stand and gawk.
Clap hands, you say, Clap hands to the music.
The act of creation is the greatest art.
For dVerse Poets, we were to make a poem from the first lines of one poem we published each month in 2023. Finding it almost impossible to sort through over a thousand posts made in the past year, I instead went through my file where some poems from past years are filed alphabetically. Selecting some poems from poem files A to D, I recorded first lines that seemed to be possible lines in a poetic compilation, then set about reordering them. This is the poem I came up with. The lines are exactly as they were in the 40 poems I borrowed the first lines from. The only changes made concerned punctuation and capital letters. The title is also from a first line.
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
Quartets of Memory
To what extent
do you lament
losing the blush
of teenage crush?
Tease and chuckle,
tight-gripped knuckle,
that challenge of
teenage love—
to cultivate
a future mate—
dawdling where
a certain stare
might meet with yours.
These sweet amors
left in the past,
nonetheless last.
Some afternoons
listening to tunes
of a past kind,
they come to mind.
Prompt words today are knuckle, challenge, lament, cultivate, dawdle. Image by Eric Krull on Unsplash.
This piece composed of a painted metal retablo box, silver leaf, watch and clock parts, fragments of old documents, peacock feathers, a milagro, silver charms, a ceramic face and a print of a painting by an artist whose name I’ve forgotten—perhaps Rudolfo Morales—was one of my favorites. It sold long ago and I don’t remember its title, so I have named it what I would name it if I had just made it. Perhaps it was the original name.. We’ll never know.
Heirlooms
Heirloom quilts, wedding veils, and Grandma’s tablecloths
are but future feeding grounds for silverfish and moths.
Since we cannot control the changes that the future brings,
we should not be flummoxed by the loss of treasured things.
Their value is more visceral than literal, it’s true,
so time can rarely mitigate their presence within you.
North and south and east and west—wherever we are cast—
within our minds and hearts, we bear the treasures of our past.
I cannot help mourning the loss of this quilt handmade by my grandmother over 100 years ago which seems to have vanished from the assisted living facility where my sister lived for the last ten years of her life, so I guess this poem was mainly written to comfort myself.
Prompts today are tablecloth, visceral, flummox, mitigate and north.
Now and Then
In cracking the present to reveal the past,
it shimmers, triumphant, expansively vast.
I tend to remember the moments most happy—
successful and positive, silly and sappy,
but when I remember it using a filter,
it leans to one side, completely off-kilter.
The same number of memories from days gone by
if remembered at all, are recalled with a sigh.
I reach into my heart and remember again
the more negative moments of days that have been.
Then I quiver with passions, now full of dejection
of the losses and failures and pains of rejection
It’s the way of the world to give us one day
what in the future it will take away,
but nonetheless, we must live for the present
and accept all it offers—both painful and pleasant.
When we pin all our thoughts on past sadness and fun,
We fasten ourselves to a life that’s undone.
This is my answer to John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”
The Sunday Whir Wordle 537 prompts are: undone cracking triumph expansive reach quiver shimmering filter way reveal sigh moment
Foxtail
We live in a modular world, things changing around us so fast that what we once thought we’d always remember can pass in a blur. We come together and we part, now close, now remote, castoff too fast to really memorize each other so that years later, we half-remember by a certain picture in the mind, a passing scent, a strain of music. Something. There was something special. Half-grasped, caught like a foxtail in our mind.
Prompt words are castoff, together, modular, blur and remote. Image by Emmy M on Unsplash.
1960School Reunion
I love school reunions, it goes without saying.
Rehashing our virile youth now that our hair is graying,
our stories grow much shorter as our memories are fraying.
I’ve drunk nostalgia from the cup, but now there’s no delaying.
The past is always with us, but alternatives I’m weighing.
I’ve an acumen for homecoming, but no talent for staying.
Once the bloom is off the rose, I have to be off straying.
The past is a dead horse, whereas my future self is neighing!
2016
(Click on photos to increase size and view as slides.)
If you want to know how I colorized that old black and white photo, go here: https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/colorizer
Prompts for the day are homecoming, acumen, bloom and drunk.
Memory Games
Though memories are sketchy, those that remain are vivid—
mere scraps of joy or humor or times when she was livid.
No way to tell what snips of time her memory will nourish—
current relations lost to time while past ones live and flourish.
The mind does nasty tricks when it decides to misbehave.
It may leave us abandoned within its darkening cave,
or perhaps it casts a cinema only one can see,
drawing them into a world of dreams where they are free.
No one who walks through memory’s door can return to tell
whether it is heaven or a living hell.
Another trick of life that draws us fast within it,
forcing us to play the game without a way to win it.
Prompt words for today are jive, sketchy, relations and vivid.
Bright
Why do all our memories fade out to pastels?
The dulling of the colors, the muffling of the bells?
Often we discover that a happening once dated
becomes a strain of music half-remembered, mostly faded,
and we labor to remember a life so full and vast
that fades down to a shadow relegated to the past.
Better to infuse the present with such light
that all its various colors shine out vividly and bright.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 