Poetry
There
Is a place in all of us
Where we converse
With a different part of our mind.
Anyone
Can do it.
All it takes
Is turning off the television
Or the free cell solitaire
And bringing up a blank page on the screen
And filling it.
A poet
Is someone who chooses to go there often
And to add to the bank
Of wisdom
That comes from the part of us
Whose language is
Poetry.
Word Processing
Lightning flashed,
sparking the current which fueled the dream.
Letters zinged across a field of white,
waiting for justification to join other letters
in neatly-spaced rows of words.
For split seconds between thought and white space,
they danced into the dream.
Smoothly, straight-backed l’s and i’s
slid together in magnetic minuets
while b’s and d’s bumped heavy bottoms,
vying for position.
Into the dream they went,
and then,
their brief dances over,
they froze into equal rows upon the stage
to watch the choreography
of each new letter as it joined them,
for the dream was of
entire dictionaries of words––
syllables holding hyphenated arms with syllables,
antonyms crowding synonyms in tight ironic cliques,
articles moving in swing rhythm
toward their appointed nouns.
Four rows of tables
faced the stage,
one fat spectator sitting on each table,
third row back,
surveying the white screen of the dream.
Applause issued from the table-sitters,
pushed out in broad solid farts––
brief ovations as they jumped from table to table
in swift movements
so that they themselves
seemed dancers on hot pavement.
When they paused,
it was to hover lightly over each table
before pounding short applause
with their fat rumps
and moving on.
Yet their applause was indispensable,
for it fueled the dream.
When lightning flashed again,
the dream stood still.
The dance over,
the spectators vanished
like the single-fingered ghosts they were.
Rain tapped the window,
adhering to the spider web
which hug like an intricate rope ladder
between the bougainvillea
and the window frame.
A distant alarm clock
burred into the silence.
A door opened,
and a woman
entered the empty room.
The dream called out to her from the screen,
but she did not heed it
as she disconnected the cord
that ran from the machine to the wall,
destroying its memory of the dream.
And so the poem died.
She Used to Say
“How many loves, Senora?” she used to say.
“Perhaps twenty,” I would tell her.
I was forty when I married,
and I had traveled the world.
She had married at fifteen
and was a mother at sixteen.
By twenty-six, she was a mother of five.
When he drank cerveza,
he had beaten her.
She had not missed him when he left.
No more men, her children had demanded
and she’d agreed,
for the young man from El Chante who courted her now
was handsome and had money
but was not in her heart.
Still, I could see her pining
over the tall Arab
who hired the men of her pueblo.
He neither looked at her nor talked to her.
But in the night, I imagine she pined,
Arabian nights unreeling in her imagination
impossible and foreign.
One day, returning early,
I found her asleep on the divan,
a Mexican novella
rolling out of the television
into the eyeless air.
What futile dreams superseded
all these vicarious heartaches?
What magnolia-scented air
slumbered heavy in the hot layers of her sleep?
“How many loves?” she had asked me
on the road home from Guadalajara.
“Oh, many loves, “ I told her.
“I was forty when I married,
and I had traveled the world.”
For dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 