Mixed Media Retablo “Macho” by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Macho
That stern detective, hewn from stone,
is a kid when he’s alone.
Looks at cartoons, lives on snacks—
bubble gum and Cracker Jacks.
Just goes to show you cannot tell
what delusions you must dispel
to find the truth of those you know.
You must look at what’s below.
Annie as a kitten and almost 19 years later. Seems impossible. The second two photos are of the day the kittens arrived and I found Kukla on the wall in a standoff with Annie, whose meal they were eating! Fiesty little thing. (Photos will enlarge if you click on them.)
Dream’abort’ Annie
Two A.M. and four A.M., six A.M. and eight.
My nineteen-year-old cat is such a reprobate.
She awakens me with yowling to be fed again
or simply for a rubbing over ears and under chin.
My night’s full of awakenings, my days are somewhat muddled.
I try to block the sound of her. I’m bleary and befuddled.
I’m sleep-deprived, exhausted, and yet she is so old,
how can I consign her to the night air and the cold?
I awake at 5 a.m. with no bleats for attention—
that every-other-hour irritating cause of tension.
And yet what mixed emotions this five-hour rest has brought.
Finally, a full-night’s sleep, but Annie I have not!
I knock upon the closet doors, follow every lead.
I mix up her favorite cat foods, but she does not heed
all these invitations—the water and the calls—
the peering under beds, searching the bathrooms and the halls.
I look behind each open door, behind the stereo—
so many hidden spaces where a cat can go.
The old cat’s turned up missing? It’s an oxymoron that
nonetheless is true when applied to my gray cat.
You may find it silly, putting up with such a cat
once so wild and kittenish, so active and so fat.
An outside cat who never deigned to come inside,
Annie chose walls and bushes as places to abide.
Every year she grew more wild and more free,
making an appearance on demand for only me.
Twice a day for meals, she would jump up on the wall
In between, she vanished—not visible at all.
Two years ago, four kittens abandoned at my door
meant that she just left for good, and I saw her no more.
One month later, she returned, hip shattered, skin and bone.
with stomach and liver problems, she was Annie’s ruined clone.
When the vet said nothing could be done, she came to live inside.
I thought, to make her comfortable there until she died,
but two years later, she rules the house and she won’t abide
any other lesser cat to be found inside.
She eats small portions all day long and though she’s lean and spare,
it seems she’s come into her own in my cozy lair.
The problem is, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since then.
For all the constant roarings that disturb the old cat’s den.
If it isn’t food she wants, it seems it is a rub,
or for me to clean her litterbox that’s found inside my tub
that I haven’t used for the two years she’s been here.
I use the guest room shower in lieu of one that’s near.
Sure that she’s died in some dark corner that I cannot see,
I move aside the furniture. I peer on bended knee
beneath the beds. I search each room with a fine-toothed-comb,
but no evidence of her is left within my home.
I’ve thought so often how much easier that it would be
if she would slip away one night and leave her master free.
What a lovely gift it would be for her to give me,
for often I have thought that probably she would outlive me!
The house seems oddly empty. By her water dish, her meal
left uneaten these long hours has started to congeal.
Her gray hairs left upon the rug where she liked to sleep.
Although I’ve loved her absence, it’s true that now I weep.
When the other cats give voice and I decide to heed them,
I get an extra surprise as I go outside to feed them.
When I open up the door, Annie scoots right in,
dashing from the overgrown foliage where she’s been.
Thus ends her great adventure and ends my great travail.
As I sit here writing, I can hear her latest wail.
I guess we’re back to where we were. Annie’s on my lap,
and as long as she is quiet, guess I’ll take a little nap.
Prompts today are mix, follow, knock, silly and solicitude.
Photos will enlarge if you click on them.
Wooden Heart
We often wash our minds clean here on memory lane,
so what was a dark portrait is illumined once again.
Daily random memories wash up on the shore
while sadder associations stand waiting by the door.
I do not choose remembering the dark spots in our past.
It is the brighter moments that I prefer to last.
The heart I formed from copper, the heart you carved of wood.
All the broken contracts healed by all the good.
Love stories come in fits and starts and so it was with ours—
we must choose our final endings by our selective powers
to decide what we will sift from memory’s fine sand,
and though the bitter moments haven’t been fully banned,
I daily choose the moments that I will remember—
that March day when our love was young, not your final September.
When I met Bob, he was teaching art in Canyon Country, California. One day he brought me this pouch necklace he had made of leather in class. Inside was a wooden heart with his initial on one side and my initial on the other. Yes. I had to marry the man. Later, with his encouragement, I became a metalsmith and formed this heart out of copper for him. The pouch now also contains a lock of his hair, a lock of mine, a miniature bar of chocolate–his favorite food on earth–and a tiny dinosaur carved by one of his small sons in the studio where he worked with his dad. When I admired it, he gave it to me, just as Bob gave to me the family he brought with him when we married.
Prompts today are memory lane, daily, dark, portrait and wash.
Second Thoughts
We’ve brought your breakfast tray for we know that you’ve been restive,
but now we’d like to urge you to try to feel more festive.
Will you remain forever, questioning and forlorn
because you could not go downstairs on your wedding morn?
You cannot stay much longer in this sealed-off room.
The wedding guests are gathering. It’s time to jump the broom.
Jumping the broom is a time-honored wedding tradition in which the bride and groom jump over a broom during the ceremony. The act symbolizes a new beginning and a sweeping away of the past, and can also signify the joining of two families or offer a respectful nod to family ancestors.
Overdressed
“So, I reckon you’re naked under all them clothes?”
It was either the dumbest or cleverest pick-up line she had ever heard. Everyone else seemed in a state of shock over what she was wearing, and already one person had tried to oust her, but she could see no signs that actually said “Nude Beach,” so she was sticking her ground.
No one on this earth was going to tell her what she should (or in this case, shouldn’t) be wearing. Next week she intended on entering everyone’s favorite coffee shop with no shoes, no shirt. That should balance things out a bit.
Prompts for today are reckoning, either, naked, oust and state.
Belated Wishes
My greetings on your birthday, I admit are most belated,
but I hope my guilt in this can be expiated.
I toiled to construct a card, wording it in rhyme,
and then invoked winged Mercury to present it in time.
(I’d addressed it with a flourish and signed it in gold ink.
The card was of a purple hue. The envelope was pink.)
But I fear this faithful messenger shows the effects of gout
which has curtailed the usual speed with which he gets about.
He had to take a taxi, which developed a flat.
So then he had to hitchhike to get to where you’re at.
Your doorbell is defective and your neighbor wasn’t in,
and by then I fear that his resolve was growing thin.
He sat upon your doorstep, but it seems you never came.
So it is your own tardiness, it seems, that is to blame.
As the midnight hour approached he finally gave up.
He found a little pub where he thought that he would sup.
He put your card upon the counter. It was there that he misplaced it
along with the good wishes with which this friend had graced it.
By the time he had informed me of his failure at this task,
I fear your day had ended, so what I now must ask
is that you don’t feel slighted by your real card’s surrogate—
the fact that it is Hallmark and the fact that it is late.
This card can’t compete with the first one I created,
but you share the guilt, friend, for the fact that it’s belated!!!
Prompts today are flourish, address, belated, invoke and speed.
Hearth
That vacant place in my heart.
That pool missing from the ocean.
If the purpose of life
is to live it,
why all the fuss and bother?
Why the wars and thievery?
Why the empty heart?
Is it the law of supply and demand?
Peace more treasured when a rarity?
Love more precious surrounded by hate?
Let us make a little cave here in this place
where no one else wants to be.
Let us take pleasure and do no harm.
Let us fill up the oceans of our hearts
and pray that the world with all its problems
keeps its distance.
Prompts for today are vacant, live, ocean, purpose and pool.
Big Hair and Histamines
“These Kleenex are too flagrant, they always make me sneeze,” she said as she added yet another wadded puff to the pile in the trash can beside her bed. “Why in the world would they add perfume to something people with allergies blow their noses into?”
“Yes, it’s a fragrant abuse of medical logic,” I said, but she didn’t get the joke. She was too miserable and so I just let her malapropism slide by as I had so many times in our long friendship.
The air in this season of new growth was full of pollen. We indulged our roommate by keeping the windows of our college quad closed at all times and we had long ago relegated all our perfume to bottom drawers or trash cans. In those long-ago days of “big hair” when there was no such thing as unscented anything, we took the calculated risk of using hair spray, but only by climbing out onto the fire escape, pulling the window shut behind us and waiting a good five minutes before entering the room again. And this only if our allergy-prone friend was not in the room.
Occasionally, she caught a whiff of us as we passed in the game room or dining room, but she didn’t mention it. We knew that look, though. Only vanity won out over our need not to irritate the nasal fibers of our good friend. No one would miss our perfume, but in terms of hair, no girl dared to defy the norm. Bubbly, big, smooth and helmet-solid—that was the hair-fashion decree of the sixties.
Prompt words today are flagrant, indulged, quad, calculate and air.
Image by Ivan Dodig on Unsplash. Used with permission
Wardrobe Change
Her sequined dress, once fabulous, has lost its shape and glitter.
It lies beneath her window, reduced to roadside litter.
She might have been more charitable—donating the gown.
They could have earned a pretty penny for a dress of such renown.
But she needs its story ended. She could not bear to face
another woman’s body and another woman’s face
pictured in the tabloids in that gown made just for her.
Its memories running through her mind, quickly, in a blur.
Trips down long red carpets, the flashbulbs and the fuss.
Minding how she sat so its gathers would not muss.
How its beauty cut into the soft mounds of her flesh.
The sharp knives of its edges. The fine silk of its mesh.
The fusing of those opposites—the pleasure and the pain.
His gentle kiss, but how, at last, he left her once again.
The lovely words once spoken that turned out to be just script.
The dress tugged off in anger. The dress she’d pulled and ripped
to be free of all it brought to mind—the glamour and the pain.
Best it be diminished by harsh sun and rain.
She flung it out the window, not caring where it rested.
Rid of it, would painful memories be bested?
Covered up by road dust, bogged down by stormy weather,
sequins floated gutters, each weightless as a feather.
Threads loosened and seams parted as the garment ceased to be—
its combined pains and pleasures consigned to memory.
Prompt words today are charitable, litter, fabulous and dress.
photo by Jordhan Madec on Unsplash. Used with permission
Opening Night at the Theater
with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance
There’s an air of raw excitement in the theater tonight.
The ingenues are nervous and the grand dame wants to fight.
Her makeup isn’t done right and her hairdo is a fright.
The set is way too yellow and the stage lights are too bright!
She regales them with stories of when she was at her height.
They wonder just how many great successes she will cite.
It is a frosty evening, yet they brave the cold wind’s bite
to stand out in the alley to escape the much worse plight
of the thirtieth retelling of the star’s first opening night.
The male lead finally gets here, but, alas, high as a kite.
The orchestra begins their opus, hoping to incite
the audience to wild applause as they get their first sight
of the famous lady, surrounded by pink light
that obscures those telltale wrinkles and a costume that’s too tight.
The ingenues are all in place, ready for the fight,
waiting for the star to speak, then exit to the right.
Then all their minor lines they are ready to recite.
It will be a war of words, and they’re ready to fight.
This era, it will be their turn the audience to excite.
Will they outshine the brightest star? Yes, perhaps they might!
Prompt words today are excitement, stage, frosty, regale and yellow.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 