Jhnson
“Words
say, Misspell and misspell your name
Words say, Leave this life” ---Michael Palmer
Jhnson
looked so correct reflected on
the tin-foil tray.
Jhnson, so plump in green
play-doh, rolled so carefully round
and thin
by the arc of my five-year-old palm and
my arms
leapt to the air waving like red-hot
thermometers, I was
sitting on a
steam of coals, waving for response from the
warm
round mouth of Mrs. Van Ness.
“No,”
slapped her full mouth
forward into my freckled face.
“No.”
With the shadow of her hand
she brushed away my
morning’s
sculpture, put the play-doh back
into the
yellow can like a bad genie.
Then,
pulling a thick, red
pencil from her hair,
so thick it took
my whole hand
to hold it in mid-air,
her hand eclipsed my
tiny fingers,
wove onto the rough brown paper
my properly
spelled name.
And
all day every single
five-year-old played
in their
three-foot-tall way
with the treasures they’d
pulled
from Mrs.. Van Ness’ box.
They’d
spelled right
the words, felt each letter
form from the
paper to their
brain, to their play-doh-
stained fingertips
and
carried their prize pinned
to their shirt:
a scratch and sniff of gasoline,
a pocket full of rainbow erasers.
My tongue has always
been heavy.
For four years I was dragged
through the gray
fog of school mornings
to the portable classroom
of the
speech pathologist.
th--he’d
say
sssss---like a snake
and
still my tongue sank
as if it held too many stones.
And
when, in the fourth grade, I stood trembling
before an
auditorium of eyes
I did as I should and stepped to the
mike
repeating my spelling bee word: Sheriff,
my
heavy tongue slipping on that bright
star,
S---H---E---R---I---F, sheriff, I
spelled,
just to leave that weight behind and sit down.
Cedars,
Lilies, Stars
The
cedars wrestle their boughs nervously.
We lie, weighed beneath
possibilities.
Above, the still dark sky simmers—averse
to
the damp rot of earth – the not yet knowing.
Venus will
burn a hundred times awake
the stars, whose translucent down
will simmer
until cedar branches illuminate
the lion-roar
of the lilies’ desire:
a new life nestled in their
slack-jawed yawns.
Her face not yet seen -- a sky full of
stars --
already bends to the weight of the dawn --
to the
weight of what she will become: ours.
The down of dawn,
that-rosy fingered bliss
We drown in the grenadine of love’s
kiss.
The
View from Mercer Hospital, Pittsburgh, PA
--For
Ken
Tantalus
sits eleven stories up
pressed in glass--a cool eye skating
the cool
river that interrupts in ice—below.
He is a
man between--a butterfly
observed on pins: his own imprisoned
face
reflecting back at him--a stranger, thin and
out of
place. A gray man in a gray place.
Who wouldn't believe
escape? That just
one bright apple, crisp to the lips, wet
to
the touch, might be permitted. But, the
tongue
recoils. The stomach sulks. The walls move
in.
Until he no longer sees his own face
reflected
back--just the cool, gray, river below
city, forever carried
on its back.
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