Moving by Darrell Gray

Moving by Darrell Gray

There comes the time

        moving its house,

the yard and cat

        that can't come back.

The dark was big. The car

        went through,

And what they thought

        they thought they knew-

the yard, the house,

       the car, the cat.

Goodbye, goodbye. It

       seemed so real.

here's a sweet blog post about darrell gray & his poetry:

http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2011/07/darrell-gray-rip.html

& here's a review of this anthology:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5691

camped on the doorstep of panic

the barista is young and scarred, scared too, her glasses slip down toward the end of her nose like a twenty year old pigtailed granny. a stray lock dangles down her cheek like a curtain that did not complete its fling, flung unfinished, face partially eclipsed. a flock of tiny birds swarm the bell shaped tree across the street from where i sit by the wide window, sipping my notebook on a fudge brown plank of wood, studying the puddles, how light rain lands like an invisible ballerina on the hood of a pine green toyota truck, each drop a cold gentle tap that releases a faint steam from the still warm hood. i watch the barista plead with each customer who orders, tiptoeing along her edge like those old black & white pictures of people building the early skyscrapers, but she's new and not at home in the sky. i think of how many times in my life i've had to survive on that ledge, to live in perpetual trembling, needing to always be that vigilant, tight as a piano string and exhausted by the constant failure of my instrument to stay in tune. never feeling secure enough, afraid to not be afraid is like being homeless with a home, camped on the doorstep of panic. i notice how often she calls for help, raising her already raised voice until it climbs into the thin atmosphere of its peak, where it begins to collapse from the lack of oxygen needed to sustain its summit. i do not want to be kept. i do not wish to be tracked. i am an open secret. the mailman enters wearing a plastic white mushroom cap to protect him from the rain. i walk over to the counter and ask the barista for more hot water to replenish my story. i sit back down and a fashionable young blond woman, straight out of a french movie, perhaps the "umbrellas of cherbourg," saunters past, her lunar face slashed with cherry red lipstick. she pauses furtively on the corner, holding a lemon yellow umbrella, wrapped in a beige shawl, her poultry thin legs stockinged & high heeled. the last leaves on the young, recently transplanted tree across the street are that yellow. a crow alights on the thick black sharpied telephone wire just above me, a half dozen others striping the overcast. i cannot hear the crow's caw above the groovy cafe music played by the owner who is wearing a wonder woman tshirt and spotted white tights, who lingers nearby, arranging cut limbs in a vase. when the barista reaches for my teapot, i can see numerous finger sized bruises spotting her arm in a leopard print of pain, all up and down her milky skin. she is nervous. she is always nervous and very nice.

lunar eclipse

a woman came into the store this afternoon which technically was after noon but the day never felt like anything other than morning, until it was evening, like when you don't lift the blinds after you get out of bed as if you could milk the morning by refusing to open your eyes. i was sitting across the room studying a lunar atlas when she apparently began to swoon and behave irrationally but not the usual irrational behavior that we're accustomed to. i thought nothing of it at first as they, the cashier & the customer, or perhaps in another way, the man behind the counter and the woman in front of him, not touching, yet seeming to wrangle somehow, without force, lugubrious, as if he were trying to stand a deflated doll that refused to stand firm in his grasp. i saw him get on the phone, and then he mouthed to me from across the room M-O-D (manager on duty) who i immediately paged, not knowing what was happening. they immediately called back and the cashier said, paramedic, i'm calling a paramedic, which i reported to the MOD, who said he'd be right over. the woman sat down at a table to wait, muttering that she didn't want to die again, over and over, as if death could be repeated like a grade. i feel so weird when this sort of thing happens, heightened yet passive, powerless to respond and yet ready to respond. the MOD came and knelt with one knee on the smooth textured gray floor beside her, assessing what was happening and assuring her that everything would be fine. he normally has a deep bulldog bark of a voice but he almost seemed to purr when he spoke to her, though she was resolute about dying again. the paramedics came, serious burly men. i wanted them to be less clinical than they were, more tender, but a litany of emergencies probably insists on them being pragmatic, i guess. this is the second time i've watched a customer being wheeled out the door. she waved like a football player being carted off the field after a vicious hit. it's hard to be heroic when you're strapped into a gurney. the MOD walked over and stood beside me for a moment, clearly disturbed. for some reason i had a strange line from a frustrating movie stuck in my head. sometimes i say things without considering how they might be taken or even what the deeper meaning might be but just take a leap and hope it's right. and sometimes it's not. i told him it's better to be a live dog than a dead lion. he just looked at me like what the f*ck is that supposed to mean and left. i've been pondering it all evening, worried i put my foot in my mouth again. but you know, it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion. dead means end of story, no matter how beautiful, how powerful you are, and as ugly, as messed up as your life might be, you are still alive, which means the story continues, and at the very least, something could change, maybe not better, but at least it could be different.

tragic hero

Theaterfotografie van Albert Greiner sr. & jr. 

"now it is true that tragedy is the consequence of

a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly."

arthur miller's definition of a tragic hero

10/22/12 Caffeinated Art #158: rick j, Judith Fay Pulman & Natalia K Burgess

here is a link to the show i did with judith pulman & natalia k burgess.

http://showandtellgallery.org/?p=6263

autumn caught

Ink, oil and Industrial Enamel on cut velum Matthew Dennison

the fisherman leaves
home to return to the leaf house
stolen tears do not repair the wind
nor mend the scream torn
nets of other
world pain globed
autumn world 
unshaken but captured
sculpted to state
what is still
unsettled in the settled
useful to a tree
in the house of
unrelenting leaf taking
mute dogs of muscle lay
quietly about his bones
waiting to serve, drifting
toward a beach inside
becalmed the maniacal surge
swiped from cradle, stolen from grave
the wave broken boxer
rests on a stool in his corner
placating the swell
with a spoon of cool metal
sewing the skin shut, coached
by grief and loss, by leaf and
tree, repaired by moist wet
silence around him all
the yield is decreasing around him
all is leaf mutiny that you do not see
them scurry in pink shells leafed in
tinny tinted caves inside him all
is leaf tunnel maze, carpeted
land of ears and mitts to catch
what was too golden to be heard all
around him is too tear-shaped is bled
brown and abandoned by sun all
around him is the shape he could not hold
cold fish hooked from an infinite pool of
sorrow is the son sunk beneath the horizon
who could not grope his way into father
who could not leave his mother even after
he landed still wearing the red boots
he stood for days in puddles of
blood, in blood wave sloshed in blood spray
the killing he has made is killing what's still
wriggling alive inside his slick suit
a yellow hearse kept the corpse warm enough
to approximate a human on land, but at sea,
everything swims in a direct line from
eye to tear to wave, whichever breaks him
first can salt the bones for the bowl of
what you do not have is full of
lack and loss what the greedy
swiped clean leaves an unusual
hollow carved pause in the chest where
a line extends clear through
him into world into sea the reckoning
between each trip is a fight 
victory defined only as escape
vaguely familiar the face that smirks 
sleepless in his dreams