Dispatch from the Home Front: Halloween 2001

like every other year I sit outside with a guitar
while kids roam in small packs
from lit door to lit door

the costumes tonight are not that frightening

angels and fairies and superheroes abound
a few bloodsuckers and ghouls
a sprinkling of skeletons
no terrorists

the adults pretend to be scared

jessie (the giraffe from across the street)
solemnly hands me M & Ms from her stash
when I put the Snickers in her pumpkin
“honey,” I tell her
“it’s not a trade – it‘s a gift”
and she solemnly takes them back

the young girl in the bathrobe and curlers
wearing the sign that says
I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON
says to me
“I want to hear you play your prettyful music”

so
I hand her candy
and I pick up my guitar
to play a song appropriate to the season
(a song by the Grateful Dead)
for this world’s recent ghosts

this world
where unimaginable ashes
sift down on children’s beds

in one part of this world
the very rocks and baseballs
smell of abrasives, jet fuel, burning rubber, corpses

in another part of this world
they are making the mail glow white
long enough to kill what lives on the words

in another part of this world
this guitar would be
illegal

in that country a shrouded woman
has been carefully picking food from a minefield
(food that was airdropped in my name)

she runs and lifts her child from the ground
raising his head high up onto her shoulder
vainly trying to keep the frightening blood from spilling too much

it will take her years to fall asleep again

when she does fall asleep
she will dream of picking up a yellow bomblet
wrapping it in swaddling clothes
suckling it until it blooms hot and bright

but she will not cry
as she holds him in that dream

we all dream that dream these days
we all hold our children closer
while holding back tears

a dream like that
is not a gift
it is a trade
we have all already given
more than enough in return for this one
and you do not let go of your tears
when tears are all you have left

Halloween night
I am pushing aside the veil between the worlds
a mourning person waiting for dawn
pretending to be scared to cover real fear
while I give sweets and prettyful music
to my neighbors’children

we are all a long way from home

if I knew the way
I would take you home

by Tony Brown 

National Cat Day!

Today is National Cat Day! I explained this to my cats and gave them lots of hugs. They appeared unimpressed.

Silent Sunday

Sonnet LXX

Maybe - though I do not bleed - I am wounded,
walking along one of the rays of your life.
In the middle of the jungle the water stops me,
the rain that falls with its sky.

Then I touch the heart that fell, raining:
there I know it was your eyes
that pierced me, into my grief's vast hinterlands.
And only a shadow's whisper appears,

Who is it? Who is it?, but it has no name,
the leaf of dark water that patters
in the middle of the jungle, deaf along the paths:

so, my love, I knew that I was wounded,
and no one spoke there except the shadows,
the wandering night, the kiss of the rain.

  Pablo Neruda

The cat's song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,

says the cat, although I am more equal than you.

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings

walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

 

by Marge Piercy

Random Pictures

What The Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

   by Marie Howe