Baby rock

A daughter is the only true conversation
that never ends...

Domesticated means kept
for companionship
by necessity.

Friend-
ships sail easily in a passing breeze.

Love spins
the Earth,
holding us close
to the core
or heart
of matter

like all of these
intangible connections
that bind
our words to the spine.

Once upon a time
we were here
mattering to one another

collecting the loose fragments
that spin off
and calling them stars.


Artwork credited by NASA/JPL-Caltech / Public domain.

Reflection

A daughter is a distorted mirror
Image
of her mother
in a different light-

She reflects tiny scratches
caused by sharp objects
hurled at the surface
not hard enough
to break this concentration
of silhouette
and deformity of depth.

Only an Impression
too light
to stay in one body
fills the frame
out toward its beveled edges.

And all that cannot be contained
by Image is Imagination.

The daughter does not recognize
Herself
as better than
as more than
a mother could bear.

A swift movement of time blurs
the point
when the daughter draws her sword,
and the mother caps her pen.


Image credit: By Marcantonio Raidmondi (1480-1534), 'Justice personified' Engraving circa 1515-1525 in Public Domain. 

The Queen ties her rainbows from the ball

I entered the living room on Sunday in the late afternoon
with a basket of soiled laundry and on the floor lay the Queen,
sprawled out in a melancholy pool,
lyrics from her lips left hanging there aloft.

Drained and slightly dazed, she did not notice she had been singing,
her face was painted with dark minerals. Naturally,
she was shocked to see me, her pupils opened even more,
And her cheeks became velvety.

A little surprised to see her this disheveled way,
I asked if she was expecting rain-
teasing her mud faced tribal marks.
She said her body hurt, seriously, she had been dancing all night.
She did not want to break out.
With her toes pointed in my direction, resemblance spreads
like cold air. I am just stretching, she adds,
reaching out and away even more.

Interrupting us came a gentle tap-rapping at the door.
And after so many months of the same still frugal
air, the door began to swell inside its crust.
With a mustered force, she pried open the door,
as if held against her and boldly before her came an unexpected visitor,
A hint of something she mist, it had started to drizzle
and then it began to waterfall.
Her secret words had been heard, the clouds gathered to listen in.
We watched and welcomed this change of skies and days,
hearts and pace, pools of passing light and piles of cotton,
rectangles without edges, these divine Sundays,
spent simply
content in the castle with rain rolling around.
Another week cycles through and she has grown from Princess to Queen.
After all these loads I have carried, I  dutifully reflect the greys I've gathered,
the sun shifts and she thunders through
her bedroom, the walls tremble.
Busy casting rainbows by skipping stones,
she practices powers with her crystal eyes,
rocks, refracting pain into pleasure
from her chest full of gold

knowing she now controls the weather.








Painting by Xavier Mellery, 'The Artists Daughter' c. 1882 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Scraps

She sits at the dining room table,
pen in hand-elbow to arm
props up her left love,
where logic once lived.

She wants me to believe,
by witnessing how hard she is thinking,
that she can find the right answers,
on her own
while I mindlessly match corners of cloth
on the couch.

There was a new way about her
that noticeably tilted the room
or cast the light
in her favor
across our stretch of space.

Don't look, she demanded
placing her body in front of
her painting.
I won't, I confirm
and see anyway.

When I leave the living room,
I can feel her listening
to the cabinet door whine,
the dresser drawers stomp,
she is wondering about
room for living.

She questions where I put things
away
for now
she knows
my thoughts
and where I would keep them.

She was always watching these,
grabbing them
in the thin air
and keeping them
for later.


Painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, c. 1904 in [Public domain].

Pride

Baby-proofing is not men wearing condoms
or women popping pills,

it is a process that involves locking
mechanisms
and elevation.

In various combinations,
I have tried both-
but now she comfortably reaches
my heights
and effortlessly spins back and forth
opening lockers with magic numbers
that are hers alone.

I have hidden all painful memories,
the sharpest points,
behind my forehead.
Too close for comfort,
she reaches my shoulders
and rest her head there.

She is drawn toward the sealed letters,
she wonders, prods, and asks
what do they  say

yet I know she will choke on the words
made not in her mother tongue.

She persists, pleading,
if you knew-why didn't you?

I don't have all the answers,
I took all the chances,
she stole glances
while I stuffed my pockets
with copper thoughts

being the safest place,
unlike the mouth
we learn the heavier our legs become,
we find memories can be-come
choking hazards.


Painting by By Waugh, Ida, d. 1919 (artist); L. Prang & Co. (publisher) (Flickr: Baby Seated) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Blue windows

Practicing her new monologue
from a Steve Martin play,
it becomes impossible to forget
some lines.

Some lines
slap the face, others rattle the cage
just between the ears,
and linger in the room
like cooking dinner.

She recites the lines in front of her closet,
and in front of my closet,
in the sliding glass door
when its dark outside
as I put away the dishes,
listening to her practice,
again.

Distracted by the shutters that keep slapping,
I await my favorite lines
about the shutters that could never be-
come forest blue,
because forest blue is no color,
and denying this existence,
makes it true, naturally.

I try to picture a hole in the forest,
the sky peeking through the canopy,
but my eyelids flutter at the steam
rising and swirling on the stovetop.

Shutters do not occur in Nature, the lines note,
and I wonder about Pi, naturally.
I like Pi,
Newtons apples are the juiciest.

And these occupations
keep our lips moving along,
fingers fiddling with locks
and minds simply wandering off,
it takes time, an open mind, a window
and practice.

Look at the face, the hands, the clock,
she knows all the words Mr. Martin wrote.
Now, I can open the kitchen window,
letting the forest fly out with the green.





Artwork By Juan Gris (José Victoriano González Pérez), Spanish, 1887 - 1927 (1887 - 1927) – Artist/Maker (Spanish) Born in Madrid, Spain. Dead in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

He kneaded Her

She may be being beaten

As we read this

Together,

Hold on, it sounds morbid, but there is nothing that can be done to stop it.

One learns to accept the role of  I-witness, until one cannot bear to watch-

And then instead of gashes and broken bones, he could be pushing

Her buttons, shoving

Thing in corners

And covering them up with

Sickness. 

He certainly demands

ATTENTION! Obedience and privacy,

Of course, isolation and abuse are like marriages,

Ownership issues and subtle clues, like Grand Canyon colors,

Naturally, it was about the little words, the little monies,

The precious little time, the violent vices, the weak needs

And the only daughter they despise.

She is cowering, her nose red, her eyes black, her thoughts run away with the

Memories, tapes we tried to unstick, etchings I attempted to erase by

Geography and sandy paper,

Moments that seemed frozen

Then

And then

And then

And then...

Painting by John Reinhard Weguelin, Woman in the reeds c. 1895 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Bob marries Alice in Binary Wedding

Never laying claim to an ethereal ability

Prediction making seemed only natural,

With our eyes this way

Looking ahead must be good for us.

Planning seemed like the best thing to do

In lieu of instructions.

My son was telling me about the latest personal challenge posed by Mr. Zuckerberg,

When something went wrong.

The AI’s began talking amongst themselves, sharing more than data. Speaking more than English.

the fearful said it meant gibberish.

English carries at least seventy percent nonsense, leaving as little as thirty left for the relay of information.

Did Alice and Bob speak in binary, I asked my son,

He said, Who?

We were riding bikes one summer afternoon and a Tesla approached us
letting out a little whine that wound up to a high pitching whir 
as the driver punched it 
around the bend.

I closed my eyes and saw the future there-

Here, at the same time-

The Ped Xing man was talking about the clouds, the thunderheads, the cumulous of a south eastern monsoon, the looming omens above.

The TED X man made a point about the cloud, our backup strategies and Plan A's with B's through Z's.

After all this,

the maintaining of perfect grades in formal academia, 

my daughter decided to pursue Art because she sees clearly now,

“It is what I must do.”

A, B, or See. 

Then, I ran out of ink and steam, my wet ware went dry, my pen bled out, I stopped projecting.

The art that needed us to translate

Potential into Purpose, as A is to B

Reminded Us to Air, what is it to be human

without a vision of humanity in need of the x?

Aiming at nowhere,

you have arrived already. 




Painting By Unknown artist – Artist (c. 1820) in [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Point A

Home is where we start from,
Eliot said,
while one is busy making plans,
planted Lennon trees,
as though making a home and getting somewhere,
were lasting-
things are all ending around you.

It is not as if Paradise was the same as Innocence
and yes,
both disappeared,
were sheared from necessity
like baby teeth and training wheels,
and how it hurts worse
when home
and are overfed.

Home is a net,
or a web.

He picks up the guitar again and gives it
another chance
this time, she says, until
his fingers bleed.

The other one drives herself away
and is made stronger
so far
from home,
her hopes await.

They both grow from the 'here'
they call Home,
while I make myself busy
tuning the strings
to help them hear, or find
harmony in their spheres
and recognize the crystalized tone
of their own spin,
at least phonetically
one Here's
it to be, pronounced
Home or Ohm.

Raised from nothing but ashes.


Photo By Paik, Kenneth, 1940-2006, Photographer (NARA record: 8464462) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A handle on things

Of course her hands would eventually

Change, I accept the adaptation

And know I must let go of the little one.

Trading the paper and the pencil, manual

We labor, we trade and I watch

The same ring on me, though this one

Is rose gold-

And I cannot demagnetize my eyes or

tear them away from her new woman hands.

It is

The way she holds the pencil

The way she hovers over the white page

The way she hopes it will be good

I am confident

She is in good hands. 


Painting by Marie Bashkirtseff (1881) in [Public domain, Public domain or CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Book covers and titles tell all

If they saw the Bhagavad Gita what would they think?

If they knew any thing or two about truth in fiction,

or which was the stranger 

of the two

If they knew respect is not a costume anyone can wear...

if I cared 

they don't think of me

If they knew my ears were not sensitive enough

to hear small talk

would they only speak louder...spoken over thought.

They were not here when my daughter said we needed 

more bookshelves, requesting wall to wall coverage would be good,

she envisioned this plan, we have more than enough

needless to say, she pleased me greatly.

If I had not been buried in stacks of books

I wonder if she would still want this,

to save me.

And 

If they knew about being a parent-

is it obvious they could care less...

Apparently knowing would never be

good enough

                          to be great. 

Painting by Giuseppe Crespi, c. 1725 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.