I Often Dream of Secret Rooms

I find this room I never knew
existed, an attic accessed by hidden stairs.
Big stuffed chair, slanted skylight.
A book I have never read
rests on a table casually
as if someone just put it down.
If I sit there quietly,
I can hear footsteps below,
back and forth,
searching. If I sit quietly
long enough, they go away.

I step inside a  dark closet
but find strange windows, curtained
with billows of illusion,
an bright space filled
with glaring whiteness
where pale shadows dance
across the ceiling--
a wedding veil room with northern light.

I walk down the hall
carrying a laundry basket and right there,
between linen closet and bathroom,
a sudden door springs open.
Warm, woodsy walls
stretch impossibly long.
Chairs line up along edges
like a waiting room. Laundry forgotten,
I sit down and wait.

 
Another Language

I  loved the bounce,
your voice off walls, surprising
every corner.
Coins of words
spun out and I scrambled
to fill my pockets.
Laughter jingled,
settled in.

I drew the quilt
of your voice around me,
heard you translate lightning
into another language.

So that now I am
reminded of a clap of thunder,
how it shakes the night with silence
when it’s gone.

 
An Abstract Artist Named Walls

The woman in the lime suit
resembles a big bottle of Fresca.
Her male companion stares,
stunned by fifties memorabilia
mounted to wall as sculpture--
toasters, patent leather bags,
armless store dummies, Chevy bumpers--
all painted white. He tries to explain.

This work is about blandness, the numbing white bread
of material existence.

Secretly she thinks it’s all rather funny.
Like the next room, ablaze
ceiling to floor with a thousand colors,
hung with blank canvases.

Emptiness, the infinite sadness of alone
against the gaudy backdrop of the world.

She glances back as they walk through.
      
You know, she says,
I once knew a mortician called Earthman.

 

 

 

Darkness falls like a leaf
stalled by a breeze,
its flat green blade cutting slowly
through the florescent hum.
The once visible sky,
 tri-colored face
freckled with black birds,
costumes itself in a hood
of hovering shadow,
steals away, a faithless friend.
Tomorrow is a body of myths.
Something black, something very white.
Uncertainty.
I have no compass for my fear,
only feel its scurrying through the maze
of my veins, a clammy sense of nightfall
chilling the nape of my neck.
The air is cold.
Hugging myself is not enough.

 Berries

In nettled underbrush
along the fence line, we hunted
June dewberries with greed
like a bellyache.
Sweet melting juice of unwashed fruit
purpled our lips and tongues,
rolled warm and gritty
down our throats.

Later
we abandoned berry hunts,
left sweetness to drop away
into the nest of briars that tickled
our fingers with warning.

Through lifetimes chasing
that taste of summer,
cafe cobblers disappointed,
too rich, too heavy
in presentation.

What we forgot:
berries tasted better dusty,
with stained hands stinging, and before
our mothers drowned
the naughty tartness in milk