Week 11

How My Mothers Talk To Me

I'm not terribly pleased with this, but I'm trying.

1.

Dear Niece,

Please stay in college

so you don’t have to get as exciting a job as mine.

Today a DLOM, a dear little old man, for those of you not in the know,

called my desk and wanted me to read off the baseball listings from the newspaper.

And he’s not even a subscriber.

2.

Colleen. Please get off the table.

You and I both know the administration does not hold with that.

Yes. You really can write.

Yes. I believe in you.

No. That should not go in your mouth.

Yes. If you were orphaned in a tragic car wreck,

I would adopt you.

(you could milk my goats and write me poems)

3.

I Just Want You TO Know That I LOVE YOU REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DO

and JESUS LOVES you TOO.

Pray for the Second Coming OF CHRIST And Another Republican President.

I’ll send you some cookies I baked next week.

4.

Please shower more. And brush your hair more than once a week.

Are you taking the Vitamin D?

Be sure to send in the promissory note, it’s very important.

Are you sleeping enough?

Martha’s been watching me a lot.

Your furry Dad is off in the mountains somewhere.

Your sister’s off with the boyfriend.

I miss you.

Missed my first week

DAMN. I'll post two to make up for it, I promise. I was too bust having shenangins in San Francisco to retype the poem I wrote.

Nine

Ugh. Midterms. I should be doing them instead of posting this.


Cash Out and Get Out

Because sometimes I can hear the creek, but mostly I hear the freeway
Because my small and private pleasure are being marketed to focus groups
(and they aren’t testing well)-

I am cancelling the electricity, I am letting the dog run feral.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I’m not saving you.
You know this, the poet rescues nothing

All poets feed on forests. We grow bloated
on the exact light of midmorning, the sensation of preemptive grief,
love’s tangled footpaths through the heart.

If you want much of anything, cut the oaks down,
cut your mother and St. Sebastian and the house down.
Mulch it into the pen and paper that will give you permission to say this:

i’ve always felt like that treasured childhood memory
could’ve used a little extra poignancy, a touch
of extra melancholy. let me add some.

Verse eat, verse lies.
For every Grecian vase, a grandmother,
for every Howl, a child