poetrymagazine.com/zawinski
"Your poetry speaks of America and the transitions of the soul...
your poetry speaks beautifully."
..Michelle Boleyn |
STUCK INSIDE
I want to write about a balmy night, the sky a sweep of clouds,
crows diving into pines, the feathers of light a
gibbous moon
flings low, but I am stuck inside in Pittsburgh,
eavesdropping
over diner coffee from a barstool in a donut
shop, this time
over the shoulder of that cantankerous harpy who
occupies
my old house, the place from which my dreams were
launched,
and from where she boasts she has hooked up an
extra washer,
is taking in laundry, will not pay the water
bills or the rent,
and just won't move.
I want to take you with me on a sunny walk
alongshore day lilies,
droopy-headed dropping blossoms in rows tidy as a
run of sailboats
slipping by the San Francisco skyline, neat as
kites, easy and steady
on the smooth bay breeze, a moment's
elixir. But back in Pittsburgh,
there are storms driving me in to where I watch
my gypsy father
stumble drunk with wanderlust and burning with
the fire of cognac,
staring from our kitchen window at that frayed
clothesline flagged
with bedding above a backyard choked by a flood
of dandelions
and doldrums.
I want to hold you to me in this poem like
huckleberry and fern
do the mossy trout stream bank, eucalyptus
perfuming the air
whipping the coastal highway, barns puddled in
dewy light.
But I am crouched inside a dark corner of
somewhere I left behind,
my neighbor's voice rumbling in on a consonant
strung tongue
of her Old Country, recounting how she hid with
her mother
from soldiers in a grain pipe on some abandoned
farm back when
the earth shook as bombs fell in whistles and
booms from above
and behind.
I want to send you with these words through this
shape-shifting
landscape past a cypress windbreak at the next
turn, give you
a nosegay blushed pink by seaside daisies at the
water's edge.
But back in Pittsburgh, a flurry of noisy
nightbirds is breaking loose again
on orthodox church bell peals, the hillside an
echo of women singing
at the untended grave of my mother, the pinwheel
I propped there
for a new year faded by spring light, its leaves
heavy with the weight
of coins I pasted on, pennies I found tossed in
my path by some gods
of good fortune.
Back in Pittsburgh, I get stuck inside, alone and
on my back again
in bed growing claws and bird wings to take me
where I have come
to be, no longer dreaming windmill farms I now
pass by, their petals
spinning celebrants of air on a palette of
sky. But in Pittsburgh,
there is always an explosion of light back in
that amusement park
where I met a mechanical fortune teller queen in
a penny arcade,
who, each time I looked for a way out, slid her
card predictably
down the shoot to me, and with all the words I
ever needed for this:
good luck, good luck.
STUCK INSIDE: Publication Credit:
WordWrights! Washington, D. C.
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