Selected Poems from 2022

For almost 25 years I rose at 4 in the morning to write—5 or 6 days a week. I was a single mother; I had a job, and grabbed the only time available. I burned with words. The children grew up, MIDNIGHT LEMONADE bought unlimited writing time, menopause brought new sleep patterns, and the flames leapt lower. I began to ‘bargain’ with the muse, put her off the way you do with organizing a closet or calling a friend who talks too much.

On New Year’s day of 2012, I cut a deal: I would write a poem a day—no matter what. And I did, In fact, I kept to that resolution for several years. I wrote probably hundreds of pages of poems. If I could find them all, I could trace those years and seasons, own them over again. But the point is that I wrote a lot of poems and maybe one passable poem for every thirty. I have been graced with friends who are true poets, even great poets; a couple of them have been read by many thousands of readers. I understand I’m in whatever is lower than Little League as a poet. Prose is more my medium. On New Year’s morning 2016, I made a resolution to start a novel (bear in mind I already had 3 or 4 unpublished novels filed away) and to work on it every day until I finished. And I did. The novel was GONER. My powerful agent sent that manuscript scurrying back to a drawer to join the other novels she had already rejected. My friend, Lynn Hill, asked to administer CPR to my 2016 novel and that is how GONER found its way ‘back into the light ‘and to an Independent Press. Thank you, Lynn!

All this, as preface to Selected Poems of 2022. I continue to pen the occasional poem and this New Year decided to cull out a few from the past year. Here they are:

 

Dinner Out In The Pandemic

    Separate cars parked

    in a haunted parking lot

    waiting for the storm.

     We seat ourselves among

    empty tables, pretending

    to remove our masks.

     The menu is stingy,

    the past conspicuously

    not ‘Du Jour.’

     Missing like the sauce

    not served with

    January Oysters.

     A silent soundtrack

    plays golden oldies

    gone silver.

     1/13

 

STELLA

 Stella     star

     but you were

not even close.

You were pretty,

but unremarkable,

maligned by virtue

of your shyness.

Four children

to    disregard you

invisible star

out

shone by

your moon man,

volatile but

a  damned

good storyteller,

my grandpa,

“Kill the kid on the bike!”

he’d shout, speeding up

while you cowered

in the passenger seat.

 

Who could even imagine

       your hands

on the wheel?

At four years old

your French mother

tied an apron round

your waist and

stood you on

a stool to reach

the stove where

       you spooned

liquidly dough

into hot grease

making breakfast

in the house where

your father

killed himself.

Crepes!

those lace

edged pancakes,

I recognized

in Paris.

Like discovering you

now    In my old age

and remembering the

year I was abandoned

at eight to live

with you, and

volatile grandpa,

where I learned how

poetry can mute pain

while voicing it

in all those sad

nineteenth century

poems you read to me.

The tears we two shed

together          over  lost

causes, dead children

unrequited love.

Grandmother      my star

I don’t even know

where you are buried.

Let’s Get On With The Show

One night, two years before you died,

you called to tell me to look at the sky.

You were probably not sober

and had probably tried to

call each of our children

who never took your calls after 6.

 

The moon and a couple planets were

performing a once-in-a-lifetime show.

You were an old actor, decades alone,

the only patron in that big house,

but the sky needed more

audience that night and there was

no one else to call.

 

Though I, too, never took

your calls after 6, I answered

just before the last ring and

carried the phone outside.

The show we watched together

was splendid, astonishing.

 

It leaves me, even now,

suspended between

gratitude and grief.

      HOARDERS

You would think that

the people who love life

the most would be the

ones who cling to

life most tenaciously.

 

But it seems the other

way: the misanthropic,

the glass half-empty-folks

are the ones who horde

life, hold on tight, misers

huddled over their dark gold.

      HUGE

When her heart broke it wasn’t

Just her heart breaking, she

Brought her whole body down.

Other people fall, or trip, miss

A step, slip on ice, Maureen

Crashed down through a ceiling.

Driving 460 drunk she hit a ditch

Drove the gear shift through her

Thigh, drove herself to ER.

When she smoked she pulled

The smoke deep into her lungs

And then said what she had to say.

She loved big and thought big.

Whatever she told us, we did

And we were better for it.

We six women, her safety net

Woven to soften her landings.

The bridge on her way out.

She was smart, hard, sharp.

It was just like Maureen to leave

without saying good bye.

                           September 2022

          Please Don’t

Please don’t touch the butterflies.

Flames of color flaring

the flowers,

lighting down, lifting up

silk tatters torn from

the glimmering fabric

of wistfulness.

They are so airy and

fragile, child palm

bursts of gladness;

flighty, brave, brief.

Like first love

      Overlook

 We pull off the road

    driving down

        from Mountain Lake

to gaze out over

      the verdant valley,

           the slash running

                 through its heart.

Land stabbed

   In the Devil’s deal .

               Angel Resting

Drive past a rusty trailer home set back

in a hollow, cars mounted on blocks

tattered Rebel flag fluttering above

a tipped over two-wheeled tricycle .

 

Around the next bend, early morning

sunlight has turned the creek stones to

chunks of gold;  velvet green hills  swell

and rise toward Angel’s Rest Mountain.

 

Mist turns the angel’s gown gossamer

and stirs beneath her frigid wings, as if

to wake her, bring her to attention.

These people here believe in heaven!

 

And really, how can they not? Marooned

so close to Eden’s promise, viewed through

cracked windows from an unsweet chariot

home swung too low, carrying them nowhere.

       Dwindling

Not urgent, but essential,

these almost-autumn swims.

The river cooler, slower

my strokes parting  leafy

scrims as I aim for

the late sun streaked

over the river’s belly.

 

I turn on my back,

feet upriver, letting the

current fan my gray hair

toward the sunset.

The sky pales and speckles

With Summer’s

             early birds

                       checking out.

9/19

Disconnect- October Italy

Puccini babel of language

heard but not understood.

The tasty lunch with wine

before dead hours of Latin naps

above cobbled streets once

marched by soldiers, memories

vague enough that grudges

click the flint of war

near cracking gas lines

lacing the globe while

The U.S. news is all

About the weather.

10/1

   Specter Spouse                       

I loved him for myself

the beautiful blank page of him

the way he blew the way

the wind blows, so easy.

“The silk touch of your skin.”

“The silk touch of your skin.”

 My line and his refrain

 bed talk, times two:

“So blessed to lie together.”

“So blessed to lie together.”

 

He took on my dawn risings,

the same people & places,

same books, movies, politics .

On Friday nights we lit

candles, played oldies,

danced close, singing

along to our song:

Time goes by so slowly.

And time can do so much.”

Though I couldn’t sing

And he couldn’t dance.

 

Such a love: like one lover

pressed against a mirror

made into two.

Everything the same way

he had no way but mine.

We never disagreed!

He repeated my stories,

without my timing.

My best friend was his

in all but intimacy.

 

One day I found him                                                  

holding onto a locked box.                                                                 

When I asked to see inside,                                                               

he swallowed the key.     

       

          Hanging In

The customers at Food Lion

smile as we pass each other.

It’s raining outside and we’re

a cozy community of shoppers

full of small town good will.

 

In the dairy section, I have

to squeeze past a portly

toothless man’s electric

grocery cart, parked at

an angle in front of  the

cottage cheese I’m eying.

 

How you doin?” he asks,

eager for conversation.

“Fine, I say, giving up

on the cottage cheese

 And you?”  He throws

his shoulders back, proud.

Gonna be eighty in couple

weeks.” He watches my face.

“If you can believe it.”                    

Waiting for Tony

Vladimir: “We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment.”

Almost five years after his death, my daughter and I made the pilgrimage to place her father’s ashes in his family crypt in Brooklyn. Tony, like so many men before him, had been an indifferent father. Though not as ‘important’ as his own father, Tony had been far too important to be concerned with the childhood of his children. While ‘distant’ as a father, it must be added that he was a pretty awful husband. With such a dark--but not especially unusual for its time--family history, it is essential that I go on to address Tony’s Redemption. His redemption, like a rich and nourishing meal clumsily served at The Last Stop Café. Tony spent his final years making amends, stretching his elderly limbs over the chasm of his past as father and husband.

Some of the story

Tony & I had our first date on December 9, 1965. We were married four months later.

tony and I on our wedding day

The following spring, Tony and most of his colleagues resigned in protest after the administration at Tulane University refused to commit to building a theatre for their internationally-known theatre department. Tony’s colleagues went on to head theatre departments at such places as NYU, Illinois State, and Temple University. Tony came to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State Institute to establish a theatre department, a unique opportunity to begin at the beginning. Our first born, Paul, was seven months, and I was twenty one years old when we moved to Blacksburg—then, a town of 7,000. Our daughter, Gretchen, was born the year Tony directed Measure For Measure and our youngest son, Tod, the year of A Funny Thing Happened on The Way To The Forum.

Tony worked days and nights and weekends, expanding the department, promoting the arts at a former military and agricultural college; back then, a most fallow field for the arts, a Quixotical task if ever there was one. He helped form the Virginia Theatre Association, became President of the American Theatre Association and Dean of The College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He put the young Theatre Arts department into a national spotlight. Tony turned down a deanship at Penn state and formed the Marching Virginians at what, by then, was beginning to be called “Virginia Tech.” Tony led and chaired the growth of a department of music. The combined departments merged to form the School of The Arts, with Tony as director. In those intense, hardworking, tireless years completely devoted to the university and his profession, our household went on without him. Tony worked harder. He envisioned a future where, one day, there might actually be a formidable performing arts center on campus, his lance pointed at windmills. In those intense, hardworking, tireless years completely devoted to Virginia Tech and his profession, he missed birthdays, family dinners, ballgames, plays, and teacher conferences. His young family slipped away. In November of 1978 the children and I left the drafty 200 year old house on Shadow Lake Road for a tiny house in downtown Blacksburg.

“Discipline is the essential ingredient of art,” Tony told his students. He worked ever harder, spreading the word of the power of art to transform.

His work drive took his family and his drinking kept Tony from the life he deserved. His youngest brother died in 1981, his oldest brother in 1990. He was alone in that 12 room house on Shadow Lake Rd for almost 40 years. It was probably not until after he left the University and navigated the waters of institutional amnesia that he realized what he had given up, what he had missed: the first steps, the birthdays, the bedtimes, the bad dreams and funny dreams, the first loves and last school days of his beautiful three children; the buzzing, growing, stretching of the community his family had created. Tony woke up to the missed years and his missed chances.

He paced the waiting room while his first grandchild was being born and became a wildly devoted grandfather to her and to the ensuing other four grandchildren. Tony gave his time and money; sleepless nights of worry, and summer seaside afternoons of delight to his family—the three children who had been there all along and the five, precious, unique, off springs of the three.

The Grand Children

While he was parsimonious with himself—Tony’s lunches were baloney sandwiches, he drank generic vodka and bought all of his clothes at Penny’s--his generosity to his children and grandchildren was boundless, as was his philanthropy to the schools he attended and to The Lyric Theatre, The Warm Hearth Foundation, and Planned Parenthood.

It is true that Tony did not have the personal life we would have wanted for him; but he appreciated the life he had. He gave almost everyone the benefit of the doubt. And he always, always loved to milk a joke. He died, surrounded by his loving family, in that big old house on Shadow Lake Road. A lifelong member of Actor’s Equity, he was a consummate show man who continued to look forward to each new season. Tony Distler reluctantly left the stage just as the curtain was closing on 2016. Art and Redemption were the show of his life.

My sons--for different reasons, but reasons all their own—chose not to join Gretchen and me in taking their father to be interred with his own father, mother, and siblings. So, it was just the two of us catching the train from Roanoke to Penn Station on an early morning in June. It had been planned that we would meet Tony’s sister-in-law and her oldest daughter in New York, but they were forced to cancel two days earlier. Gretchen and I would be the only mourners at the cemetery in Brooklyn. We carried Tony’s ashes in a beautiful urn, bundled in bubble wrap, tucked into Gretchen’s suitcase, and stored in the overhead rack. Slipping our masks on and off, we nibbled on snacks, drank wine, and read during the 8 hour train ride. A lovely easy day, summer scenery passing by.

Well Urned

New York had only just ‘opened’ from its Covid shut down the week before. The night we arrived in Manhattan, we dined in our hotel’s spectacular restaurant and it was crowded with beautiful people wearing clothes we’d only seen in glossy fashion magazines. The Beekman hotel was lovely and secluded; walking distance from the Brooklyn Bridge, and crazy expensive.

We spent the next morning meandering the High Line and browsing through the Whitney, where—because of Covid restrictions--we were part of a sparse and socially distanced group. It was a privilege. We had an early afternoon reservation for the opening of the Distler Family crypt. So, we caught an Uber from SoHo to pick Tony up at the Beekman and take him to Brooklyn where his parents and siblings were waiting.

We settled into the back seat of the car; Gretchen cradling the urn of ashes in her lap; me with a small cooler in mine as we rode over the Brooklyn Bridge into clusters of leafy neighborhoods and past a scattering of sun blasted shopping centers. My daughter and I were quiet during the long drive, each of us drifting in very different memories of her father. As he aged, and she matured, Gretchen tended to Tony more and more. In mid-autumn of 2016, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died three days after Christmas. Gretchen took a leave from teaching to look after him as he was dying. She kept company with her father in the house where she had lived for the first nine years of her life. Almost five years after his death she was still deeply mourning Tony. He had been my husband for slightly over twelve years. Those twelve years had long been put to rest, and I know I was thinking only of the redeemed Tony, and, among those thoughts, a particular memory:

One night, maybe two years before you died, you called to tell me to look at the sky. You were probably not sober and had probably tried to  call each of your children who never took your calls after 6.  The moon and a couple planets were  performing

The scenery began gradually to change until we were driving through neighborhoods of abandoned buildings, trash-laden streets; store fronts and open car windows blaring dueling music over the scream of sirens. It seemed the further we were from Manhattan, the more desperate and rundown our surroundings. Gretchen and I found ourselves dreading our destination, fearing for where the end of Tony’s road might be. Then. . . and then, the driver turned off a noisy, crowded intersection and drove through high stone gates into a lush green place of gardens and ancient trees. ‘An oasis Grows In Brooklyn.’ It was as though a door had subtly closed behind our Uber. We were enclosed in a place of enchantment. The car left everything urban behind and we were now gliding into a silent and shimmery June; a forest opening filled with lovely marble cottages, family crypts. Tony’s last stop was in the Evergreens Cemetery, a unique place founded in 1849 as the first secular cemetery in New York. The marble crypts bore writings in Hebrew and Arabic, French and German; some of the crypts were like small palaces, others were humble stone huts.

We had hosted a full weekend memorial in Virginia the May after Tony died—all of his family present, and his most beloved former students, eating, drinking, telling stories—lots of laughter. But this June day, in the shadow of the Distler crypt, was elegantly personal.

We stood in the cool darkness and read the names of family we had known and family who were only legend. We toasted Tony with the small bottle of champagne I managed to keep fairly chilled.

Gretchen had expected to weep and instead found herself laughing at the stories of the 4 brothers from Queens who had opened the crypt for us, respectively left, and then returned to seal Tony into his rightful place. They were like the comic relief in Hamlet. Those good men were enamored with Gretchen and vied for her attention, trying to top one another in Tales From The Crypts: ‘the biggest crypt,’ ‘the most haunted,’ ‘most eccentric’. All of which made the end of Tony’s journey much less grave. He would have loved it.

PAUL ANTONIE DISTLER

Born May 5, 1937; died December 28, 2016

Father of Paul Conrad, Gretchen Elizabeth & Theodore Eliot

“Good night, sweet prince, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”



Corona's Splendid Spring

 

Ours was the Age

Of The Embrace.

The last of its kind.

 
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Tender Mercy in the Time of Corona

Sunrise Shadows

Sunrise Shadows

Strange, in that I am not entirely solitary. The good husband, who turned bad and suddenly left me nineteen months ago for some imagined life that failed to materialize is here. That husband, with all he knows of science, was terrified of getting the virus. He petitioned to move into the guest room before the craziness had even set in. There were a thousand reasons to say no, but I could not have lived with the women who left him to his big empty house in town, with no yard and (so he claims) only a mattress on the floor. I said I would not cook, and haven't.

The runaway husband runs his company from my dining room table, leafs through recipe books, and prepares a commendable dinner every evening; weather permitting, he works on a victory garden, mows, and moves rocks outside.

I write and continue my political and community work from my cozy study. And prepare a different cocktail every evening.

It has worked out. Imagine I am the landlady and he is the boarder who cooks and does most of the chores to pay his ‘rent.’ He has kept terror at bay, and I—who had not turned on my stove even seven times in nineteen months--am gaining back my wifely fat.

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And then it sets

Children cry out

In sleep dreaming

Of fearful flowers.

Cherry tree & river, 10 days in

Cherry tree & river, 10 days in

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River before evening

River before evening

Sunset shadowed

Sunset shadowed

In the shadow of summer

Strange things are growing

Twisting from damp earth

Suspiciously.

And this morning I was thinking of the beautiful, and very strong, young Bosnian woman who took us out on a small boat to swim in a blue cave off the Adriatic coast. The swim and the cave were memorable, but her story of waking up one day and finding their good neighbors had become their enemies, (reminiscent of Rwanda); dust and noise of bombs and gunfire, the chaos stayed with me. I remember few details other than she said that she spent her entire adolescence underground, hiding in a cellar.

The war happened that suddenly and what should have been (she expected to be) the most carefree time of her life was spent in darkness. Puts these times in sharp perspective. Corona came suddenly, yes. But our teens aren't hiding in basements, they're merely missing their proms and gradations.

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Light

Light

Blackdog looks toward river

Blackdog looks toward river

My black dog barks

At the sun and

The sun retreats.

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Candle For Sarah

My niece is hiding in the attic from her small children.

They call up the stairs for her. She is feverish and coughing.

It is possible that snow is falling outside their gray house.

We imagine the children calling and calling.

 

Revenge’s forked tongue Flickers at Liberty Fangs poised to strike.

We are a country Writhing beneath A headless snake.

 
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Misty morning

Misty morning

Electric green

Electric green

April’s Cover

Morning sun tugs back black billows to illuminate nuclear green grass slashed by silky crow wings.

A sudden quilt of cloud smothers out the sun.

The land goes still.

Eddy & the boys

Eddy & the boys

 
Heavenly shades of night are fallin
It’s twilight time. Out of the dusk
Your voice is calling…
 
She has risen!

She has risen!

 

Resurrection

Early light of Easter morn A pair of bald eagles, The only thing flying. They are the American come back kids.

 
Easter tree

Easter tree

Nutshell

Nutshell

Time In A Nutshell

My ex is re-hanging the birdhouse shaped like a giant acorn that his father gave us the last Christmas he ever gave us anything, the Christmas after his wife died.

When he first hung the acorn five-year-old Paul Wyatt helped, chattering deliriously, by the sapling oak that today casts such a long shadow

Survivor

Survivor

Survivor

Scarecrow tree still blooming Standing steadfast through a Couple centuries of Nature’s capricious temper tantrums.

Two summers ago, a fat bear Climbed the tree to get that apple, The one just out of reach, that Failed to fall too far from the tree.

Local lore claims Washington, After crossing the river right here, Passed over this sunken roadbed Shaded by a long line of apple trees.

Why did Washington cross the River? All that he could see was The other side of the mountain, The other side of the mountain Was all.

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In The Way of Angels

So We’ve wandered through the forest to ask your guidance and protection. We are lost now, inexperienced, uncertain. Tuck our children, and theirs, under your wings light a torch, draw a sword, show us the way.

Angel? Angel?

Hey!



Deep forest flowers

Deep forest flowers

This spring of isolation has been breath taking. Perhaps there have been springs as lovely, but--not being sheltered in place--there wasn't the time to immerse. Yesterday I gathered an occasional morel in this forest--I am said to own--and climbed a steep ridge to an open meadow royal purple with Larkspur, carpeted with the smallest trillium I've ever seen. The new leaves on the giant beech, oak, and cherry trees too young and not-yet-out enough to shadow the sunlight; an illumination of green. Don't think I've ever before spent 4 hours in this forest, always too focused on the beloved river. The bounty of Corona’s Splendid Spring.

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Sundown Reflections
 

All we know is

What we don’t.

All we have is

Here.