story poems endlessnightfall.com
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GRANDMA APPLEBY
The porch was stifling hot and bright, with wasps
Drifting about the ceiling in the sunlight,
Exploring screens, and crawling into crannies.
One bright black wasp was crawling on a sock,
Dried stiff and white, and coated with beachsand,
Hung on the line all by itself, and torn.
I looked into the kitchen through the screen,
With sunlight on the counter and the sink.
I said, "It's like I've been here all along."
I knocked and waited, and I knocked again.
On the kitchen counter, a potatoe-man
Was sitting in the sun, a pair of flip-flop thongs
Lay on the linoleum. The house was empty.
The only noise was traffic from the street.
How I could walk into the empty room,
As if expected, and the door unlocked,
(With tinkling cowbells from the silent porch)
To stand there by myself, I'll never know -
But not for long before a woman's voice
Behind me startled me.
"Yes?" She spoke out loud.
"Can I help you with something?"
"I was ...just...,"
I said, and turned to answer through the screen.
"Is Joe at home?"
Her face peered in at me.
"I doubt it, since his car's not here. He's gone
To the beach this time of day. But who are you
That just walks in?" And opening the screen,
She came in too, a woman old and wrinkled,
Dressed all in white, a moistened handkerchief
Around her throat, and drops of perspiration.
I backed up one step more, and said what came
Into my mind to say. "I just got here.
Joe told me to go right inside and wait."
I looked at her.
And she looked up at me -
Speculative. "Of course he's not at home.
He has to read and swim the live-long day.
And struts around without his clothes, whistling
And whistling all day like a parakeet.
What is your name? Snookums. I'm Grandma
Appleby. That bachelor. I didn't think
He had a friend. Are you a friend of his?"
I don't know why, I felt strange and afraid.
I heard the roar and clatter of a truck
That zoomed past to the lot in back and died,
With voices, and the bang of tools and doors.
"Oh yes, we're friends. But it's been years, ' I said.
"To see him on a hot day in September
Above a TV store in Willoughby..."
The room was shining with September light
While I looked at the crude potatoe-man.
"I stopped to look at his green vegetables
In the backyard by that worn-out picket fence.
A fly was basking in the sunlight on the wood
And sunflowers were nodding in the blue.
It's lonely though to stand and look at things."
There on the counter-top he was, lonely,
Happy, with carrot arms and raisin eyes
And radishes for shoes.
"Oh that. That's mine."
She smiled - a twinkling - like a little girl.
"I put that there for him when he comes back.
A farm wife learns to play as much as work.
I taught the children games with spools of thread,
Paper and scissors, and they would say, "Oh Ma."
I milked the cow, and slapped her on the flank.
'How are you, Mary Jane?' And she'd say Moo.
One day I sent the children to the beans
To pick for dinner, but they found a snake.
'Quick Ma, there's a big snake in the garden!'
We kept a sharp spade there, I snuck up on
That Mister Snake and cut his head right off.
I done that more than once."
I thought she would go on talking forever
When suddenly to my surprise she stopped.
"How long do you expect he'll be?"
"Not long.
He drives. There's an Apache Indian rug,
A towel and earplugs all thrown in the car.
He climbs the cliffs of flowers by himself
(With sunlight on the deep green water)
And hangs wet stockings on the porch, caked with
the sand, like sugar. He leaves green bits of
Wave-worn bottle glass out on the rail to dry,
And don't they shine when the sunlight comes and goes.
And big black feathers from the gulls - there's one,
Stuck in that modern art" - Kandinsky's
Ribbon With Squares in a glass frame hung on
The wall - "with colored stones, and washed-up shells.
He's put some in that pyrex cooking dish.
Green buttons too."
The kitchen was filled with
The light-in-air, and we were silent while
We looked around.
I noticed on the wall
A packet of sunflower seeds, the flowers
Pictured gold, with just beside it, propped
Upon two nails, a bright old silver dollar
Crowned with Liberty, and from a glass-head pin
A sheet of notebook paper with the word,
"Emptiness," printed in a pencil hand,
Lopsided, and stuck up beside the door.
...............................................................................................
GROWING UP IN OHIO
for Karen Karbo (78th & St. Clair)
She remembers:
I remember he was on top of me
And he was hurting me and schmooching me.
He had a flannel shirt on. He was big.
He was a carpenter, his hands were rough,
And he smelled bad. He'd take me upstairs
Where he lived, above a beer joint in the heat,
I'd lay and watch the curtains blowing in
And sunlight on the cracked linoleum.
He told me it was wrong to do like that,
What I had done, I could get into trouble.
He made me write a note and sign my name,
That said he never did such things to me.
But he did it again and then again,
He'd pop up all at once and take me there.
I remember it all as well as - yesterday.
You could hear the cars going by outside
And music from the jukebox in the bar -
Polka music. His glasses were all smudged -
Like from the job - and sawdust got in his hair,
Like sometimes maybe he took off from lunch.
He'd need a shave, with whiskers sticking out,
And his eyeballs they were yellow from up close.
He used to whistle a song - I can't bear it -
"You are my sunshine" - over and over,
That horrible song. I can see his face,
Whistling, and smiling, and winking at me.
I remember climbing up those steps, half-lit
With the single lightbulb, and the smell of heat,
And my heart pounding like it wasn't mine.
Then when I knocked his door would open up
And I would wave, and smile, and shout out "Hi!"
But when he asked me if I loved him too
And started touching me, I said, "No, don't."
................................................................................................
IT'S ALL A DREAM
The room is beautiful, in stillness and light,
The standing book-rack looms in warm sunglow,
With portraits hung, my strawhat, and a flashlight,
A written poem dangling from a nail, the desk
Against the four-square rack, the Baudelaire photograph,
My food table, and the speaker and CD's
Opposite, with car parts where I dropped them,
The long old-fashioned windows, ten feet tall,
The fireplace of stone, I give it up,
Wherever I am is beautiful, mysterious,
I can never seem to grasp just what it is,
The woods are glorious until I come back in,
And then the beauty of my room interior
As old as the life of things, unconscious,
It's all a dream, I don't know anything,
I can only work to keep my purest light,
And free myself from mental suffering,
And escape the drudgery that kills the mind,
I don't know what I really am, I can
Only watch myself, simply and in silence.
Gardening isn't easy, you learn and learn,
The ground takes time to fill with compost dirt,
The apple trees take five years just to start,
Keeping the beets and carrots is a trick,
And mice dine in the root cellar if they can,
The law requires a privy built to rule,
And barrels filled with gravel for waste water,
A sun-warmed greenhouse, not too big,
Will grow me greens all winter long,
I'll have to can tomatoes at the least,
With peppers, onions, celery mixed in,
There's firewood to be prepared, a barrel stove,
The quonset hut of saplings with roofing paper stretched,
The cookhouse, sauna, toolshop all in one,
And storage for my books and clothes as well,
Plenty of work at first, and later on
A reservoir for drought, and a den
Dug in the ground for winter, forty degrees,
To protect me from the deadliest of cold,
And then I can live with nature, not the town,
Eating the healthy food I grow myself,
And water (I'll distill my own for drinking),
If you keep after it, it takes not long,
Then I'll be free to write the poems of life,
In the very nature I am myself made of,
With country people just as anywhere,
But people I won't talk to if I don't,
Safe on my acre of garden, acre of woods,
But only an eighth of an acre actual
To till, with a good strong fence around it:
I can go to the city in winter if I care,
To a furnished room and part-time pick-up jobs.
...............................................................................
LA MURDER BOHEME
It was in the snow at Christmas that I began to
realize they murdered cabdrivers. Since then I have been
murdered ten times a year. But that Christmas driving
in the snow falling and helping old ladies get their
luggage up the stairs of a brownstone in Harlem,
and the rich on Madison and the theater hour jams
on Seventh Avenue, and the lonely four AM streets
of the Village and Brooklyn, it was really a starlit
time, I earned enough for that week's rent and food
and that's what I had, and I guess I was happy,
I was beginning to write for real, for life and
death as they say, although my friends had left
New York for their destinies, and the late
60's beatnik writers my own age, starting out,
really didn't write like me, and they didn't seem
to think like me either, or so I thought. I remember
I was on the hill at Christmas uptown on Park Avenue
at night, and far far off and down directly in the middle
of the road blocking Park was the Pan Am building at
forty-second with its windows lighted in a pattern
to form a giant cross, and, "No!", I said, "They can
murder me, but I'm writing poetry!" It was very desperate,
very grand, and it was truly courageous. But it was
a lie, and without knowing it, I began to work towards
the end of the cabdriving. And they did murder me too,
ten times that year alone.
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