Three Poems by Kelley White

 

Since Ground Hog Day

 

Alan B. is playing cribbage in the beginner’s lounge

and yet I know he died supported by his two sons

at his daughter’s house in Green Bay on Valentine’s Day

and that he lived long enough to see the Packers win

Super Bowl 45 and just 5 months before had led my team

to victory in a Mini Golf tournament in Lincoln, New

Hampshire on his final tour to say good-byes and choose

a place to die. He didn’t choose my mother and I

for his final days. It was better that he choose his children.

Even if his ex-wife, their mother, was near enough to spit.

And his brother might not have notified me if my Valentine

chocolates been undeliverable. In Arlington. Virginia.

Where Marines might choose to die. My honorary brother.

Who only on that last walk in the woods told me he’d had

a crush on me. And I’d thought of him as a baby. Just three

years younger than me. Even dying his neck was

a leatherneck iron post. The big-rock, of our childhood, revisited,

was merely a stone. I still keep getting status messages.

It’s well past Easter, he’s still playing cribbage,

in the beginner’s lounge.

So the waitress says. . .

 

are you done working on your pickle? and we

are laughing harder than a pair-of-dice swinging

from a rear-view mirror. My diaphragm

hurts, I’m tasting brine and smelling juice

and the jukebox is playing a song about dandelion

wine and all I can see is your red weeping face.

We needed this. A bee buzzing our lips with

honey. It’s Becca’s first day stepped up from

busser to server and she’s already scored a twenty

dollar tip here at Lou’s. You’ve been researching

 

the history of diners. I know all about it. How

the heavy porcelain cups were made from war

materials. How SOS, chipped beef on toast,

isn’t quite right for ‘best family dining’ 2008,

but they won the People’s Award anyway, so its

bloodhound in the hay, bossy in a bowl, whistle

Betties and cackle fruit and drag one through

Georgia. We’re gonna be saying it all day. All

week. The Dictionary of American Digestion

hanging on a chain by the always out-of-order

 

pay phone. Dial up maiden’s delight or mystery

in the alley. Bec’ gonna learn there’s more than one

way to provide good service. (NO NO NO

I didn’t say THAT. See where the stream on conscious

can take you.) Oh nervous puddling.

Put out the lights and cry. Shingle with a shimmy

and a shake. (How high can a toddler stack

those little packets of marmalade and jelly?)

Oeuf’s brouilles! The sealed shut windows are asking

To breathe. And you said thank goodness the

waitress was already seventeen.

Torn Silk

 

I could say your death was like the changing

of trees at the end of September. I could say

you hung on like a spider swinging on her

broken web. I could say I still taste your scent of old ash

and sodden hay, hear your hot grey breath, feel

your blue veins whistling an intended lullaby.

Mother, youngest sister, grandmother, why didn’t

you make it to New Orleans? You might have taken

that imagined trip Fat Tuesday on the back

of your cousin’s Triumph, ridden it through

the Florida panhandle past winter circus grounds

and a thousand gulls. I remember you singing,

‘what’s it all about, Alfie,’ stirring soup on the stove

in your little post-war  pre-fab kitchen,

singing, with a thousand other women, an anthem

of betrayal and hope. As if loving a man made him

a hero. As if tout le monde meant something in his language

or mine. No, the swallowtail freedom of tomorrow

did not embrace you. The iron butterfly did not press you

to her maiden breast. Did you tell me you loved me?

I told you nothing. I was not the last to whisper

in your ear. Children will whisper the truth. That’s all.

That’s enough. Tout le bonheur le monde, sweet cadaver.

That little clock betrayed you. It sang of autumn.

You died in spring.

Kelley White - Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, NO. HOPE STREET, was recently published by Kelsay Books.