The Artist in Her Garden
This too a palette bringing forth beauty:
from chaos, order; from dark earth, colour.
Now browns, blacks, whites and greys
erupt into spring like a madwoman
with a box of crayons marking the asylum walls,
except that these blossoms calm the heart
as they dazzle the eye.
There is peace in this profusion,
a quiet center, which is the fire pit
ringed by rough wooden benches and rusted iron.
The pit holds only last year’s ashes,
the benches seat only ghosts
and the laughter of ghosts.
But soon there will come new fire,
new laughter, new love, or rather
old love made new by an almost imperceptible
tilting of the turning earth beneath the sun,
older than time yet evergreen.
The picture pleases, though it cannot
be framed and hung over the mantle.
Death Row
The paper gets smaller every year.
Soon it will be a postcard
with a tinted photo
of the city on one side
and obituaries on the other.
Speaking of death, I see she came
for Charlie last night,
cutting off his wind as effectively
as holding a pillow over his face.
It says here the official cause
was pneumonia, drowning
in his inner lagoon,
but I think we can chalk that up
to a failure of investigative journalism.
We’re all on death row.
It’s just a matter of time
and there will be
no last-minute reprieves.
Most nights I fall asleep
with a book propped against a pillow
and the flashlight on,
forgetting to mark my place
with that lovely postcard
which may or may not have
my name on the other side.
Half Gone
The world is half gone,
whited out by the dusty snow
falling lightly yet continuously
for a day and a night.
Some things are still showing:
tree trunks, stalks of grass,
green sprigs of pine needles
spreading their little fans
lower down on the tree,
two squirrel nests.
The undersides of branches
are dark openings
into another dimension.
No birds, no visible animal life.
The sky a smudge of grey
made by a dirty eraser.
All is silent, expectant,
a held breath.
A real storm is coming.
Then we shall see
what, if anything, remains.
Home
Home is where the telltale heart is, beating
Beneath the floorboards and driving us mad.
The sins of the fathers bear repeating
In families, whether happy or sad
Or simply too tired to resist the pull
Of intergenerational decay.
Drink deeply of despair. Your glass is full
And will remain so every night and day
That you try to survive under this roof,
A shadow among shadows, a grey ghost
Whose mere existence provides ample proof
That some things take a long time to be lost.
Enter the home, you will enter the heart.
And then tear it, tear it, tear it apart.
Ode to Silence
I’ve never heard you, if I’m being honest.
For many years now a mild case of tinnitus
has left me with the continual chirp of locusts
or crickets in my ears, not unpleasant,
actually a sort of comfort, but it does mean
there is always a noise in my head. Before that
I don’t recall ever experiencing complete quiet,
no, not even for a moment.
There was the hum of the air conditioner,
the cough of the furnace,
the breeze rustling the blinds,
distant thunder or the low rumble of traffic
the neighbour’s dog barking at the end of his chain,
a tomcat howling for sex,
music from the house on one side
and television from the house on the other.
If nothing else, the sigh of my own breathing,
the beat of my heart counting down my life.
And now we’re getting to it, silence.
I’ve never heard you, yet I wonder
if I will at the end, or just after,
and if so, will you be
like a period at the end of a sentence
or an ellipsis marching ever forward
into the blankness of the page.
❤️
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