Who Are We?

Who are we but everything else?
  Nothing's new no matter when.
What is else but us somewhere?
  We've been everywhere a while.
What are footprints in the dirt?
  Mud reshapes itself forever.
Why is dust to be despised?
  Life lives in dust, regenerate.
Are our photos life made dead?
Are our dreams another life?

Pack It In the Sweet Case

“She’s ninety-two; I think she’s ready to pack it in,” he said.
I murmured, “Ohhh, ohhh, mmmm, I’m sorry.”
  Of course,
I thought of me.

I sure am not ready to pack it in.
(Of course, I’m not ninety-two, either.)
There is still too much to pack—
I could fold for the next ten years;
I could sort for twenty;
I could discard for forty after that.
Or, if I discarded all at once,
There would be nothing left to pack, so
I would have to start over.

So I am not ready to pack it in.
Into what?
  A coffin?
  A grave?
  A crematory?
  An urn?
  A jar?
  The skull of others? living on in flashing
    synapses to fade finally into
  dust?

I cannot count on tales
Told by descendents (or cabbages and kings)
  around holiday tables.
I have no offspring.

I cannot count on the lasting fondness of
Young friends, because they will soon
Start their own chain of descendents,
Hung from their genitals like jewelry unpawned.
Redeemed.

I cannot count on librarians to recommend my books   so that
Readers can absorb me, suck me up from a blurb.

So, no, I am not ready to pack it in.

The Master of Artemia Salina

  Useless, endless swarms and squirms of activity (or “comical tricks and stunts”) – were ordered by Horace Makely in 1970 from a comic book ad. Horace was a boy in private school, and as everyone else was engaged in useless, endless swarms and squirms of activity, he thought “Sea-Monkeys” that he could train to do tricks, that -- with a magnifying glass -- you could watch mating!, could make him popular.
  Horace had no friends. His roommate short-sheeted his bed, put cold spaghetti in his pajamas and shunned him in study hall. Horace ordered the shrimp – “Mom, Dad and their babies,” for a dollar postpaid.
  What a disappointment! Horace couldn’t see anything that looked like a shrimp, let alone the naked sexually-active “Sea-Monkeys” in the ad.
  Horace had stolen two milk glasses from the dining hall in his pockets, and he poured tap water and neutralizer into both and let them sit. The next day he added part of the package of dried dots to one glass. After classes he would rush back to the room to get the glass from his closet, peering through his magnifier at the tiny shrimplings. Finally a miracle happened and they hatched. The baby shrimp struggled, as if the water of Connecticut was so different from their spawning water that they had to learn a new way of swimming. They grew, but they didn’t do stunts and they didn’t mate. Horace had kept them a secret so far, hiding them in a shoebox under piles of laundry on his closet floor.
  After a week, when a few of the tiny monkeys had floated to the top of the water, Horace added a pinch of Coca-Cola, thinking it might be the kind of shock to the system that would revive them. It didn’t. Horace poured everything out through some toilet paper, picking out the dead ones, quickly putting the few fragile squirmers in the second prepared glass, which he hid in the closet again, and left for history class. Several things may have happened next:
1) In a raid on the boys’ closets, looking for hard cider and stocks of 27% alcohol Listerine, a proctor found the smelly glass and poured it down the toilet.
2) Horace’s roommate found the glass and added a drop of Pepsi-Cola, and the shrimp grew fat enough to eat with lo mein.
3) They really were monkeys, and they scampered out and ran away.
4) Horace became popular and captained the lacrosse team.
5) The glass turned over, soaked into a pile of Horace’s dirty clothes, which he sent home (as usual) to be laundered. When the box arrived at his parents’ in Faxfield , the smell from the dead shrimp reminded the maid of the beach. She quit and went back to Honduras and married her old sweetheart. Horace was enrolled in public school, and captained the A/V team.
7) Horace grew up. In 2008 he googled “sea monkey” and got 209,000 hits. Nostalgic, he sent off to Transcience Corporation for another kit.

Cinderella Goes to the Ball without a Prince

  Black cokeslag pearls strung on squirrel sinew, tendrils, and evaporated trainsteam, my dress stained with pawprints of mud, blood; ruddy cheeks rouged by too-cold walks -- I wear them to a ball in the rotted-red hollow tree, with white fungus shelves for deepwoods wine. No prince. A handsome stag, without choreography, bounds away from my companion Robert Browning -- part beagle, part choirboy -- who barks in a highpitched tenor, while Copernicus blurrrtrots back to the car.

Radiant Shroud

  I sit in the backyard at a reticulated iron table, eating strawberries and watching ants. Occasionally in my peripheral view there is the lunge or glide of a venturing shadow--a cat, a dog.
  I see my own humped shadow. It could be the shadow of a rock formation. A weathered mound with a bump (head), windbent scrub pines (unbrushed hair), steep slopes that will be difficult to climb (shoulders and arms), a tumbling rock (hand, dashing at a fly). Sun on my back, I am thinking so that I can write. I am the Sphinx. The ants are caravaners in the Gobi. Each grain of sand is tuned to sing. Each weed is an oasis.
  Suddenly my shadow moves. It detaches itself from my feet and rotates into a position behind me -- between me and the sun. Oh, I am so weak, so transparent. With my last strength, I turn and see my shadow pulsing on the ground, breathing with relief. I am my own shadow. When the sun is out, I will be seen fat and round as a pumpkin, and I'll be long and thin as a pole as evening comes on. When the moon is full, I will spread across the ground like a blanket, sheltering the very ants I watch in the morning.
  In a lighted room, I will be that chimera on the other side of the lamp -- the ghost companion who attends a reader in the evening, the one who stands patiently outside the pool of light, the one that disappears when the reader turns off her lamp to go to sleep.
  I will now be beautiful at all times. Just as all cats are gray at night; just as all women are beautiful in the dark. My life as a rock trying to affect the world is over--now I can do anything as a speed-of-light shroud of my own past.
  I will race clouds across the plains, pointing the way to hot buffalo. I will enthrall children who stare out of minivans at the altercar that keeps apace on signboards and jumps ditches, just by riding on top and waving. I will meld with the single shadows of glades, and deepen the shadows of each tree and vine and bird in the bush to create obscure shade.
  It has happened the way I said. I sit in my backyard eating strawberries and watching ants. I win a race with a high cloud; I cool my aged cat. A roly-poly bug's bus-shaped shadow disappears within me, then comes out the other side with a banner -- a hair that's stuck to its back.
  I go back to thinking.

Pianos Don't Play Themselves

  In 1943 or so, my parents bought a beautiful upright piano in Memphis. My mother played Chopin and rag, and I started taking piano lessons at the age of three, and six years later I refused to practice, so the piano sat silent. I painted a picture of it, with the bench waiting for someone to sit on it. Sometimes we used the bench to hold a tray of objects collected quickly from around the house so the family could play "Memory". Thirty seconds to look at all the objects, then the cloth went back over them, and you'd write down what you remembered.
  My parents sold that piano while I was away at college, and bought a Steinway baby grand at a house sale. They asked how much it was, and the man said $150. My father, standing a few steps behind my mother, saw that she had one finger pointed down from her hands clasped behind her -- she loved to signal with eyebrows, lips and fingers -- so he said "I'll give you a hundred," and the deal was done. The piano was moved into our living room, which was bigger than the old one, and now it was my brother who played the piano. There's a photograph of my brother and me sitting on the bench playing something together. Forever.
  In the 60s, my brother rented a piano from a small company in Manhattan. They delivered it, two skinny guys who knew how, and set it down in his living room, which looked out over the George Washington Bridge. You could look inside the piano and see where some of the strings had crinkles of tinfoil wrapped around them, then look outside and see crinkles of lights on the Bridge. My brother enjoyed playing the piano with the foil-wrapped strings, but he finally took them off. Turns out, the person who rented the piano before my brother was Bob Dylan, and he'd put that foil on to give the piano a funky trashy sound.
  My boyfriend Paul and I used to find things on the street and take them home. I found him a table saw once on 75th Street. In 1969, he found a piano, and I went to watch him and two friends carry a piano up two flights of Forest Park steep steps. Paul was small and wiry, Darwin was tall and thin, Chris was tall and hefty, and I stood at the bottom watching. They didn't know what they were doing so they laughed, and the old upright jiggled and tinkled, and finally they got it inside the apartment. Paul taught himself to play, and to repair and tune. I think there was some leftover soul in that piano and The Goldberg Variations sounded wonderful on it.
  In 1991, I bought a house in Baltimore built in 1871. In 1995 an antique dealer in Charlottesville showed me the 1870s square piano he'd bought at a field auction in Crumpton, MD. I bought it for $100-- if I'd take it away the next day. A few guys unscrewed the fat shapely piano legs, and slid the piano into my truck to rest on carpeted pads. The legs rode with me in the cab. When I drove up in front of my house, my neighbors Tom and Edward were having a get-together, and so Tom and Edward and Steve and Will and I carried the piano into my living room, and Will and I screwed the fat legs back on while the other three held the piano up, and there it stood against my living room wall. Home at last?  In a cold rowhouse parlor? 
  In 1995, my brother hired movers to take the Steinway my parents had bought in the 1950s in Toledo from their home in Charlottesville to his mountain house in North Carolina. The mover said it was automatically insured for $2000, but my brother paid extra to have it insured for $4000, and they hauled that baby down highway 29 to Hillsville to Mouth of Wilson to Creston and wound through the mountain roads and hauled it up the mile-long gravel drive, and carried it into his vaulted stone living room. The driver hit center C -- maybe that's something they always do -- and left.  It sounds like a concert hall piano now.

Linda Finds Leaf, Joe Sees Parrotfish

The parrotfishleaf is still alive. Green leaf has golden fins and swam down to the path. A sapsuck bug has cut an eye that will be seen by Joe. Through the veins sugary blood is slowing. With the first frost, the parrotfishleaf will bleed out and turn brown, be crushed by feet, turn to dust, sink in the shallows of black dirt and rain. Down below, undisturbed by the current, a worm will eat the parrotfishleaf dust and poop out its remains. The thready root of the parent tree will stretch another inch, so father will eat sonleaf, or mother will eat daughterleaf, and in the spring, more green minnowleaves will venture from the eggbud on the twig, and many months later, another parrotfish will swim on a breeze to earth.