My Bobble Head Dashboard Deity
In the hours before dawn, on a desolate Mojave Desert highway, I ask my bobble head dashboard Buddha deity, his once bright colors faded, nose melted by furnace-like desert heat, his bloated, smiling head bobbling like an old man with a neurological condition, whose God is the right God? He bobbles amiably, as he so often does when asked the unanswerable, gyrating his distended belly. Been with me for 30 years since I Crazy Glued him to the shiny, oiled, fake leather dashboard of my 1975 Dodge Dart; now a car show classic. Just like Mother Theresa, near the end of her...
Read MoreTime Travels of the Older American Poet
Today on my way to see The Surrealistic Adventures of Women Artists, I tripped and fell into a hole of sky, tumbled up, and landed at the Locke Insulator Company, Victor, New York, circa 1903. I saw my baby grandfather James held in the arms of great-uncle Fred, ...
Read MoreStern Grove
We are all women of a certain age— at seventy, mine more certain than others’. I’ve been somewhere much like this eons ago: Love-ins, Be-ins, we called them then, but the young girls in short skirts or long, the couples, the children, the music: almost the same. We filed down a steep, shady path, orange nasturtiums lacing through dark ferns on either side as if lighting our way to where musicians are setting up on a stage under tall redwoods. On either side of us the earth angles up, terraced to the west for seating on the ground. We’re early, but every space is full, blanket to...
Read MoreZum Zum
The hot chocolate sipped at Schrafft’s the nickel’s worth of mac and cheese at the automat the bygone watering holes that only linger in the adipose tissue My working life coincided with the launch of a wurst purveyor with kraut or not and mustards, birch beer and, upon tap, hell und dunkel Found about Manhattan, one Zum Zum was niched in the concourse of the then Pan Am Building A steady traffic of business-types came to be served by dirndl-clad waitresses in the blond wood setting on the appealing pewter plates and heavy glass mugs Imbibe the pungent crisp of the grilled wurst skins;...
Read MoreFrom the First Weeks in New York, If My Grandfather Could Have Written a Postcard
if he had the words, the language. If he could spell. If he wasn’t selling pencils but knew how to use them, make the shapes for words he doesn’t know. If he was not weighed down with a pack that made red marks on his shoulder, rubbed the skin that grew pale under layers of wet wool, he might have taken the brown wrapping paper and tried to write three lines in Russian to a mother or aunt he might never see again. But instead, too tired to wash hair smelling of burning leaves he walked thru, maybe he curled in a blue quilt, all he had of the cottage he left that night running past straw...
Read MoreI Think of My Grandfather
on a cramped ship headed toward Ellis Island. Fog, fog horns for a lullaby. The black pines, a frozen pear. Straw roofs on fire. If there were postcards from the sea there might have been a Dear Hannah or Mama, hand colored with salt. I will come and get you. If the branches are green, pick the apples. When I write next, I will have a pack on my back, string and tin. I dream about the snow in the mountains. I never liked it but I dream of you tying a scarf around my hair, your words that white...
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