poetry

“Good Bones”

run down house

by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

October

robin egg

I will tell you about the naked oak in our yard and about

my dead robin, June, who couldn’t fly south for winter

and about the Cooper’s hawk that swooped down to eat

the poor thing, pecking first at a dull eye, while close by

two cracked eggs, each the size of a large jelly bean,

lay oozing yolk and about the cold sky pulled thin and

plumed across my low horizon and about Hyena, with

his pail full of silver buckshot, who shouted from across

the avenue, “Wanna lick my lollipop, pancake tits?”

while behind him two fat boys cackled, with Br’er

Rabbit, the older by some years, in Daddy’s pink shirt

and about mother leaving for the City, her thin

lips painted plump, and about my gray lunch

congealing in a tin pan that sat on the top rack of a

cold oven and about the canned peaches she dumped

into a tea cup and placed on a shelf in her

refrigerator. But not yet and not here

…

Photo

Colder stars

stars on a cold night

Where do we go from here,

when it is nightfall,

when soon the cold stars will spin,

the moon will die again,

and the marsh peeper

will call out to his coy lover,

who may or may not appear?

Must I beg for that last drink of you,

that spilling grace,

or for the touch of

a cool hand?

Longing can become a dark dog

awakening briefly to an emptied bowl.

If I leave here tonight unwhole,

will a smaller god follow me,

whining,

back home?

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Star stuff

torn screen

A thin, naked

branch scraping

her lacquered nails down

and up the bedroom

window like a pointless

backscratch reminds

me we are the same

star stuff the same

sorrow the same

sackcloth of bones

and wails the same

hunger and heat

we hide from

the one

who says,

“You know we love you. Right?”

 …

Alone in her bedroom a young mother shouts,

“Don’t pretend you can’t hear me!” and smirks,

those teeth, front-gapped,

those eyes, dark and empty—

on the walnut nightstand sits

a drained bottle of bourbon,

beneath it an oval

burn mark the size of a

child’s scabbed knee.

 …

 By the pond a peeper

announces the arrival of

spring, his biology

unhiding a loin-longing

he cannot escape.

…

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baby’s bones daddy’s dust

holy-road1

Try to hide sorrow in a dry poem

and all you’ll get is a line arrow

of razzle-dazzle pique

pointing down, down deep,

towards a brown road in

a flat state where the sky there

hangs half dull half billow

and no one gets up before noon

or goes out before the moon

rises over a straw-colored cat

stretched sleepless across

the lid of a metal can half filled

with balled-up paper and gristle scraps.

Baby tried not to cry,

her eyes still bulgy from a ten-day

binge on gin and tears

and sex with an uptown pimp

we’ll call Joe, who promised

a generous wad

of cash each week, a sapphire

ring, a Chevy Impala, a trip

to Acapulco, and back,

plus a condo with deck just outside Coral Gables

in exchange for a lie-down wherever and whenever he said

so. Seemed a better option, by miles,

than a tenement on the lower east side.

While her daddy diddled every big-breasted, boy-hipped secretary he

could get his hands on but married himself off to a little, brittle

chickadee from across the pond, who herself

had a taste for gin and also for Vegas craps

and kidney-shaped pools but not for the small dark girl

who followed her everywhere, nut-scampering and twitchy,

and dogged the silky retriever pup that ate soft sweaters,

then piddled in circles beneath the stairs.

Under a scorching sun they came from far flung

for daddy’s burning, the jackass penguins and their lah-de-dah crows,

but baby’s bones just got tumbled in,

with only a parched girl in black jeans, a lunatic aunt, and a few sparrows looking on.

Someone touches daddy’s coffin and sobs.

I throw a few rose petals into baby’s open grave.

Photo

Wondering where the music up and went?

MusicYou can still enjoy the music/dance videos after I remove them from the home page. I’ve put them all in one place. Just click on the “music/dance videos” tab at the top of the page — and ta-da. My poems are all in one place, too. Simply click on the “poems” tab, which is to the left of the “prose” tab.

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Discernment

Sign

A golden eagle glides

down a mountainside & midair

drops the oily serpent

she has been holding in her talons.

This is God telling us to worship the unseen.

A young man with black eyes removes his two shoes,

throws them into the street,

& gets down on his knees.

This is God saying that our fear will be our death.

A husband beats his bride because

she will not sleep in their bed.

This is God telling us our dark thoughts

will create a dark world for our children.

A moth beats its wings against a backdoor screen

& plummets to the pavement, exhausted:

There is no way in or out.

This is not God speaking.

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