|
|
About
Contact Archive Donations Subscribe to Today's Situation | ||
 News from Israel
|
 Peace: Educational Resources
|
 Pleasure:Poetry and other Arts |
 Ariga's Amazon Bookstore
|
Home
Poetry || SubmissionsSeen scenesPoems by Karen Mandell Scene with Bike You had already collected two paperweights whose fused glass innards let you pretend they were underwater caves– when you saw the ladies bike in the back of the yard: Rust speckled spokes cobweb trimmed fenders handlebar grips fossilized by time and weather wicker basket studded with plastic flowers. Take it for a spin, the man said. You'd come back later, after dropping off your finds. It'll still be here, he said, stirring pity and fear: poor baby and what didn't you know? He was right. It was still there, maple pods drifting into the basket, collecting on the seat. J.C. HIGGINS in chipped capitals trailing across the frame. A classic, he said, some thirty years old. You knew. Same brand you had as a kid. You rode it home, brakes stiff and temperamental, like your bones, tires soft. Worn out. You sat at the kitchen table, back then, the summer heat rising in the long afternoon, and jumped at the boom in the yard. A burst tire, your bike drooping with heat stroke. Once Rose wrapped ice chips in a towel and draped it across your forehead after you rode to O'Hare and back (you don't know when to stop no common sense), your bike hurtling across the street-lined prairie, clattering up and jolting down curbs. You both recovered. You never doubted it. Now you park your bike under the smoke tree and leave it unlocked like you did then. There, right up against the trunk. Tulips shove red fists into the picture. Adds spunk. It's make believe, sure, you're a thousand miles from the brick ranch, the graveled alley, the modest elms before they took sick. Half a lifetime away. Like a diorama from grammar school only life size, like a movie set. You take out the extras– mortality's narrowing path, beset by ruts, fallen branches, or regret's rough pavement– and let yourself take credit for the still life you put together. Paco unlearns cause and effect Sometimes you have to teach your old dog new tricks. No more glory days of sit and up and stay and down, your hands greasy from cheese cracker rewards, his nose specked with orange dust. He wouldn't see the sense of it now: by watching him, his life circumscribed and liberated, owning only a bowl (your words, not his) you unravel Zen koans. Who were you to act as teacher? How did he know there is no self? He's at the steps of Nirvana when you pull him back. You're ashamed, yes, but unstoppable. You must fix and alter, arrange things to your satisfaction. One more time. You keep his treats in the laundry room, where you fold, uncrease, gather the damp, embrace the warm. You enter, so does he and waits there as your hands work over the piles, picking up putting down to no great effect. He watches the ceaseless flapping of your arms and wrists and waits for what has happened before: a lump neither kibble nor meat, placed on the floor, then sounds meaning do this thing and sounds meaning chew. He sits like a supplicant at the temple, huddled in rags under sun stars rain and you cannot stand it. You won't give him a treat in the laundry room again. Sometimes you have to teach your dog new tricks. He enters with you, for many days he enters with you. You don't open the cabinet but form words you say for him: what's the deal what's going on One day he walks out while you're loading the dryer; one day he doesn't show up. The dryer knocks the clothes senseless, arms and legs entwined, slammed apart, the juice steamed out of them. You don't like the noise it makes just now. So you turn off the power and go looking for Paco. Portrait of a lady, 1801–1834 The words next to the paintings tell me what to look for. Dutiful, I read them. Folk art portraits, done by itinerant artists, no formal training, no garrets, ateliers, benefactors, imported cigarettes. "Look," I'm instructed, "at the way the child's head is placed on her shoulders without benefit of neck." Why so it is. "Notice how her left foot has a life of its own." It is a bit long, not impossibly so. "The part in her hair is drawn without perspective." So what if her head is flat; her teeth are pretty, though gray by today's standards. Notice the articulation of the teeth, a touch not often seen in folk art. Although they made her look rather carnivorous, as if she had just eaten mouse stew. But it's the young woman next to her I'm worried about. She's waiting in plain brown dress for the artist to leave, freeing her to race down to the Gloucester harbor, where her husband, swordfisherman, rises from the sea, like Poseidon in oilskin pants. No fussing with color on her cheeks, no simpering smile; she's told the artist she won't have it. She's got fire in her eyes, though the artist wasn't sure how to put that in. She lived thirty three years. I search her face for signs of trouble, anemia exhaustion consumption. Nothing there. Succumbed, perhaps a year later, to childbed fever, typhus, cholera. Oh, so many ways. Maybe grief. The world's turned over a number of times since her death, tumbling everybody out like salt from a shaker, refilling, emptying them out too. I'd guess she held on for dear life, but the only record of her is the painting "whose proportions are not those found in real life." Bracelet picked up at a yard sale Besides my two sets of Buddhist prayer beads I'm wearing a tortoise shell bracelet on my right wrist. I think it's really tortoise. It's not like the shiny mottled brown plastic I've worn as glasses, barrettes, since school days. This is a band half an inch wide with the composition of thick toenails. The colors segue from cream to pale green to bruised brown. It's looking very real. I picture my toenails, yellowish now in the last days of winter, wrenched off to make a brooch, overlapping petals bound by silver. Doesn't mean I take the bracelet off. It's big so I wear it on my rolled up shirtsleeve instead of my skin. It doesn't touch the prayer beads carved of sandalwood. Maybe they just cut off a limb to make the beads. Let the tree get off with a warning. Wonder what they did with the rest of the turtle, soup perhaps, or tossed on the slag heap of small bodies, bent spoons, charred breath, the mountain beneath the mountain. True life In fourth grade I learned the nym words: Mrs. Green in perfect cursive (also new that year) wrote synonym homonym antonym on the board already alarmingly blurry (too much reading, Rose has continued to say, too many words). Rose doesn't believe in synonyms. A friend's apartment was big (perhaps very) – no need for large grandiose huge, interlopers muddying the Celtic pool. In another life she was a Celt; that memory faded with the blue stripes painted on her body. She insists, still, on little words of house and home. We had a couch, tasseled and brass-tacked damask, no sofa davenport loveseat. For cooking we had pots and pans. Rose didn't believe in cookbooks. She had one, a gift from both daughters, kept in her bedroom closet. I read the recipes; we'd need saucepot, skillet, stockpot, sieve. Rose said they were pots pans and strainer. Didn't match up; saucepots simmered their gravies, skillets sizzled their lamb chops (which Rose shoved into the broiler, brillo-scoured heart of darkness.) Pots and pans? Knobble-bottomed, dented, scraped, scarred survivors of ordeal by fire. Strainer? Rose stomping around the kitchen, draining stringbeans, noodles; yes, getting food on the table strained her– eat, she said, no talking until you're done. And no reading at the table. She didn't mince words, plain talk, plain food. She tamped us down, like packed brown sugar in a cookie recipe. Outside, her roses flushed and blanched as the light changed. She left us at dusk to tend her quiet children before crickets and tree frogs cut the air, their insistence and urgency so like my own. Karen Mandell says: 'I've recently completed a novel, Repairs and Alterations, about an elderly man's secret past during World War II. I've taught writing in Minneapolis and Boston. My favorite poet is Lisel Mueller: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems Today's Situation
Back to the top
If this page was useful, please consider making a donation or use Amazon links at Ariga to go to the biggest online store in the world and help keep Ariga going. Click over to the bookstore, check out Ariga's latest recommended book, or visit one of the subject areas that interest Ariga visitors: Yiddish || Middle East Affairs || Military Affairs || Religion || Hippotherapy (Horses and Feldenkrais) || Women's Issues || Pop Culture || Cooking || American Issues || Or click over to Amazon's Top 100 Best Sellers
|
Ariga Recommends:
|
