To Want

Jealousy curls up in my heart,
a cat in a warm blanket.

She makes herself comfortable,
stretches, laps cream
that doesn’t
belong
to her
with a rough tongue.

Purrs.  Her fur is silky.
Her claws are sharp.

KAW Oct 12

Observation

Monday
morning is regret.
A dropped favorite coffee cup,
a broken garden sculpture.
The pond inexplicably empty of water.
Cramps and headaches,
and remembrance of one last scotch.

Even the crows call
in the rainy gloom,
for some other day to
show its face.

Cold.  Pull the covers back
over your head, wait in the dark
for a friendlier day to smile at you.

Kaw Oct 12

Lessons

My daughter wants to learn
to play the piano.

It is a worthy goal; music is a path to many
wonderful places.

She doesn’t like to practice,
however.

She wrote the names of all the notes on her
keyboard, with a sharpie, on pieces of tape.

She wrote them wrong, and has been playing the notes
a little off.  E follows C which leads to A at the wrong moment.

At practice, after trying, and failing, to fix the error with
another sharpie, we resolved to tear away the tape.

The tape stuck tight.  Refused to budge.  My daughter gave up.
Left to play with the computer.  Said “You finish it.”

I think of the looks the piano teacher gives me,
her suspicions of my lacking parenting skills.

Like a mom trying to be good, I continued, doggedly, to pull at the
shredding scotch tape.  Little “plinks” and “hums” of electronic
keyboard answered my efforts.

It sounded like some frustrated improvisational Jazz.
Coltrane, but without the theory.  Or talent.

I thought about my own music lessons of many years ago.
How I hated to practice.  How I never really did it, but
was good enough to fake it.  To mix with more loyal musicians.  To have fun.
To be in the Symphony.  But always,
at the edge of being revealed:  fake.

Remembered Tchaikovsky.  The victory of the final swell of marching music.

Think about hating to practice anything.
Get the labels wrong.
Jazz.  That’s what it is.

KAW  Oct ‘12

On Loss.

I once wrote
a poem for a friend’s lost marriage,
the hot kisses of temptation that chased love away,
she, a small horse bolting from the herd.

And one for another
whose lover’s kiss of betrayal
landed her not one piece of silver,
not one memory of comfort.

There was another about my own young love
and what we held close
       dying in the summer, unnoticed.
This one was funny.  It made
people
exclaim
with surprise at its
final sentence of reversal.

I’ve written poems about sex, about death, about
sonogram pictures.  About tears
about rage about tiny
green lizards tasting
white flowers
and bee laden hummingbird feeders.

You know.  Innocence.  Experience.
That story.

There are too many about Goddesses.  Especially
the ones that taste red fruit, find it worthy of winter.

And so, trying to sit, and write about
the loss of a friend’s mother,
(too soon.)
Trying to find comforting words
something to soothe the tears, the need to push away
knowledge of being the root, now, no one else
above to shelter (us) from that last long breath.

Only the sky, and clouds, and a moon that is still there.

So.  Instead of something needful,
I find lost poems, like a little lint in an old coat pocket.  

KAW, 2012.