Kites

My great-grandfather
was widely regarded
as the Arnold Palmer of kiting.
He was a world-renowned expert on kitemaking
and on the intellectual history of kite-patenting.

(Which I suppose must be a vast and
relevant area of study.)

He was also, in his time,
an advertising Vice President for Kodak-Eastman
after working his way through college
as a Magician on the Vaudeville circuit, a hobby which
he later recanted as falsification and deception.

(Though I wonder if he ever thought the same of
Advertising.)

He and his wife,
my great-grandmother,
a warm, kind woman
with a penchant for cocktail-hours
and tautologies

(and of whom my memories are sadly hazy,)

would travel the world
collecting tribal masks
for some purpose or another:
solemn sentinels warding off
invading mildew from posts
along the staircase.

In my last, feeble memories of him,
I am twelve and he is hunched over,
I am giggling and his moustaches gently droop,
his withered fingers curl around a pencil,
writing down a grocery list.
His failing ears
cause him to mistake 'Corn Chex'
as 'Corn Check,'
a phrase repeated
dutifully.

(a mistake we don't have the heart
to correct.)

His wife is
only recently deceased,
something which seems to have left its mark
in a quiet corner of his heart,
its loneliness settled even in
those careful fingers.

Kites, though. what a wonderfully silly interest.

Koi

There is a thin copper pole
from which our plentiful rain
drips off the gutters of my parents' roof
into a barrel sliced in half.
My father got this idea somewhere,
probably a gardening magazine or Bob Villa,
to fill this barrel
like a makeshift fishbowl
with two or three twenty-five dollar Koi.
Every few weeks, these Koi,
which should theoretically grow
in proportion with their surroundings,
instead grow far too large
and eventually float stomach up
to the top of the water.
When this happens,
A riot erupts in my confounded father's mouth,
"Dagnabit!"
"Fuckin A!"
before he goes back to the pet store,
forks over at least fifty dollars for more Koi
and once more plays the role
of their confused and bumbling God.

Doohickies

A scientist has me tied up
on an operating table.
He cracks my skull open with
a hammer and chisel
and piece by piece,
removes my memories,
carefully examining each
using a jeweler's loupe.
He places them in mason jars he marks,
this one 'joy'
that one 'misery'
this one 'fun'
that one 'despair'
this one 'NSFW'
Each memory smiles and waves as it
is taken away
by his scientific hands.
They look strange.
'Doohickies' may be the best way
to describe these contraptions,
somewhere between
creatures and machinations,
aglow with the light of a film reel replaying
the times I kissed a pretty girl
or times laughter masked sobs,
or beauty wiggled its way into furor,
or all those things I bitterly regretted
which I can barely now recall.
As each leaves in the scientist's hands,
my heart grows a little colder,
and Emptiness pokes his head up at
the end of the end of the table.
I watch the vision of my last happy day
being sealed up in its new home, when
the doctor's voice whispers softly in my ear
"No place will be better than here
or worse."

song for a missed home

Summer, Oregon, Whenever.

Splayed out on the tired porch couch.
The sun peeking out from behind
schizophrenic clouds, for
the first time in months.

We stare up at the trees,
those clouds,
lose ourselves in
gentle rustling, the
the scent of dust.

The music of Liszt
now Debussy
now Schubert
(now some Name
I could not hear clearly...)
drifts out the screen door.

A joint curls
in our fingers,
spicing our lungs,

its smoke rising,
dissipating,
conversing with

our laughter and
faint melodies
(Was it Ravel?)
lost in happenstance glare
and warm breeze.

Breeze which now
beckons the looming trees
to dance.

Soon they will be quiet giants
swaying with Ravel,
unsure of the time.

The Gift of Language

All this talk--
"The pen is mightier than the sword"
"Words cut deep"
is bullshit.
The implication being
language is sleek,
silent, razored, arced.
In other words:
Elegant.
That language is the
sheen of blood seeping out
in the shocked afterglow
of a knifing.
But in my experience
Language is blunt force trauma.
The bloody bludgeoning of hammers,
the splintering, wincing crack
of axes on the skull.
Language is clumsy.
Messy. Confusing.
intents and understandings
stand waving at each other awkwardly
across the street.
And when they do cross paths,
the results are so often
destructive.
Not lilting, dancing, whimsical.
Just devastating:
"We regret to inform"
"Sorry to say"
"I don't love you anymore"
Words leave marks.
Words leave scars.
Words leave wounds.
Language is violence.