Monday, 5 November 2018

5 Poems by Gail Rudd Entrekin

Blue Moon
     (the second full moon in a given month, occurring about every 2 ½  years) 

and which isn’t blue, but pearly as an abalone disc

washed ashore above the roof tops.

Just before bed we shuffled out in our slippers and night clothes,

in time to see it break free above the tree line

almost bouncing as the trees relinquished it,

settled back into their quiet places

empty handed.  I helped you find it, that flood

of light, with your broken eyes, 

and we stood there swaying with the trees

marveling.


At the last blue moon we must have been

learning to stand to the newest loss,

your cancer finally behind us, and the Parkinson’s,

your dis-integrating vision waiting in the wings.

At the next one, for all we know we may be gone,

nothing but a memory, and so I yipped a tentative yip,

and then you yipped back in your crumbly voice

that gives way a bit, falls back, and then

my voice began to fill out, lift into a howl

and then, neighbors be damned,

another howl for both of us rose up,

round and full of all the lost and broken things,

lifted up in my chest, poured out of my throat

and the long high note spun

all that loss into silver light.



Chances

That autumn night at my mother’s small apartment

I’d been tossing all night on the narrow daybed

in her alcove room.  She came to the doorway

in her blue nightgown, asked if I was all right.

I can’t sleep, I said, sitting up.

Would you, she asked, tentatively,

almost politely, would you like to lie down

on my bed … on one side of my bed?

She carefully chose her words, did not say

beside me, or with me.  Quickly, before

I thought or felt what I wish now

I’d thought or felt: Oh no, I said.

No.  I’ll be fine.

                              She backed away.

OK, she said, turning to her room.



And she was gone, and there never

came another chance

to lie beside my mother


in this life.


Brewster Road

Killeen, Texas

 There you sit in the yellow bean bag

spit shining your black boots till they gleam.

You’ll line them up before you collapse

on the turquoise aquatic sheets, the water bed

rolling slowly toward me, sloshing away.

The lieutenant retires for the day.  Taps.



When you are funny I love you:

when you do your El Medico accent,

appallingly offensive, or when you are Rock,

the punch drunk fighta from the Bronx

to my Esmeralda Robinowitz, which we do

deadpan for hours.   Also when we have sex --

an activity we invented together and share

on the secret side of the blue beaded curtain --

there is love. 



                          But Vietnam is coming, my formulaic

letters, your uninformative casual missives.  Your hooch maid,

your VD quarantine (which, when I’m finally told,

I will not mind, having myself slept with an old lover.)



You will arrive in uniform, my dad’s welcoming banner

above the porch, and we will not know each other.



Dusty hot days I will sit in front of the window cooler

and cry.  You will call me fat, make fun of me

for eating in front of friends, in private

call me Soldier, issue orders and commands

while you lie back smoking pot, plastic cookie

wrap and soda cans around you on the rug.

And it will all unravel, go to dust, come down

to a few photos in a shoe box on a high shelf.



Already we can feel the air changing, feel

how nothing we believe

will turn out to be true.



Promise

We knew that everything ends.

We said death by the same shot.

We said always.   Lucky, we said.



And when the sidewalk began

to sink on one side, we learned to tip

our bodies, to walk with one leg longer

than the other.  When the air grew thick

we breathed less deeply to avoid the cough,

and later, when everything turned green,

I went blue so you could tell me

from the furniture, the grass.

                                                       When

touch turned to fade, went pale and flavorless,

we added spice, slowed down, savored, slid

from one moment to the next with more

deliberation.  Waves settled to rolling brooks;

in sweet warm waters we bathed

each other’s bodies in our little tubs. 

                                                                    When

I was bent, you bent around me and we saw

how there would be no bullet through both

hearts in the dark bed – only the slow receding

of our powers, our agency, of who we thought

we were, a purifying to our narrow essences,


our small sap flowing quietly away into the ground.



Dream of Carrying Natalie

1.

The snow is over my head

my blue snow suit, my father

laughing, picks me up, takes me

down the stairs, through the billows

of white, the dazzle, the bright –

down where the lawn used to be

down where we roller skated

leans into the deep back seat

and warm, settles me safely

down among the coats.


2.

I hold my arms out straight to the sides, hoping

I can lift her, lovely exhausted Natalie in shirt of grey

her black hair blowing, and she stands

behind me, stretches out, takes hold of my arms

and I lift, we rise up, stars blowing

such an upsweep of relief – I am strong

enough and she is so light.


3.

Natalie and I are drifting now.

Somewhere below

the fragments of her broken son

come together,

knit themselves closed.

We see boys running.

Surely that one’s Logan

whole again.


Bionote

Gail Rudd Entrekin is Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press and Editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (www.canarylitmag.org).  She is Editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002). Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Southern Poetry Review, were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011, and won the Women’s National Book Association Award in 2016. Entrekin taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years.  Her books of poetry include The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press 2016); Rearrangement of the Invisible, (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012); Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998); and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).  She and her husband, poet and novelist Charles Entrekin, live in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay.

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