A Poem for One Shoot Sunday...

I've actually written three poems for One Shot-- most recent first.  xj

Resurrection

Laudamus te, glorificamus te.

I put the Eucharistic wafer, the soporific

Under my tongue.

I mouthed the Credo of the Bach Mass in B Minor

And I focused on the crucifix on my wall.

I filled with light and transcended myself. I floated

Out of the wheelchair as a sound wave, a Sanctus

Traveling bed to bed, my lips against their lips.

Pauline sat under the clock asking the time

I rubbed her thin shoulders in their cashmere sweater.

Rose wept for her engagement ring

And I held her in my arms.

Julia pined in a high and indecipherable voice.

Kay read at the window at the end of the hall

At the end of the line, in her Scottish woolen skirt.

We shared Brie and crackers, and laughed.

I painted dolls and placed them

In the laps of the lost and forlorn.  I sang

O Holy Night to a demented soprano

Who smiled at me at the end,

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

One day I ambulated the hallway

Dragging my healing leg and Julia 
held up the sign for the wet floor:
"Cuidado: Piso Mojado."  

The hours trailed their damp filaments 
over us like golden rain

And the coiffed and broken migrated 
to dinner and succor,

Opening their mouths for the aides

Like unfledged sparrows.

I was home again.  Among my lost parents.

They were all there in triplicate, my mother

In bed talking about her Indian jewelry.

My father watching a football game.

They were mine.  Mine own angels

In the cloister of forgetfulness.

We loved each other in the profane night--  
I held Irene to my breast, her wig 
on the bed-stand.

I sang to JoAnn, my uncertainties 
melting away as she flapped her arms

In the death-throe,

A swan primed for flight.

xx

Fiat

For Kay Elliot and the other angels of Golden Peaks Nursing Home

The old woman has forgotten to be ashamed.  She watches Lawrence Welk

again and again, joyfully incontinent.  She greets all in her Sunday best each day of the week, in her Queen Elizabeth purple hat, her clean diaper. 

It is not a bad thing to be old, bent, and to forget.  Forgetting is freedom from the past, with its divorces and its chihuahuas killed at the corner, the child who overdosed on heroin.  The aged are beautiful in the way of platinum and polished family silver.  Our heirlooms and their loquacity.  They prattle at night;  their secrets spill out like white moths from their mouths.  With their sighs and gestures they relive the making of cupcakes, the planting of roses.

A wheelchair universe, often wordless, with its roamings and dreamings and rollings away from the disdained.  A demented old woman has manifold imaginary orgasms and the aid speaks softly to her to quell her cries.  But she is beloved.  When she dies she is surrounded by her kind, those beleaguered sisters who only hear her when they are asleep, her breath-caught humming of worn folksongs. 

On a Rocky Mountain high she lifts off, crossing the moon’s harbor, ship of bones in a wedding gown, making her way.

To read about photographer Greg Laychek please visit One Stop Poetry.  


Another Poem:

To Be Read

It is so utterly hopeless, as the stars are hopelessly

glorious in their uncountable numbers, the relentless unfurling

of light across heaven. Hopeless in the way of a marriage

withering by candlelight.  As in litanies of the barrio and the surfeit

of weeping before a crucifix draped in black crepe.

Hopeless to stutter into black space and be heard or forgiven. 

It is a crucifixion a death sentence, a rune and a conundrum:

this compulsion to discern. To need to devolve from the evolving,

anything astute, memorable.  What folly.  It is useless to put yourself

out into the void with the others dancing to the same tango.  To strike

gold you need an orchestra, the best violinists of Germany.  To be heard

And considered and your pages turned, you must be a book, but books

cannot make themselves; they need our help, the butterfly kingdoms

of dialect, the wine-laden epithets that come back to haunt.  The black 

bark smelted to paper.  A campfire of light-filled tongues, a night

inhabited by only you.  Only you so that you may shine out over all 

the seas and the seas weep  at the beauty of your words.

xx

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011