From Still Pilgrim
To Be a Pilgrim
To be a pilgrim is to ring the stones
with the clean music of your best black heels,
each click a lucky strike that sparks a fire
to see by, that lights up the long and level road
you walk with no map, no stick, no wheels
to relieve you when your feet ache and tire.
To be a pilgrim own what you own,
stuff it in your clutch, lug it in your tote,
all the heavy history you’d like to lose
nestled up against your dead mother’s shoes.
To be a pilgrim you must be a killer
of myth, a new invention of desire.
Every pilgrim is a truth-teller.
Every pilgrim is a liar.
The Still Pilgrim Makes Dinner
It’s Mother’s Day and I have no mother.
She left and took my daughterhood.
It’s hard to lose us both, recover.
A double grief. A day to brood.
I dredge the chops. Fry them in oil.
I slice the onion, wet as tears.
I wear my sackcloth apron, soiled
by meals I’ve made for thirty years.
For ashes, flour upon my head.
For prayers, the rise of scented smoke.
My mother, who is five years dead,
lives in this meat, these eggs I broke,
this dish she taught me how to make,
this wine I drink, this bread I break.
From Lovers’ Almanac
Unfallen
“I was happy, happy, happy, happy, happy!”
–Philippe Petit upon completing his high-wire walk
between the Twin Towers, August 4th, 1974
The day he tossed his line across
and tricked heaven
was not a day like all his other days.
Walking tight along the wire
he kissed the world’s abyss,
charmed the wind into thinking
he had wings he could ride
if his ordinary legs should fail.
He asked the sun to hide its eye
so the eyes in the canyon looking
up could see him against the sky.
So a young god eclipsed
an old for an hour,
less than a sixth
of one day’s rise.
No one would remember
the weather that day.
All they would recall is the fall
the small man dared and delayed,
how the towers swayed,
and after his mad dance
how still they stayed.
From Waking My Mother
For Shadowment: Villanelle for the Solstice
Here, here in the crook of the year,
the crux and fix and flux of the year
light falls long across and dear.
Here in the ruck and dreck of the year
we glean and gather grace and gear.
here, here in the crook of the year.
Here is the neckbone of the year,
its knuckle sharp, its blade sheer,
where light falls long across and dear.
Hear the matins of the year,
the chant and praise of marrow fear,
here, here in the crook of the year.
Cheer the vespers of the year,
the prayers that rise from tongue to ear
as light falls long across and dear.
Clear your mind as night draws near.
Stead your heart and shed no tear.
Here, here in the crook of the year
where light falls long across and dear.
Our Mother at the Nursing Home
She smiles and says No Teeth!
for the 13th time.
A daughter trims her hair
and paints her 10 fingernails.
A daughter hangs 2 fresh
dresses in the half-closet.
A granddaughter lines white
dominoes beside her untouched lunch.
I read the Get Well cards aloud
for the 13th time.
Four women fussing over a fifth-
the one who started the fire
we tend in this linoleum-cold room.
Like the women who entered the garden
bearing spices beneath their robes
chatting of children and chores to be done
when they found the tomb
empty, the one they were seeking, gone.
She, too, is moving on.
And here we stand,
jars of spices in our hands.
Watching Dirty Dancing with My Mother
in the sad sleep of the nursing home,
we are both surprised by beauty alone,
by Jennifer’s new-found ecstasy,
the passion of young Patrick Swayze
as he glides her across the bare wood,
lifts her high towards the old god of girlhood
and sets her down, sure of her charm
each step beyond his circling arms.
Nothing can soothe her father’s frown
seeing his daughter as someone now,
no more the child she cannot stay.
Patrick, too, has since passed away.
None of us the beauty we used to be,
my mother, those dancers, me.
De-mentia
This trope a backwards living.
Such signage eases grace.
Un-becoming what you’ve been.
The falling of the face
it took decades to grow into.
It takes knowing who you are
before you start forgetting
what you’ve come here for.
The letting go a talent.
The carelessness a skill.
You’ll never miss your self.
The others will.
.
From Saint Sinatra & Other Poems
Saint Sinatra
“Saints are the most excellent of voices, the most brilliant of stars.” –Cardinal Avery Dulles
Croon to me, Baby,
blue-eyes smiling,
So Easy to Love
Night and Day,
skinny legs draped
in gabardine as you sway
sweet and easy, singing.
The mike your attribute,
lucky close to those lips,
In other words, baby, kiss me.
I’ve Got a Crush on You, Sweetie Pie,
You, Sicilian Saint of Song,
the one girls pray to when we lie
awake, pictures of boys in our heads,
each of them holy-card pretty as you
only In the Blue of Evening.
You and the Night and the Music
much more than we can stand,
we fall to our knobby knees,
genuflect to your smooth
slide down the scale of desire,
a true tune we know and can’t carry.
O Hoboken Hero of Eros,
Star-eyed Stranger in the Night,
Pray for us, Sinner. Sing us alive.
Take these Valentine hearts from our hands.
St. Eve in Exile
Here amid a field of light
You say my name.
And I am not she,
the girl You called Your own.
My mouth a cavern.
My chest an empty cave.
I am dry and dusty.
I am not wet or well.
Not the riverbed of love
You shaped me to be,
wide as a delta,
deep as any mine-
ful of diamonds,
not this common coal,
my birthstone, my rock
of heavy longing.
I am black with it
where You would have me white.
Ever a disappointment,
I grew breasts
where you shaped me straight and smooth,
spoke when you asked for a song,
agreed where you hoped
I would exceed,
climb out of the hole
You dug for me,
place where You planted
me in the dark
among creatures
who never knew my name.
You cut me in two.
I take half the blame.
What the Angel Said
for Fra Angelico on seeing his Annunciation, Chiesa San Marco, Florence
He spoke to you in blue, in the long call
of light from the top of a Tuscan hill.
Your hand answered, the quick sketch of a girl
taking shape before you knew she was you,
head uplifted, her angelful eyes
sure of what they see: being bodied true
as the stilled wings, the beatified sky.
What words might have passed have passed as air
sighed by the soul in the act of rapture.
Now there is only ocher and thin-skinned cream,
struck gold against the garden’s sudden green,
forever as present as it once seemed,
her hands crossed soft against her hidden fear
and angel’s breath still warm within your ear.
from MOVING HOUSE
Lies
Our favorite set, the operating room.
Our favorite plot, death by folly.
Poisoning by restaurant garnish.
Livers brined in bourbon and burst.
The killing argument.
The suicidal drive.
And Junior, the arsonist
who set him self on fire.
As if we defy natural causes,
predictable as gravity and night.
Claiming, instead, the flaming corpse,
the surgeon with his impotent scalpel.
The Atreus and Usher of Coal Town,
we lived and died by stories in that house.
Northern Nights
“What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
Robert Hayden
None of us could sleep those coal-black nights.
The furnace coughed deep in the cellar
until our father rose in the iron cold
his footsteps sounding loud through the quiet
house, five of us huddled tight in two beds.
We’d hear the turn of the handle, the chunk
and swing of the metal door unhinged,
the steady thrust of the rusty shovel
graveling against the binful of coal.
We’d hear him hoping in the dark for fire.
Then the sluff of slippers across the kitchen,
the oven door opening and the match,
and soon my mother’s voice echoing
up the steep stairs to our attic room
calling us to hot milk at midnight,
to slip on coats and scarves and hats and gloves,
to sit in the circle around the stove
bound together in blankets, two by three,
to watch each other’s heavy heads drowse
in the orange glow of that blue flame.
While our father cursed the furnace man below,
the smell of sulfur rising through the house,
as our mother worried wordless on the stairs,
we moved closer, wove our circle tight
against the cold that claimed them in the dark.
Angela Alaimo O'Donnell 