unexpected sherry

Crisp. Wine as nail polish remover

Wide, then stopping sweet

The taste of mentorship

A working crush, a kooky inspiration

to be better than I am

It’s the manly-sweet voice in my head

A small girl’s pattern

watching her own performance from just inside the door

I try harder

to be worthy of his momentary attention,

to show qualities translatable on a mother’s tongue

My dad kept a small bottle of

acetone-laced liquid in a vial in his desk

MacGyver-like agent that cleaned mistakes

and misspent glue

Later we found it among his accouterments

I am to be writing my annual review

Assess professional contributions

as I twirl a tiny glass

Test tacky connections to colleagues

who might value my performance

from secondhand account

I must revisit each strength and gap

in a year I wish to forget

Perhaps I can submit a poem

My only product ever given full marks

by my father – even though

he never read them through to the end

© lila.p.levy, March 2013

Shame

Shame, a photo by lilalevy1063 on Flickr.

delicacy

I test an impossibly small joy
Lay it flat on the spare bed
As I wait for your call
After you finish cleaning up todays job.

I too finish an impossibly flat job
Test its wait on you
After I clean my small bed
of spare joy.

2020

I will be thinking I did not raise my son to die
in a war waged for some personal agenda.

I will be thinking of a sister who can no longer cross
the chasm of Christian piety to talk to me.

I will be reading headlines of the Asian world domination
and a fifty thousand Dow.

I will weep for the suicide rate of Muslim women
in the post-oil-economy religious fundamentalism.

I will be experimenting with astroprojection.

I will be listening to radio speeches
by an Hispanic president
full of new solutions to the US famine while
looking over junkmail about Mars homesteads.

I will struggle with philanthropy and memories,
still missing my lover's face full of scars.

I will be too young
to be feeling this alone.

I will be assessing the performance
of a new breed of kayak that's taken me
twenty years to afford. I will be sitting, alone,
lightly on a green river, testing my salt,
swiveling my hips in a hula
through quiet currents.

I will be searching Latin markets
for natural textiles and things made of real wood.

I will be paying for all the personal technologies
that promise to usher me through an easier day
and growing mindful of my caffeine intake.

I will be lacking the brevity with which I once spoke
and regretting the diversity I once embraced, and
lamenting the Europe I'll never see.

I will be feeling young enough
to want to be this alone.


lilaplevy (c) august 1999

Periscope

Too many thoughts
have become headless soldiers
standing impotent watch
over the next great need.
Poke above the surface
to see God in melted babies,
thinned like blood to the brain,
Intelligence borrowed and
low
or Time now desperate for land
to lay down roots deep enough
to soar sequoia-like.
I never had potential like this
when I was young.

On the other hand,
knuckle down and sort the laundry
of memories, picking out the useful
from the tired
cut through in ribbons;
fold it all neatly for storage while you're at it.
This chore gets harder and harder
every day so check the paperwork:
it's cheerily
indignant
and wants for relevance.
And your progressive lenses
aren't helping anymore.

lila.p.levy (c) April and July 2010

lenses

spots on my lenses
obsessed with blocking my view
form maps of Mongolia

With apologies to Kay Ryan for posting her poem for Steve and Fred

Why We Must Struggle

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

-Kay Ryan (c) Say Uncle, Grove Press 1991