As Mourning Doves Persist

My husband leaves each weekday morning at seven. I hear the door to the laundry room open and close. Then sense a gremlin draft  from the adjacent vacated garage. The house goes quiet    for nearly nine hours. He rarely leaves a dirty dish in the sink though  lately  he hasn’t made up the queen-size bed entirely. One corner of  the sheets  pulled back like a welcoming tent flap. Returning, he stacks his most recent hardback library acquisitions  on the blonde end table next to his burgundy wingback chair,  and retrieves the same blue bowl nightly for a dinner salad   which he eats alone. Hungry earlier than I still typing. He walks the hallway with a minor tilt and two clenched fists as if  balanced oars.    This, a recently acquired mannerism. Together we are kitchen dwellers. Gritty lemon pepper granules and orange juice sans pulp. Eggs on the weekend. Subtitles on the television in a r...

                         A car stops and the door opens                                               -   Linda Gregg, Bamboo and A Bird   A car stops and the door opens and sound  escapes. Splash that was not there before.  Into the air, jazzy brush on drum. Lullaby with rouged plum sky.  Snippet of guitar strum, winsome sonata.  Sound propels me to see all the cars parked  under the summer night’s street lights.  Cars with bodies inside sucking smoke and  reaching for one another.  From my vehicle determined closure  as my mother zips her weighty beige  purse shut. Dangling from her left hand.  A single tube of lipstick having fallen  onto the sidewalk alongside us. Its descriptive clink like dropping...

Her ghost comes around.  Makes small popping sounds.  Her death, ricochet of many questions.   Around us, landscape on fire.  I add the Bible to the box in the back of my car,  early plans for potential evacuation.  Scripted inside, tree limbs of births and deaths.  Those relatives I remember  yet the milestones harder to conjure.  We were married in the year of our daughter’s birth.  Hammock between occurrences.   Ledger of access for those left behind.

  No god is secure from the lofty flight of mortal thought .       - S or  Juana Ines de la Cruz   Un-attach your leaden wings. Replace them with survivor scalp of  post-chemo down. Speak to the angels in your sleep. Assure your daughter you will always catch her. What we’ve grown from such compost is splendor. What we chant still are the ABCs. Washing our hands up to the elbows. Poetry Postcard Festival 2021  

  The dreams that found me here induced by others.  Temporary rooms where the anticipated inhabitant  never returned.   We rummage for lost things. As I pack  I survey this  cottage into which I’ve spilled white coral and cords for charging.    My dreams once home again will likely be of hibiscus, blood  pink  pinwheels, and the Willi Willi bloom stitching the limbs of highway trees -  yellow and orange and fading. I will awake to remnant archipelago green; roosters’ wild calls and tea cup sized mourning doves somnolence interrupted by soot black lava  reef and north Pacific wind little sips of the narrowing cave of my father’s dementia as we shared nightly dinner visits here. And on the rental lanai, the sun setting above the lucky  horseshoe tip of the other side of the island,  dropping from brief chimera.    There will be rain. (Haiku, Maui, Hawaii, August 2021)

Six women arrive at the table. Cup remnants of waking dreams in crowded, dissipating wisps, faceless characters and confusing maps. We arrive to decipher together, mouth groggy snippets over biscuits and bacon. Outside, snow that could just sigh. We've returned to our previous seats. Forks placed to the left or tossed collectively into the center.  Last night we drank at this table, over  Scrabble tiles. Making up rules. This morning, one early riser emerges from the day's weather. Sock monkey with down on her brown cap.  We start a new game. Acronyms are not acceptable, we decide. Directions  no where to be found. I slowly stir my drink. Another undresses  to hot tub on this vacation patch of Colorado cottonwood and pine.  Red cars turn white in the driveway. We reach for the names and  favorite sayings of bygone partners as if a clue inside. How we arrived here. Fortunes scripted on our tea bags.  One continues to whip farm fresh eggs.

If I cut my hair approaching chemotherapy  let's refer to it as fruit tree blossom scatter anticipatory lightweight valuables windy decision making ahead