Tim Mayo

Apologia

Now that I have gathered all my experience
into the little treasure chest of my head
like a squirrel wintering his nuts,
or the make believe pirate hording
his Halloween gold,

I feel a poverty has fallen over me
as if my entire life–its little significances
piling up their rough edges in the bifocal
hourglass where I’ve measured myself–
as if all that isn’t enough for me
to sit here and write to you as
I’ve always imagined I would.

Take for one, the time I almost drowned:

we both know, that having survived,
I must hug that lesson to my heart
like one of those rings
that are thrown to the drowning,
which later, some clever person
made into and sold as little candies.

As a child I ate them, too,
but their true significance escaped me
all those years until this very moment
as I suddenly fear what I will say to you
can only be sweet and small,

that you will only briefly savor it,

and which by its very nature and form
holds nothing at its center
except what you imagine to be there
in this desperate moment to save me
from drowning in the ocean of my own words.

At a Walmart in Southern New Hampshire

What landscape will we never see again
which the imagination has bulldozed into this
commerce, this macadam sea where cars gather
like schooled fish and people enter the blinding
neon of this place as if the sun were darkness?
And you, Walt Whitman, greet me at the door,
naked without your hat, retired old scribbler
with the sun’s smile pinned to your blue smock--I’d
recognize your slouch and stubble anywhere.

We walk together down aisles of lawn care
like aging lawn-boys shuffling our bootsoles
toward the certainty of astro turf,
tweaking along the way the plastic flowers
in their plastic places, trying to ruffle
the stiff pinkness out of the gay flamingoes
spiked fast to their styrofoam stands. Suddenly,
you turn to me with an old eagle’s fierceness
I will remember as much as these words:

Someday, this will all be funky with history,
and a patina of ancient ways and wisdom
will settle over this place to make it all look
like a temple. Tourists will come and fan themselves
leaning against these walls in the hot sun,
and as the day-glo shards of the flamingoes
wink back, they will wonder what our Gods
were like whose molded images on these shelves
our children reach up to like supplicants.

A Translucent Voice

Before I began beaming
back my reflections,
as if I were a lighthouse
instead of what I am,

I wrote endless parables
that seemed to journey
through stations of the cross,

their sharp details
pushing like intense thorns
into your forehead and mine.

Now I write in a visual way
showing the clear words
all at once, not as words
but forms upon a surface,

and I’ve disappeared
as a mirror does,
appearing only to be
what the mirror shows

and never what it was:

that invisible past writhing up
to this brittle present
which time may one day shatter
into a million starry pieces.

I see you leaning closer
peering at my reflection,
losing sight of what I see
for want of what you can’t.

To you,
I must seem bodiless,
a mere echo of the visible,
anything but persona.

Look at these flecks in my iris,
and you will see that special tint,
a little more silver than sepia,

the vision of true poetry

and not that sentimental stuff
peopled by motherly indifference
and the absence of fathers.

Try to imagine, here,
in the vast cadre of all I reflect,
you, also, appear bodiless to me.

Imagine our intimacy
distilled in my glass,

but even here,

the infinitesimal atoms & the cells
of our beings do not mingle.

Can we ever get closer?
Or is it that something always harder
than a reluctance to touch

has solidified between us,
an ars poetica walling us
into this mutual speculation?

How will you ever know
that my body, too, is a fragile spell
I cannot break?

And how will I ever know
that you will listen, that you are
what you claim to be–

and not a soft bag of bones
full of heart and spleen,
one that likes a poem or two
and good advice?

Spring 2007

Portulacca

Portulacca, I said, Por-tu-lac-ca?
to the young girl at the nursery,
and she smiled, her eyes brightening
from some memory like jewels
turning in a light I couldn’t see.

She looked around then said,
We’re sold out,
her eyes taking on another hue.

All around us things flowered
in the misty gray,
red, orange, pink and blue,
as though shouting
against the sunlessness of the day.

Portulacca--a plant I didn’t know,
I was just buying for a friend,
when from that old greenhouse
inside me where all the plants
jostled and groped for more dark,
the word suddenly blossomed
burning through almost like a sun,

and for that one moment it hung
between us, a bright talisman,
before the gray air erased it,
and I went home to my friend.

Red Convertible

For Laura

You call me about your car--why does it smoke?
I want to say desire has caught your engine
and your well oiled heart has frozen from the heat.
--Or should I use the male vocabulary I’ve heard
around the bottles of beer at cook outs
when the men gather at one end of the table
and the women find themselves at the other
turning over the lumpy potato salads of their lives?

In the end I take the male high road--I
suggest your radiator leaks under pressure.
I, too, leak under pressure. The hot air puffing
up my chest sighs down like a balloon,
and the hero in me suddenly sees himself
as ordinary as the man who gets on the bus
in the morning and steps off in the evening
knowing nothing but the humdrum of his heart,

hoping for the red convertible of your smile
to pass by and give him a lift.

Tim Mayo’s poems have appeared in Arbutus,
The Atlanta Review, Del Sol Review, The Rose & Thorn, The Cold River Review, Paris/Atlantic, Four Corners, Mannequin Envy, Poet Lore, 5 A.M. and The Chrysalis Reader. Two of his poems have garnered "International Merit Awards' from The Atlanta Review, and in 2000, he was a Semi-Finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Contest. In 2006 he received a Vermont Artist & Writers Grant from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, and recently his first collection Dreaming of a Dependable Force was chosen as a Finalist/Runner up for the Man Street Rag Poetry Book Award. It will appear in January 2008.

tim mayo on the trapeze

photo by Joe Templin

Tim Mayo has been a member of the Author Committee of the Brattleboro Literary Festival since it’s inception in 2002. His poems have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Del Sol Review , The Rose & Thorn, Paris/Atlantic, Four Corners, Poet Lore, 5 A.M. and The Chrysalis Reader. He was a Semi-Finalist in the “Discovery”/The Nation 2000 Poetry Contest and recently received a grant from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT . For the past year and a half he has been studying Trapeze and other circus arts at Nimble Arts Trapeze and Circus School in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Girl In Pink Gloves, 2005, oil on canvas, by Theresa Pfarr

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