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Tim Mayo
Winter Melt 2009
How It Comes to You
It happens waiting for a bus: you cough
under a street lamp, the ground shudders,
steam rises from a grate, and suddenly,
a shabby man thrusts out his hand.
He offers you something small,
purpled like a bruise and oily
as a rubbed jewel in the gloom.
Here, he winces and pleads.
You clear your throat to answer.
All you’ve wanted is a way to get
from here to there––preferably
the express, but now, a local
has come, and if you turn and leave,
you may never get there in time.
------
About Beauty With a Capital B
About beauty with a capital B,
a poem of modest consequence
quotes a Zen (capital Z)
story about two monks.
They come to a river bank
where a beautiful lady,
unable to cross,
weeps over her plight.
Not even hesitating, the older
monk carries her across
(A real Samaritan with a capital S),
and the memory of her buttocks
never even weighs upon his shoulders.
But having perhaps missed
his last worldly opportunity,
the younger monk gets all hung up
over the forbidden gesture made
by his master. (This is the little k,
hard to crack, kernel of this koan.)
The story is famous, but not for showing
how behind each perception of beauty hides
a sensual nut squirreled deep inside you.
How it lies in wait like an apple in your tree.
The lady never thanks her Samaritan,
nor does she eye the younger monk
over the older’s frail shoulder
even though she must have felt
his sharp desire piercing
through his master’s body
trying to jolt her heart and loins
into his wishful communion.
The poem continues, but being
no longer important to this poem,
the monks go on to oblivion,
because they are Zen,
and the master has already forgotten what
the apprentice will take a lifetime to forget.
And the poet leaves the lady, alone
on the indifferent river’s far bank,
weeping because she’s beautiful
and beauty is a thankless calling
which, like the river, must constantly
be crossed again and again and again.
Naming the Emotions
A therapist I once knew used to ask me to
name my emotions. It made me feel like a
taxidermist: stuffing the pelts of rare species,
refilling their deflated and crumpled bodies,
then placing them in the diorama of my mind.
There I could label them for the children who
would come through once a week in unruly groups,
their teachers trying to contain their unfettered
imaginations long enough to gather them
to view my ruffled grouse of astonishment
as it flew above that long-toothed lion of resentment
which stalked the furry, little pachyderm
of my infancy, whose elfin tusks I once believed
could keep at bay all the predators the world
had ever imagined by piercing their hearts
as hearts had never been pierced before.
| Tim Mayo's poems have or will appear in Atlanta Review, Avatar Review, Arbutus, Babel Fruit, The Chrysalis Reader, Del Sol Review, 5 AM, Inertia Magazine, Mannequin Envy, Poet Lore, and The Rose & Thorn and The Writer’s Almanac. In 2007 he was a finalist in the WinningWriter’s.com War Poetry Contest. His chapbook The Loneliness of Dogs was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008, and his full length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities will be published by Mayapple Press in the Spring of 2009. |
by Amelia X |
Fall 2007
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.
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