Incubus

In my unadorned room
I sleep the sleep of the alone

Dreams filled
with floating images –
lovers, romance, passion

By daybreak
the fragrance of dreams
wakes me –
its essence
nourishment for one more day

2003

Estate Sale Trappings

Books:
dusty boxes of faded physics texts,
outdated Methodist doctrine,
“How to Survive Breast Cancer” booklet with dog-eared pages

Scarves and gloves:
chiffon squares with rolled hems,
Sunday gloves, yellowed and safety-pinned into pairs

Clothes:
suits, and neckties of varying width,
closets stuffed with housedresses
their sizes creeping upward,
a lone prom dress,
its mating call color and shiny fabric
out of place amongst polyester pantsuits.

Photographs:
shoebox of family snapshots
undated, unnamed, unclaimed;
high school graduation portrait
alone in a nail stubbled hallway.

Medical equipment:
cane, walker, wheelchair
testaments to decline.

Detritus:
Employee of the Year award from a now-gone department store;
gold rimmed 50th anniversary plate;
perfect attendance certificate from the Lion’s Club.

Terminus:
once life’s treasures, their masking-tape price tags
now reduced to MAKE AN OFFER
on the last day of the sale.

Fort Davis, Texas
2004

The ignorance of memory

A packet of my past is buried in the bottom desk drawer.
I don’t know what these dozen letters say,
even though I wrote them.

The recipient stood in my kitchen yesterday,
handed them to me – a birthday present, he said,
that money couldn’t buy.
The letters, neatly rubber banded together, were in chronological order.

He read them before the return
giving him the advantage
of refreshed memories. I am, however,
more comfortable in my ignorance.

There are things I remember:
sweaty backseat makeout sessions,
his sister dying in a car wreck,
the ways he planned to change the world.

And once, riding shotgun with our friend Doris,
I turned around in the seat, on my knees.
As he caught my hands in his, our eyes met and locked together.
I was the first one to look away.

The next-to-last envelope is dated July 25, 1977. The last one,
twelve months later, is an invitation to my wedding.
He gave us a place setting of our dishes,
a gracious gesture from a jilted lover.
Those same plates watched him hand me the letters.

Tonight, when I replaced the rubber band with a narrow red ribbon,
I realized that he’s not yet broken his gaze.

Lubbock, Texas
March 2006

A World Lost

A wagon wheel light

(a move prop abandoned
in the town with a Biblical name)

Tossed dim light onto burlap curtains

(salvaged from the basement
of Holy Family Church)

Competed with votive candles

(reflected off plastic tablecloths
as white as sacraments)

Lit two front-row priests

(and heard “Born to be Wild”
played on a mandolin.)

Nazareth, Texas
1999

Assisted Living

No one should have to live in
places like this:
warehousing the elderly
is all it is
and anyway
other societies
respect
their elders.
Not like here.

But you just don’t know
until it is your decision
to make

And you realize
there aren’t any
right answers
so the best can you can hope for
is the least-wrong
solution

Which leads you to following along
at a barely-perceptible pace
behind an elderly parent
heading to dinner
at 4:30

And you avoid eye contact
with other middle aged children
which seems odd
except maybe none of us
are completely comfortable
with these decisions
we’ve made.

August 4, 2013

The park was our parish

The park was our parish

That Sunday when we hiked the canyon, I
wore black lace underwear from Victoria’s
Secret, which I started thinking about when
Joann and I sat on a flat white rock in the
sun and baptized our hot bare feet in the
inches-deep clear stream while Darryl hiked
ahead to look for a shaded place called The
Cathedrals where their friend Louise, who’d
recently died, had directed her ashes to be
scattered and when Darryl got back he said,
“I think Louise sent me a present – a yellow
butterfly flew all around my head while I
stood still back there!” and then we hiked
back to the trailhead and I was thinking
about why I chose that lace underwear in the
first place and how it was likely that I was
the only hiker wearing lace panties even though
it was an easy guess, because besides me, we
were a priest, a nun, and a bunch of Boy Scouts
and then the swallowtail – or maybe it really
was Louise? – flittered around us on shining
saffron wings and was so quickly lost in the
spring-new green mesquites that we hardly
noticed that she had been with us.

May 8, 2004
Lubbock, after a visit to Quitaque, Texas

<

these dreams

these dreams
jerk me from sleep
imprisoning me
in snarled sheets
while I puzzle
over what sins
I am paying for with
these dreams

“Say…”

Somewhere in the hills outside of Austin on a very hot Saturday in August, my friend Carlos and I stopped at a roadside bar for a beer.  The place was small, set parallel to the highway and barely clear of the right of way.  Out back was a large deck shaded by liveoaks.  Picnic tables were scattered around the deck, and each one had a coffee can filled with sand, makeshift ash trays.  There was a large dancehall across a pasture and an about-to-fall-down barn next door.

Even though the day was hot, it was pleasant on that shady deck.  We walked up to the double-loaded bar (the other side opened to the inside of the bar) and ordered a couple of Shiners. Almost as soon as we’d arrived, we’d caught the attention of a man at the bar.  I think he’d been talking with some other patrons and shifted his attention to us (those other patrons should have paid for our beer for the favor we’d done.)

“Say, where are you folks from?” was his opening line.

We told him – Lubbock (me) and Seagoville (Carlos).

He had a story about Lubbock; his ex-wife was from there, or went to school there.  Or maybe she lived there now.  It was a little unclear.  She was a doctor.  And he was, too, although he was now retired.

“Say, where are you folks from?” was his next question.

Lubbock (me) and the Dallas area (Carlos).

Naturally, that triggered a story about how the town we were in – the very town! – was for sale.  If we were interested.  It included the bar, the dancehall, and a house across the road.  The price had been something and was now something else.  Lower, maybe, but it could have been higher.  He knew a guy, if we were interested.  Just let him know.

“Say, where are you folks from?”

Lubbock (me) and Dallas (Carlos).

“What do you do there?”

Carlos said he was in economic development.  The guy told us, with a tone that made it sound like the very first time he’d mentioned it to us, that the town we were in – the very town! – was for sale.  In case we were interested.  He knew a guy.  The place was a good deal – the bar did a good business, especially in good weather, when there were a lot of motorcycle riders that came through.  Except for the night before when some Mexicans had stopped and there was nearly trouble.   You know how Mexicans are, he said.  Carlos, with maybe just a hint of irony, admitted that he did, actually, know how Mexicans are.

“And you, pretty lady – what is it you do?”

I told him I was a poet, which usually ends the questioning.  He did, however, have a follow-up inquiry:

“Say, where are you folks from?”

Lubbock, metroplex.

That round of responses reminded him to tell us about Luckenbach – this narrative was so convoluted that it made all the previous ones seem coherent.  Something about his mother, his stepdad, land squabbles, speaking German, a Kaiser, perhaps a posse or three.  And then, something reminded him of an important question he’d somehow failed to ask us:

“Say, where are you folks from?”

Lubbock, north Texas.

Lubbock?  Texas Tech?  His ex-wife had gone to Tech.  Good school.  She’s a doctor.  He, also, is a doctor, although he’s retired now which is a good thing since the damn Democrats are going to ruin healthcare.  He’s never been to Lubbock, but he might make it up there someday.  He’d look us up when he got there.  He introduced himself, and we told him our names.  Naturally, now that he knew our names, there was one more bit of information he needed.

“Say, where are you folks from?”

Lubbock, Laredo.

Wait – he’s from Laredo and you, pretty lady, are from Lubbock?  How’s that work?  Those places are pretty far apart, but you two are…together?  Really?

It worked fine, we assured him.  Things with us couldn’t be better.  We were having a great weekend, enjoying a beer in the shade.  We told him we’d heard the town was for sale.

It was for sale – turns out our information was correct.  He knew a guy, if we were interested.  It’d be a great opportunity, as it included everything but the barn next door.  We should probably think about it.

It was time to head back toward Austin, so for entertainment purposes, we asked him for directions.  He gave very detailed instructions that I am positive would have, if we’d followed them, landed us Tucson instead of Austin.  As we started to walk away, he had just one more question:

“Say, where are you folks from?”

Lubbock, Seagoville.

He shook Carlos’s hand, hugged me, called me Pretty Lady one last time, and turned his attention to some people who had just arrived.

As we walked away, we could hear, “Say, where are you folks from?”

Saturday, Austin

Two glasses of chianti last night
lead to a headache today.
At the trendy hotel
a half dozen self-consciously hip patrons
eat granola and yogurt by the pool.
Five blocks down Congress
a crotch-to-knee wet spot
on a man’s ill-fitting jeans
trails a faint ammonia aroma.
An indignant street corner prophet
sheds one of his grimy coats
and begins his sermon
to the automobile congregation.
You buy four scones, seven daisies
then drive home.
I choke down three aspirin,
navigate airport security
and fly away.

2002

Going to Earth

I liked going to the country, to the farm where my cousins lived, because it seemed so exotic. First of all, while I lived in Lubbock, they lived near Earth, a small farming town in the Texas Panhandle. That just sounded much better. At the farm, there were cows! They grew cotton! And even watermelon, too, one year! That summer my Uncle Donald gathered us kids on the front porch with a watermelon warm from the field. Using a machete, he hacked it into pieces and we ate it, juice dripping from our chins and elbows. At home, we’d have had to use a spoon, and couldn’t have spit the seeds at each other.

My two older cousins, Bill and Donna Beth, hovered on the edge of our trips to the farm. They were enough older than the rest of us to be disdainful of what we did.

But the other cousins, Ruth and Margaret, were almost the same ages as my sister, Laura, and me. In a fit of family unity, we even shared names. Ruth and I had the same first name, Evelyn, after our grandmother who’d died a few years before we were born. Margaret and Laura had the same middle name – Ann – but I don’t think it was as significant to the family as “Evelyn.”

Our visits to Earth, which was an always-funny family joke, seemed to occur with no sort of regularity, except for a mid-May visit to celebrate the week-apart birthdays of Laura and Grandpa. Almost the best part of the trip was that we got to skip church! Yes! A virtually unheard of thing. We’d go to Sunday School, then slip away, to Earth. By the time we got to the farm, they would be just arriving from the Earth Church of Christ. Immediately we’d break into groups. The two women would head to the kitchen to get dinner ready; in rural fashion, “dinner” was the meal served at noon. Meanwhile the men would stand around outside, if the weather was good, talking about crops, or politics, or whatever men talk about. The four cousins headed off to play until it was time to eat.

Dinner would be huge, with lots of choices: roast beef, fried chicken, biscuits, corn, limp green beans, green salad, congealed salad, cake-mix cake. No matter the occasion, Grandpa held the head-of-the-family seat at the end of the table. He would say grace, artfully blending Methodist and Church of Christ theology into a prayer that was acceptable to all of us – or at least to the ones paying attention. Bill and Donna Beth would get to sit with Grandpa and the rest of the adults at the big table and the four girls got the card table. We didn’t mind: family tradition was that we got to get our food first and we also had the pleasure of uninterrupted giggling.

The phone at the farm was on a party line, so unless it rang in a certain pattern of longs-and-shorts, no one even made a move to answer it. But I am sure that Aunt Elizabeth noted whose ring it was, so she’d know who was getting calls during Sunday dinner.

At the farm we four girls would pair off most of the time. Ruth and I liked to go for walks along the dirt roads that marked section lines around the farm. We’d walk on the hard-as-pavement dirt until a vehicle approached; then we’d scramble into the bar ditch, which seemed deep and dangerous and steep to me. After all, I was from town and our streets were rimmed by curbs and gutters. (When we’d leave the farm, I was always nervous my dad would back too far into the road – I could always picture our Ford Fairlane teetering precariously on the edge of the bar ditch before pitching us backwards into it.)

Once on one of our walks, we went into an abandoned farmhouse. It seemed like a grown-up thing to do, somehow, stepping through the door that groaned as we pushed against it. We didn’t stay long – it was dark in there! – but before we left we grabbed an old Mason jar off the floor. We were, we said, going to show it to our mothers. That way, we weren’t thieves, just juvenile anthropologists returning from Borneo with a shrunken head. Before we actually made it home with this treasure, this amazing find, we thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if we slammed it onto the hard-as-granite dirt road. I felt a pang of loss as it shattered, but that must have been offset by Ruth’s sense of relief over destroying the evidence and avoiding punishment for being in that old house in the first place.

Once when Ruth and I were walking our usual square walk, she HAD to go to the bathroom. So she squatted down in the bar ditch and took a dump. Right there. Outside. In a ditch. I was astonished. When she was done she covered the turds with some dirt clods and we continued on our way. On our next visit to the farm she confided that she’d told Bill what she’d done. He said that’s just great because it’ll decay and float in the air and every time you walk by THAT PLACE you’ll breathe tiny pieces of your own crap. We stayed in the house during that visit.

Ruth and Margaret (we said their names kind of like one really long word) always had better toys than we did – more Barbie dresses, a Chatty Cathy doll, board games that were more fun than ours. But the best thing they had was the Creepy Crawler set. It had little bug-shaped molds you could squirt variously-colored goo into, put in a metal tray, and bake for a few minutes. Then, you could carefully pop out a still-warm orange worm, or a pink-and-yellow spider, or any number of garish combinations. We’d try to scare Donna Beth and Bill with our creations but of course they never fell for it. Once, though, when Great Aunt Mary Jane and Great Uncle Roy were visiting from California, we snuck a freshly-baked spider onto Aunt Mary Jane’s thigh. I can’t imagine that she felt it through exoskeleton of her good girdle, but when she saw it she squealed in a most convincing fashion. We thought we’d really fooled her, but now I know it was the other way around.

Four cousins, hard at work

Back then cotton was picked by hand, partly by migrant workers and partly by the farmer’s family and fieldhands. To Laura and me, pulling fluffy cotton bolls off dry stalks looked like a lot of fun, and not too hard, either. One year during harvest Uncle Donald hired us four girls to help. I know now that Ruth and Margaret weren’t as seduced by the 25¢ pay as Laura and I were, but we each got a long canvas bag, slung it over our shoulders, and set to work pulling cotton and poking it into the sack. We kept at it for a long time, too. The sacks were starting to pull down on our shoulders, we were tired, but we knew we’d helped a lot with the harvest. Only we’d covered about ten feet of the half-mile long row and the bulges of cotton in our sacks weren’t even noticeable!

Cokes. That was biggest treat at the farm. My parents didn’t allow soft drinks at our house. At the farm, though, there were always a couple of wooden cases filled with glass bottles of Cokes on the service porch. The bottles were always gritty from dirt that blew under the door or around the windows. Beside the cases of full bottles, there were usually one or two cases of empties, waiting for the next trip to town when the deposit on them could be applied to a new case of Cokes. Once, Donna Beth had proclaimed – in the throes of adolescent huffiness – that IF YOU TOOK A COKE FROM THE REFRIGERATOR REPLACE IT WITH ONE FROM THE PORCH. She’d even posted a sign on the refrigerator door. We deliberately ignored the proclamation, just because we were pesky. And we even drank extra Cokes that day, just to show her.

Uncle Donald was quite outspoken on the subject of my family’s camping trips. His family had a pop-up camper – which we oxymoronically called a “tent trailer” – and he just couldn’t believe the foolishness of my family camping in tents! Bears? Weren’t we afraid of bears? Or mountain lions? Or snakes? That was all my mother could take; in the only known example of her back-talking anyone, she whirled on Uncle Donald and snapped, “Snakes? SNAKES? Since when can snakes open tent zippers?” Wow – we were impressed; we had no idea she had that kind of fire in her.

My last visit to the farm was in February of my junior year of high school, on the day of Grandpa’s funeral. Grandpa had been in the hospital in Littlefield for a few weeks before he died; he was 88. When Aunt Elizabeth went to his house after he died, she found his suit laid out with a note pinned to it, saying that was the suit he wanted to be buried in. He’d written the note while he waited for the ambulance, which he’d called himself, to come get him.

We gathered at the farm before the funeral. Donna Beth and Bill were both married by this time, so there was significant shift in the family dynamic. While we waited to go to the Methodist church for the service, Bill entertained us by taking extreme close-ups of us with his new camera – a front tooth, an eyebrow. It was the most attention he ever paid us and maybe it was how he dealt with grief.

At the little Methodist church, the pews were filled with Eastern Star ladies and Rainbow Girls, and people I didn’t know. Our minister from Lubbock gave the sermon, though I can’t recall why. Nor can I recall what he said. Grandpa was the first grandparent I’d lost and I was trying to figure out my role in the universe, or something, and didn’t listen to whatever words of comfort were offered. After the service, I rode with Ruth and Uncle Donald and Aunt Elizabeth for the 30-mile trip to the cemetery in Littlefield.

Just north of Littlefield, we passed the house where Grandpa had lived for many years, the cedar windbreak he planted decades earlier grown enough to nearly obscure the house. Seeing the house was sadder than the funeral had been.

The only other things I can remember are that it was bitterly cold, that I wore an extremely short dress, and that Ruth cried (in my opinion) more for effect than in mourning.

The graveside service was on a windy, cold hill in the cemetery in Littlefield, where Grandpa was laid next to my grandmother Evelyn. I’d never been to the cemetery before, and I learned then that my grandmother had died on Christmas Eve, another sad fact to stack with the rest that I’d begun to accumulate. After the graveside service, we got in our car and returned to Lubbock. It took me three days to get warm again.

The family gatherings tapered off after Grandpa died. At some point, Donald and Elizabeth built a new house in town; I guess one of their farmhands lives in the old one. The last time that I saw Ruth was at my wedding, in 1978, when she elbowed her way through the other unmarried female guests and caught the bouquet. Supporting the bouquet-catching tradition, she was the next one to get married, to a crop-duster from Muleshoe.

My mother tells me that Aunt Elizabeth brags “too much” about her grandchildren, which I take to mean that she is overwhelmed by Aunt Elizabeth’s higher grandchildren census.

She also says that Uncle Donald “drinks.” But I think she’s still mad about the snake comment.

December 2002