The heart, those four walls of clichés,

creak in on me like Disney's

haunted home. Mid-summer your name,

arrhythmic, still clatters in my veins.

Like yours, my bloody pump now leans

this way and that. I wake dismayed

that I still wake. The ordinary trains

for ordinary: day estranged 

from day, the overarching aim

of light on blank expanse. This pain,

mundane in its display

of what is wrong and mean, reclaims

belief in miracles, the sane

or insane wish you misnamed

prayer. And yet... you plotted, risked it,

with faith—not luck, not superstition;

waiting for what finally came

from someone dead. The counterclaim

is that from death came death, a game

of synonyms, of metaphrase 

that interchanged malaise

with thumping grief. There is no name

for what you couldn't get. A man

gave you his heart. Unashamed,

you took it. At a distance,

you followed where he'd gone. To listen

to your heart you need one. To refrain

from hope? The same as arteries, veins

so bloated, clogged, they can't contain

a bit of life. You undid cliché:

the heart worked; the blood alone decayed.

Foreknowledge gone into another room,

the walls move in—the dying die too soon. 

Previously published in Crab Orchard Review and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf and Stock, 2018).

————————————————————————————————————————

Flight Patterns

  July 17, 1996; Montoursville, PA 

  TWA Flight 800

On time, normal, through average air,

your plane came home to me 

out of dusk above the Montoursville horizon

and settled without fanfare on the runway

just as, in New York, that other plane took off

to Paris with the neighbors' children

pressing their faces to the window to see 

the last of Long Island,

their horizon waiting to explode

into sunset.

We didn't know driving home,

lugging your two suitcases from the car

and up our stairs to the bedroom,

the emptiness of other rooms,

the space on a pillow where a head should be.

Our first child slept soundlessly 

in the room of my body.

We had just learned she was there,

the trip we would all take together

as yet unplanned.

What patterns are these?

Prayers for the unborn crisscrossing 

those for the newly dead,

a strange radar of dread

hugging hope in the stomach.

Parents of the just-buried and just-begotten

circling a small town with their weeping.

Before I knew, 

I slept, exhausted 

by the small one within me

curled tight as a tornado

ticking its way to an explosion

I longed for.

Exhausted, too, from your travel, 

you didn't sleep, but read

from the doctor's color brochures

our child's beginnings, 

the daily care we must take;

then perched yourself 

before the black-and-white news

and learned.

When you woke me,

your voice was the sound of small birds

flapping from the nest,

the hush of the watching world

huddled and blazing.

Previously published in Essential Love (PoetWorks) and in Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf and Stock, 2018)

————————————————————————————————————————————————______

Skin Rising

You say the bites are kisses,

that they swell

toward heaven white,

red about the edges, sucked by

angels, their mosquito hisses

hesitating like his brother wishing

Abel wasn't right. This other hell

inside the veins transmitted

from one to one to one: the perfect legend

of blood, betrayal, suffering, and kisses.

We swat at such divinity; we itch

for it. The summer filled with misses

and mistakes. Behind the hedge

it's Cain alone who yells;

the angels bite his heels and his legs,

then flap and flip into his eyes and nose.

The clicking wings that suck our sin and go

into another teach us how to sip

what starts out sweet, diffuses into dull.

These are angels whispering in my head,

the after-echo of the morning bells;

they tell me bites are kisses

that they swell into the mouth

and loiter in the lungs; the heavy wishes

settle in the liver, but the rest

become the face and soul, become the glistening

within the eyes. Now insect-like

we flit and lick and see about all sides,

our feet still sticky on each other's skin.

The wings are light and veil us from sin

that bites our kisses, kisses all our bites.

Previously published in International Quarterly and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf and Stock, 2018)

——————————————————————————————

Indelible

"Jim C., of Cincinnati, Ohio, has a tattooed

wedding band.”

—from Romance 101:  Lessons in Love

Chapter on Commitment

Before he said, "I do," the groom

had it done, inked himself

a circle of seraphs, sunk

thin swirls into skin that clutched 

the bone like a bride

unable to hide a not-slim leg 

within a garnished garter.

 

At the prescribed time,

he handed his love his hand

attached to an arm of Botticellian artwork.

Or maybe his best man, 

in from the Bronx, Detroit, or even Boise, 

light-skinned proprietor of The Dark Horse,

resourcefully used the only outlet behind the altar 

to jab the high-tech indigo ink 

succinctly into the fingers held out before a priest

in a Bud-Light T-shirt and collar.  

Then this friend etched matching sets

in purples and pinks entwined.

Everyone waited patiently, except the soon-to-be

mother-in-law, who fainted.

But she was revived quickly

and helped when the fuchsia-dyed cake injected, 

inconveniently, with badly burnt brandy 

was cut in precise slices

and placed on a skin of napkin.

Which is what I ate

the moment I saw your permanent eyes,

a half-heart tattooed so vividly 

on each matching lid.

Previously published in Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf and Stock, 2013)

——————————————————————————————————————

The Storm Before the Calm

“…the tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else

Save what beats there.”

-King Lear, William Shakespeare

She doesn’t know what rages, but each night

the pain, unpinned from logic, begins its slow spin

toward howl. Her words, flung in the vortex,

circle accusations, fly out at us,

stunned into silence while the tempest

in her brain keeps howling. Each night

she doesn’t know what rages. We circle

her flailing body, try to unpin her pain

from the vortex that spins her howl. 

Logic keeps silent. Night flies out at us,

accusing. It is a slow spin, this rage

that unpins her, flings her out into a vortex 

she cannot name. Her brain’s tempest

is the howl circling our nights. We flail

in silence, circling rage. Night unpins

our bodies. She doesn’t know.

The tempest in her brain keeps howling

until rage unpins its pain

from vortex and out

flies silence.

Previously published in True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books, 2016; Bronze Medalist Illumination Book Award Winner)

All poems are Copyright © Marjorie Maddox.