Five poems from the heart...

Party

Alone with all these people talking,
I’m almost one with the room.
Maybe I am the room!
Have you seen me anywhere else tonight?

Now I’m the paisley couch.
Anonymous legs try to tickle me with dull jokes.
Or my face is the Oriental rug.

I can hear my own wool lips chattering
like so many Chinese women.
My table top needs polishing.
My lap’s ashtray is full.
My floral drapes are heaving for air.

Help! That artificial fern is snaking out
under the bathroom door again!
Wait fern, not yet!
The guests are searching
for something to remember.
Don’t crowd them out!
They need fresh images to carry home!
If you don’t stop, you’ll hide them
from one another.

I give up--you might as well go head;
I guess they won’t know the difference.

I am the room, the same room,
alone with all these people talking
a tangle of plastic leaves and words—
this reaching out and getting nothing.

Nothing is what it seems

I wake, still in the dream
But know where I have been.
Reveal, ignore, pretend--
Nothing is what it seems.

Your arms, my longing came,
Erased the path we made,
Yet staying in the brain--
And I forgot my name.

I wake, remembering pain,
But know where I have been--
Flower and sting the same.
Nothing is what it seems.

Sweet kiss that sealed my fate
And lingered at the door
A promise made and lost--
Oh, I had hoped for more!


The Black Purse

La bolsa negra
perdido
nada, zip, zilch,
lost in time.

I mourn
with limited Spanish
a few words, no grammar,
so make other languages,
such as breathing
and make believe, suffice.

Now, remembering your laugh,
our laughter, the fun…

My purse was filled
with junk, in reality:
Plastic cards, licenses,
detritus of a life unreal -

watch gone, ipod,
cell phone, names, numbers
yet I keep thinking
someone will care enough,
to send me back myself.
But nada, zip, zilch.

Then the thud of home, but
-- this matters most --
alone now with Camilla,
her soft gray fur informing me
of the real loss…

She is saying with one look
that my dear friend, Karen,
might just be in that black purse
hanging out
somewhere near Bucerias, Mexico,
and the warm sun
is shining on her
with its soft
and healing love.
_____________
KAY WEEKS MARCH 18, 2009

KAREN MIDTVEDT, A GREAT FRIEND, DIED IN MARCH , 2009, OF BREAST CANCER THAT MIGRATED TO HER LUNGS, BONES, THEN FINALLY TO HER BRAIN--THREE DAYS BEFORE MY TRIP TO A DANCE RETREAT IN MEXICO.

The Night Spinner

There’s this crazy lady in the attic
with a spinning wheel
and she says her wheel is really the sun
and her thread is a skein of light
that shoots out and she whips it back
with her fingers
until the ball starts to grow
and the house swells with day
and we are bright and we are surrounded
and we expand with the walls
and when something explodes
we go running up
but know the crazy lady is gone
and we are here and we are everywhere
wrapped in her dark gown
and her wheel keeps on spinning
and we scream to the air
for our crazy lady
who says her wheel is really the sun
but it is night now and there is no sound.

Or Ariadne

Once around the nighting pale,
Medieval limned
for love's sake
our orbing mouths frolicking long,

And Dorinda spinning her blank sheets,
sterile as the sun,

We sang our songs
while old Dorinda spun her lucid webs
in our dim lighting
to show us how it really was.

When close came bright-skinned dawn,
clothed still in our naked thoughts,

We went running to her wheel,
to turn it 'round and 'round,

We found Dorinda dreaming
counting slowly backward in her sleep,
the once-tight threads
loose blown and raveling,

Her garment almost gone.

______________

Kay Weeks

Poems and photographs

Revised 2.13.11