My Christmas Ghosts and Some Great Poems

"In the Palm of Your Hand, The Poet's Portable Workshop" by Steve Kowit

<><><><><>

"The poet Dylan Thomas defined poetry as 'the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision.'"  ~From:  "In the Palm of Your Hand" by Steve Kowit, page 11


The Tooth Fairy
by Dorianne Laux

They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can't hear it.

My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm breeze lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.

It's harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chainsmoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in his walls.

I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered Taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.

He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
of a rare bone disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.

She's a nurse on the graveyard shift,
Comes home mornings and calls me,
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.

And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints...

Whenever I visit her, I ask again.
"I don't know," she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. "We were as surprised as you."

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

I Like My Own Poems
by Jack Grapes

I like my own poems
best.
I quote from them
from time to time
saying, "A poet once said,"
and then follow up
with a line or two
from one of my own poems
appropriate to the event.
How those lines sing!
All that wisdom and beauty!
Why it tickles my ass
off its spine.
"Why those lines are mine!"
I say
and Jesus, what a bang
I get out of it.

I like the ideas in them,
my poems,
ideas that hit home.
They speak to me.
I mean, I understand
what the hell
the damn poet's
talking about.
"Why I've been there,
the same thing," I shout,
and Christ! What a shot it is,
a shot.

And hey,
The words!
Whew!
I can hardly stand it.
Words sure do not fail
this guy, I say.
From some world
only he knows
he bangs the bong,
but I can feel it
in the wood,
in the wood of the word,
rising to its form
in the world.
"Now, you gotta be good
to do that!" I say
and damn! It just shakes
my heart,
you know?

~From:  "In the Palm of Your Hand", pages 44, 45

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

My Christmas Ghosts, or, My Last Best Christmas

Christmas is coming and I try to get into the spirit of it all, I do.  I try, but every year, no matter how determined I am to not be sad, the old, familiar sadness comes and settles over me like a cloud.  Not a good, puffy, light cloud, but a dark, obsidian cloud.  My father died in late November when I was 6 years old and Mama sat me and my two older sisters in the front row at the grave and I sat there horrified as they lowered my Daddy's body into the cold, hard ground.  Yes, bad dreams followed.  (I'd dream I was running down the hall of our old home and something horrifying was chasing me.  There was broken glass on the floor, I was barefoot, and I could only run in slow motion.  A terrifying dream for a small child.) 

We went to live with Mama's sister and her family on their farm, my Aunt Mace and Uncle Warner.  Their two children were grown.  We had one good Christmas...my uncle was a carpenter and fisherman...and he caught an 80 pound Catfish that year in the Red River and I got what I'd asked Santa for:  a beautiful, tall bride doll and my first purse.  (Remember bride dolls?)  It was the last best Christmas of my life.  I was in the second grade. 

The following year Aunt Mace's son and his family were driving home for Christmas (they lived out of state) and were hit head-on and killed by a drunk driver in Meridian, Mississippi.  Their son, daughter-in-law and two children all died in the horrific car wreck.  We attended two double funerals the week before Christmas:  the mother and her one month old infant son, Ronnie, and the father and his 2 year old daughter, Bitty Bess the following day.  My four cousins were all dead.  My Daddy was dead.  I developed a supreme fear of death and had recurring nightmares for years.  I began to get up every night to check my mother's breathing to make sure she was alive...Aunt Mace and Uncle Warner had taken Mama and her three girls in, yet they lost their son and his family.  It just didn't seem fair.  Then life got even harder.  Their only other child, Linda, died in childbirth a couple of years later.  Another funeral and a motherless infant.  For the remainder of my childhood, the adults all pretty much stayed drunk.  And now, looking back, I can't say as I blame them much although it wasn't much fun at the time.  I think that's why I don't drink.  Too many drunks in my childhood.  I don't know how they kept on living and breathing after such monumental tragedy.

They're my Christmas ghosts, these dead relatives from my childhood.  They haunt me annually and I often wonder what life would have been like had they lived.  I can't not think of them.  Mama used to say, "I hate Christmas!" every year.  I guess it sank into my subconscious.  I don't hate Christmas, but I could use a good Exorcist if any of you know of one.

xoxoxo, 

~Marion

<><><><><>

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." ~William Faulkner

<><><><><>

The past is not a package one can lay away. ~Emily Dickinson


<><><><><>

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." ~Lesley P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953


<><><><><>