Friday, May 22, 2020

Lenora Rain-Lee Good ------------------- three poems


This While
            --by Lenora Rain-Lee Good

I lie next to you this night
listen to your soft snores
feel your chest move up
move down, enjoy your
body so close to mine

and fear this is
our last time together.

A thousand miles and more
separate our homes; I fear
you won't return,
and I cannot come to you.

Age holds us both
in its iron grip; only one way
for us to break free.

I so want to share
with you the years we have left
to treasure you,
to hold you close and tell you
I love you—
but your heart belongs
to the Salish Sea.

If you ask, will the Sea call me,
allow me to be with you?
You and she have years
together; a history you and I
can never share.

I swing between happiness
you have her to love
and tears it is not me.

I do not sleep while we are
together; I lie awake
listen to  your soft breaths
feel your chest move up,
move down
                    keep you
covered so you don't chill
as you dream of that distant sea

and marvel
you chose me

for at least this while.




Without End
            --by Lenora Rain-Lee Good

i

The clock measures time with
the monotony of a well-made quartz
movement. Barely audible, ticks and tocks
count the minutes of my life;
the pendulum no longer swings
with youthful abandon of self-
absorbed lovers walking through
the park swinging entwined hands
with each step into their future--
a pastel colored dream.

With inexorable precision the
metronome keeps perfect time,
measures the beat of heart,
of song, of life, of death.
The sky grays with predawn light
birds chirp and call the sun.
They live, they sing, they eat,
they die. Where do they bury their dead?


ii

I miss you, I tell my son.
Why? He asks, somewhat surprised
and maybe a little embarrassed.
Oh, I reply, no reason—
maybe the garbage needs taking out.

He laughs, and says
he's going to die. Not soon
I quickly say. No, he laughs
at least not to my knowledge—
but I don't control that.

We all will die. Our bodies
no longer home to our souls.
In his youth, he pictures himself
worldly wise, accepting.

I wonder his reaction when I die
when I can no longer laugh with him
comfort him. How, then will he think
on death's inevitability?


iii

Reiki music softly
repeats on my stereo.

The wind sneaks
a chill into the house.

Birds squabble for
seed and territory.

El Niño disrupts
our weather pattern.

I smile. The
butterfly beats wings
near a mulberry bush
in a land far away.




Kubota-sama Dreams in Silk
            --by Lenora Rain-Lee Good

His hand, steady, gentle
takes narrow bands of silk
places tiny stitches
silk puckers
mini hills, mini canyons
dyes of love.

Vibrant colors emerge
purple     blue     pink     golden
the four seasons
in kimono to grace a wall
to grace a body.

Dreams of silk
flare when the wearer
turns in unAsian haste
to betray western clothes
beneath
garish     loud.

Kimono evoke
samurai
chivalry
gentility of sword
and seppuku.

Poetry interwoven with pain
shimmer together
in narrow
bands of silk
simple
elegant
regal
dreams of Kubota-sama
become kimono.


Inspired by the book Opulence, The Kimonos and Robes of Itchiku Kubota

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

John Grey ----------- three poems


MAGGIE

She was all about morning light and lost causes.
Had she been born fifty years before,
she’s have taken up arms in the Spanish Civil war.
But her window looked out on discrimination.
And battered wives. And raids on gay bars.
And kids handed rifles and pointed toward the jungle.

She marched more than some armies
but with placards not weaponry.
And she paid for that more than once –
a blackjack across the skull for example,
or a family that just stopped speaking to her.

She was shot at in the South once.
The redneck missed but she figured next time,
she wouldn’t be so lucky.
But she was lucky.
At least, as much as a woman who lived in 
a low-rent flea-trap in the Bronx
could be said to live in sight of fortune’s smile.

She volunteered in food banks,
found shelter for the homeless,
read poetry to inmates,
some of it her own.
She never saw herself as a saint.
Just someone who rose to that morning light.
no matter where the darkness had taken her.

She never married. Nor did she have children.
Her long hair went silver in her thirties.
And then, when AIDS came for her friends,
she tended the dying, accosted the indifferent.

Maggie died in ’93, unreported by the newspapers.
The news even took its time getting out to the ones who knew her.
She’d become more of a hermit by then.
Her health was failing. Her spirit was like a purse
down to its last few grubby pennies.
I like to think that, even in the end,
she kept abreast of the light of the new day.
But then I always like to think.
Maggie liked to do.  



ISABELLE                                                                                         Page One

Fourteen guys you dated.
The first at fifteen,
the last at twenty-five.
One reminded you of your father.
He wasn’t the one you married.
You figure ‘dated’ for an odd kind of word.
Did a movie with friends count?
What about an accidental meeting in a coffee shop?

Will was handsome.
The competition got too fierce,
Dan was cheerful.
That got obnoxious after a while.
You were with Paul for over a year
so the details squeeze together
but you do remember how
there was this kind of acceptance
that he was the one
you’d be spending the rest of your life with
but that fizzled.
And there was Frank.
He really had the mean gene.

Fourteen guys it was.
And surely, they all left some kind
of a mark on you.
None a bruise, thankfully.
But a place in the heart –
even for Joshua
who’s now in an institution.
You could see that coming.
His kisses always felt like symptoms.

Jerry is the one you finally said yes to.
He was the second to ask that question.
Strangely, the two of you didn’t date all that much.
You just hung together.
Neither had much money.
That seemed the cheapest way to honor the arrangement.




ISABELLE                                                                 Page Two

And marriage was just hanging
at a whole other level.
You ate out from time to time
but only because the two of you were hungry
and neither felt like cooking.
And you went out to the movies together.
But that was before the neighborhood was wired for cable.
Maybe that was the problem
with thirteen of the fourteen.
They had no idea how to just be some place.

You’ve been together twenty years now.
You’ve worked. You’ve traveled.
You’ve had kids. And, of course, your own home. 
If it really is a date, then it sure is a long one.
If you’re still just chilling
then you have redefined the word.



THE MOUNTAINEERS

No point in further discussions.
The slopes before us will not hear of it.
And the peak itself points the way,
to inspire, to intimidate, or both.

We are not heroes. Not particularly smart.
But, unlike most dreams, ours take shape.
They rise up before us on the path we’ve taken.
No way we could ever turn around.

Here in the mountains, words know their place.
And so, does normal, from blinding ice glint
to the rumble of distant avalanches
and that stomach-punch of a drop below.

And the rocks’ chilling faces
are out-ogred by the creeping clouds
and a pure-white goat steps lightly up an incline,
grandstanding while we step shakily.

In the village, we were warned of
sudden weather shifts, told of those
who never returned. Even at lower levels,
there is no small talk. 

But here we are, having settled our
affairs, triple-kissed our loved ones, 
calmed their fears with our excitement,
and have struggled halfway toward the summit.

And in the mountains, there is nothing
we can say to each other. We just go on.
We know what we have set out to do.
Dangerous yes but, as ever, in our best interests.













Monday, May 11, 2020

It was in effect (Elmira sequence) --- by Koon Woon


It Was in Effect (Elmira Sequence)

It was in effect
                                                                                       
It was in effect a river of sorts
the ocean returned its water
across the vacant hours at the slow crossings of the afternoons
in low-blood-sugared towns
while the pale lights of taverns burned.

The barber sat in his chair listening to the vacuum tube radio
the cigar vending machine full of Indianhead nickels
the Emerson Hotel with its dark stairs leading to dens of vacancy
this was the coastal Highway 101 in 1960.

Tracing my path, the random trajectory of a
housefly, I have coursed through the
backroads of the Pacific Northwest America when
I was a bit young for the Beats and not quite old enough for
the Hippies.
Merely a schoolboy in the logging and fishing town of Aberdeen when
rain and windshield wiper swings gave me a rhythm to beat words against
one another in the English creative writing class.
But Science was still the reigning discipline and Mathematics its Queen,
as America raced the Soviets to the moon and beyond after
the Spudnik scare of 1957.

It was in effect a town of sorts
the ocean lapped its tongue here
the mudflats harbored mussels
loggers shook dice for schooners of beer while
the sky threatened to rain all day.

The Chinese cook diced vegetables,
string beans a mile long, work expands to fill
idle hours while the Pacific tides contract and expand
across the pretense of commerce while
small fishing boats returned with Dungeness crabs three for a dollar.

The Beatles were all a rage while the Stones were in a rage
however, I paid no attention as I was trying to penetrate reality in
physics class and work out chemical valences and balancing
equations, that inequality was the fundamental state of the
universe did not enter my mind, nor did I think of going to law school
as the classmates who took Latin, justice was blindly followed
until the war in Vietnam erupted.
I was a loner who helped out at the family Chinese American restaurant
Even served my classmates and teachers as waiter
wearing that yellow waiter’s jacket that my forebears had
worn for three generations. I bring teapot and tea and
egg drop soup, and set their dinner down before retreating to a
back corner booth to puzzle out one last algebra equation.

It was in effect a time of sorts when
high school graduates still stayed in town
pulp and paper mills saturated the air that
spelled jobs and a fair shake for small homeowners.

These towns were strung along highway 101
the scenic drive that took you to Pacifica, California
where surfing was just getting on film newsreels and
soda was still dispensed in glass bottles.

When girls dressed to kill in physics class, they say we even
got Koon’s attention and yet I was accused of cheating in
biology, physics, and chemistry where Mr. Sieler gave a set of chemistry
handbooks with my name engraved in gold,
and MIT had invited me to their conference in Seattle and urged me to apply to
their school. Later I did and said I wanted to study electrical engineering or literature.
It became obvious I knew nothing of their school as they did not at that time have a
program in literature. I received a swift rejection.

It was in effect a life of sorts
when Vietnam was still some unfamiliar place in the Orient
when Ricky Nelson was a traveling man with a pretty girl in every port
and the price was right every night and Groucho hit his marks.

Those times and places burned like LSD
that flashed and burned into the next century, but basically
it was a time before waking up to the enormous world as it stirred while
the miser still counted his pennies.

Elmira Sequence

Who knows any more of time but its direction?
High school was completed when I read Heraclitus, who said,
“You can’t step into the same river twice…”

Night driving to Eugene, Oregon from Seattle
when I ended up in a greasy spoon next to the rail station
at 3 A.M. with the university catalogue and black coffee on the counter,
I suddenly veered from mathematics to philosophy,
keen on learning wisdom from a Professor Wisdom (no joke) of philosophy.
In the loneliness of the café, I turned to my first love
that was neither holy nor profane, also neither of blood nor sinew,
it was simply Platonic.

Around me those deported the train ate and gulped coffee
as daylight broke and here was my destination for mind as well as
for body. I had not a place to stay and I never did, really; however,
blankets were in the trunk and my pocket had cash.
I will register to sit next to Professor Wisdom with other pretentious
kids. Yes, we were kids, pretentious kids, I was one.

Like three-leaf clover camouflaged in weeds,
a lucky find, my love for logical parsimony and elegant
arguments began here, but I was not stellar.
It merely meant I did not want to be tainted by the world
and its worldly goods, for nothing impure will I let into
the Platonic heaven.

College begins. Here I am in my well-worn groove
trying to skip across a few bands by whatever means
to succeed, at whatever price in rubies or steeds.

Yet a shiver runs through me –
is this a pristine discovery? Or a nostalgic longing
for cold water flats and underheated rooms?
We could barely cover ourselves in the winter in the village in China!
The days went around and around as current in a super-cooled coil.

The lyric impulse rides the Greyhound past the mud pastures of
Elmira. At the sleepy Post House at 5 A.M., the flies under the
florescent lights over cakes and frosted donuts. Stirring my coffee, I
think of Brower’s Fixed-Point Theorem – that if you stir smoothly enough,
a particle of coffee will end up in its original position.

Math and philosophy, like the right and left palms, when closed together,
is a prayer to every solution.
But I was green, and my life was a game of musical chairs.
Sanity and insanity opened and closed my hands, my brain,
as materialism and idealism metronome inside my skull.

Forward a few decades, at the urban sirens my neighbors move about.
The roomers to the left of me, to the right of me,
change their faces as I sleep, in angst and anxiety,
and as I push myself off the mattress at night,
I feel the heaviness of incompetence and age struggle.
And now in this high-rise apartment twice last night
The helicopters whirled by transporting patients to
the trauma center at Harborview Hospital…

My parents had kept saying, “Don’t think too much!”
But let me return to the pasture at Elmira in 1970,
when a few cows, a few apple trees, and the night had us as
captive audience, the numeric sleep over backroads and bumpy
lanes were America not yet hardened and congealed by the
cold air in the sideroad diner as the gravy on the
plate of a three-hundred-pound man…
That was Elmira in 1970…

Now the urban landscape is to stack up density
as the cranes lower the sky
and building peak up to jet space.
Taxis rear end cars trying to accelerate the lives of passengers.
Brakes are tested at every intersection.
Stop! They are now collapsing new buildings,
while the construction of mindlessness goes on.

Here I find myself a “fixed-point,”
knowing that an “experiment” has taken place,
but in as much as my neighbors have changed,
I am unable to characterize my difference…


Koon Woon