Just Before It Rained:
"When The Moon Is On The Hill."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015
There was something in the sky that afternoon, like a pinpoint pale sun in the swirl of clouds. I'd never seen that kind of ice chip moon in summer. The air was low and near, close to the truck, along with that strange kind of low to the ground light that gets trapped under a pending storm.
We had pulled over to figure out where we'd gone wrong. You had a map spread out over your spindly thighs, finger marking where you thought you were, but your attention was outside your window.
After a long time, you came back and told me what I already knew, but had to hear from you. There's no cure this time, you told me. That's what they told me. There was a kind of detached relief in your voice, about the news, about confessing it. I'm done like dinner, Bobby McGee.
the sky closes in
there are no blues like these ones
the book's last pages
~
Tea Sandwiches:
"This side of the creek."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2017
Here is the house where I used to stalk you, where I opened my eyes to watch you when our heads were bowed to pray. Your father always welcomed me to the door, where I appeared, scrubbed and sanitized and ready to be sanctified. Your sweet Ma, always with a tray of tiny egg and mayonnaise sandwiches. Her pickles were the best in town.
Forget what it was that we buried in these hills. Or have you already? I keep coming back. You keep being gone.
the white clapboards are
painted fresh each summer by
people we don't know.
~
The Poem I Didn't Want to Write:
"Nature always wears the color of the spirit."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015
My father is suddenly old. He has never been old. He has never been anything but strong and serene. He is every young girl child's Superman, he is the kind and patient doctor, the Laughing Buddha, the stern and sensible life raft friend, the man whose prayers are taken seriously by other congregants, and by God.
Here, look. I have dug out of my memory box a picture of Daddy, half my age, in big plastic glasses and a stethoscope. In those days, he worked double shifts at the auto factory, but shows up still in all the pictures where I'm playing. Once for my birthday party with the girls from school, he put "four leaf clover" on a scavenger hunt list to keep us busy for hours and make sure no one would find everything. But there was some kind of mutation in the fields that year, and we found hundreds of them. He was a magician.
If my father was good luck, I was cursed, and learned to weather the worst. When I turned 20, Daddy said, "Your life has already been something out of a country and western song." Johnny Cash was warbling on a cheap cassette player in the kitchen. I was as moody and brittle as I'd ever been, and cast a hostile glare. He was not deterred. Looking straight into me, hand on my shoulder, he said, "You ain't seen nothing yet."
When I was 30 and started burying all my friends, I stood up in my room after a nightmare and thought, since my father had probably never skipped a day, there've been at least 10 950 prayers for me.
The world I know is one that careens between the sun and the pits of the hell with alarming rapidity, and I have found my ways of holding on.
But I do not know this world, this bulldozer barreling the foundation that holds my fragile balance. I do not know what it means to reach to steady myself and find my father frail and uncertain. I do not know what it means to consider a Dad that vitamins and the Lord cannot fix. I do not know whether I am coming or going. I despise the appointments and the pills and the tests and especially, his strange small smile, how it flickers like a dying lightbulb.
This is the poem I didn't ever want to write.
I remember the pink plastic jump rope and the park trail in upper state New York, the rough knit of your palm when you dragged me upright and brushed off my bruised knees. How there was nothing real except the high pitch whine of endless mosquitos. I remember us putting a little ball of plasticine and a toothpick flag into a dozen half walnut shells we had painted bright with polka dots and stripes, and sending a fleet of little mouse boats down the river.
the bright blue green fields
are waiting for you, Dad, clouds
like cotton candy
~
Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of four collections of poetry: The Astronaut's Wife, Solace, Aspartame, and The Lords of George Street. She is editor at The Ekphrastic Review, which publishes writing inspired by visual art. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
