Author: mao

I'm a student. Always.

Lost

The crows have found the crumbs,

covered the moon with their cruel wings.

You and I consumed the last bits of rage

hours ago.

Orphans crudely bedded and cold

we recall

the acrid nourishment of indignation,

the nervous warmth of pain.

Labor Day

The boys have grown so hard this summer –

little apostles of violence screeching out of their driveways

in their bad cars.

The mamas are pleading up and down the block –

Don’t you leave.

Don’t you take that car.

Why do you do this?  Why?

And the answer is the same

for the mamas and the gods and the jackoff cutting them off

in traffic –

Fuck you, man, fuck you.

The boys have grown so hard this summer

watching the mtv boys whip the clothes off some bitch

until she’s only lips and tits and high heels,

stripped to cruel simplicity.

And I am afraid.

On my Retirement from UMSL

Back when I was a little hippie girl neither I, nor anyone who knew me well, expected me to live past the age of 25.  My career plan consisted of sex, drugs, rock and roll, dying young, and leaving some brilliant poems letting the world know how badly I’d been treated.

You can imagine, therefore, my dismay when I woke, or to be more accurate, came to, on my 30th birthday.  My plan was not working out at all.  Apparently it is harder to kill an Irish woman than I had thought.  I decided to quit trying.  I cleaned up and started looking for a life.

It was at this juncture that I got into my 1970 VW Beetle with the (as my mechanic described it) stickers and shit all over it, drove to the UMSL campus, and took a job as a word processor.  I decided to work at a college campus because the only time I had been vaguely happy to that point was during my 7 short years as an undergraduate.

For the past 24 years UMSL has been my community, and in many ways my family.  I’ve made lifelong friends and had loving, patient mentors.  Frankly, I’ve learned everything I know about being a grown up either here or in one of my many support groups.

What did I learn?  I learned to show up for work.  I learned to believe in public education.  I learned that I could learn.  I learned that I could be glaringly, publicly wrong and still live.  I learned that the smartest and most accomplished people are often the kindest and most generous.  I learned there’s no substitute for actually doing my job, no matter what kind of mood I’m in that day.  I also learned that if you bang a phone on your desk you can actually break it, but we won’t talk about that today.  Most of all, I learned there is a great joy in being of service.

These may not seem like big lessons to you, but they changed my life.

Since 1983 I have had the privilege of working with all of you and of being of service to many students.  You have given me a place to live the life I was looking for when I got here.  It has been an amazing ride.  I thank each of you from the very bottom of my heart.

 

Proposals

 

Knowledge

I want to marry a machinist,

to stand on the lot at the plant

in my hard hat and visitor’s badge watching

while he slides the metal together,

measuring.

I’ll wear pink lipstick and a cotton dress

and bring baskets of warm cornbread

he can pass around.

For lunch we’ll sit

on upturned buckets side by side

and his coveralls with smudge my thigh.

When they whistle as I walk away

he will smile at his steel-toed boots,

knowing what he knows.

 

Invention

I want to marry a used car salesman.

We’ll make up stories

about the people who will drive away

in the Camaro or the Escort wagon

as we soap the windshields –

Real Honey, Runs Good, 1 Owner.

On Saturdays I’ll dress up in the bear suit

and wave to the people driving by

in their old beaters.

As we leave the lot every night

we’ll pick a different car,

depending on how we feel,

and drive into the Porsche-red sunset.

 

Travel

I want to marry a nomad,

feed him greasy meat

wrapped in flat bread

cooked on a hot rock.

I want to smell rain

and know when to put up the beasts.

I want to be sold for spices or camels.

When I come to my new husband

I want to spit and curse his eyes

before I dance.

 

Fall Romance

I want to marry a terrorist,

get grit in my khakis

while I squat to pack munitions,

a blush of gunpowder on my cheek.

When we rut

I want to be hardly there at all,

a crater burnt and sifted after.

 

Surely

For Dr. Shirley Martin
based on a true story

At the invitation of the Shah’s people she set out

for an adventure abroad taking

10 uniforms,

3 pair of good American shoes,

2 identical white cardigans,

and her mother,

who would find clean water, bargain for melons,

and train the help.

Square and blonde she moved briskly

through Labor and Delivery trying to discern

the structure of the system.

As women arrived, they chose empty beds

and quietly let her know when they were ready.

As the baby came, the nursery girl

would write the mother’s name

on its forehead with a grease pencil.

Several times a day the babies were brought

and mothers’ names called out.

If there were many Maras, the baby would be carried

from one to the next until the mother was found.

Some days she would visit the nursery

after her shift, brushing back babies’ black hair

with her small white fingers,

crooning their mothers’ names to them

in a language they would never speak.

Once, puzzled by clean faces

she asked the nursery girl:

Why no names on the babies by the heater?

The mothers had left.  They had too many.

Or too many girls.

They would stay warm here until the end.

Her own mother told her to bring them all home.

More realistic, she presented a plan to the Director.

Milk could be expressed, agencies involved.

Fingers making the church and the steeple,

he explained it was impossible.

She never visited the nursery again

but served her time efficiently,

telling herself over and over,

like a prayer sung out in the marketplace:

Surely this one

sliding into my hands

will be delivered.

Three from Hospice

The Spread – GN

She’s slim, wearing silk pajamas, weak, purposeful,

folding paper towels into precise fourths

and setting them on the side of the sink.

With the economy of the dying she weighs

the need for each word against its cost to her reserve.

She doesn’t want me to see this.

She doesn’t want her daughter to see this more.

She needs my help.

Peeling back the gauze she says

This is the spread

and for the first time I see cancer, the crab.

Some of it has crawled outside of her skin

and grows there – a mountainous landscape

the diameter of a dinner plate,

hard, red, yellow, raw, oozing, wrong.

Some of it is tenting up the skin nearby.

We work together until it is clean and covered.

I pray to see the beauty beyond the horror.

My prayer is answered until I drive away.

 

Sitting with the Not Dying – MO

No one knows why she’s still here.

Three months without food, two weeks without water,

she has become an anatomy lesson:

dark, fixed pupils in an adamantine face,

the cords tying the bonnet of her skull clearly outlined

on her neck,

veins running like mole tunnels over her forehead,

feet blackening.

She breathes.

I hold her hand,

read to her from her own bible,

the underlined and highlighted bits,

in the hope that she hears and finds comfort.

She might wish I’d shut up

so she can finish her business of dying.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.

 

Sitting with the Dead – MS

Margie S. died today, called at 6:15 a.m.

aged 62, surrounded by no one.

A ward of the state since her son went to jail,

she lies naked, covered by a grayish sheet,

no pictures, no teddy bears in sight.

I read her prayers I don’t believe

about I love I do believe.

And the staff in this place

about whom you would think the worst

if you saw them out on the street,

come to touch her body and say good bye.

 

 

Shearing Season

A fleece arrives in a black plastic bag

in a brown cardboard box

and unfolds in one piece

on the porch like a white buffalo rug.

The street is quiet at 10 a.m. and

she takes her time spreading the wool in the sun,

rustling out the dust.

The heat melts the lanolin.

Her arms glisten with it and smell of farm.

Soon she will make something of it.

But today

being in warm animal presence

is enough.gracie

On Picking a Man

for Amy

You’ll want to choose one with small flaws.

A painful past is good:

the memory of being overweight

or having been small enough to stuff into a locker;

a history of unfortunate eyewear,

bad skin, lack of coordination, or poor color sense;

maybe a job requiring a paper hat

to which he had to ride a bicycle with coaster brakes.

If there was success in class, it will have been in science.

If there were sports, there will have been a concluding injury.

If there were girls, they will have left him for politics, or

religion, or other girls.

Some current conditions will do:

recovering from alcoholism;

drying out from drug addiction;

suffering from a minor mental illness controllable by modern meds;

a child who won’t call;

an ex-wife who still shops with his mother;

and inability to keep his hair, or business, or waistline.

And most of all, you’ll want him older.

He’ll have memorized enough baseball stats

to be willing to abandon the game

for a Saturday afternoon.

No longer cocksure, he’ll have developed

a compensatory adroitness in loving,

more tender and reliable.

And when you are ready to unbutton yourself

you can leave the light on,

knowing he knows, as you do,

a soft spot or a bruise is a small price to pay

for the sweetness of ripe fruit.