weekly muse...
volume 2, issue 2 | 2023-01-18
poetry
watchdog
he sits in the window frame, keeping his vigil, his eyes a candle flame spine straight rump alert his tail waits like an anchor he knows -- those who pass by the temple must need a good barking
-- from homebound
riverbed
rocks and shelves yellow green and brown beneath clear rippling shadow and sun remind me how it feels to forget all rivers flow to the sea
-- from along the way
early winter
teeth gone i went out on the ice but it was so crowded there was no place to die so i had to wait, what will i do in the thaw?
-- from everything rhymes
the unlearned art of wax paper combs
-- for lather, ageless child simpler than a tonette more sophisticated than a blade of grass between two thumbs i mastered the instrument in a single day perhaps you have seen my album Greatest Hits? the Village Voice called it “ageless...innocent!” they thought it had something to say
-- from lives of the poets
neighborhood cat
the orange striped cat comes and goes where he will, his ways unknown, even to him another day -- from another day
short stories
sideview mirror
-- coming next…
-- from signs & wonders
mē (silent symphony)
‘Mē,’ even his name put me off. It was so contrived, like everything else about him. Ridiculous, how all these people chased after this little man like he was some kind of phenom. And now, here I was, driving up Route 12 to attend one of his asinine poetry ‘concerts’ with my poor mother. She was so pathetic, I couldn’t turn her down when she asked me, pleaded with me, to take her, even though she is perfectly capable of driving herself. ‘Come on, I need the company’ she had cajoled, disingenuously. ‘It’ll be fun. We’ll have a good time together.’ When all the while, I knew…she only wanted me to be there, to hear the great man for myself. No doubt her addled mind was convinced I would succumb to his spell once I heard him, like so many millions of his devotees around the world. People will fall for anything, if they are desperate enough.
Mom certainly had reason to be desperate, what with Dad’s condition and all. It had been months now since his…what do I call it?…‘event,’ I guess, for lack of a better word. The doctors were surely no help on this account. They put him through every test you could imagine: EEG, EKG, MRI, CAT, and a bunch of other acronyms that run a few thousand dollars a pop. It’s a damn good thing they hadn’t canceled his insurance yet, or Mom would have been up a creek. They found no evidence of stroke, heart attack, head injury, brain damage, trauma, tumor, ischemia, Alzheimer’s, nothing. He was a perfectly healthy man, they concluded, except for the fact that he just sat in a chair and smiled all day with a distant gaze, saying nothing to anyone. ‘Acute Idiopathic Aphasia,’ is what one medical marvel labeled it. ‘AIA,’ another platinum-plated acronym, his professional way of saying he didn’t have a clue why my father had stopped talking.
My mother came home from her supermarket shopping one afternoon this past January, and found him sitting on the back porch, wrapped in a blanket and staring out at a shaft of sunlight sprayed across the frozen lake. She thought nothing of it at first, since he often sat on the porch at all times of year looking out on the lake. But when he didn’t get up to help her bring in the groceries she wondered if something might be wrong and went over to check on him. When he didn’t respond, she plunged into a panic and called me on her cell phone. ‘Sylvia, what do we do?’ She frantically wailed. ‘Your father’s not moving! It must be a stroke!’ I told her to hang up and dial 9-1-1. The ambulance got there in fifteen minutes, which was none too soon. Not that there was anything they could do for my father. She was the one who needed their help. They had to give her a shot to calm her down in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
After the cardiologists and the neurologists all came up blank, the psychiatrists went at him next. They found no chemical imbalance, no indication of childhood abuse, no explanation for his catatonic state. One shrink, an outspoken born-again Christian, was convinced that it was some kind of acid flashback, since (I was surprised to learn) Dad had taken LSD several times back in the 60’s. His smug sense of vindication, his tacit conclusion that this was the judgment of god, really pissed me off. What angered me even more was my fear that this zealot might be right (about the after-effect of the drugs, I mean, not the lunatic evangelicalism part). It was the only plausible theory advanced by anyone so far. My only comfort came when another doctor, a psychotherapist, observed that it might be hereditary. I remember my father always talked about his grandfather on his father’s side. He spent his final years sitting on the front porch of his wood-planked bungalow, pleasantly smiling, without the slightest response to any stimuli.
My father used to sit at his feet, with dozens of National Geographic back issues spread out before him on the porch floor. Dad always spoke fondly of those days, when he explored the far reaches of the world safely beneath the benevolent smile of his silent grandfather. Of course, my great-grandfather was in his late sixties, and people simply regarded his condition as an advanced form of senility. But my father is only fifty-one freakin’ years old, and he showed no sign of progressive psychosis or degenerative disease in the days before the onset of his waking dreamlike state. If it is hereditary, it must skip alternating generations. Because his father was sober and practical to the end, when he died of a heart attack at age fifty-five. Who knows, maybe it just hadn’t set in yet? If he had only lived longer, he might have turned out this way too. My father told me the relatives used to joke that his nagging wife (my great-grandmother) drove him to it, and that it was just his way of escape. The way Mom behaves, I have to give this idea some credence too, but more on that later. Anyway, I find it pitiful that the last sixty years have seen the Seidler men move only as far as from the front porch to the back. This is another reason why I can’t marry Ralph. What if it is genetic?
-- to be continued...
-- from summer’s end
microfiction | a history of the world
…continued
easter (dyeing eggs)
A scent of vinegar stings my nose, as we dip the eggs in their bath. Pink. Green. Yellow. Blue. The longer they soak, the deeper the hue.
Like Christmas tree bulbs. Only prettier, and without the glow.
The little bottles are deeper still. Colors so pure they’re almost black.
When they dry she’ll scratch lines in some. Patterns. Like Indian rugs. No two the same, but all alike. Like I once made, a long time ago.
When we crack and peel them, some of the eggs will be stained. A faint trace of rainbow soaked in white skin.
-- to be continued…
-- from a history of the world