JULIE K. SHAVIN - Penultimate Days

J. D. Nelson

Nelson - 198 – Spahr-Summers

Julie K. Shavin

Penultimate Days

Again, a falling green wilderness of thoughts like the cracking of a heart like an egg on a pan like a bulb like a room going out like a winter confounded by spring.

Various things cloud the mind, toggle the totem of memory in these our old sequestered days spent reading ourselves backwards into our braille beginnings, the sky a template for sorrow that stamps our joys on the ageless face of Time,

Shavin – 199

arguing with seconds like bleeding argues with clotting or sleep with wakefulness sneezing with breathing, standing with falling –a catatonia of ghost possibilities that live forever side by side like spittle in the throat of a horn or something out of whack –like a cricket with no rhythm.

We share a nothingness larger than large is defined. Give me the answer in watts, one demands dumbly, knowing drab December brings more color to our grief than we thought possible of any month or feeling. We row our very names down the water, and the names they would have given us but for our gender treachery.

Shavin - 200

Also, we can't remember what children were for, now that we've made some

and given them our most famous faces.

red tree

Shavin – 201 – Spahr-Summers

Sweet High Bath of Unknowing

Bright sun, oblique sun of late afternoon in a small alpine town, white and tan horses grazing snow melt and snow in lazing fields...

Could I remember more of childhood

or its sibling, youth, I might know what it is about capturing beauty, such as horses in a winter's field, paradox of fierce wan sun, frail askew houses on tilting hills.

Will I give to darkness, not a trace of warm breath nuzzling some sweet high bath of land, gently withering away sweet morsels that rise, valiant, to meet the longing tongue?

Shavin - 202

Leaving, I saw again how day is sniped by night in abandon, fields become blind eyes, faces tipped to stars, cold moon cratered

with sequestered keepsakes of day.

Might one conjure what beckoned this time –not the illness, as in those urgent, more somber days –but what continues to lure to alien terrain, to genteel murderous horses, clapboard houses blinking, grand shadows of margin less mountains –

and with such need to sing, to paint, to speak the certain vex of nostalgia, for what, exactly – can I, can one, ever say?

Shavin - 203

All in Order and True

In order not to eat, my mother smoked cigarettes. My grandmother her mother had called her fat all her young life, then died when my mother was fifteen. So to not eat, my mother smoked – all day. All night. In all rooms. In the car with the windows rolled up. In the bathroom just before brushing her teeth. Through three pregnancies. Surely in her dreams. The Trues in their carton crooned above the wall oven. To not eat, my sister took up anorexia. An eighty-three pound five-foot-nine scaffold of skin and straw hair. A scarecrow that made us think until we didn’t. To not eat dessert my mother took up sunflower seeds between smokes. To avoid oil she took up air-popped corn. To not eat meals, I took up bingeing at midnights. Fasting all through school. To not smoke his Tiparillos, my father took up Oreos and chips. To not snack, he took up Valium and ERs. My cookieless father quit looking pregnant but my seedless mother birthed and nurtured loathing for him. When my father died, to not eat, smoke, or do seeds or corn, my mother took up colon cancer. All day. All night. In all rooms. In the car with the windows up. In the bathroom just before brushing her teeth. Deep inside her dreams. She survived, and in order to eat no words, we the remaining rarely speak. To take up little space in one another. To not eat, we binge on denial and fabrication, we, the pretend-full, the roomless, dreamless, windowless, going-on toothless – ghosty, skinny as smoke-wisps.

Shavin - 204

Marionettes Among Us

In old age, chthonic thoughts surface from the sanctum of dimming memory. How we long for something to convince us we are not strung along for nothing, that vital hues never take to their graves. But rattlesnakes laze in impermanent skin, and so do we.

Winsome angels droop their eyeless heads towards perfect somnolence, and yet we stand wide-eyed. Will we make sleep masks of even our wooden dreams?

The old adages become old hags, wisps of forsaken god fingers. Who will show that death is but small genius?