Soon to follow…

Poetry

Dogs on Mars

Dreamstix

9/18/10

Ruthless

It hasn’t been long since you were here leaning over to me with those rolling eyes and your smirk turned smile, wryly pointing out to me how much I must be enjoying my meal to have my wrist wrapped into the food on my plate, the veal of ninety years to the day since you entered, a young girl in Brooklyn, growing amidst a stew of concrete and stone called America, a metric of causality amidst, awash of histrionics called the 20th Century as if it was yours to name all along, as though meeting and dancing and courting then marrying and bearing three children made it all the more your own, your art suspended on walls while Barney slowly brewed martinis to make the blood boil, your laughter floats still amidst the walls of your home of 47 years, more then half a lifetime painted beneath the unimproved, unchanged and uninterrupted since the day you picked up the kids and your life to leave the frozen tundra called Chicago, to drive West until you could smell an ocean never challenged and fill the song of life with your laughter, with sorrow and resolve, then later joyfully moving your folks to Sunnyvale another half century since they abandoned and were abandoned by Mother Russia, to Flatbush Avenue, then to a small apartment across the road from a suburban shopping center amidst a garish inequality of time place and reason, suspended in the snows of shoeless Orthodox priests punishing themselves and taunted by the sticks and jeers of children, displaced, dyslexic, serving antibodies like threats, surrendering to their tethers and telling themselves apart from others, then witnessing the slow, ever so slow feeling of an infrared caress drifting off their cheeks, fallen flakes, word of mouth, replacing ancient with the all new amidst a storage bin of relics and antiquities. – You vant some money? Then shave the beard my boy- growing like the roses in your garden, once your pride, now abandoned for the innocence of forgetting. You bore them Ruth with elegance, with pride and huzpah, until their last breath floated up among the clouded Santa Clara Valley sky, in time, you did the same for Barney, filling us all with memories we never owned but listened to, voices from another century with accents thick as borsch soup and knishes. Stuffing all that was and is into this moment, Ruth, you say to me; -It’s ok Danny, it’ll all come out in the wash.- and I say, -Yes, and there’s no accounting for taste.- then wipe the sauce off my cuff and suck the delicacy from my finger, listening to your laughter as this newly found form of forgetting wipes my hands clean with its silent napkin. Some times Ruth, less is more, and some times Ruth, less is less. Without you the latter is truly the case.