Friday, February 06, 2009

Two new poems in journal matrix

Friday, February 6, 2009, 7:26 PM We are hurtling north on I94 approaching I96 headed for Twelve Oaks where we're goingto dump the kid with Sandy for the weekend.

                He stayed home sick today.  I do not belive he was actually sick, so I am annoyed about it.  I believe he was simply over tired because he stays up all hours IMing with Irina.  This is the second time he's taken a sick day to simply sleep.  Lost precious academic time to mooning over Irina.

Between the Stones

                A boy sleeps all day and misses school.  All night, he touches the screen of a tiny box saying yes, yes, mmm hmm to the girl who smiles at him in choir.  When he sings, he is an angel who wraps the wings of his voice around her. When she sings, she is a devil, tantalizing him with the soft roundness of her voice.  He sings bass and she walks down the deep stairs of his voice into a tiny midnight cellar, narrow, with mildewed stones.  His skinny shoulders barely fit between the walls. She wants a kiss.  But as she purses her lips and leans toward him and as he leans at last toward her, lips slightly parted, his mother unplugs the late-night internet one more time. In an instant, he disappears yet again from her life.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

1st, February 6, 2009,7:47 PM in car on Psion on way to take Graham to Aunt Sandy's

                8:09 PM  I have a cut onthe end of my thumb that makes typing a bit painful.

                We have dropped Graham off with Sandy at Denny's--turns out she's been sick for a few days.  So they can be sick together.  K says he's been feeling "kind of punk" all day.  I feel OK, in spite of a pretty bad night last night.  Well, I was up in the night painting.  Keith drives fast enough that it makes me nervous to ride with him.  I almost didn't come.

                I was hoping to write another poem on the way home but I am utterly uninspired.

Oh Shit

A man dodges in and out of traffic, driving fast.  He is eager to be somewhere other than here.  His wife holds the "oh-shit" handle, but the man scolds her.  He says the handle is only held on by sheet metal scews.  On the next turn, when the woman doesn't hold the "oh-shit" handle, she slides across the car into the man whose seatbelt fails.  He falls out the door into the road.  The car behind swerves to miss him and there is a twenty car pile-up on the highway.  The man rolls out of the road into the ditch where he is carried by a flash flood through a huge culvert into an alligator swamp.  His wife is sitting on the chassis of the upside car which had careened out of control into the swamp.  He climbs up beside her in the nick of time.  The alligators gather around, scrabbling at the sides of the car with their claws.  The man and his wife may not be going anywhere for a while.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

1st draft, 090206, 8:26 PM coming back from delivering Graham to Sandy

 

 



--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary

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