Poetry for spring and Easter
in which we let the sunshine warm our undersides
Never fear, Undersidians (Undersidites? Undersidish?)! It’s true—April 1st, aka fool’s day, has come and gone, and no jokes from me. I can’t try to convince you that I’m joining up with Harper’s or publishing a collection of Underside Stories or closing down Underside to join the circus. For that, I am deeply sorry!
Some of those are not so far-fetched. I will let you discuss which ones.
It was also Palm Sunday, a fact that leads to this Sunday, aka Easter. So we skipped a week entirely, as I was away, and absence may make the heart fonder. Well, one can hope.
I have a story for you, and I hope that you will like it. But! It is Easter, and I think instead of the story at this moment, we will pause and enjoy the spring, if for but a moment. From the underside, of course.
The story will come, probably in a few days! For now, poetry.
Carolyn on the first real day of spring Colors of a waking city flash, reflect and turn blind eyes away. "I am that double rainbow," she tells me, "fading and short-lived, soon forgotten." "Like an apple blossom, butterflies, the pink sky on the horizon after the sun has gone to earth." Beautiful, I tell her. All pointless, she replies. She's a promise of peace, a sailor's delight, hurricane-maker a continent away as she bats her tiny iridescent wings. She's the smell of rain when the dust is thickest where the lawn used to be. She's the garlic on my bread and she knows it. "What do you think of carnivores?" she asks me, petals in her hair and fingers dimpled deep into her cheeks. "I like rabbits," she says, before I can reply, "but not that much, I think." --as first appeared in Dual Coast Magazine
This next one is an Underside reprint, posted last Easter, and presented with all the flourish of modernity.
#Easter
Behind the glass, we waited for the needle
administered almost kindly into his arm.
I unfolded the note and reread it, glanced
at his mother who couldn't watch,
and promised him without a word.
Afterwards, we moped in the common room.
Peter lamented unfriending him
when the taunts started. "Mate of a madman",
"here comes Waco", "the man who would be
king"... When the ladies arrived,
breathless, still carrying flowers intended
for his marker, Andrew and I put down
the cue sticks and listened to their hysteria.
Someone stole his body: you can't imagine
what horrors went through my head.
It's one thing to believe in a good man,
even one misunderstood and resented
in his own time. It's quite another to believe
in the re-animation of the dead, outside
of strange viruses, Shaun, and of course
our old friend Romero. But when he arrived
before us, ate a slice of pizza, showed us
the injection point, the bruises and cuts
where the cops roughed him up--had us
plunge our fingers into his abdomen
where his donated organs had once been
and felt the hollow beneath, well...
Later, before he rose like Neo or Criss Angel
he reminded us to spread his vision
throughout the internet, that he would be with us
for as long as his intern maintained his Twitter feed;
and if you love him, you will forward all chain mail
and Like all horrible photos of his death,
from now until the end of the election.
Oh, and check out his new sermon on Ted.
And finally, a poem to calm and to enjoy the new life around us.
Solicitude She draws the shades across her eyes to keep her sunshine in, considers dandelions, how they close their eyes to night, how their yellow spatters the space between the rails. She is never forgetting her mother's lips, red as her eyes in those final days, with little deathly dandelions splotched across her skin. There is a pond, here, huddled under bowing branches, tepid, green. No sky breaks forth, only sandpapered ceilings for another sand-castled day, tucked safely in its little box served on a tray. Her mother used to say she once had said how a moth will find its true light, if in its clattering it dies for the one yellowing the color from our skin. She sits now, peels the skin from the ground, lays the moss across her lap, listening to frogs babble and understanding nothing. —as first appeared in Touch: the Journal of Healing
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