Old Letters

Old Letters

When I was young

I wanted to ride horses

wear long dresses,

instead, I rode wild buses.

wore blue jeans.

I dreamt of Tudor queens,

of dancing on my toes

dressed in fluff and foamy white

improbable swan, mute sprite;

instead, there was black light.

The only space I had

for everything I wanted

was deep sleep.

The only thing I had

that ever was my own

was the man who paints the rain,

an old address and a name

on blue letters fading white

tied up tourniquet tight

with rose ribbons on the bones. 

~April 2014

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Fireblossom Friday

The incomparable Fireblossom(Shay's Word Garden) asks us to contemplate the oldest of old school 'social media,' the Mail.

Process notes: 'The man who paints the rain' refers to the picture above by Gustave Caillebotte, my favorite painting at the time of this poem, and a reproduction of which from the Art Institute of Chicago has been on all my various walls since 1969..

Photograph: All Your Letters, copyright joyannjones
Footer: A Rainy Day in Paris, 1877, Gustave Caillebotte

Tenement Blue

Tenement Blue

There’s not much room in a tenement blue

three room fourth floor walkup, but legs can run.

Cover's in the slum-dirty dystopian streetscape,

ghettoed too thick for the grab of garnet-nailed fingers

gifting purpleblack coins, too far to hear names.

Vacant as a rubbled building, feral as wind

she plays birds all day, thin arms flapping.

On the very next jump, she’ll go up,

a rising speck of sparrow in fields of sky,

not the drying embryo in a fractured brick egg.

High in her masted nest of broken glass

she chirps until the giant’s stick knocks her out,

drunk’s acidsweet breath flooding her lungs,

learning  the freeze, missing the center

as he pulls her harder than he has to

down to the big bed

where her mother is always blind

missing, nowhere, in three rooms

raptor eyes shut so all of the girl

can be invisible. 

Little bird isn’t minding

the neon patterned bed that wavers

in the windowlight; too small, tiny hands

no wings, just the falling to show

for cheeps hushed to silence. 
On the floor cotton feathers, yells

gone to whispers, rustling wind sounds

inchoate touchshadows all

in that hungry fishgrey belly of

a deaf ocean, of a ship rolling.

She boards up her eyes

against the day-blink, engine off,

charts lost, course unplotted

boxing the compass, drifting
from the thick tillering fingers,

pressed small as a diatom

taken in salt waves of

tenement blue.

June 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Day-blink – Moment at dawn where, from some point on the mast, a lookout can see above low lying mist which envelops the ship

Boxing the compass – To state all 32 points of the compass, starting at north, proceeding clockwise. Sometimes applied to a wind that is constantly shifting.

~Glossary of Nautical Terms, wikipedia

Thanks to Fireblossom, Anna Montgomery and Brian Miller for their help and encouragement in writing this poem.