The Floor

(This started out as a contribution to this week's Poetry Bus, but something happened along the way. It just didn't want to be a poem. It wanted to be the beginning of a story, so I let it have its head. I hope Barbara will forgive me for playing fast and loose with her prompt.)

I got down on my knees and smelled the new linoleum, not sure why I had insisted, against all sense, on using this flooring. There are newer, fancier, shinier floors to be had - plastics that don't require waxing, that shine like mirrors for years, asking nothing but a quick sponge mopping now and then -- but here I was, smelling the motor oil smell, feeling the porous surface, staring at a background the colour of Jersey cream --

(Why start with white, when after a few waxings, you'll have yellow anyway?)

I found this roll of flooring. It was here when I moved in. I suppose economy had something to do with my decision, but there was more to it than that.

Gazing at lines of intertwined deep green stems and leaves, floral medallions set at intervals, roses the colour of candy floss, I realize why I have done this foolish thing, moved back into this old house, chosen to use this floor, summoned ghosts long quiet.

The man who installed the floor wanted to take up the old linoleum, but I wouldn't let him. "Just lay the new stuff on top," I said.

It comforts me somehow to know that under my "new" floor is the one that my mother scrubbed, the one with garish golden stars on a marbled background -- no doubt a stylish pattern when it was installed, but ugly to my modern eyes. When I move across the floor, scrub brush in hand, I see my mother's hand moving there, burnishing the stars. I hear her humming along with the radio while she works -- Edith Piaf is singing "Milord". From time to time my mother raises her scrub brush to shoo one of us out of the room, lest we undo all her work. What, I wonder, did she see when she stared at the floor? Her own mother's floor, perhaps,  the bare wood floor that my grandmother scrubbed, hidden beneath her own floor and underneath a torn layer of tar paper?

I can see my grandmother's hand even now -- careworn, red-knuckled, tired. I hear her muttering under her breath that she'll never see the end of this work, not with seven kids tracking mud through the kitchen, not with a husband who won't learn to take his boots off at the door -- a husband who comes home from work whistling, for God's sake. If he had to clean up after this brood, he'd soon stop whistling.

No wonder she always looked so sour in those old photographs.

I leave my grandmother to her grumbling and go back to following the line of green leaves across my own new floor. I look with tenderness at the rose medallions that speak of a gentler time, a time before vacuum cleaners and suffrage, before the Pill and careers for women. They lie, those medallions, but I think they mean well. Perhaps that is why my mother bought this pattern. Perhaps she bought into the notion of an idyllic past just out of reach.

I get down on my knees again and smell the new linoleum. I inhale the acrid smell of dreams deferred. I draw my hand along the nearest line of leaves, and I wish my grandmother, even my mother, had had a life not quite so circumscribed -- a life like mine. I've wanted for years to find a way back, to learn what life was really like for them, but I needed a key, a way to open the door into the past. And all the time it waited for me, rolled up tight, leaning against the far kitchen wall, tied with a piece of hemp.

Poetry in Motion -

The Poetry Bus is rattling through Ireland this week, while I am feasting my eyes on the rolling hills of Devon.  Never mind - I'll get back to Devon shortly (That will be today's Blog Entry 2). First, I must catch that bus.  Padhraig Nolan (aka Scalder) is driving, so goodness knows where we'll end up.

(Lipstick production at Colgate-Palmolive, c. 1940s, by unknown photographer)

Oops. Sure enough, we took a wrong turn somewhere along the line, and ended up in New South Wales, where we were set loose to find the inspiration for this week's poems. I chose this photograph as my launching point.

What kind of life is this,

to spend the working day

mixing, pouring,
shaping,

imagining

poppy petal red,

shy shell pink,

sun-bright coral and

deep purple like

blueberries for breakfast,

saucy on the lips,

pouting for a technicolor kiss,

when all you can see

is this endless parade

of trays of tubes and trays of tubes

in inglorious black and white?

All Aboard the Poetry Bus

Who could resist?  This week's driver is (are?) The Watercats, who has assigned the intriguing topic"Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" (any or all thereof).  There was more to the assignment than just writing and posting the poem. We were to record ourselves reading said poem. I tried. Honest I did. I downloaded "Audacity" and succeeded in recording my voice, but that's as far as I could go. If anybody knows how to get the recording from there to my blog, I'd be grateful for yet another lesson in the mystery that is (are) the interwebs.

Meanwhile, though, channeling Gracie Slick, here is my contribution - entitled

"Better Than Sex".

The sex was just
mundane, you know,
stowed away back seated
behind the rocking of the
music and the pulsing
otherness of flashing lights
and the sound, 

 grinding sound that moved
in the belly
like a four-month foetus,
like something alive,
demanding, commanding
attention, even fealty,
sewing bone to sinew,
then tearing them apart,
making something altogether new.

I'm off now, to see what everybody else has to say on the subject(s).  Thanks to the brilliant and handsome  TFE for running this behemoth of a bus company.  It's a dirty job, I know...

Oh - oh - oh Frabjous Day! I figured out how to embed my podcast in the sidebar - not sure how to get it right here in the post, but never mind. Baby steps...

 All Aboard the Santa-Kart!

TFE has worked his holiday magic. While the Poetry Bus is under repair (We know how long getting a car repaired can take, and a bus is that much longer) he has contrived to set the Santa-Kart on the road, and we are all invited to hop aboard. Price of a ticket? A poem.  Here's mine - (By the way, this photo is from TFE's blog, borrowed for the occasion with thanks.)


In Mid-Winter

Under cover of darkness,
swathed in silence,
await the slow coming
of the sun's new light.
Listen to your breath
caress the velvet night.

Sway with the new snow
on a scented branch;
mourn another chance gone by.
Make a gift of your pain
to the dying year,
and then, begin again.

On this first day of the earth's new year,
let us raise a toast to the future.

Runnin' for the Bus

I thought I'd better get here early, because it looks as if Dr. Einstein is one of those Demon Bus Drivers that don't know from schedules, just drive as fast as their wheels will take them. So okay, I won't post-date this post. Sheesh. Scientists. Always in a hurry.

TFE's Monday (sic) Poetry Bus assignment was to write a poem while listening to a harrowing piece of music called "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" by Krzysztof Penderecki. (Please note that when I say "harrowing" that is not a criticism. The piece is riveting, which is good, right? but it's also harrowing. Not what I'd call Easy Listening.)

I've copied the YouTube video below, because I want to keep track of it. Meanwhile, here is what I wrote under its influence:

Aftermath

Hearts bursting, minds aflame,
we stumble through the rubble
of the world we knew before,
choking back our agony,
searching in vain for absolution,
finding only horror in our path.

Where are you, my darlings? Where are you?

The ghosts of those who died here
rise like a poisonous cloud before us,
hover, dark butterflies larger than the sky,
singed, moaning. Oh, the keening!
As too late we close our eyes and ears,
they shriek their accusation:

How could you? How could you?

Evermore, forever we will look
into our own children's eyes
and see these others looking back.
We will see their mouths gape open,
feel their terror and their pain, know
that whatever learned men may say,

It need not have come to this.

All Aboard!


(Photo from Flickr - Click here for source.)

Hear the engine roar! TFE's Poetry Bus is on the move, taking us, this week, to places we might not want to go. Okay, fellow travelers, I'll hold your hands, and you hold mine, and we'll face the demons together. Safety in numbers, right?





The Followers
by Sandra Leigh

When we are very young,
when the world is ours to make,
when our hard-won power is at its giddy peak,
even then, death is a hungry shadow slouched
behind every open door, every velvet drapery.
Silken, smooth as Johnny Depp in a soft grey fedora,
he licks at the eager hollows of our necks,
whispering seductive poetry
of dark annihilation, and we listen.

We listen, tempted,
goose-flesh peppering every limb,
flushed and faint from the hot confusion
of contrary impulses, warring desires.
Is it sex we want, or death?
Or is it, perhaps, to die of sex?

The wonder of us, the luminous beauty,
the capacity for joy, the moist glow of skin
the electric touch of skin on skin,
break our startled hearts, stop us in our tracks
just when we most need strong pumps to move us,
and the sudden knowledge that this shuddering joy,
this arrogant perfection, cannot last forever
is more than we can bear, and the sibilant urging
to end it, end it now, while it still shines,
before time and toil and sadness have gnawed it away,

rings like music,
glows like a distant star.
And sometimes, sometimes
we follow it
into the cold forever.

Aboard the Poetry Bus



...where the company is stimulating, the scenery is fascinating, and even the seats are comfortable. We seem to have left the station a little early this week. What am I saying? We weren't actually supposed to leave until next week -- but our wanderlust is such, we couldn't resist a little joyride. We would push the bus ourselves, if we couldn't get the engine running.

Fortunately, there's no need for that. This bus is humming, and TFE is at the wheel. He showed us three photos, and suggested that we use them to inspire our poems. The photo that caught my eye was the third one (third photo, not third eye).

I suppose this is as good a time as any to confess that my eyes don't work very well, any of them. The photo, as I saw it, brought to mind hoarding. When I went back just now to confirm that it was in fact the third photo, I enlarged it, for some reason. Oh.my.god. That photo isn't about hoarding at all. It's about desolation and the hope of redemption and...oh, well. This is what I wrote about hoarding. ;>)

Cling to the memories, girl -
hoard them; hold them
close beside your body
while you weep, while you sleep.
Inhale the heady fragrance of them,
rock-a-bye, rock-a-bye,
caress the tattered softness
of their flannelette skin.
Never let them go, girl,
they bind you, they blind you
to your filed away and folded
and circumscribed life.