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California Coyote
Is
he a mangy dog?
Does he depend
on neighbors
leaving out food,
trying to tame him?
His yip and howl
have stopped dead
He has stopped
dog-tired confused
tail down in the midst
of suburban streets
Twice I’ve seen him
He isn’t bold or clever.
Dead eyed, sickly scapegoat,
No illegal immigrant
No purposeful trickster.
but lost animal soul
that can’t find
purpose or place
in this maze
of planned housing.
The Sky is Falling
Who
will live in the house nearest the forest?
asks the little red hen
Not I!
cries the woman in white fearing
open spaces
Who will live in the middle of
the block?
asks the red hen
Not I!
broods the man dressed in gray
flannel trapped in the norm.
Who will live between these two?
asks the hen-god.
Not I!
shout the children
who will never share their toys
Then none of you may follow me
to the forest where you may be free
says the hen disappearing
in a poof.
Into The Deep We Slip
(Winning poem
Benicia Historical Museum,
2005 Love Poem Competition)
You at the far end
I at midpoint though
I long for depth.
I wait, will not
Cannot move
Toward you.
You too wait
Then slowly
Splash toward me
More than half way
We are two bodies washed
Clean beneath the ripples
Beneath the waves
Our hair tangling
Together like moss.
At Pt. Lobos
(for Leon)
You stand there
in our son’s down jacket
white stubble on your chin
snapping the small camera
I bought for your birthday
but took for my own
In the nip of air
you make me pose
against a rock
Sea lions yelp seagulls flap
and you who are so calm
shout above their calls,
“Look, a whale!”
And I who have
waited all winter
to spot that dark hump
on the horizon
say nothing as if I were you
as if the wetness of my eyes
were from sea blow
Yet at the same instant
I think myself gray bent
first you gone then I too
this moment a late
twentieth century photo
snapped shut in an album
that distant relatives browse
like tourists in a museum
and barely believe we once
breathed the same sweet air
as we imagine glimpses
of spout and dive.
Valentine for
Myself
warts pop from my nose
nails grow long and
lethal
curses fall from the cupboard
a pox on order
a plague on neatness
all day I stir
waiting for night
to transform
these words
to my will
even love
won’t stop me
now
c elaine starkman, 1 1986
Telemarketing
The phone again
during dinner
You’ve won new pillows
a trip to Hong Kong!
I have new pillows
and can’t travel now
In the middle of meatloaf
the middle of writing
I listen with impatience
But hold my tongue,
wait for an opening, say,
“ I’m sorry, No, thank you”
Sometimes I buy
a subscription to
Veggi Times. Newsweek
I don’t read or like
then I think of my sister
making 75 calls a day
until she is hoarse
ekeing out her living
in small change
Elaine Starkman, (c)2000
Chagall Notes
He dreams Bella and Bibles fly
through air, sea-gull messiah---ceilings
open to prayers, goats, crosses;
childlike,
he floats, takes wing,
his backward letters, weightless,
aslant, cows commune
with God—
as Vitebsk,
mired in deprivation lifts itself
to his heights.
Elaine Starkman, (c) January,
04
You’re up
on the roof?
Damn you!
With your rotten back
Like the last time
you climbed up
and I didn’t know
where the hell
you were and
we didn’t have
a cell phone yet
so I called the police.
This time I’ll take
the ladder away
and won’t call a soul,
not the police
not the kids.
Stay up there
all day.
See if I care.
Just come down
Before the dark
C Elaine Starkman (c) 12 04 |
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Subjectivity
I
rise to a perfect day
My soul returns
To me from sleep
The sun pleasantly
warm
My email works
I find every website I want
The mail comes on time
I walk just far enough
Eat just enough to please myself
Chat with my husband
Of many years
I do not read a paper
Or listen to the news.
But what if tomorrow
I rise from sleep, glum
The sky gray
My email is off
The mail full of junk
I don’t walk
My bones ache
I eat far too much
My husband of many
years and I ignore
each another
I read the news
And heed awful omens
Of our planet
What then?
I want
Nothing
this moment;
I’m sated, tired
of wanting.
I’m not longing
for anyone
or anything.
Enough is
right here.
People.
Sunlight,
Trees.
Books
Quiet.
Let not wanting
Last.
Shapes of Paris
stare into
night’s green
garbage truck
smashed tomates,
ne touchez pas s’il vous
plait
Genevieve in the Martyr’s
Remembrance keeps the past
You don’t become Parisian,
but you touch
rainbows over the shopping
mall twisting a tongue lost
on the way home tournez
a droit a gauche
Remember “qu’est-ce que
c’est” has five parts
two as in “la bas”
two in “les animaux” are
not permitted dans la supermarchet
Diamanche:
What? Which Louis? They’re
all the same
smell of urine and beeswax cleaning
up
peace and war on La Dame al'unicorne
and n’est pas mon Seul desir
in the Marais but a flamboyant
Christ
slips his hidden face into
the bell of a trumpet
in the blackness of the Metro
where musicians play
Jean-Jacques Goldman, qui?
“Il est tres cher,” you learn,
not admiring the Burgers of Callais
or Dante’s Gates of Hell
leading to dust on Napoleon
or the yellowed kitchen at Giverny
avec Monet’s Cucillez
les roses de la vie: 16th c.
Lundi: Luxembourg; Mardi:
Mona Lisa covered with crowds;
Mercredi: look, a train station:
Fontainbleau
Samedi: synagogue
You read “Maitre de Monde”
Tight security politics profane
Six flights up Suzanne hidden during the war
“Bonne chance,”
she says.
Elaine Starkman
At Green Gulch Zen Center
Even today when the sun
refuses shining
along Highway One
and the crows
continue cawing
while circling the compost
I leave behind that
tainted part of selfhood
understanding
the inevitability of death
At last I’m stilled
from last week’s plague
I didn’t think
this could happen again
this sweet stillness
in my measurable life
Elaine Starkman 2 13 – 05
Transference
It’s her shrink, who else, the jock at
the pool? He didn’t have to love her,
only her thoughts. How odd to tell him
everything and know nothing of him.
It was his work, a constant drain, this
getting enmeshed in the
emotions of others.
All that endless talk. He had to
keep distant.
She knew she’d be sorry for what she
said. Now she’d have to find a second shrink,
Talking to one about the other, like
a rich widow paying two paramours.
It could ruin therapy; it could make
life sweet.
She enshrined him in power, she liked
when he told her she was
“Deep and Complex.” Or when
she saw him lost in what
she said. Best of all, when she
even forget he was there.
He drove her mad, what force, what fire—to
hum like a bird, to buzz
like a light.
If she told him, she might turn greedy.
It might turn terrible—or
wonderful.
If it was wonderful one, what happens
then? How does it end? If only
he’d touch the back of her neck, the
palm of her hand.
She’d tell him she loved him, even if
it didn’t matter, even if he’d
heard
it a hundred time before. Even
if he wrote something awful in his notes
about her mother who’d always cleaned
house or her dead father she’d adored.
Elaine Starkman (c)
Let’s Go
to the poetry reading—
you with your dark skin
and West Indian tones,
your anger and brains
you who grew up on an island
wore no shoes
learned about England
assigned to teach in ghetto school
you don’t like
because you’re not African-American
even if people think
and I, whose color is memory,
A Jew who grew up in a city
taught here-and-there
whose old angers are tamed
by age and conformity
but still have
some
island
and shoelessness in me
both of us far away
from where we were born
meeting on the edge of the
continent
Let's
go now!
Elaine Starkman (c)
Dysphoria
you wish you were a radical
but fear the loss of parental love
you've listened to too long
by now good baby instincts
are blocked and the habit
of pleasing pulls you along
you take a job and go to work
busying your hands
with irrelevant acts
you'd stay safely in that spot
if 100 revolutions and 1000 wars
hadn't whammed into your way
you wish you were a radical
sitting on railroad tracks
talking peace with the enemy
making poems that poor
can eat
Elaine
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