Varsha 2024 Poems - Rachel Baum
Like beatniks
By Rachel Baum
They ate at an Italian restaurant, the kind you stair down into, all faux archways and muraled pastoral scenes. My mother wore a deep raven black - black turtleneck, black skirt, black stockings, black pumps, like beatniks, she said, the Manhattan she rarely saw, growing up in a Bronx tenement, this bistro adventure as daring as anything she would ever do, though you can imagine her young, tinged with rebelliousness, shocking her immigrant parents, God forbid she might marry outside the faith. My father would one day give her enormous diamond stud earrings, she hid them in a coffee can or was it the brisket pot, along with her family history she chose never to reveal. In their nineties now, along with her secrets, she has essential tremors, yet will not wear the wrist weights I bought for her, and so her fork knocks loudly against her plate, she holds her glass, water sloshing, between both bony hands. My father ruts a path from lift chair to kitchen to toilet to bed, falling frequently, he is off balance, and the stilts of his walker catch on an edge of carpet, or his own feet. Together, they watch out the front window, peregrine falcons in an urban habitat, waiting sharp-eyed to pick off tender, oblivious prey, the landscaper’s indifferent hedge trimming, neighbor dogs allowed to sniff the lawn, every transgression a bitter affront. Their many years of routine in this house are ending, my father needs care my mother can no longer provide, so we find a facility with an Italian name, lavish with gold flecked chairs, lush drapery, opera arias synchronized with the leaps of a foyer fountain, walls painted floor to ceiling with grape arbors, distant mountains, and on a craggy bluff, some kind of bird of prey.
Minor key
The way you filter your coffee
slice cheese as if you honed the knife
it’s like someone stole a flavor of you
there are canyons just as steady
floods that surge like pride
in case you were wondering
I watch the same gathering of geese
how they scatter from a duck blind
that will float to some other shore
and good riddance to it
do you think about me
with your musical sensibility
your love scaling the scales?
those so wistful notes curated
by a one man orchestra
oh yes, there I am,
flying just under your harmonies.
Rachel R. Baum from US is a Best of the Net nominated poet, editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings Poems and Tributes, and author of two poetry chapbooks: Richard Brautigan’s Concussion and How to Rob a Convenience Store. She lives in upstate New York with her dog Tennyson. |
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