Shake the Box

(with gratitude to Bruce)

For desperate days now I’ve petitioned for poetry

All I get is the image of my Grandma’s strawberry smile-

The one that rivals Mona Lisa for mystery, but twice as impish

So I say,

 “What about you grandma?

Shall I tell the day you packed us up in The Grey Ghost,

old silver Cadillac with the showy fins

and like a shark in pursuit

followed that biker with a fishing pole sticking up

all the way to the beach and left us there,

me, barely pubescent, and in a tank top?

I burned to blisters shunning the smelly leather jacket offered

by a kind Hell’s Angel.”

I always wondered how you spent that day.

How about the time I splinted my lover’s spectacularly broken finger

with a quarter teaspoon and a yard of ripped up rags

in the middle of an anonymous night

after he really punched that guy

for saying something nasty to a street woman he cared for.

For days, he discreetly searched the paper for news of a body,

But she died first.

Antoine. That was her name.

“Shake the box,”

my current lover says.

And he plays Burroughs and Bukowski,

Ginsberg and Kerouac for inspiration.

I think, Baby, do you really want me darker than I am?

My box has a rich tumble

But it’s all stuck inside

Not wanting to be shared.

Not now.

Unrequited love laps up against

the joy of driving an old green schoolbus

on deserted Wyoming roads- making love and pie-

and Pink Floyd, the flamingo, not the band.

Disney Eyed Dudie, my most loyal dog gazes adoringly at me

from a bed four pads thick to ease his old bones.

He’s shrinking and most steps cause him pain but neither of us wants to let go.

Certainly a poem in that.

But not now my recalcitrant brain voices say.

I have nothing I can get on paper

But plenty in the Swirl around me.

Last night, I asked the Muses and do you know what I got?

Dream of a one legged mummy

In the ordinary opulence of some American house.

A mummy who knew lighting.

What kind of dreck is that, I ask you?

My Muses are only rarely serious.

Roll the bones, shake the box

Just live.

LeAnn Cole