Cultural Daily, 2016
The First Time I Heard The Doors
After Tess Gallagher
I was the kind of girl who— when Light My Fire blazed
in the Cal Tech Auditorium and my date, a Norwegian
science genius, got drunk and broke beer bottles
against the wall until he passed out,
and the music was pure sex—disappeared
with a classmate’s boyfriend, told myself it was okay
because she wasn’t that good a friend and my
first real love had just broken up with me. Mom
wanted to sit up and talk over Ovaltine when I got home.
I was out of Winston’s and so she offered me one of hers.
She couldn’t sleep after the divorce. She didn’t let on she knew
I’d been drinking. She didn’t bother anymore to tell me
that it was best to kiss a boy only if you loved him,
best to wait until you were married to have sex.
Long before, a boy had already reached into my shirt
and stuck his hand into my bathing suit and led me upstairs
to a room with a tufted bedspread. Mom had taken one look at me
the next morning, then took me to the ob-gyn who’d delivered
me. The speculum hurt. He didn’t say a word. Just frowned.
Mom made me promise I wouldn’t do it again and I didn’t
until New Year’s Eve, when I lied and saw the same boy.
She said if I was pregnant she and Stevie and I
would go live in San Francisco. But I wasn’t and
soon I had a boyfriend and she saw us wrestling on the floor
after school and there were other boys and
we never discussed my sex life again.
Desire, defiance, hunger for touch. My father wasn’t around
to know about it. At the drive-in; on rooftops; in a taxi cab on Avenida
Fernandez Juncos on Spring Break in San Juan; in the social hall
of the Unitarian Church; in the library stacks and stairwells; in a VW
van outside the Shrine Auditorium, after seeing Procol Harem and Country Joe
and the Fish; after hours, in the dining hall; in a sleeping bag in the backyard
at Mom’s house; in my boyfriend’s driveway next to an oil spill from
his Oldsmobile; at the cast party of the high school play. It felt too good
to stop. That boy. The others. The boy with the big freckled hand.
Meanwhile at school we were reading Shakespeare, learning that love
can restore balance; Tom Jones and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill.
In my head I was starring in my own book, a bildundsroman, a kuntsleroman
because I also loved books about the road and the sea. Road scholar, a sword
swallower, a hollerer. Down to the juicy bits. I had already decided
which kind of heroine I wanted to be.
***
Leon Russell at the Ark
About four songs in he said My wife
tells me I need to talk more to you folks
and he told us about growing up in
Oklahoma and playing piano
in church at fourteen and going home to
the crystal radio he’d built himself,
only got two stations—church music and
rhythm and blues—and when he tried to sneak
some of the sounds into his church-playing
the Methodists would have none of it and
found another fourteen-year-old to play
for them and because Oklahoma was
a dry state it meant they didn’t have whiskey
laws and he could play in the bars and he
could drink and he said he was pretty much
over alcohol by the time he was twenty, and
he studied piano—Tchaikovsky and
others; but mostly he studied B.B. King,
and Leon told us how he’d moved out to L. A.
to go into advertising but got
his feelings hurt a few times and started
playing on other people’s records and
the Flying Burrito Brothers wanted
to meet him and that’s when he got his green
silk hat, the one Graham Parsons gave him, which
he later discovered had Al Jolson’s
name inside and he talked about Ivory Joe
Hunter from Kansas City and sang from
the B sides and played Tightrope and Georgia
and Mad Dogs and Englishmen and talked about
touring with Joe Cocker and about how his
manager had called to say B.B. wanted
Leon to write a song for him, and B.B.
sat with Leon and told him stories, saying
a line and then playing it on his guitar
and when Leon played the song he’d written—
he called it Hummingbird—B.B. cried and said
This has never happened to me before and
Leon told us he’d written another
song long ago for a friend who’d fallen
asleep, deep asleep and snoring, when she’d
come to watch him record at Muscle Shoals
and he told us he was going to sing this
song for her now, for Emily, who
had died without warning a few weeks back
and at that point in the show he was alone
on stage at his big white piano and then he
played Song for You and I cried and held my
husband‘s knee and he put his hand over
mine and I remembered when I’d first heard it
back in college and remembered falling in love
years later with the Ray Charles cover
and when we gave Leon a standing ovation
he stood up at the piano and sat right down
again and said Those of you who know me
know I’m not a big fan of walking so this
is the point in the show where we’re supposed
to go offstage and act surprised that you
want us to come back, and he said But I’m
just going to play you some good old rock
and roll and he launched into Great Balls of Fire
and we gave him another ovation
and on the way out Taj Mahal was playing
over the speaker system—Tangled up
in Blue—and a homeless man outside
the theater said if we wanted an autograph
Leon was out back at the bus.
Cultural Daily, 2022
Forget Everything I Am about to Say
Be a shy child. Find solace in furry creatures
and rocking chairs.
Fear abandonment. Feel
unlovable. Above all, carry shame.
Smoke too many cigarettes. Find your worth
in the opinion of others.
Die inside
when your mother dies.
Believe me: It’s your fault.
Drink. A lot. You’ll be bolder on alcohol.
Decide not to love
or need anyone like that again.
Resist philosophy and its easy answers.
Do not make peace with impermanence.
Drive
too fast on mountain roads, coast downhill
with the engine off and rely heavily
on the brakes.
Laugh when others say all you ever wanted
was to love.
Ignore random signs from the universe.
Do your best to override any rosy opinion of yourself.
Try not to watch the geese glide effortlessly
across the surface of the pond.
*
Wicked Games
The harmonica is the best-selling musical instrument of all time. You’re welcome. ~ Bob Dylan
He’s a dubious cat, our teacher, around sixty, with Johnny Cash hair
and sideburns. Over these next two hours he’s going to teach us
Harmonica for Health and Blues Harp for Beginners.
My husband and I walk in minutes late and the teacher’s not happy.
The old lady next to us is hard of hearing.
She says What’d he say? Her old man says Shuddup.
Overgrown teenagers, like us.
I ask about our teacher’s favorites:
“Christo Redemptor,” Charlie Musselwhite
“Wicked Games,” Gemma Hayes
“Roller Coaster,” Little Walter
Have fun with your harp he says.
We want to learn to play like:
James Cotton
Stevie Wonder
Taj Mahal
Tom Petty
The Rolling Stones
The Doors
We’re Baby Boomers. We never grow up.
Love Your Harp he says.
He shows us licks, trills, flutters, draw and blow, air from the throat,
pucker vs. tongue block and the almighty tongue slap.
Paint the harp with your tongue in little strokes, he says. Be one
with the instrument.
She wants French kisses.
Pucker won’t do.
Whoo like an anxious, excited owl
Did-der daddy is your jam
Hit those dirty notes
Hold it with your left
even if you’re a rightie.
Fun facts on the back of the Hohner box:
At the Illinois debate Abe Lincoln went toe-to-toe
with Stephen A. Douglass, who had a bandstand
orchestra to back him up. Unfazed, Abe said
My trusty harmonica will do.
At the end of class our teacher hard-sells the practice CD
containing all his tricks. So we can hone our Hohner skills
in the privacy of home.
The old lady and her man are smiling now.
My old man and I are smiling, too.
Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.
*
Architecture: (a) as History; (b) as Aphrodisiac
I interview the old man, my father-in-law, about his first eighty
years on the planet
and on a napkin, he draws a map of his childhood home,
built around a courtyard in Orashaza, Hungary,
where his father owned the town textile store, called,
in translation, Young Married Woman of Szeged.
He says the black décor makes the restaurant un peu funèbre. A bit
funereal.
II
Generations come. Generations go.
His father, his father’s father, my father, my father’s father, all
the fathers.
And all the mothers of all the mothers stayed home.
We sit under the clock in the Beaux Arts station home of the Musée
d’Orsay and visit his old building on Rue des Grands Augustins.
Paris. Home to High Gothic, Flamboyant, Belle Epoque,
Art Nouveau; majesty and ornament.
III
At our hotel French doors lead to a balcony framed in ornate
ironwork.
The sun is rising to extinguish the night. The river is rising.
Citizens are rising all around the city.
The sun is rising. The bread is rising. The steam is rising.
Rising to fill the empty space that waits in my body.
We look toward the window
and see something shimmer
behind the veil.
In a white bedroom in Paris,
hesitation slips through the tiny waist
of an hourglass.
Forsaking allegiance to our separate selves,
we slip into history. We slip into the dream.
| Poetry Superhighway, 2019 The Summer My Parents Got Divorced Every morning, Dad picks me up at Mom’s and drives me to the plant. We don’t talk.The machine shop smells of oil spills. Metal shavings stick in my sandals.Ida May and Mae Belle type invoices for White Engine Company and Caterpillar and Mack on company letterhead: Power Plus Corporation. I don’t want to be them. I pretend to be one of the guys.Out back, I assemble manuals. How to Prevent Dipstick Disasters, to the whoosh of compressors and hydraulic equipment.Machinists (Juan, Ricardo, Manuel) pour molten aluminum—crackling, liquid silver—into molds. I have a crush on Ricky, the cute one.I tell my mother the plot of Camelot. I saw it with my boyfriend at the drive-in.When I get to the part where Guinevere tells Arthur Live! Live! we both weep. We hate goodbyes. Lately there have been too many.I am sleeping with my boyfriend. She must know it.My grandmother teaches me to sew. I make a badass backless wrap dress to wear with combat boots and a short battle jacket.I put it on for the first time to go to the Free Press Bookstore in Old Town.I’m working not for wages but to pay for the former VP’s company car: A ’65 baby blue Mustang convertible. Mom went on two dates with him after the divorce, but she’s nowhere near ready for this.The foreman’s son goes to Dartmouth. He doesn’t think much of me—the boss’s daughter. Which literary figure do you identify with the most? he asks.Anna Karenina, I say. I can tell already that romanticism will be the death of me. |
SoFloPoJo 2019
They Named Our Streets for Saints and Angels
My name is Spanish. Lin for Linda for Rosalinda for patron saint of gardens, for living in a little
hut in her garden. For pretty. For beautiful. For not always pretty. For never been pretty. For
Beau like boy, for Belle like girl. For Rosalinda. Beautiful Rose. For the love of roses. Rose
roses. Roses are rose. Violets are violet. Rose roses and violet violets.
L. A. Inventions:
Hula hoop, Egg McMuffin, Barbie, WD-40, California Rolls, Cobb Salad, the French Dip
sandwich, the Shirley Temple, Orange Julius, Nicotine patch
(Note relationship to leisure time, food consumption, cigarettes.)
Good people of Los Angeles, you call yourself City of Angels, but do you know what it takes to
become a saint?***
To become an angel is easy. A lifetime of good deeds and you’re in.
Alternatively, redeem yourself after a fall. It’s not that hard.
Saint Nicholas: Patron saint of prostitutes.
A stranger asks you the way. You say: Take me to the river. Wash me down.
A stranger asks you how to get there. You reply: Take me in your arms and hold me. Do all the
things I told you in the midnight hour….
A traveler doesn’t know which way to turn. You sing: By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat
down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.
Tell me. Who’s the patron saint of messengers and postal workers?
Angelenos, when we give someone directions it sounds like a prayer.
Take San Pasqual to San Rafael to San Joaquin to San Anselmo to El Camino Real
They just might get there.
San Pedro, Santa Catalina, San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo,
Santa Clarita
Get off however and whenever you like.
Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, help me to find myself again.
I know of few roads named for our first dwellers, although they must exist:
Chumash, Hahamogna, Tongva
Because Spain. Because Mexico. We kept the names.
Because the ones with the horse, the purse, the sword.
They held the naming rights. The rest of us shall remain nameless.
El Camino Real, La Ballona, Rincon, La Brea
El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles
But we alone are responsible for our nicknames. We, the people.
Angeltown, Hell A. Lost Angeles. La La Land. Grit in our glitter in this town with a past.
Something for everyone. Geniuses, robots, ATM machines, drive-in churches.
Be an angel. Try for sainthood. Or make this your motto: Better the devil you know.
There’s something for everyone. Forget about the orange blossoms. The ambition.
Jim Morrison bedeviling the night air.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light or just another lost angel,
City of Night?
Never mind the days so bright, the nights so dark
We’ve got saints. We’ve got angels. L.A. is a Goddamn prayer.
Italicized song lyrics by ( in order of appearance) Al Green, Wilson Pickett and The Melodians
Quartet LIterary Journal, 2021
- I chose Lin Benedek’s poem because she so deftly illustrates how poems happen; how we have to open ourselves to receive what is given. And how could I, an “okay poet,” not select this poem when the author, at the very end, invokes “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens?
—Linda Blaskey
Musings of an Okay Poet of the Twenty-First Century
1.
Lady and the Tramp introduced me to love.
My love is three weeks older, four inches taller.
I admit I am a bit like Glinda. I discovered boys
before they discovered me.
2.
How to make guests feel comfortable in your poem: Give them something to pluck.
My literary companions: the Jabberwocky, some rough beast, dappled things, little red feet of the pigeons.
3.
Dreams are common property, someone said.
And something resembling sorrow.
One friend sends me peacocks; another, butterflies.
And here is my pantheon of old boyfriends, gods all.
See how the scars define me.
4.
Stars can’t be all bad. Nor flowers, trees, birds and bees. And anyway,
most of us are mutts.
5.
Turn on the radio and never turn it off. Listen with eyes that hear,
hands that breathe, taste that deciphers smell.
6.
Meanwhile, another rattlesnake dream, empty and holy. And
an experience which shall remain nameless. To the poet in me,
hereinafter called the artist: What shall I write about today?
Culinary banquet? Prurient debauch? Pastoral tableau? Nautical
voyage? Surefire tearjerker? Unfettered joy?
7.
Moonday through Aphrodite Day:
Coax the inchoate from its cloak of invisibility.
Did someone else say this, or did I?
8.
Fall poem: fall in line, fall of man, fall asleep, fall in love
9.
Be free. Be strong. Be Beautiful. (Buzz words on FM 98.1)
10.
Eros and Thanatos?
11.
I was always a character actor, just born with the looks of Little Red Riding Hood, said Paul
Newman. I had a brush with greatness as a waitress at Viva Zapata in Westport, Connecticut, when
I showed Paul Newman the way to the men’s room. The sky was cornflower blue and cloudless, like his eyes, no hint of artifice.
12.
O, rueful moon! I have reached my dew point. Japanese scientists have created a mutant mouse that does not fear cats. But can they make a man with no enemies? There’s always the endearing curve of the duck’s head in profile, the duck’s back, his sense of comedy. The dog keeping time with his
tongue and tail. And a 1500 year old Byzantine church with a well-preserved mosaic floor and
images of lions, foxes, fish and peacock.
13.
Does it hurt when the leaves begin to turn?
14.
Notes for a poem with sparrows: Light Plight Bright Height Might Flight
15.
To be continued. The blackbirds whistling, or just after.
൪
This poem was inspired by beloved teacher Marvin Bell, who advocated for keeping a poetry scroll, a running document recording daily writing in progress. Most often I write a stand-alone poem. This one brings together disparate pieces—from different writing sessions—guilty by association, accessories to the act of meaning-making. Our brains like to synthesize and we find connections in the oddest of ways.
Here I make homage to so many of my influences. Lady and the Tramp, The Wizard of Oz, Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and poets I read in school, things I heard on the radio, dreams, bits of conversation, chance meetings, rhyming words, nature, love.
One of my favorite things about poetry is that there’s room for everything. We get to choose what to keep, towards the end of creating satisfying work. But in the writing process our raw material is life itself, no subject too high or too low. I find that intoxicating.
—Lin Benedek