Alphabet Soup
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Category Archives: POETRY BY COACH IRIS
Machete Magic-Seeing Kim (Oct 1, 1943-March 12, 1982)
-Iris J. Arenson-Fuller
Machete Magic-Seeing Kim (October 1, 1943-March 12, 1982)
I-
I see him out in the yard, no shirt
sun imprinting rays on naked back,
etching an Aztec calendar in skin.
The small silver one I bought him
used to tarnish from his acid sweat.
I made a ritual of polishing it.
From kitchen window, I admire muscles,
bull neck, robust arms, thick, reassuring calves.
Machete in hand, he dances, attacks brambles,
strategizes against weeds that will not win.
A smile spreads, batter-like over his face,
oozing into hazel eyes with flecks of orange.
The mower in the shed, dejected,
expensive German steel he had insisted on,
pushmower bought on one of many whims.
He refused to stand behind a power machine
along with the neighbor-clones.
He choreographs his moves, muscles recalling
Zen football in Golden Gate Park.
He becomes an artist, pretends to paint poppies
with the blade, but cuts them down instead.
For a moment, he is sad, then resumes the planned offense.
Resting, he chugs water, between swigs, sings a loud song
hidden in his head from a years-ago acid trip.
II-
One day he announces no more machete.
He wants vines and weeds growing fast,
crawling over doors and covering windows,
undulating snakes protecting us from outsiders,
blocking out wind and troubles that threaten chilled bones.
We are sweetly huddled together by the soapstone hearth
listening to endless Oz Tales on the worn striped couch
in the big white house on Unicorn Hill.
I think about machete magic, how it up and left.
When I tried to solve the trick of cups and balls,
no matter how fast my eyes raced to catch the magician
at his game, I saw the dull thud of death.
The magic just went away for too long,
leaving a new joyless madness that paralyzed us all.
True, we survivors walked again, hanging on to trees
with thin bark, breath forming flimsy questions and sighs.
There were no pills but only time and light
sneaking in slyly through cracks in the armor.
III-
When new fears swell, larger than Coney Island waves,
I cry and roar internal prayers that lips quickly change
(for survival’s sake) to soft musical pleas.
I am mother, interloper by nature in their adult lands,
also founder and keeper of what was native and safe,
I can uselessly dig for maps that lead to fresh magic
till doomsday peeks through the bedroom curtain.
What is hiding in folds of invisible cloth is like poems in Braille
waiting to be touched and read.
They must first find the cloth and will to live
without aid of mother-midwife.
The machete rusts in the red shed.
I watch for Kim’s ghost wondering if he sees us too,
wishing he could block out wild wind
and troubles that threaten to chill bones.
Eyes seek light that is slow but will arrive.
I dream of us sweetly huddled together by the hearth
in the big white house on Unicorn Hill.
Photo by Zoe
Like this:
MANDEL BROIDT
Mandel Broidt
-Iris Arenson-Fuller, Feb 2011
Gertie was no master European pastry chef
creating glorious golden strudels or pies of scraps
and wishes from the cupboard and ice box.
That was her mother, rotund, sweet-faced
sporting a flower in her hair, large drooping breasts
hiding under the full length patterned apron.
Gertie’s mother gathered ingredients in the apron
holding it out gently like ancient treasure,
carrying baking bounty from pantry to work table.
Grandfather prayed and swayed in the next room
droning, bending, sniffing as wife sifted,
rolled, pinched, conjured up sweet miracles
Did she think of Romanian campfires and gypsy
remedies while magic and surprises hovered in
her kitchen, invisible vibrating hummingbirds?
My mother planned and measured, pounded dough
into resignation, beat the white floury, eggy mess
till what made no sense sighed,
assuming the order she needed to feel safe.
Mama’s kitchen was unlike mine,
things spilling, minds of their own,
jumping from blue glass bowls, creating chaos.
Her kitchen was sparkling, predictable, as she knew
the real world never was, never would be.
On clear, cold nights, when we went outside
to watch for shooting stars, she studied recipes,
chopping precisely, never adding odd tidbits stashed
in the cupboards of imagination, as I would.
She hummed the song, Ramona from the days
she and my father courted, but hummed so softly
that the dog sleeping under the table could barely hear.
When perfect crisp logs, never lopsided, emerged,
more measuring then cutting and frosting.
Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry in equal numbers.
Warm prizes peered out from the every-day white
china plate or the flowery one for company.
Hands reached and teeth unearthed fruity secrets
while eyes found my mother’s smile.
Yearning is foolish but how well I remember
the predictability of us at the table, counting chews,
entering Gertie’s orderly world. where for that quiet moment,
we wanted nothing more.
What I Didn’t Know When I Met Langston Hughes
No Known Restrictions: Langston Hughes by Jack Delano 1942. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collections
What I Didn’t Know When I Met Langston Hughes
-Iris Arenson-Fuller
Feb. 2011
Before I truly knew all living things were kin
or that there was a larger menu of sexual preferences
than was served up in my family’s small vinyl papered
kitchen with the orioles and jays staring at my soup
Before I heard the first ugly name on my father’s lips
after the neighbors scurried like tattling roaches
when they saw me riding in a rusted old car
with six boys and I cried hard from the stinging words,
a blue bruise painted in a bad dream by
Smokin Joe Frazier’s powerful fist
Before I knew about toddlers in the ER at St. Vincent’s
whose limbs were mistaken for bacon strips and
burned in frying pans in kitchens where they should
have been eating freshly baked cookies
Before I ever heard of Matthew Shepard, alone and
shivering in the cold, beaten, tied to a fence,
whispering why into the brutal Wyoming wind
Before I heard of napalm burns or Gulf War Syndrome,
of veterans who believed in their country, fighting
demons under city bridges, talking to themselves
Before I grew up and out of a life that was bright and
textured like velvet, the nap never stroked in the wrong
direction but wrapped around me, warming me with
promises of poetry and young love
Before my cave sanctuary turned into darkness where
I sat carving sad pictures of too many lost loved ones
or where I lay drenched in high-fevered sweats
unable to see a world that would be all right again
Before all of that I stood up, left foot asleep, limping across
a high school auditorium, pleated skirt, crisp white blouse,
high heels, ears with hoop earrings listening to loud claps,
tongues clucking with sincere pity for the pretty girl
they thought was crippled and about to receive a poetry
award from Mr. Langston Hughes
Before that, I was pre-me and thought him merely
a rambling old man who foretold great joy and suffering,
extracting a shy promise that I would not stop writing
even if the pain of life took hold of my throat and choked me
Four years later, he was dead and I still didn’t know
what I didn’t know when I met Langston Hughes.
The End.
WHO I AM IN THE MORNING
Who I Am In The Morning
-Iris Arenson-Fuller, January 2011
Morning gives a final sensual stretch
then it’s time to close the big book of dreams
time to mark that sleepy place with a bit of
tissue and a tear because last night I visited
spring meadows behind the house and just
don’t want to wake up yet.
Perfect colors wound themselves around
my body as I danced, and bled their beauty
into my heart, its edges stained with pigments
of blue wildflowers and also wild geraniums
swaying in an illusory breeze.
New England winter shocks hard as feet hit face-nailed
pine floors, leaving me dangling and twitching on the
bed’s edge hoping for a shot of whatever will fill me
up with some newly found lust for life.
Next comes egg and muffin, savored and nibbled
while heating frigid hands with teacup, waiting for
kitchen blower to kick on and screech warmth.
Languid, remembering things that connect past dots
and form an image of who I am right now at the
small round table in the beadboard, blue and yellow
kitchen in Connecticut.
I wish it weren’t winter but I have learned patience.
I know that beyond my window with blue glass
inserts is a cold wind to bite the face and make
the Scottie shiver, trotting back inside, skirt waving.
Even when the wind shouts with anger, showing
no softness or compassion, it will ease and grow
sweeter when spring pokes through the snow.
Meadows and flowers from my dreams will jump
through dreamland hoops into sharp reality, reminding
that life is forever filled with the vibrant colors of
my dead father’s photos and I am still here, thinking
about a Leonard Cohen song I never liked till now,
that wisely tells us to ring the bells that still can ring.
*****************************************************
LADY SUU KYI
Lady Suu Kyi
Iris Arenson-Fuller, Jan 2011
I wonder how it would be
to have a country give me a fond nickname
to know that taxi drivers and school kids
carry my photo with them everywhere.
I will never win a Nobel Peace Prize but
like most women, have made my share of
sacrifices in the name of keeping peace
just trying to make the Cancer nest as
cushioned, safe and homelike as I knew how.
****
Don’t fool yourself though.
I have also done my share of whipping up
thin breezes into swirling tornadoes that roared,
carried me aloft to dark states of mind where
I found myself lost and wounded, crawled out
from under toppled houses feeling like a victim,
remembered quickly that I still had causes to
make the eyes flash and the blood come to a hard
boil in unending kettles of political discourse.
****
Friends comment how I never seem to wilt,
much like the blossoms always perched in
her lovely dark hair though I lack the regal
bearing and the calm that clings to the air
around her, a calm of sleepy mosquitoes
hovering over the netting above the bed.
I will never be that calm, so merely imagining
her forced isolation and how she perseveres now
has me tugging at ropes holding me down
that aren’t even real, but make my flesh hurt.
****
She and I have shared one common path.
Each sludged through thick rivers of muddy
grief, each lost loved ones, too young,
who no longer blew their wise breath into
our weary hearts and somehow, each found
the way to keep from bleeding out , learning how
to focus on something seen clearly as a patch
of amazing light through a dirty window.
I wonder if she saw the pink, heart-shaped flowers,
the orchid tree blossoms that line the roadways there
as I see them sometimes in my dreams?
****
Snippets on a Snowy Sunday Morning
The more I contemplate it, the more I see that poets and coaches have some things in common. Both examine life, look at ordinary and profound ideas, trying to view things in a fresh way and to help others do that. Both ask a great many questions and try to make sense of life and move it to a new, different or better place of understanding and feeling.
*******************************************************************
The Task of the Poet
IA-F
The real poet has no time to waste.
All of his days are spent at the task
of making clear, first to himself and
then to those who want to hear,
questions of the eternal, of the
transitory, questions that death
whispers, while life goes on simply
batting her lashes but listening
shyly!
*******************************************************************
Lest We Come Soon To Whimper Time
IA-F
When we should have been feeling alive and newborn
we would walk the dead docks of San Francisco,
a green-shirted philosopher and a girl so sure of her path
refusing to heed trafic signs or crossroads, stumbling often
and losing her way, unsteady as is all youth in perpetual
refusal to grab hands extending from a distant painted sky.
So when life was full of sparkle and bubbles
from all of the celebratory drinks that should
have fizzed and overflowed the days with
promises in silver boxes and a few pure gold
coins tucked in under layers of pale tissue
those kids shivered instead at the insecurity of
being alive and the certainly of death waiting
patiently at the end of San Francisco’s foggy docks.
Now age has filled my cup with fewer sparkles and
with so many questions that spill onto the floor.
I answer the ones I can and don’t bother to mop
up the rest, stepping over puddles of doubt and
prancing on quickly (with as little looking back
as humanly possible ) to patches of possibility
when and wherever they can be found.
I think of the hours spent discussing Camus
the worrying and angst that packed so many
days more tightly than my small overnight bag
when I should have been watching shooting stars
and creating even more memories of making love
in the bushes near the Palace of Fine Arts as noisy
tourists and dog walkers strolled only inches away.
*****************************************************
Goodbye Eva On December 30th
Eva, At About 95
One more goodbye.
Almost like a script for me now, I know how it goes,
word for word, what to say, what to feel, how to hurt
and remember, careful ink swirls and sentiments, words
for writing on cards and quiet tears for sealing them up
in place of wax and signet ring like Kim had years ago.
They shrink before our eyes in their electric beds as
the pain grows larger than the body and crowds them
into small corners of life till they sigh and disappear.
Her squeezed-out breaths barely fluttered one extra calendar
page beyond her 101st birthday and just last week
she sent us a holiday card postmarked on the day she fell.
In my world the distance of the pool, end to end, is mostly
short but Eva was the one swimmer who kept going.
Her phone calls brought Brooklyn back to my ears, soothing
heart cracks like one of my mother’s salves or some
connective tissue protein that my body was lacking.
Memories roared, loud subway cars rushing to Coney Island.
After Carol died, we chatted often, tying complex verbal knots
in endless unfinished doily squares that needed piecing
together, though unseen and unacknowledged by any but us.
We dug up dusty stories from under rock-years of time and loss,
laughed at things in a language I butchered but understood
with a chromosomal recall that always surprised me.
The day we buried my sister, we drove you home, Eva,
and you refused help, walking alone down the long dismal
assisted living corridor, joking that I was tired because
I was the old lady and you were merely 96 years young.
You washed your own undies there, putting them through
two cycles to make them snowy and to keep your secrets.
Once you told a story of defiance as a young woman when
your toddler got diphtheria and you insisted on keeping him
home with the elder son, though under strict quarantine.
The Health Department said no visitors but you needed to
cook for the elderly relatives across the street and had
a friend make deliveries, hiding her under the bed when the
Public Health Nurse came to check the family.
When your grandson died, you fit in neatly with the rest,
a worn puzzle piece, tidying messy feelings that you wrapped
in silence to preserve for a distant day when it would feel ok
to talk, pretending it was natural for a 24 year old to keel over
and simply stop like Papa’s old watch on the bureau.
For years the tears and questions waited until our long juicy talks
bubbled and foamed over the trans-country phone lines as we cried.
Nobody else listened, nobody else remembered names or faces
that show up in my dreams, unreal, cotton candy melting in a dry
mouth without sensation till someone tastes it with you.
You knew me at age 8, when one day you gave me cookies
with a Toni home permanent, me and the favorite doll from my father.
The other things we had in common were minute specks on a pin head
even examined under a microscope, but you took me back easily to
places I’ve heard of and places I’ve been that are now boarded
securely and closed to me forever.
So goodbye Eva.
To Wasted Young Lives Thought Of At Thanksgiving
To Wasted Young Lives Thought Of
At Thanksgiving
For Richard S, Randi D, Ellen P, David G and Peter B
Iris Arenson-Fuller
November 24, 2010
Thanksgiving time again.
Instead of finding old recipes for cranberries, we climb up
rickety stairs, flight after flight in vain, never quite reaching
the tucked away attics of your minds where you formed thoughts
that changed us forever when you took lives in your palms,
closed them painfully and crushed them into fine, sandy crumbs.
I think of a cookie from the Italian bakery, delicate, with almonds,
and sweet butter, lacy, rich with potential, poised on white plate,
no consciousness of how we sit, studying shapes and imagined flavors
waiting to choose the one we will pluck from the plate and taste.
But you are not there for us to find in old cardboard cartons stashed
under the eaves with holiday ornaments you may have made in school,
old toys and Star Wars figures collecting dust and silently begging
for happy cries and discovery by the children you will never have.
You are wrapped in dirt and mystery under the ground, somewhere
we can’t see even with drops for our eyes and progressive lenses
now that we are slowly growing to look like the brittle brown leaves
of approaching winter that will sit guarding all of your graves.
So much time has flown by, rustling its long cape as it passes and
catches us shivering in a breeze we barely notice till holiday nights
when, after trussing the turkey and polishing the silver, we rest weary
heads on pillows as tears and sad memories once more cram in,
like the sweaty bodies that threatened to crush me once on that
chicken bus in Guatemala!
Fiber Optic Search For My Birth Mother
-Story Poem for Gertrude, My Mother, My Mamala
By Iris Arenson-Fuller
Crunched in the chair, chalky tiny chicken bones
smiling, grinding out complaints like kosher chopped
meat from the old grinder in the big kichen pantry
She says she wants to leave now, doesn’t care
but marcasite necklace and earrings she fishes out
in a contradictory ritual of choosing life still light up
her face, stars perched on skin of thin, pale strudel dough
lighting my way back to what and how she used to be
My father called her beautiful, with dark, wavy hair
diminutive body, carved ivory bones then, so delicate
soft like antimacassar lace on the blue corduroy couch
Our Jamaican friend, Joyce, says he watches her from
shadows only seen by lives barely hanging here and
seized the right moment to push her down, made her
fall because he wants her there soon to join him
frozen in a faraway life we don’t see
Now so small, my mother might even be an official
Little Person but would her membership get perks?
Free movie passes or a discount for the dismal wares
of our local Hebrew Funeral Association?
My vigil began when the moving truck came
eleven years ago from Brooklyn with kosher
pots and pans to a final nest in My Connecticut.
Ed thought he had met the character actress who
played my mother, but no, there she was, the new
incarnation of the tough prison guard from my teens
when she held me hostage in the bathroom, washing
out my mouth with a spray of reprimands and guilt
An unfamiliar gentle side oozed through sliding doors
where New England snow formed one more sad
deterrent to her fierce, though fading independence
Still feisty, still spewing out embarrassing morsels
in the restaurant while slowly chewing and ingesting
others, -“Will ya look at the Can on her! Oy Vey!”
These days she adds ingredients to the pot and mixes
her complaints with unexpected condiments of praise
She sits in the alarmed-chair, eyes cloudy with
vivid travelogues we can’t see and I know
she is in flight as we interject pills or conversation
She startles, makes a rocky landing, not adjusting
to our time zone and asks, “When did Bubba die?”
pointing to her mother’s picture as my heart
contracts without aid of her Lotensin
I, too, am looking for my real mother and am
having a hard time finding her
The camera captures her epiglottis as food
dyed with coloring advances more slowly than
the posted speed limit on the nursing home door
I expect to see Harry, my father, with camera poised,
snapping the highway down her throat, searching
for autumn colors or giant pink peonies
I watch the journey on the screen and in my mind
am optically caressing a familiar neighborhood nearby
(Later we learn there is cancer in my old neighborhood,
sitting not far below the rusty, worn pump)
Transported back in time, I, a most unobservant Jew,
find that I am born again, remembering how she said
when they cut the cord I gave her a dirty look
I’m sorry, but it’s too late now
Soon she will reach the mountainous terrain of my
memories, which I climb all night and never sleep
Soon she will find a kitchen drawer to become one
more yellow-paged yahrtzeit calendar that reminds
me how all the rainbow bubbles dance on our heads
and pop without any human intervention
Her hand is veined like a small grape leaf
I think again of a fetus and then of nagging,
spilling from her mouth between gates of
iron stained clenched dentures
Somehow it doesn’t matter and what made
me hide in Vermont and California and Connecticut
is only glue mixed with spittle now, that has
turned into love, fully expressed
She is my birth mother and each day her life is
an inchworm dangling from a branch over my head
ready to fall and I know how much I love her and why
