Category Archives: Aenigmas (My Poems)

Oh Little One: Four Haiku

Oh Little One: Four Haiku

That brave little neck,
the stem of a sunflower;
your brain is blooming.
—–
Your luscious curved cheek
is a small apple that begs
for tender kisses.
—–
The tree sapling back
nourishes roots and branches;
may it grow mighty.
—–
Hands touch but don’t clutch
like curious mice seeking
their fortune in cheese.

–Kathryn Harper

she loves books

How I love her!

There Is No Place Too Small

I’m healthy. My daughter thrives. My marriage is happy. The weather is sunny and mild. We’re not in the middle of a mortgage crisis. We can pay our bills. I have a good social network.

So why have I grown tired, sad, and teary over the course of the day? I was prepared to chide myself for ingratitude, but then I remembered. Tomorrow is an anniversary. It’s been three years, but time doesn’t erase the mark completely. I feel fragile right now. (And my daughter has changed –yet again — these past few days; the cues that used to communicate hunger and exhaustion have changed, she’s eating just about every 90 minutes, and I feel off-kilter in my competence.)

I wrote the following poem a couple of years ago regarding the event.

No Place Too Small

It is easy to know how to meld with so much grief.
With joy there is blindness, rose-colored ignorance,
No body to tend, to anchor one to the earth.
When the world remains intact, you move nimbly,
Caressing the surface of things, noticing little.

But grief burrows in.
It needs only the exposed, wounded soul
To dig in as a tick under skin.
Grief bangs around the cellar, shrieking,
behaves unpredictably, hijacking your eyes
When the store clerk asks how you are. Clutching your
throat when you call the dentist’s office for a cleaning.

You walk now among oblivious humans,
an emotional leper
With lesions rotting your heart.
All of existence has its own death,
It too could slip into a tumor-ridden coma
Adorned with catheter tubes,
And gasp last breaths to the sterile beat
Of a monitor, attended by loved ones.

Since there is no place too small
For grief to infiltrate,
You lie down, surrender, pull it
to every cell of your being.
You take orders, as a dog obeys commands
From an owner; you honor and bear it,
And in this way, endure.

–Kathryn Harper

Surreal

Surreal

At the turn of the century
it is a long way down
to the mind’s I. A treehouse
chronicles my journey to this
lost continent, which requires
the amber spyglass to navigate.
When I arrive I am barely a
shadow. There is
snow falling on cedars; through
the woods I hear the single hound
wailing for her hometown. After
twenty years at Hull House, I
mourn for that bastard out of
Carolina who left her tender
at the bone. I wander through
trees toward her cries and find
her. My journey ends across the
river, past the canal town. Before
crossing over, I ask her for
directions. “I don’t know,” she
replies. “I’m a stranger here myself.”

–Kathryn Harper

Our Life’s Prayer

blood art

Our Life’s Prayer

Carnal syrup which flows within,
why not make it art?
It has been spilled
enough to fill
the gloomy pit of Tartarus.
Ferry to us the draught of life.
Preserve us from dissolution,
for our gene codes fight dauntlessly,
against this.
Be not used to segregate others,
for humanity is one tribe.
Thou art the mystery, the
sinew, and the richness
that makes our lives worth living. Yes.

–Kathryn Harper

—
For Poetry Thursday. This poem is based on a Poetry Thursday exercise using a style called ekphrasis. The photograph is of a piece by René de Guzman and is titled Blood Color Theory. His artworks allude to current issues such as the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1990s. In this piece, de Guzman sandwiched his own blood, mixed with preservatives, between two Plexiglass sheets. The work’s impact lies partly in the shock value to convey the message, and the work takes on the formal qualities of a minimalist painting. What I find intriguing are the images reflected. This poem, which echoes The Lord’s Prayer, is the result.

Turf War With A Spider

Turf War With a Spider

I drape against a picnic table, inhaling
orange blossom perfume thick
on the breeze. With pen poised,
my hand starts scrawling when
in the corner of my sight
I catch perched on my elbow a small
tuxedo with eight legs.

Jerking,
I shake her off; she lands on my knee.
I am Goliath. With a stamp of my foot
she tumbles
to the concrete,
banished.

Moments later a presence pulls me
from my pen. I look down.
She has crawled
halfway up the table leg. One gust
of breath blows the leaf of her body
to the concrete, again.

I return to my words, absorbed, only
to soon find my nemesis at the
table edge. We stare,
eyes to eyes. I’m a behemoth,
but this David is relentless.

Such determination in so small
a creature deserves reward.
I move to another table.

–Kathryn Harper

These Old Boots

These Old Boots

These boots were once fresh,
a leather pair of strutting
peacocks flaunting
straight laces in full plumage.
They boasted proud soles,
like granite; impervious
to water, stoic in heat
and cold. These centurions
marched to conquer.

Now the plumage, frayed
and faded, holds scuffed
split leather by a thread.
Mile after mile erased
the heels. They are failed
sentries against enemy
pebbles and creeping rot.
These wounded soldiers
wear the perfume of decay
waiting to hike one last
time into the shadows.

–Kathryn Harper

—
For Poetry Thursday; from an exercise in The Poet’s Companion. Photo by Fedot Praslov, used under the Creative Commons License.

A Visit With Mother

A Visit With Mother

Playing with the ocean is a high contact sport.
Wrestle a wave, expect
to be tackled, lifted up, tossed aside,
waves sprinting and jockeying each other to shore,
cresting, swapping twelve-foot high fives.

Boys tag icy waves; cries of surprise
compete with seagulls. A toddler in pink totters toward
starlings holding their convention on the sand.
Her face beams as she waves to each bird.

You cross dry sand and it swallows your toes.
The wind slaps and pushes,
scrubs your face, bleaches your mind.
Your eyes sting and weep in the salt air.

You do not come to the beach for tranquility.
You do not come here for shelter,
but to absorb ancient energy,
feel the rhythm of waves in your blood,

swing on the tidal pendulum,
submit to the scrutiny of the bald sun,
gaze at the horizon melting into thousands
of miles of nothingness and possibility.

You come to release your illusions.

–Kathryn Harper

The Lonely Hours

The Lonely Hours

The second hand on the clock marches,
dances a stiff two-step circle.

Sleep flees, an unfaithful spouse,
courts everyone else while I lie
still as a corpse, pretending not to notice,
not to care. The rest of the world
sinks into its embrace.

My conscience sparkles like clean plate
glass. My body a race horse, ridden
hard and put up wet. If I were a rode
doper, I’d be a recovered one,
stimulant free.

God does not whisper to me.
I receive no visions.
I am simply awake, witness to the hours.

On The Way To The Library

On The Way to the Library

Two oily crows play chicken with idling cars
at the traffic light. Inches
from a tire, the birds jackhammer
gray pavement for a smashed tidbit.
This is their only task,
to eat six times
one’s weight every day, even
if that meal sits on a four-lane
boulevard. One crow grabs
a prize hunk and rises
with helicopter wings, landing
on the crosswalk light.
The other pecks and pecks again,
unaware of the thrumming metal
bull looming next to it.
The light changes. I drive past.

Cat Nap

Cat Nap

The cat comes
on little fog feet
sneaking toward me
lying prone. She
heaves her body
onto the ottoman
moves to my thigh
her paws pressing
into my flesh.
She bursts into a
roar of purring
kneads my stomach
and ample breasts
reliving kittenhood
memories of suckling
finally settling
herself across me
pats my cheek
and closes her eyes.

Quenchable

Quenchable

A toothless pinecone sits abandoned
on a tan patch of crispy grass
that serves as a lawn.
Pointed brown pine needles
long enough to knit with tangle
among singed ivy leaves in cemented
dirt. I sit at a sun-bleached
table, scrawling on a dry page
inked with a Rorschach tea stain.
The earth is sullen.
September. Everything not
artificially watered sits parched,
patient, dormant, waiting for
autumn rains that will make roots
gasp with relief. Soon dust and water
will meet, mingle, dance in rivulets.
Gullies of debris will rush to the
sewer to merge with the bay.
Magician rain will vanish smog.
Crumpled tissue mountains will
bloom emerald green, cloaked with
clouds and adorned with shafts of
sunlight. The sky, no longer a
one-dimensional flat blue, will
carry chilly news of the coming
season, a season to replenish.
We are so thirsty. So ready.

Rush Hour

Rush Hour

The gray man in the next lane over
digs into his nose, oblivious
to the fact that there are six lanes
of witnesses to his nasal excavation.

The bumper in front of me touts peace
and the sun winks through a crystal
pendant hanging from the rearview mirror
while a leather-tanned hand dangles
out the window flicking cigarette ash.

Somewhere behind me the air
is punctuated by the seismic bass
thump of some cholo’s rap music.
Words are garbled but I can feel
the beat in my bones as Dr. Dre
and Snoop serenade us.

To my left a sleek black Beamer
shelters a woman who appears
to be talking to no one. Then
she tucks her hair behind her ear
and I see the earpiece. She’s not
insane (yet).

A Little Desire

A Little Desire

His kisses like cotton candy
melting quickly, barely touching my lips.

I devour them.

His fingers stroke the nape of my neck.
A chord of need rang through me,
vibrating up from between my legs,

snaking around my hips,
winding through my lips, impaling me.
I fell
away from myself, turned
inside out,

inhaled,

and floated away.

Still Life

Still Life

Two weary oranges sit in a cracked
wooden bowl. In California there
is always a navel to contemplate,
but I have abandoned these dimpled globes
for sexier fruit.

They have company. Three bananas
lean against the curved belly
of the bowl, their sunny skins thinning
into a melanoma of ripeness.
The air is sweet with ruination.

In the rotting fruit, decadence born
of carelessness and disconnection. Looking
closer, the brown hands that cut, plucked,
sorted and packed, worked
many hours for few dollars. Dusty hands,
scraped and cracked like the bowl.
—
This poem is a result of an exercise suggested by Jack Martin.