Family Fun!

Well, the family reunion was fun for all concerned! Three of the cousins bonded over Pokemon and became fast friends. On this end cousin withdrawal has set in. Check out the 3 stooges above!

As for me, I loved visiting with the sibs and meeting new family members. There were babies and baby-to-be as well as a couple of spouses I met for the first time.

Life is too short to go this long before reconnecting with my brothers and sister again.!

At least I'll see my sis again before the summer's over!!!

Summertime Blues

Can you tell I'm ready for school to be out for the boys and me next Friday? I am sooooooo ready!!!!!!!

Summertime Blues

Lounging on the patio,
feet up, fan snarling at beads of sweat
that threaten to tickle my scalp,
I watch them:

Sunbaked Siblings sweat
testosterone rivalry as they slip
and slide into the pool
and each other.
Shrill laughter darts in
and around the jumble of gleeful voices.

The fan’s hot breath chases
escaping tendrils of hair. They sting
my cheeks and eyes in retreat.

Panting dogs circle the pool
and me in search of relief, or liquid, or
the simple need to round up the straggly pack.

A purple umbrella shelters me
from the insistent glare of a probing sun
as listless ice cubes sink into the tepid sea
of lemonade. It sweetly beckons a buzzing fly
as I watch through the streamers across my eyes.

And so begin the days of heat and sweat,
the endless hours of water fights, water guns, sticky hands,
stinging flies and eyes. Ushered in by sun-screened boys
a wave of summer joy douses my desire for snowflakes,
dampens my lingering dream of frostbitten breath and tongues of firelight.

My sigh is lost in a gurgle, choked-off by a well-aimed stream of little boy glee.


Pam Patterson © Summer 2003

The Past Not Taken

This is a quirky poem I wrote sometime ago and tinkered around with the past few days. So, for what it's worth (since National Poetry Month is winding down).......



I fall back
through past chapters
of my life, slip
into a sea of change.

Fabric along the shore
feels rough and knotty and so
I pluck a thread, here
and there
a thread
to smooth the way.

And as I pull and pluck
the past flies out of kilter
slips its bounds and
slides away.

I grasp for the familiar
as, like bright balloons
set adrift
in winds of time,
they drift off and out of rhyme and place.

I have loosed the fabric of my past,
unraveled time
and space
and place,
set sail on a course
unknown and out of bounds.

There is no traveling
back
to the place
before I fell
into the muck with my need
to pluck, retouch and refine
what was mine in all its rough-hewn glory.

My story, it belonged to me,
and only me, a journey writ
one page at a time, one blank page
at a time, where one can only edit
in present and future tense.

Like drifting balloons
treasured faces of the past
sail away from tomorrow.
Frantically, I reach
for what has slipped away,
to no avail.
A new course
unwinds
before me.

I stumble
among the paths not taken,
unfamiliar vistas, unknown faces.
With a heavy heart,
like Lot’s wife spared,
I set out blindly
in a desert of regret.

~~Pam Patterson

My own poem I wrote about Sylvia Plath:

"Dying
Is an art, like
Everything else.
I do it Exceptionally
Well."

~~Sylvia Plath ("lady Lazarus")

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Girl Who Wanted To Be God

The bald fist of English winter
pummeled your soul.
It would not, would not,
cease the pounding,
lift or pull away.

You vaulted
humdrum walls,
shrinking around you.
What ultimate God-stare
prompted you to seal the door,
to climb into the tomb?

O surreal enigma!
Spouting dark dirge-consonants
that goaded your final triumphant blaze-
a controlled head-trip of pure motion
hurtling you into the eye, that red-eye magnet
long drawing, burning

in your brain, your veins, until
it consumed your flesh.
A bitter triumph, they say,
a brainstorm from which you failed to return.

O ironic victory!
When the fat black heart ceased its beat,
the virgin queen rose, reborn in God's eye,
liberated from her bald wax-tomb.

~~~~~Pam Patterson


And, one I wrote about a bleak time in my own life....

Aborted Reason

Slice-and-dice sound bites
chew on the worm-germ
infesting my slippery skull.
The vapid hunger feeds on itself.
Like an aborted cancer clinging to life
it crawls back into the belly
hook-pricks along its raw umbilical.

O the sweet-meat of death dreams:
tempting vapors that swirl and curl
deep into the night nostril.
Mad-mother wakes to the wail of her fetid fetus.
Contractions contort the brief sanity-slivers
that pierce the counterfeit labor pangs.

I am a victimless rape victim.
The bloody seeds of sanity
spill out from my spread-eagled soul.
The crime is mine. I asked for it.
I nurture the beast that feeds
deep in my fertile skull-womb.
I whored my shaky psyche
for a willful dance on reason’s edge.

~~~~ Pam Patterson

Yellow and Red

Two poems from Sexton and Plath. As I have said before, the images are harsh in their beauty. Each stroke of their pens or typewriter keys are laced with vivid defiance. Having read their numerous biographies I'm always captivated by the beauty extracted from their pain. Where Sexton is untamed an unstable free spirit, Plath is tightly wound, ever coiled and chafing against her self-imposed constraints.

YELLOW

When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing, I'll
take my mother and soap her up, I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?

~~~~~~~~~Anne Sexton




POPPIES IN JULY

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!--
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colourless. Colourless.

~~~~~~~~~~Sylvia Plath

An Exercise in Futility

This is a poem I've had in the works for a few years, actually. I get a thought or a phrase or the germ of a poem and I put them into a file. Periodically, I revisit these dormant seeds. Sometimes I discard one or even an entire file. Other times I nurture one of the seeds and see how it grows. This is a fledgling bloom that I feel sure I will revisit and rework from time to time.


I study the smiling photos of
a five-year-old Spiderman grinning,
web slinging into the camera.
I look for shadows
that surely lurked,
like the villain he pretends to slay,
in the corners of his mind or
the curve of his smile.

When did the shadows
creep into his burgeoning psyche
and how did I miss it? One day
the laughter was too shrill, too
over the top, for too long before
the trip down--fast, furious
and frightening. He was tethered to an
out-of-control bungee cord,
furies unleashed.

Searching the photos for clues
I catch a glimpse of five,
white sunshine frozen in time.
I close Pandora’s box knowing
it’s too late to go back.


~~~~~~~Pam Patterson

Olds and Sexton

I have every book of poems that Sharon Olds has published. As I've said, she's my mentor when it comes to amazing poetry. I'll share one of my favorites (one of my MANY favorites) from her book THE FATHER.

CLOSE TO DEATH

Always, now, I feel it, a steady
even pressure, all over my body,
as if I were held in a flower-press.
I am waiting for the phone to ring,
they will say it and I will not be ready,
I do not have a place prepared,
I do not know what will happen to him
or where he will go. I always thought
I had a salvation for him, hidden,
even from myself, in my chest. But when the phone rings,
I don't know who he will be, then,
or where, I have nothing for him, no net,
no heaven to catch him-he taught me only
the earth, night, sleep, the male
body in its beauty and fearsomeness,
he set up that landscape for me
to go to him in, and I will go to him
and give to him, what he gave me I will give him,
the earth, night, sleep, beauty, fear.

~~~~Sharon Olds



And...from one of my two favorite, most intense, possibly, most unstable confessional poets, THE RISK by Anne Sexton. Both Sexton and Plath, my other favorite, were, in spite of being unstable, suicidal and immensely self-centered, were incredible talents. Often harsh and rarely subtle, their images seem to bleed into the pages.


THE RISK


When a daughter tries suicide
and the chimney falls down like a drunk
and the dog chews her tail off
and the kitchen blows up its shiny kettle
and the vacuum cleaner swallows its bag
and the toilet washes itself in tears
and the bathroom scales weigh in the ghost
of the grandmother and the windows,
those sky pieces , ride out like boats
and the grass rolls down the driveway
and the mother lies down on her marriage bed
and eats up her heart like two eggs.


~~~~~~ Anne Sexton