Free Verse
Celebrating Mother's
Day
Wishing
Every day all year, not just
Mother’s
Day time, wishing she was in the
living room or on the back porch,
wanting to tell her what I never managed
to tell her before she passed away, my father
already dead, her at Mount San Antonio
Gardens, this old-folks haven in Pomona,
me in Michigan, never quite saying it the
last time I visited her, “I wanna thank you
for the violin lessons, P. Marinus Paulson,
opera with Madame [how she always referred
to herself] Metzger, the trips to Europe, art
at the Art Institute...my whole life has been...,”
not that I believe in ghosts, but she’s really
always here, in the green or snow outside
my work-window, when I stretch out and
try to sleep, as if she were a Ph.D. in
Psychoartifying and I was her (only child)
only patient/student/friend.
Telling
Telling Mozart’s youngest
son, Franz Xaver
Wolfgang, on his deathbed “Come with me
back to Michigan, you’re only fifty-three and
in another eleven years, eighteen fifty-five,
they’re going to start the Agricultural College
of the State of Michigan, well, Michigan State
University now, great music department, all kinds
of Russians and Germans, and you’ll love the
rivers and forests, a lot like the Ukraine...,”
tuning in on his brain, reading brains, ever since
I became a time-travel esprit, he’s writing his
Grande Sonata Opus 19 in E Major, cello easy
but the piano a regular finger-breaker, esprit-
telling him “Besser als seine Vater/ Better than
Your Father, “Aber wo kann Ich finden ein
Klavierist....?,” “Die Damen von Korea en
MSU.../The Korean women at MSU...,”
“Die Korken von..?,” / The corks from...?,”
and suddenly the brain-wave river waterfalls
into splash-roars, then windless desert silence.
