The Old Woman's Estate

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One shady afternoon not long after she'd passed,
The caretaker tidied up the careless things
That laid about the dusty house.
He felt bereft and curiously breathless, embalmed almost,
In the dry deathless residue that curious spinster sculptress left.

Nothing she'd left behind was his, or could be,
Except his vagrant thoughts,
As he recalled beneath her favorite white oak tree
How like a leaf she'd shake beneath the covers on stormy nights.

Behind the house, he stepped into
The artist's still over-crowded studio—
Inactive now, but still the source of all the dust—and thought,
"Love has a thousand foolish faces in the aftermath of life.
Her life is gone now, yet only life is left.

Of her, there is only her young/old gaze staring out
(From years of photographs, I mean)
Above that sweet and poisoned mouth
That would so seldom laugh—
The stern and somber specter of my soft and secret wife."

current draft: 02/02/07
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

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Conversation Piece

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(Saturday Perversions)

There she was again, his new friend whom he barely ever saw,
disheveled but enchanting in shoulder-length gray-golden hair.
She wore that Saturday a crushed-velour green blouse atop a
wrinkled brown-suede mini-skirt she'd owned a bit too long.

On her right shoulder reposed a wide-winged dragonfly-brooch
with Griffin's claws and lovely human female face and breasts—
“A cheap and vulgar replica of an Art Nouveau Lalique!”
she'd laughed lightly earlier that day. He'd shrugged and smiled.
He knew his English Lit; he did not know Lalique.


They'd both been taking far too long to drink a cup of coffee each
in that dim-lit roach-infested faculty lounge downstairs.
Was it the coffee-colored stains and bugs
or the buzz and flicker of fluorescent lights
or his own loud knocking knees and nerves
that finally drove them back to work?

Half-hidden but upright behind her old oak desk that night,
she sat at ease, her bare and bouncy fanning feet
dancing to some happy unheard jazzy beat,
so trim, so leggy, so proud of it, and seeming very pleased!
Was she waiting just for him like that? No, she always sat that way.

She was dawdling in her office in the History Department,
looking pleased as any well-fed gray catbird might look
who'd found a round and rapt canary all aflutter
right there amid her usual shifting clutter—

all her red-inked scattered papers and splayed laid-open books
and bite-marked apple cores. He glanced aside
and took a breath because he felt her mocking eyes
had landed right on him. He sucked his stomach in.

He made a show of spotting something odd or out of place,
then stopped outside her door and, standing on one leg, leaned in.
“You need to clean that cobwebbed cow skull out
with a high-pressure hose!” he grinned, pointing to her
newly-acquired but musty relic of the old wild desert west.
He'd recognized it instantly as the perfect conversation piece.

“Why, do you have one I can use?” she laughed.
“This college campus is full of them,” he told her,
meaning it pragmatically—but hearing how
uproariously she laughed, he saw the joke.


“I need a high-pressure hose, huh?” she smirked.
“I used to have one myself,” he said,
“but I've gotten a little too old for it now.”
(Now why, he winced, did he say that?)

“That's too bad, I guess. But how does one do that?
How does it feel, I mean? Oh, God, I can't believe I asked you that!”
“It's all right,” he shrugged. “All right for you to ask, I mean.
IT hasn't felt quite right for about two years, I guess.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked. Her question sounded serious,
but her face still looked amused.
“Not exactly.”
“What, exactly?”

“Well, it just feels less!” he squirmed. “It takes
a great deal of real and imaginary stimulation,
not to get its attention precisely, but just to feel
some sensation that is precise instead of general!”

“What can you do about it?”
“Suffer. Or go to doctors and let them make me suffer.
“I've been waiting for a woman again, really,
to see if she would also make me suffer.”

“That long?”
He stared at the sightless cow skull and nodded.
“Women always make you suffer,” she kidded gently.
“Yeah, I know. You're doing it now.”
“I don't mean to.”
“Women never do.”

“And men?”
“Men always mean to make women suffer,”
he volunteered. “As far as I've been able to tell.”

“Is that true?” He was surprised to hear her ask.
“They're getting back at their mothers, perhaps.
And, of course, I guess you know men think that it's more
difficult for them to make women suffer than—”

“Really?” she interrupted. He'd never heard her sound so cold.
Her face, he thought, had clouded up as if she now had doubts
concerning not only his moral legitimacy,
but his entire liberal-arts education!
“But only in that purest sense!” he hastily added.

“What sense is that?” she stared. “You've got me losing track.”
He was losing more than that. He wiped his palm across his brow
and wondered why with every passing year every square inch
of his skin except for his high forehead got drier and drier.

“After they're married a while,” he persevered, “men hardly
seem to suffer about women at all; they tune them out, I think.
I meant it in the sense of love-in-bloom, of lovers
who are still new to love and to one another's ways.
I think I mean that men, just barely, but do,
know how stupid they are at this kind of game.
You know, while everyone's still doing all
that nervous parrying and lame ballet?

“Like we do?” she laughed, the light returning to her face.
“Are you trying to make me suffer more?” he beamed back.
“Not at all!” she grinned. That was when he licked his lips.
“I think you'd best be careful, though,” she said,
“about too much fencing and ballet!”

“Like too much horseplay, you think?” he grinned.
“All in good spirits until one day
the balance isn't right
and the play becomes a fight?”

Quietly her leather-covered chair rolled back and swiveled left—
was she showing off her underwire-uplifted breasts
or giving him the softer view of her slightly crooked nose
or was she staring into space or at that damn dead steer again?
Just then, her short brown skirt rode up her legs
and showed their come-here length and shape!

Thus, when her eyes found his again, she fixed and pinned him.
“In this sense,” she said, “the party game that we've begun
now becomes—a what? A love affair? A sex appeal?
A system of rewards and punishments that's fair? Who cares?!”


He looked at her with some distress as if he'd hoped she would.
“I like to think I care,” he sighed.
“You can have a spanking now,” she teased,
“or you can wait and fidget until you're tense enough to ask!”

“I thought—” he'd just begun when, vaguely like a spider, on long
slim legs she rose, went round, and then on silent feet moved in.
“Why don't I close the door?” she rasped.
“There. Now you can turn and face it.
Just close your eyes; don't think about your feelings or that lost
high-pressure hose and we'll just let that unwashed cow skull watch!”

“Let me think about it first!” he stalled.
“Oh, please, don't think!” she cried impatiently
and kicked his heels apart.

“I so often don't know what to do at first,”
he panted with his eyes completely closed,
“but I think you'll find that, given time,
I'm good at making things up!”

“I've noticed that!” she grinned and nibbled at his ear,
“but now you're here, don't talk so much!”
She shrewdly brushed the front of her skirt
against the back of his pants.

She reached around in front of him
while he stood still and stiff
and thought about how the door
was probably still unlocked.

rcs.

12th draft: 08/27/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

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A Young Man's Convictions

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Allowing of course that there
Is no act that has an end,
How can I hope in time and space
To only love you while I can?

How can our hope or care be broken off
When none can yet declare
This is the point at which
This moment Now begins?

How convincingly
Can I describe the eyes' conviction
When what I see is lost inside unfolding worlds
Of how I wish the world to be?

If I should take anything which you have shown,
Attempt by my most human effort to extrapolate that vision—
I swear I would produce no more than
My impression of what you truly are.

If I could take the motion of the gesture
By which you keep me in my place
In constant time and changing space,
Attempt to tear the coursing mystery into atomic composition—
I do not think I could translate that to your taste.

No matter my provocation,
No matter your response,
The answer and the problem set
Conceal the complex truth
Behind our simple act.

Upon reaction each reaction pends;
How seldom do our motions
Move to make us something that is new;
Now everything I once assumed,
I twice assume is wrong!

Ronald C. Souhern
5th draft: 10/12/04
©1970 Ronald C. Southern

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More

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"My darling Cleo, you smell so sweet!" I sighed.
The same, of course, if said of me, could only sound absurd,
At least to me, and she perhaps would not much more
Care to hear it said of her, whether loudly now
Or whispered in her short red hair as I did then.

Maybe it wasn't anything very true.
It was, after all, only perfume out of a bottle
That had a fancy pink glass stopper she could use
To caress into her skin the endless scent she sought—

That funky fetching female hint
Based on flowers and ripened fruits
And the greasy musk of a small male deer.
Perhaps there was some alluring odor in it,
Even so, that was her very own.

Such sweetness from inside seemed mostly to infuse
Those five old-fashioned fuzzy pastel sweaters
She wore in random order through the week.
She let me brush my hand against one once—
The one time that we kissed—
Beneath her wine-splashed unsashed dryclean-only coat

And I pretended that I felt the warmth alone
And not the buoyant weight of her intriguing matron's curves!
Then Cleo blushed, and sniffed and hugged herself, and, tipsy, winked,
"Such fine angora is always warm and snug like this,
But isn't it a sissy ending for a gamy goat...?"

That lazy scent would cling to anything. I smell it now.
Once I found it lingering in the lining of
A leather watchband she'd hardly ever worn.
Always it suffused the deep-red woolen watch cap she liked,
When home, to throw across the room without a passing glance.

The more time passed since her divorce
that first long year or so,
the plumper she seemed to get, but she still looked good
and triggered my arousal more by far, I guess,
than she with her sweet sense would ever want to know.

I think we never had much of a chance,
that my goat-stained desire to make her care,
to make her prance,
was bound to make our glands
Go blind and bland like this—
I wanted to consume her! She could not even kiss!

Maybe I'd have gotten further with her
if I'd schemed (yes!) even more,
if I could have simply stripped her complications down
to just that juicy scent
And dipped her dimple-deep in light sweet olive oil

And then myself in her
and rolled her plump new curves around
against my roundy own
as if we were two plum tomatoes, wet and ripe,
atop a bed of breadcrumbs adorning caesar salad!

I guess you think that sounds absurd.
She'd think so, too, I thought.
My feeling, though, is I still wish
she had let that gorgeous bright red hair of hers grow long
and let me ache for her in whispers just that much more!

rcs.

Current draft (12th): 02/09/03
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

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Gary Gilmore Blues

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Criminals are the great existentialists now;
We cheer them on to life, but they go for the glory.
Death gives them identity; they even turn into artists
In their last golden moments of captivity.

We don’t understand it
And thus abhor it,
But the fact probably is, this dying’s
The first right thing they’ve ever done.

rcs.

2nd draft: 02/08/03
©1981 Ronald C. Southern

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Horse Latitudes

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Though it is true that high and wide above these ships
that smell of salt and earthy damp and slight dry-rot,
eagles soar and mate while sea gulls sail and call
as if to tell some yet-unfathomed fate,

though through the tangled rope and cloth
a feather falls and something true aloft turns false below,
here where this craft, becalmed and yet deranged,
lets drowning horses churn the glassy sea to froth,

though in the seascape's mist my dreams completely shift
and my careening mind storms back to land to find
I can but shake my lifted fist
against the pounding of the waves...

Still, in that sinking moment, comes an
unexpected rise, a flight as full
and swift and bright as seabirds' glinting vanes
of gold and gray and white. Now, once again,

I find my heart attendant to your sorrow
and for a moment unentailed by gathered furls,
cloud-white and high and wide yet windless sails,
I still have eyes to see you as before.

Now though adrift I stand ashore and view
old visions drawn out anew in this reflecting glass.
Between those always-closed old wooden blinds you opened our first
date, the small compulsions of my house and heartbreak gravitate--

stale scents of nicotine and ash, black coffee rings
and cans of Coke, pale sugar ants and salty crumbs--
slight things, I guess, largely unseen, yet how they marred
and mar the white wood shelf above my hearth.

Now in memory or in fact I stand still,
too close again, before the mirror hung above
this cold white mantle and heart's dark fire--face to face,
the same as then, as when you said I'd gone too far,

as when you pled that you would suffocate
if I kept pressing my demands
or that we might explode if I could not just love you
and not hate your husband's plain bright wedding band.

And for a while, that worked. Still, all my heart protests
that what it is I love in you
I wish to plainly see, and wish to fold
all fantasies complex into a simple scheme.

If with insistent words
or with a brave compassion
I could dare this growing mist
which makes me your displeasure,

if from my bold and quelling hateful stare
you could tell that
part of me would gladly die
to keep your heart my treasure,

if I could clutch
hell's phantoms by their throats,
make them dance
and cease to prance and gloat,

if all the things I love to say came true--how one
can love and not possess, for one--but, no, not me.
Confess: grim truth is what is true;
the rest is jagged jest, on land or out at sea...

For truth or dare, that seabird breeze could not become
a gossamer of warm air uplifting me with ease.
No flight enlivens or relieves this flagging flesh I bear,
not till the final horse's plight and the last feather's fall.

Still, though I sank and swam, and swim and sink here yet,
and though so brief (those bright reliefs!)
I think myself a better man that you and some
fair few have loved me so, absurd and errant as I am.

So, yes, it's me you see out there,
a sailor all at sea, one of those
jerry-built, jimmied, jangled lives astray,
as aimless as jetsam at ebb tide,

a muddled mariner amidships who strives
to soar, yet always goes over the side,
a churning hoof, a lifted fist,
that strains against and to the waves

till in the frothing sea
I sink and swim no more
and drown.


rcs.

15th draft: 07/28/04
©1976 Ronald C. Southern

Horse Latitudes: Plural noun. Either of two belts of latitudes located over the oceans at about 30° to 35° north and south, having high barometric pressure, calms, and light, changeable winds. Etymology: Possibly from Spanish golfo de las yeguas, mares' sea. Reports that horses often needed to be thrown overboard, to lighten the load when no wind was present, in order to move the vessels on the water may be apocryphal.

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The Shyest Hand

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My children in the churchyard
Are singing as the bells have rung,
Hoping as myself has sung
While reaching out of time
For the kindness of your hand.

My children on the city streets
Are dreaming as the sun has shone,
Starving as my heart has pined
While reaching out of bounds
For any place at all to stand.

My children on the greensward
Are growing as the trees have grown,
Soaring as my soul has flown
While reaching for the shyest hand
That I shall ever know.

My children on the plains of tears
Are cringing as the brave have fears,
Climbing as my heart has height
While groping with these vaneless wings
To gain your chaste embrace.

My children near the forest-dream
Are dying as the phoenix dies,
Shining as my eyes have wept
While catching at the warmest sun
My dawn has ever seen.

My children by this sun-lit shore
Are kneeling as the saints have prayed,
Knelling as heart's bells have rung
While reaching healing home at last,
My hand within your grasp.

rcs.

3rd draft: 02/07/03
©1967 Ronald C. Southern

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