old mission, San Juan Bautista
(referenced movie: Vertigo)
from the roof you are a speck, your
skull
smaller still, inside its small
bowl, the image
of her a mass of electrons firing
like fireworks, like
sparks fly from a live electrical
cable
dangerous stars, telling us all the
world
ends in chaos, even if we die quietly, those electrons
grow frantic as ants searching for a
home
a receptor, lost and frenzied and
unforgiving. And this
is the point: no one truly forgives,
no one survives
without the pang of old regrets,
embers burning pure
at the core, the pain red, known by
the heart’s
palm, the sadness in your worship
scars deep
as the light of day fades along the
walkway
that laconic landscape, the chapel’s
serene arches
Bodega Bay, 2012
(referenced movie: the Birds)
the coast ablaze with
distance
an unfurling of primal
light
we squint against its
painful algebra
its continents of
logic, and zip
the ragged,
cliff-etched road, to
reach the seaside town
by
the bay, where all is
still, a
reprieve, the
restaurant calm
the view constant, the
pinot gris a bitter
pinch of white on my
tongue
inland, off the town’s
main street
the schoolhouse stands
brilliant in a
buzzing field of hot
insects and stiff
weeds; fifty years ago,
the same street, building
same blaze of sun, the
same blistering
mystery of want and
worship, moving
out through the town
drenched in the past
through the adoration
by the shore, out to
the churning eternity, an ocean of
meaning
I Confess, July 1952
we
were at a cottage, on a lake, and the night of
my
birth my mother and father played cards
at
the dining room table, they heard the slap of the
screen
door that led from the porch, and glancing
up,
told my brother and sister to stop running. this
was
the time I was thrown into, this, the family
my
mother leaning on the restless circle of me,
still
roaming the hollow of her body
but
much more roamed the country of that year
between
us, alleyways and escarpments and lonely
pious
men who genuflected before the Basilica’s
nave,
where golden mysteries rested, the Rosenbergs
forsaken
in jails, skies blocked by monsters
of
sooted cathedrals, and there you were, Alfred
in
the Chateau Frontenac, manipulating those images
of
lone priests on night streets, your catholic concern
gleaming
out like sunlight caught in vestries
this
was what awaited that July night, when the loons
cast their long thin moan to summer, the cool from the
lake
floated up
to the cottage and touched my mother’s
tender
skin awakening the wide ache of my arrival, and
you,
the closest you would ever be to me, enjoying
a
delicate meal in that ornate gilded room.
Watching Lifeboat
it’s meaning I’m after,
settling down this winter afternoon
to watch, the day grows
around me like a shell hardens
utter grey and the sky
palely, continuously grey. it seeps
into me dulling as
those images dull with their celluloid
claustrophobia. death
settles, as the mist with its scent
of forever settles, so
that I am
numb with the peace of hope’s
diminishment. until the horizon
grows wide with warring
ships, and the clamouring cacophony of voices, that litter
of rollicking animals, stop before
the german future rushing
at them and worry for the entrapment of their tiny souls in
their tiny vessels,
hungry for some shape of love and unsure
if the wet on their
cheek is from a kiss or spit
.jpg)
Deborah-Anne Tunney of Ottawa is a member of Ruby Tuesdays writing group. Her short stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Narrative, South Carolina Review,
Fiddlehead, Descant, Grain and other literary journals and her poetry has
appeared in YAWP, the anthology A Sea of Alone and will appear
in the upcoming anthology I Found It at the Movies. Her book of short stories, For the Time Being, will be published by Great Plains Publishing in fall 2014. The poems here
are part of a book of poetry she is currently working on which are inspired by
the movies of Alfred Hitchcock.
Her stories in
Narrative can be accessed at: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/authors/deborah-anne-tunney
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