Tim Mayo

Honey

A few plots over, a mower buzzes in the heat

like a bee working the flowers for its queen.

What does one say at the grave of someone so 

important you wouldn’t be here except for her 

and the choices she couldn’t make?  How in her life

she had to flee the Old Testament wrath of her father 

and leave the garden hive of her innocence.  How in your life 

you must thank her for the accident of your birth––

what does one say at such a stranger’s grave?  

I try to whisper a few words.  Dry, fine as pollen, 

they still catch in my throat.  They feel as foreign 

as a language I’ve never spoken, as foreign as here 

(where I’ve never been before) among the bees where 

she rests as if waiting for some sweet yes I never 

said, some offering that life might mean for me 

what it never had for her.  So I disgorge my sorry          

words for all I may have held against her, for all I’ve

held against the world, then do my dance and leave.

This was poem was never published in any journal, but it appears in my book, The Kingdom of Possibilities. 

*

The Obituaries

Each day the page would fill with loss,

and he would see the print squirm

through his glasses like a virus

he recognized but hadn’t caught.

His wife began to read them, too, 

not long after they were married,

but when they stopped for that same

no reason they’d first read them,

something small had already found 

its slot between their bodies, and they 

warmed it, though it remained thin 

and pale as a page waiting for its print. 

Finally, the fine print appeared, 

and the page thickened into pages,

became a tome wedged between them

which they kept but never read.

This poem first appeared on a now defunct e-zine called The Rose and The Thorn. It also appears in my collection The Kingdom of Possibilities” (Mayapple Press, 2009)

*

Playing with Szymborska

In the lost paradise of improbabilities,

we arrive at our sand box. 

We dig our toes into the clean

but gritty inches of its landscape

ready to make the best of everything.

Although I have brought to this place 

the inappropriate noises of my little red truck,

the sound of its spinning wheels in the sand,

I marvel at the subtle castles she builds,

the whimsical, rising twirls to her modest towers.

I want to know her gift for suspension, how 

when her little figures fall from their own towers, 

marking the air like desperate ants,

they never land.  I want to find the little keys 

and coins I see dropping from their pockets 

to become the archeology of their lives.

I want to dig their shards out of the sand, 

piece them into poems fanning their pages 

into wings which will also never land.

I want to do this with Szymborska, 

her hand showing me the simple action

of how to knock at the stone’s door. 

This poem has never been published.  It makes reference to a number of Szymborska’s poems, but the central reference to the towers and the little figures suspended alludes her poem “Photograph From September 11"

© Tim Mayo

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