Blue beads dangle from your neck

like silent prayers

and you sit on the floor beside your bed

murmuring at your folded hands.

I walk in slowly so as not to move the air

that carries words

from your lips to God.

On the porch is the glider. 

Your grandma spent her last

years swaying and left her whispers

to hover by the oak. In those days

we said “cheers” for good-bye.

A breeze moves in. I love

your sapphire eyes

as the mountains

pour smoke across the valley

and ashes fall like gray snow

to bring forth winter

in the august heat.

We stand in this field,

staring down at the parched soil.

I think about September

when summer will have long since

withered the sunflowers

and turned their faces toward

the earth, leaving me alone

to weed this arid garden.

I need a potrait of you

to carry with me always.

I hold your face between

the sun and me to catch

the fiery outline of your silhouette

as it pours into my eyes

and burns your image forever

in the dark void

behind their lids.

                                           Robin Reda

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Prokofiev has turned another song tonight

and communication lines run high along the road

carrying the voice in Ohms.  Over tarred poles,

the hanging line on crossbeams

like where Jesus’ arms would be. 

We count the churches too.  But mostly watch the 

oiled trunks.  Through compression

run the endless voices in the wire,

darting by each steeple’s likeness.

I don’t imagine you are thinking that exactly

as the Classical music station saturates our new Bug.

How the flutes seem to call and beckon 

through the Field Effect Transistors. 

But an early recording of Bartok

is playing.  Up ahead a few blocks we can see

the colored hope of strip malls, stranded amid

every denomination.  You are circling your lips. 

I can smell the red pigment. Staring all angles into the

lit vanity mirror.  You say, “Pull into Hank’s Market.

I want to get some wine.” In your den, the Gallo jug goes,

and you feel warm. And Charles Ives is telling us about

star spangled something old Kentucky home.  You unclick

your compact: ensign of a girl.  Next morning, Aunt Jemima

on low heat in a pan and stirring eggs in batter.  You’re so cute,

I mean with your hair all bed-thrown but you feel compelled to cook.

                                                             Robin Reda

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Beneath the cliffs of Santa Barbara, on cold waves

flooding the starfished pools, we were barefoot.

Imagine the orange coral losing as reflections of sky

became the water. Above, a biplane. The stuttering prop

turned my tongue. Pilot strained her engine through the

air, her trails like raveled bolts of gabardine. The tail

pulled the stitchery of low mortgage rates: An 800 number. 

Somewhere, a twitching banker was staying late, hoping

to see lights on all his lines, then lobster being pulled in

strainers from hot kettles. That was the first real summer.

Today, we are having foccocia at the café on the pier.

Upstairs above the restaurant. You are singing and I turn

to say something. “Lemon cake or gorgonzola?” That

Mexican beer where a sheet of ice slides down the thick

glass into my mug ring (as if I am Hemmingway.)

The loan agent, still at that office, sleeps bankrupt

with his suit coat buttoned. The nectar runs and there are

peaches in your glass of frozen Quervo Gold. It is summer’s

dusk. Just like when we stayed in the Seaside Motel, in a

wicker room with wine. Liquor store glimmered on the

street, beer logos like acrylics off the wet steamy

slurry-seal, barefoot on our way to Melody Beach.

At the Impulse Check stand we bought a Chocolate Osprey

and bound stanzas, some by Bukowski. But again, that was

the first real summer. Tonight, Dos Equis Dark evaporates

in my mug. Fish go by in the arms of waitresses. Little girl

on the runway turns cartwheels near the band like the radial

symmetry of starfish in a swell. It is night almost and we are

mediating the wind. August Ending in Lagoon: We have

bought stuff at the store including the sharp tip of a corkscrew.

You are singing above the foamy waves. The Osprey,

I am carving in it a demand to help me find forgiveness: 

At point of corkscrew – Chocolate Bird, you are suited in foil.

Take my words and fly them off like those bolts of gabardine. 

Otherwise, I will eat you with all symbols of bread and wine.

All of this for having said something last time she sang.

                                                  Robin Reda

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I

Your words are sea breeze in jelly jars.

But at the well, a girl who wants only water. 

Your grief is that she doesn’t know or care

about the salty air that moves on poems’ current. 

You may have seen the sun rising from the

flooded rocks. And you may prove anything

as the conclusion. But how you kept the

voice alive!  I could give you paper, ask you

to draw my worn Flamenco boots. We have

loitered in so many galleries. You sit on

the bar as the grainy 8mm runs, breaking

on a frame like a smashed refractor on

a streetlight. In the Express Checkout Lane,

you read the titles on paperbacks of

a thousand pages, wondering what it all means.

It is here you are about to buy tulips,

swipe your card and push red for debit.

Let the celluloid be your fever

who films the iodine of a morning kiss,

or frames the tense love where a fugitive

carves the Christmas turkey.  I confess,

I am one of these men whose Stratocaster

is blue, with fitful dreams of Eliot and his

monocle as he argues on and on.

                        II

Dear Henry Kissinger of Poetry:

Thank you for finding better things to

write about. Like the long war dead

lying in the grasses, the photojournalists

evacuated in choppers, leaving the rest

to you.

A soundtrack must be written of the

salt mounds. On every corner,

a control box ticks, changing the

traffic lights to colors of the bluest

meaning, suggesting we drive on

seaward under lily-centered moons. 

But as for you who loves the conjecture

of the sun rising from the well,

not only do I endorse you,

but I will let you divide by zero

to make your case.  And, this is only a

friendly reminder: As you walk out the

automatic doors of the supermarket,

holding the wet receipt and the tulips in

cellophane, their yellow powder ready to

diffuse, please remember to hand them

like spring to the clasping fingers of

your lover.

                                    Robin Reda

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I

Your words are sea breeze in jelly jars.

But at the well, a girl who wants only water. 

Your grief is that she doesn’t know or care

about the salty air that moves on poems’ current. 

You may have seen the sun rising from the

flooded rocks. And you may prove anything

as the conclusion. But how you kept the

voice alive!  I could give you paper, ask you

to draw my worn Flamenco boots. We have

loitered in so many galleries. You sit on

the bar as the grainy 8mm runs, breaking

on a frame like a smashed refractor on

a streetlight. In the Express Checkout Lane,

you read the titles on paperbacks of

a thousand pages, wondering what it all means.

It is here you are about to buy tulips,

swipe your card and push red for debit.

Let the celluloid be your fever

who films the iodine of a morning kiss,

or frames the tense love where a fugitive

carves the Christmas turkey.  I confess,

I am one of these men whose Stratocaster

is blue, with fitful dreams of Eliot and his

monocle as he argues on and on.

                        II

Dear Henry Kissinger of Poetry:

Thank you for finding better things to

write about. Like the long war dead

lying in the grasses, the photojournalists

evacuated in choppers, leaving the rest

to you.

A soundtrack must be written of the

salt mounds. On every corner,

a control box ticks, changing the

traffic lights to colors of the bluest

meaning, suggesting we drive on

seaward under lily-centered moons. 

But as for you who loves the conjecture

of the sun rising from the well,

not only do I endorse you,

but I will let you divide by zero

to make your case.  And, this is only a

friendly reminder: As you walk out the

automatic doors of the supermarket,

holding the wet receipt and the tulips in

cellophane, their yellow powder ready to

diffuse, please remember to hand them

like spring to the clasping fingers of

your lover.

                                 Robin Reda

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Ode to a girl of perfume facing stars                                         

Credit the river.  Glide, girl of current’s light. 

The way you did when honey dammed the Seine.

The sweeping amber wall that spun like turbine steam.

With xeroxed money you purchased wine.

Walked the arcs, small boats under beams,

beneath, the Paris that could be crossed there.

Girl of planets, insomniac in the parlor with a harp

playing Debussy to the summer-bluish night

of a lifted window.  Across hedges, the sweetness

through the dirt-thick screen. Syrup-flower of

jasmine’s scent in which I neck with you against the

golden metal of the harp frame.

Girl of ripples’ glint, who knows the fox who bore his cross,

whose birds are many, whose swan is on the pond in each ballet,

whose sugar water keeps the hummingbirds

glazing over tall and aerial, pollen-smelling shrubs.

You are an honest girl of water’s shimmer. 

I loved you in the storefront as you posed for clothes.

And used a rope to hold your most lyrical designer jeans.

You glazed the hummingbirds with each ballet that bore its fox.

Heavy sweet of jasmine is your neck whose harp is gold, whose

screen is black with many blooming nights.  Girl of lifted windows,

your summer Clair de lune is blueness of the parlor

where you cannot sleep.  Instead, you’re crossing Paris.

                                          Robin Reda

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To a girl of flowers, strays

I come with no pretense except the melted clocks

of dreams.  I have been thumb-printed

over and over, and always the result is the same: 

the iron hand that climbs builds

its undeniable music, its tones rumbling

that shake the tower. Girl of caravaners,

the open-endedness of my death how I sing.

You hear purring inside the cats.

Over the mountain, the adolescents’ dream will rise.

Out of dirty blankets they feel the boats of Greece. 

I took you to the ocean. We could smell the salt

and you made a point to tell me

how the hero passes under.  

I loved your featherbed on wooden floors. 

But then, I knew only what the tide had smoothed,

what abandoned on the pyrite grit of sand. 

O girl with the fortress of doves, this is my watch chain

of the opaque sleeper dreaming molten clocks,

the wooden beam that swings the heavy brass at noon,

your animals’ loneliness ticking in me still,

who has been thumb-printed over and over and

the result is always the same:  I am only the pigeons

flapping away from a passing bicycle, darting mid-flight

from the frigid resonance of the bell. 

                                                 Robin Reda

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At the Arboretum 

The koi glide in a

swell, where the

water is calm beyond

the veil of falls.

We hold fingers into

ripples to catch

the orange and

white. The smell of

bottlebrush pollen

is sweet yet hay-like on

the hanging air.

The cosmos stand purple

on their stems,

an aestivation 

crowning the powdery

yellow in their centers. 

I flick an ant off the

blanket’s fraying edge.

you said your grandma

bought it at Gimble’s

during the depression,

a floral print with a

black-rimmed hole on my

side where your grandpa

had fallen asleep smoking.

                            Robin Reda 

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Errant Post

Mostly it’s the beautiful accident from

which the somnolent child is freed, the

photosensitive wavelength that bombards

the retinas, even through tortoise Wayfarers. 

But also, it’s the toothbrush Kathy gave me. 

It stands on its heel on the red windowsill

of her kitchen. Its wet vibrations have just

cleansed the consonants from my mouth,

leaving me this myth of vowels to expel, 

my mouth hollow or dark like a giant shadow

on the moon.

But also, it’s the fact that we are left behind,

my razor on the sink, the shaving gel lost in the

pantry with the cans of fruit. I dream a mailbox

with a red flag.  It reads, “Brautigan” in faded

letters.  It’s huge like a Quonset hut, as if he

were planning on sending out a long manuscript or

expecting a big check. We have no mailbox, just

a rusted slot through which a phantom might slide

a note. Or like between the clumsy rocks at Stonehenge, 

something postmarked from the Pleiades. 

                                             Robin Reda

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Jitters

The whistle on the burner will be

crying in a second.  It threatens

with little gasps.  I kill the flame,

leave the bag to steep as I wander through

the front room.  I don’t know how

to read the leaves.  They will only turn

the water red.

Lisa thinks she’s pregnant –has since

we returned from Vegas.  But

we attend dance school just the same,

learning to Swing as if we are in Paris

in the ‘30s.  I look out the linen drape.

It is unusually gray for late April.

My lava lamp glows on the mantle,

promises with pink wax

that Chaos is contained within the glass.

I suddenly realize I’ve left my cup too long.

The tea will be dark and bitter.  I will

pour the honey which always starts out poignant,

then enters the cup and becomes undefined.

                                            Robin Reda

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