After the Party

After the Party 

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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Driving Home from the Phil

Driving Home from the Phil 

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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In Memory of a Chocolate Osprey

In Memory of a Chocolate Osprey

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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To he who has begotten a pollen-fall

To he who has begotten a pollen-fall

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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To he who has begotten a pollen-fall

To he who has begotten a pollen-fall

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

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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At the Arboretum

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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Loving Heather

Loving Heather

Sordid girl,

these thousand peaches love,

blow the winter hail,

put music away as a beating

finger. 

I will

kiss your music’s swaying

in the whisper of

the garden. Turn lines

within you like blood,

lather the need, trudge

the milk that sours my lust. 

assonance in your voice, lilac,

as the scent of sonnets’

vines expelled

But to elaborate the mist 

you offer me 

stanzas of a villanelle. 

alliterative as pear trees,

singing mad that swim frantically

beneath the palate.

Sordid girl,

these thousand peaches love,

I kiss you

in the longest vowel,

refrain that the jasper oil

from your skin sings.–runs down you

like tears.

                                     Robin Reda

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Where You Are –Contemporaray Poetry

Where you are 

Something about the feeling

of being suddenly complete,

the last thing Heather said and dragged

her bow through puddles of dusk,

the dank melody that answered Venus

with reflections of bone. To candles

she played the night, moaning arc

across an open string, the rich wood

asking rosin which way to oscillate–

undecidedly.

She played the orange slag

dumped into the dead river.

Played the steam rising off the banks,

lifting until it barely

fogged the stars.

And then there was the moon

that couldn’t turn the night around,

the sirens whose loudest squelch couldn’t

suffocate disaster and you teetering

between certitude and confession.

You are–

the revolving doors of the Harmony Arms,

the pure math of melody,

and then –the marginal equation.

You are in the shadow. I find you

shrugging-off your stoic grief that

Shostakovich saw-cut the cello.

Your cradle;  the cup in which you lie,

window-walking downtown,

hair-blown in the brisk Melrose flurry,

wearing last night like a snood.

                                         Robin Reda

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Tough pill

Tough pill

White threads in the holes of my Levis cluster,

resting in the dryer. It is the marginal order,

the way the worn memory exists.  

In sleep, I almost smell the oils in your hair,

scent of a girl hidden in imaginary numbers. 

Couldn’t we have danced the bones to marble? 

Or taken passionate the wine on our threadbare knees?

—the white fiber that bunches up when the

blue weave is gone and we know it? 

I agree with you, Heather.  I know the denim has

been washed from the orbit of the drum. 

Not:  Bleach-out the pink in your blouse.

But:  The aspirin chalk. Erosion in the tumbler. 

See these backlit rows of elevator buttons? 

How the integers start with 1?  Climb linear to the variable P?

I cannot find the function of P.  No parabola.

No solution.  Yet the rise and run still soaring into Undefined. 

The only cotton thread still left is Moon which

mocks the virtue I didn’t want in the first place.

My neurons errant fire.  Eyelids twitching flash of you. Then:

finality like the turned Tarot. Lying primal in your

bleached Calvin Kleins . You the first lunar entry module

landing in the camera’s lens.  As I draw back your

hair of scented oils –Girl to where clowns come down

in you and fade like the smell of rain.

                                  Robin Reda

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