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

Vote for Us by Sharing

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

Vote for Us by Sharing

To a girl of flowers, strays

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

Vote for Us by Sharing

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 

Vote for Us by Sharing

Jitters

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

Vote for Us by Sharing

Finding the Null Set

Finding the Null Set

Emptiness is the most peaceful feeling

and I lie beneath the oil painting of

abstract spines.  My door is closed and

the purple lily has started bending on

its stem.  My dresser bears a cheap Christmas

tin that holds change left on a latte or a can

of shaving gel.  When I roll coins,

there’s always a copper slug and a

peso that I don’t know what to do with.

For some reason, I can’t bring myself to

toss them.  My inheritance from my Grandfather

stands beside the tin, a plastic burgundy box with

cracked hinges containing a broken watch

from the ‘50s.  It was never actually

willed to me.  It was sitting in a drawer

and I thought to take it, use it for display.

It’s the only thing I got, while cousins ended

up with diamonds and real estate.  But

Nothingness is pleasant too.  The local oldies

station keeps the Doo-wop rolling and I can

hear the tears of Levi Stubbs, his back bent slightly

with burden.  I stare at a plaque from the school

where I worked as a janitor.  “10 Years Loyal Service”

I drift, my ears below old pillows, dreaming

a woman whose face is unperceivable,

Her posture is soft.  She does not look at me or speak.

This dream fades and I sink into unconsciousness,

the kind that comes from finally letting go.

                                             Robin Reda

“Finding the Null Set” was first published in Lynx Eye, Vol. 9, No.4, 2002, Scribblefest Literary Group 

Vote for Us by Sharing

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

Vote for Us by Sharing

Snow Blind –Beat Poems

Snow Blind

Is there nothing, not Ice as it

beholds itself? And herself in snow

who listens?  The place is barren. Air

which is silence and across the sterile

hill, the heavy sleeping frost. 

But few leaves, a maple one crumpled

then soggy from water left behind.

The wind is any misery, sun too weak

to light the glitter, yet distant pines in

twinkling snow.  And this, January sees. 

The jagged Ice, the long cold on junipers

from which the gin of basements ring.

And, January barren herself since birth of Snow,

weighted maple’s branches and made the mind

of daggers.  The cold glint of stars that shimmer

through the frozen oxygen.  Across the dead

sky you cried to on your exile from the womb.

                                                  Robin Reda

Vote for Us by Sharing

what lack of love has done

what lack of love has done 

in the beginning when step-crazed fans

swooned for gene krupa

there was merely an entropy of zeros

on which to lay cement

foundations for rat cages

your father was in the basement

loosening the leper’s wheel

a tear reached the sea

the rusted tubes had all gone peachy keen

and i just couldn’t stand the horror any more

the rat cage:  me in it splattering

the vermin dawn, ripping

twists on peppermint

(ever wonder why red stripes

swirl on candy canes?)

because blind glass-blowers swinging

to the beat, defamed gene krupa

and battered him into the null

set like so many raptured drummers

in a junkpile of zeros

then this girl turned in

a poem about how a pipe organ

somehow ended up inside an apple

the teacher asked the student to draw

it on the board but the student could not

leaving a blank 0 spinning

like the leper’s wheel

while your father, satisfied, climbed

the stairs –the nicest guy on the globe

folding his army knife, whistling

he went fishing, lips blowing sour

music like wind through rusty pipe

or the revolution of the whole moon

the tide, the puckering from

green apples or scattered flute-giggles

unmetered, no beats per measure

and infinity gets the count

hypotenuse:  gene krupa goes

barbaric, banging his unswung congas

mixed meter, xylophones, a triangle

the rats dashing from the relative safety

of the cage into the rhythm of crashing

cymbals like the spinning of the barbers’ posts

either that was one hell of an apple

or…

3:00 pm:  the blown-glass void teeters

zero falls, here in buena park

the newsboy shouts “EXTRA” –on the edge

of the santa monica pier someone has committed

an abomination of the human spirit.

                                             Robin Reda

First published in Cider Press Review, Vol.4/5, 2004, Cider Press

Vote for Us by Sharing

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

Vote for Us by Sharing