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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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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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

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For Anne

For Anne

Peacocks have fled the arboretum and

wandered through the cull de sacs of

stuccoed homes. Just as your pretty foot

has stepped on a plot of green dycondra,

and your camisoles have blown across

the yards. Wait and see how the click

of the six-gun’s fetlock is intended for

the oily-blue bird, how moonwalks

can no longer be accomplished.

There was a time when your

small black shoes were not dusty,

but waiting in the foyer for a pony ride

to the Milky Way.

And the novel colors on the picture tube

boasted the fanned-out tail of the network’s

logo, caught by the silver rabbit ears

of the TV.

The first man on the moon was

in his mirrored bubble whose reflection

showed the video camera that

shot the broadcast as he stood there.

And then later, wasn’t it Phyllis Diller in

feathered stoles? And weren’t cowboys

shooting with revolvers at the sandstone

that revealed just glimpses of a hat’s

curved brim?

Wasn’t it lawnmowers on Saturday morning 

across from the arboretum, where the radiance  

of a thousand suns had burst into the sky?

And on your father’s feebleness? After all,

he stood there unshielded from the gamma rays,

pulling the motor’s rope over and over in the grass.

And where your sight was wavering

on your forgiveness of someone.

                                     Robin Reda

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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

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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

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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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Of Water

Of Water

my emotions in 20 moons

Morrow Bay is rising in the night.

Lapping of the most delicate fish

whose only fate is skeleton.

Transparent as spirits, they lift in up-wells

just modestly visible near the surface.

The rocks are cool, water-sculpted

in the shape of angels and all.

Yet, here is where my love has led:

The long matches for the hearth,

the diner sign that crackles through the blind. 

A vagrancy in which poems return

to the whistling of air

just as smoke must show its blue

and natural flow

or drama must seep into photos

in the air-tight pages of medical logs.

Item:   20 moons to each emotion, paddle

            raising the scales

            of electric fish.

Dear Skeleton Vague As Angels:

            Let your fins be wings and let your

wings be over words.

 Oh, Motel That Makes The Truck-Stop Chatter:

            My love tonight was in using

the cover of an American Scholar to start my fire. 

Item:    Chimney needs swept.

Item:    Trucker’s gratuity greater than the

            cover price of journals.

Item:    Drowned fire –chimneysweep

            soaks drama into a photo of 20 moons.

                                            Robin Reda

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Before the Longest Cloud

Before the Longest Cloud

The clowns have gone psychotic, tying

themselves to the sides of elephants,

smoking. –except the one like Emmett Kelly. 

He shaves closely before daubing on a day’s

growth. He sweeps in circles as the spotlight

illuminates old fears. This circus

is on the grass on the edge of Malibu.

The ocean’s curvature creates a rightful dusk. 

But men with 50 foot pant legs sway on metal

stilts– almost robots yet, goofy as an old cartoon. 

The tallest one bounces as if to see what’s on

the other side of the sea’s horizon. And

we, the regular people, have gathered in these

staggered bleachers as if we are about to receive

an answer.

                        Robin Reda

First published, CiderPress Review, Vol 6, 2005, Cider Press  

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