Randall - About Little Charlie Lindbergh and Other Poems

About Little Charlie Lindbergh and other poems 2014 by Wings Press, for Margaret Randall. Cover photograph, stone sculpture (theatre mask) from the amphitheatre at Myra, Lycia (modern Turkey) 2014 by Margaret Randall Interior vignette drawings by Barbara Byers. First Wings Press Edition ISBN: 978-1-60940-403-1 (paperback original) Ebooks: ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-404-8 Kindle/mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-60940-405-5 Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-406-2 Wings Press 627 E. Guenther San Antonio, Texas 78210 Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805 On-line catalogue and ordering:www.wingspress.com All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Randall, Margaret, 1936 [Poems. Selections] About little Charlie Lindbergh and other poems / Margaret Randall. pages ; cm ISBN 978-1-60940-403-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-404-8 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-405-5 (mobipocket ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-406-2 (pdf ebook) 1. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-404-8 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-405-5 (mobipocket ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-406-2 (pdf ebook) 1.

Poetry -- American -- Historical analysis. I. Title. PS3535.A56277A6 2014 811.54--dc23 2014007529

This book is for my partner Barbara,
my children Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana,
and my grandchildren La Margarita, Martn, Daniel,
Richi, Sebastin, Juan, Luis, Mariana, Eli and Tolo.
A legacy in words.Because cosmic cyclical time finds it origins in the end and its end in the beginning, the ancient formula of the Andean Aymara is the future to be found in the past. This concept of time and existence is so powerful that their verbs have no future tense. Stfano Varese What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Muriel Rukeyser Nineteen-thirty-six. I hurried as always but was late.

Eight centuries or ten thousand years, my small story fixed to my back. Food came weighed and wrapped, shelter engorged as surplus. My own, my own, my own was a mantra I could sing in any season. I could be who I was and also anyone else. I was late and also much too early, came to justice before its time. Unprepared to receive me, its rough grasp hurt my hand, embedded its promises in my flesh.

Juggling gender I was early and also late. Juggling children, service, my explosion of words on stone, parchment, or floating cyber cloud. Only poetry and love met me where we laughed. After so many false starts they came in whole and sure before the finish line. My hand fit the ancient print, a radius of living settled on my shoulders. I am lunar standstill now, calendar of hope.

It is 2014, and I discover I am perfectly on time. Soon I will disappear together with all my kind, and the earth with its synchronized clock will wake some blue-green morning its rhythms safe for a while.

Irony and unassuming wit paint my everyday mask. A question mark where the mouth should be adorns another. A mask of kindness always works when promise comes up ominous. I have fashioned these masks through a lifetime of fear and certainty, a step back for every two steps forward.

I cannot remember when the last mask dissolved in a moment of blinding silence. Touching raw skin still surprises.

We wanted to make the world a better place but everyone lied, fought power with humble flesh, blood, brilliance, and the luck of the innocent. The enemys lies assaulted us, their language diminished our numbers, turned us against one another, touched lovers, confused our sense of who we were and why. And we lied about them, claimed they were drug dealers and murderers, all their food poisoned, all their streets unsafe. Then we lied about our own, sowed serious doubt, set fatal traps.

Of course we lied to the CIA and others who tortured us, but also to our parents, children, and those who came to us for truth. We lied by omission, convinced we must reveal no contradiction. The real story could only benefit those who would destroy the dream, who wanted us dead. Accounts to be settled later. We lied to protect our own and then to justify not protecting our own. We lied on a need to know basis, parroted our leaders even when they pretended genocide away.

We failed to question his disappearance, 100 knife-wounds in her body, followed our leaders who lied to us, then lied to ourselves: the pain that changed our molecules. Until later turned out to be the promise we could not keep, a tired ghost destined to wander hollow-eyed: the lie that would come back to haunt a sacrifice too big to name.

Two drank from this vessels duel spouts ten thousand seasons past. Lovers? Accused and accuser? Mother and child? Small desert spiral might have signed a spring or waterhole or marked a supernova sighting. Axe handle slept in the Olduvai Gorge until Leaky lifted it from sand. Bronze Minoan bull startles time as the small human figure leaps again and again between its horns.

Iraqi clay tablet offers its story of bureaucracy and beer while the great Rosetta Stone transforms Egyptian tax concessions into verse, tedious and thrilling simultaneously. On a silver goblet hammered in Palestine before the Christian doom men and adolescent boys come together in sexual ecstasy. Pornography, mentoring or simply love? An Olmec mask floats at the edge of dream, its convex shape still warm from the press of ancestral flesh, faintly pocked and scarred by la cultura madre. Twenty-first century technology lifts a ceramic fingerprint left six thousand years before. Teeth that cleaned a husk of kernels deep in the Escalante molder now, their energy spent. These things that are more than things are messages waiting for us to turn and see, objects and places witnessing our need to know how we descended from the trees.

This spiral incised on a rock wall, ancient feet in the Wadi Rum and a pair with six toes each staring back from deep in Utahs canyons.

Clay, terracotta, bronze, papyrus, or still-pungent gum of Egyptian craft ask questions of alabaster in a Saharan cave. Each carefully formed letter or glyph clothes itself in come-on layers, begs discovery or cherishes anonymity. Courage alone is translation.

He sent his water boy to spin the evidence: weapons of mass destruction aimed at us. When no WMD were found, he said: Not sorry. The worlds a better place.

Judged necessary sacrifice; 4,486 US soldiers dead. A million Iraqis: collateral damage after all. They used to ask: What were you wearing? Now they declare Boys will be boys. Do animals think? Do the disappearing glaciers mean anything at all? Is up finally down? Five years out of office, for the first time the bully president gains a positive image. They say we always like our presidents more when theyre no longer president. Its all about the way they grab our words and run, the end zone solidly in sight.

At this hour of winter north my country uncurls from sleep.

She moves in and out of a dream where the Southern Cross plays close to the horizon. That configuration of stars caresses her thighs while keeping close their fading light. My country is grumpy, reluctant to greet another day. Storms assail one arthritic shoulder, monster storms mythic before the moment of catastrophe. Purposefully garbled language screeches in her ears. She tries to repel the din, wipe rheumy sorrow from the corners of her eyes, lure memory and banish the ghosts that linger in her stiffened joints.

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