On the Move

Bursts of hail and heavy downpours,

resolute, gray, and dismal rain.

Shaggy pine trees overshadow guard rails.

I stumble on the road to nowhere

jammed with angry, hungry folks

seeking shelter from sheer boredom,

humming uplifting folk songs,

shoplifting a bit of happiness 

from the shelves of the rural stores.

Silver lettering reads LOVE

on the roof of a tumbledown house.

My world trembles around me,

I page through the fluffy ball of memories,

I invested too much in the writing to stop now.

Lonely and forsaken, 

I move from the floor to the sofa

swallowing salted sorrow,

typing the phone number,

a collection of digits.

It’s assigned a new area code since I lived there,

but those seven numbers, 

they are still the same,

exactly the same.

Such pain every time

to touch the buttons, 

listen to a pregnant pause,

hit the nail in the coffin of love,

destroying the sandcastle 

populated with crocodiles and cactuses

with the authority of a weathered writer.

Hitting the nail on my head,

deleting the dead seven numbers.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2018

AT&T Push-button telephone
from Wikipedia

The Senile Ghosts

The whiff of Pall Mall

floats across the room,

drifts in front of my eyes,

drawing a steep river bank and us 

skinny-dipping in shallow water.

The fragrant sketch revives

a hopeful evening.

Senile ghosts haven’t wised up

and crashed my Halloween party.

They thought they could change the world

but broke their wings in drunken binge

while skinny-dipping in shallow water.

The ghosts believe they run the world

because the moon agreed to swim along

in the river of missed opportunities

and misread observations,

hiding the ripples of wrinkles

below the silver rays.

The tops of maples and oaks

gleam orange and gold; 

the berserk ghosts dash down

the steep riverbank

like headless chickens.

With increasing alarm,

I open the doors and windows,

praying for a draft to carry away

the whiff of Pall Mall.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2019

Image courtesy of The Spectator

The Gloves

I am a frustrated compulsive shopper.

Without regard for the announced Christmas sale,

I buy a pile of colorful gloves to soothe myself.

Gray woolen gloves,

blue dress gloves,

green leather gloves,

red rubber gloves,

clear surgical gloves,

white wedding gloves,

and a couple of mittens.

I lost my gray gloves in my American history class, 

when I grasped that Cherokee has not always been a brand name,

but women and children sent away in winter with their bare hands.

I lost my blue dress gloves when my boyfriend married my best friend.

They honeymooned in Paris and adopted an abandoned child.

I lost my green leather gloves in a hospice

where my dying father told me that he didn’t love me.

I lost my red rubber gloves in my new boyfriend’s kitchen

when it became clear that he treasured me as a cook.

I lost my clear surgical gloves in the operating room 

when I decided to stop hurting dogs.

I kept my white wedding gloves 

because my granddaughter loves to play with them,

and I gave her the mittens to keep her hands warm

because this is the only thing 

I can do to make her happy on this cold day.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2018

ANTORINI luxury gloves,
from Wikimedia Commons

It Was a Good Year

It was a good year —

just a few broken dreams,

no broken bones,

no famine,

no nuclear war.

It was a good year!

My new friends are fun,

my old friends are alive.

I’m a year older

but 365 ways wiser.

I've replaced a few broken dreams

with a dozen new and whole.

I can do it because

I have no broken bones,

I am not starving,

nuclear war didn’t destroy me.

I can dream big again!

It was a good year —

just a few broken dreams,

no broken bones,

no famine,

no nuclear war.

It was a good year!

© Helen Kanevsky, 2018

New Year train on the Circle line of Moscow Metro
Photo by government of Moscow
from Wikimedia Commons

Water

Your first bath —

a midwife cleans you up.

You don't have fun.

Then come

the sprinkles of holy water in church,

the tepid water of the nursery,

the ardor of rain water,

the predatoriness of ocean water,

the ice water after you make love,

swallow fire or juggle clubs.

You drink that water in one gulp.

Motes of dust stuck to furniture,

your eyes are red,

but the tears dried up.

Left here alone for weeks on end

with waterlogged images

to ponder in thick gray clouds,

you play hide-and-seek

with memories of the March sky

in patches of meat and mustard,

with a carpet of bold spring flowers,

with a blue outline of mountains.

The fated assault of the time,

dark shadows around the eyes,

the hair unwashed and tattered,

promises written in water

form a puddle of bitter tears.

Your life is water under the bridge.

The last bath.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2018

Bridge over the South Yuba River ~ Nevada City, California
Photo by Kelly M. Grow, Calif. Dept. of Water Resources
from Wikimedia Commons 

Pegasus Dream

A wild Pegasus grazes

next to Star B Stables in Virginia,

ready to spread his lacy wings

and rise above the weepy clouds.

But the preverbal horse

relies on the words of a fickle poet

to make him fly.

If only there were just a Pegasus problem,

an idle poet could solve it.

If only there was just one lie,

a word could make it right —

to awake the dreamer,

to raise the dead.

The brilliance of words brings confusion —

they were mighty, now they are useless.

A peek at a stranger’s grocery list

tells me more than a hundred poems.

Pegasus glimpses the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

lusts after the weepy clouds.

But the pathetic horse cannot wing his way

without the words of the fickle poet.

On the wooden porch stands

an abandoned broken rocker.

Pegasus and poet left

to wring out a few more lines

from memories of the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

the weepy clouds.

The sunken, colorless eyes of Pegasus —

the defeat sprang from euphoria.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Four Muses and Pegasus on Parnassus
Painting by Caesar van Everdingen, c. 1650
The Hague, The Netherlands
from Wikimedia Commons

Revenge Play

In the creator’s brutal universe,

gentle exceptions seem abnormal.

I dwell on the fate of my departed friends,

live out their love affairs in my imagination,

bolt away when I hear their steps behind me —

the dead shouldn’t engage in my game.

My shiny hair is tied back in a ponytail,

theirs is unkempt and decayed.

They try to invent 

ways to be heard and revenged,

but I am uncommitted and detached,

now trying on their fates in my mental fitting room.

Nothing mysterious under the veneer of humans.

Prince Hamlet isn’t the only one

who speaks with his father’s ghost;

ghosts camp in my overheated head in the night,

complain, whine, and demand revenge.

I put a lot of stock in ghosts’ sermons,

but see no practical use for their revelations.

Burdening Hamlet with his pending problem,

using his son to get even with Claudius

makes the royal ghost an unreliable authority —

I renounce such a heritage.

The tide was in, the tide is out

on the shore at Elsinore.

We are all unavenged at the end.

Our sons are unburdened,

freed from our lament.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Prince Hamlet kills King Claudius
by Gustave Moreau
from Wikimedia Commons

Chance

Life is messy and irrational.

I make a plan, just to watch it fall apart.

So I concentrate on doable things,

sort out the dirtiness of real life

from the spotless world of my imagination,

even as these incompatible things

sow seeds of madness

in my burning, buzzing brain.

  

I try to distract myself

by looking at dancing birds,

I spend the day picnicking,

but cannot stop the seeds from sprouting.

Beautiful life and hope

are destroyed 

by a stroke of bad luck,

by lack of money,

or the cultural tide

crashing against the cliff face of reality.

I feel threatened by the power of my will

and take a break from struggle.

I listen to hit songs,

study my successful peers,

read a person’s character by his garb.

I dismiss words and smirks.

I let things pass.

Cultish servitude to the past is gone:

today I worship Chance.

I no longer mistake a coincidence

for self-conscious Providence.

I create order out of chaos,

make a superior plan

from the debris of salvaged ideas— 

and watch the new plan fall apart.

Chance is blind.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Waves from the Indian Ocean crash against the cliffs of Eagle Gorge,
Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia
Photo by Gypsy Denise
from Wikimedia Commons

The Passage

In agreement with nature,

children were born in parents’ beds

on the sperm-stained mattresses.

They farmed and hunted,

gathered around the fireplace

during long winter evenings,

looking through a box of old pictures,

reading out Grandpa’s longhand diaries.

They married neighbors,

started families in their twenties.

They took their last breath in the bed

where they took their first.

The Bible, goblins, and furniture

stayed undisturbed for centuries

under the same roof.

Baby boomers introduced a new routine,

being born in hospitals by C-section,

driven to nursing homes

to take their last breath,

emotionally crushed,

confused and upset,

caged in safe hospital beds,

not feeling special anymore

because of their high intelligence.

Their houses and furniture

are sold to young overachievers;

the yellowish pictures and longhand diaries

end up donated to secondhand stores.

The mournful goblins hang themselves in the attic

on rotten shoestrings.

The impassive Blue Ridge Mountains

overlook the young overachievers’ houses.

Lacking talent for idle chattering,

they have nothing to offer.

        © Helen Kanevsky, 2016

A Huntsman and Dogs by Winslow Homer
from the William L. Elkins Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons