Is This Synesthesia?

Cassidy’s ears, skillfully lovely yet not quite of Earth,

Swivel like the most advanced satellite dishes

To hear the good ghosts that rustle in the night,

As if cloaked in fine-spun gold.

He sniffs the delicate delight of their healing perfume.

O he sees the benevolence of the thoughts of the good ghosts

That haunt our room and clumsily try to extend help to us

Through the bewildering knots and knots of dimensions

That distance us from these spirits reluctant to deceive.

He sniffs fear and love in the room like aromatic candles.

He hears and inhales good and evil

Though no evil comes from the fumbling ghosts, our friends,

Who haunt us and whom we haunt.

Cassidy attempts to instruct us all 

At least to read lips, seen or unseen, spirit or human.

But even for Cassidy this teaching is not easy,

He who hears, sees, smells so well

And always knows where float the glow and perfume

Of benevolence, in whatever world we are in or believe we are in.

He can hear and smell clouds in their joy swelling

To fill all skies.

He can hear their tenderness blossom like mountains.

He hears more modest clouds move through blueness as if they

Were simultaneously foam, boat, wave, and sail.

Even upon cessation of the rain,

Cassidy hears grass continue to swooningly sip

While worms shape alphabets through the moistened soil

In their invigorated wiggling.

Cassidy hears birds become alert with the knowledge

Of their fulfillment.

The muzzles of daffodils blare out for my cat

The rejoicing gold of their glow!

But Cassidy in quietude will hear dawn yawning

Like an abyss that blesses;

And he will always hear twilight just begin

To feel the sensitive swell and dip

Of the horizon.

He can hear me smile.

He sniffs my fingertips to get perfect knowledge of my heart.

He hears my footsteps approaching his goodness

Down the slightly painful miles of cement.

When I see him in the dignity of his duty

Peering at supposedly unpopulated air

And hearing salubrious sounds unheard by me

I know he is haunting the good-hearted

But imperfectly-skilled ghosts who are trying to help, trying to help,

And whom my admirable animal

Is trying to guide, trying to guide.        

© Stephen Margulies, 2015

Green-eyed Abyssinian
Photo by Petekurt
from Wikimedia Commons

ARTIST-MOTHER; JUNKYARD-FATHER: BOTH HEROES

My mother’s colors swarmed over the canvas in her basement studio while I watched intoxicated by the smell of turpentine and oil paint.  I swarmed and am still swarming in those slathered lavish hues; some, though, were the night behind the lightning.  When her huge cat Sansloy, scared by a dog as she cuddled him, bit her deeply in the arm, she took no revenge and her bed remained his comfort.  It shames me to say that I did not justly value her soiled white collar husband, my father.  Dazed and lonely in a family of artists, he decided to paint half of what we owned in gold color, to honor his wife, making a golden small domain.  Our concrete steps became gold; our bronze gods holding a clock became gold; chairs and tables often turned gold.  But after he died I realized he saved his children and wife from homelessness.  His finicky investments fed us.  I am ashamed.  He was a better man than I after all and merited his wife more than I.

And his junkyard!  His brief treasured part ownership! S crap!  Yet what the heart discarded or forgot confirmed me as an artist. I owe him that as well as shelter.  As if Stella and Rauschenberg and the Merzbau and Frank O’Hara had baptized me!

At the age of five I climbed over my father’s junkyard fence constructed like entangled steel claws.  In temporarily fearless fierce reverie, I voyaged through what seemed like all the haughty toys we could not afford, mountain ranges of squashed rainbow plastic or tin giddy gizmos that now bored wised-up wealthy children.  I wallowed in mazes, fondled ousted wheels, weapons, torsos, wings, their still exciting insulted spectrums. Encouraged, I hopped into actual condemned automobiles and thrust myself in this one instance through the space-time continuum far outdistancing in those saurian motorless cars the starship Enterprise.  In increasingly scratchy fact, the mutant and quarantined metal around me was for me an alluringly hulking perhaps unidentified dinosaur.  I began to get cut.  I tried to ask help from a nice alien, a “gilt” birdbath.  I levitated, swaying in the lap of armless cast iron garden statues.  I began to get dented.  I skimmed through gravel and into the air on bicycle frames.  I saw sprawling art books.  I tumbled face down into a volume of Aubrey Beardsley.  Unfairly sudden, a jungle of pipes like a pile of anacondas unjokingly and unjustifiably surrounded me.  My daze was dear to me but dangerous.  I strayed bleeding and weeping for an unfunny mile until I came upon a highway like Lake Victoria.  A cop got me.  The sun remained amiably lavish overhead, slathering me with easy gold.

My father had almost lost me.  But I found sharp art and his junk endowed me with the bedazzled and dazzling wound of poetry. In that junkyard was everything that evaded nothingness for awhile, cowering or lowering or posing bravely.  I found the tangle that reveals hard dream and plush but worn reality.  I measured trashed treasure. Merciful mother!  She pardoned the cat!  She pardoned my fine father, finally.  I still inhale her oils.  But has art pardoned me?  Are you justly valued?

© Stephen Margulies, 2014

Junkyard cat
Photo by Downtown gal
from Wikimedia Commons

Our Saviors

Animals save the world.

Animals uphold the world.

We kill the world.

We weigh it down.

We, pleased with ourselves,

Condescend to be kind to our pets

Whose salubrious, acrobatic, untiring silliness

Wisens us, cheers the sacred stone called Earth

And makes heavy Death forgetful.

Yes, the gabby globe is supported

On the back of an unboastful undying tortoise.

The worthy tortoise is supported

On the patient but unslavish

Castle-like back of a long-tusked elephant.

The long-tusked elephant is supported

By a blue never-harpooned whale.

The whale is supported

By a scholarly dragon.

Supporting these heroes

Is an untagged but inexplicably dependable cat.

She knows naught about size and weight.

She is a student of sleep

And experiments with play.

These healthy animals enjoy gamma rays

But they are not fanatics.

This may or may not be in our favor.

© Stephen Margulies, 2014

Cats, tortoise, and sea creatures
Painting by Jan van Kessel, senior
from Wikimedia Commons

Seven Adults Cheering on a Friday Afternoon in Israel

A kitten was dying on the hot sidewalk. 

She was grey and very soft. 

My friend and I were fair-skinned and female

Wandering an unfamiliar town 

Called Tsfat.

But 

This kitten. 

We dropped our purses and watched her drink 

Water from our bottle cap. 

The rabbi was old and very grey

Walking home on this almost-Sabbath

Sharp-quick steps on the stone 

But 

This kitten. 

All three of us watch her, our heads in a circle. 

Her ribs expand against her skin 

And collapse. The women are many 

And covered and grocery-laden

Prayer calls calling them home

But 

This kitten. 

Seven of us now in desperation 

Whisper sweet to her coaxingly. 

This little cat. A little life going too soon. 

Only a cat. Only a life going too soon. 

 And why, when wars and money and oil and honor 

Beleaguer us do we care about this soft, grey thing. 

Heat bears down and time ticks out 

But I’m not about to go away. 

The rabbi stands immoveable 

And the women stand transfixed. 

And the cat stands up

And walks.  

© Emily Brown, 2013

Kitten in Sibi Mali
Photo by Guaka
from Wikimedia Commons