I'd like to say it's just a case
of elevator vertigo, or
maybe it's the heat, but I
can't seem to medicate
the "me" out of myself.

Once I taught geckos to sing
in a small apartment in the mountains.
I had no fear of high places or lizards,
their tails rejuvenating themselves.
The clay was red there, too, and
I played on the "Lucky Strikes" softball team,
superstition a kind of prayer.

Now, 998 miles from home,
I draw spaces instead of objects,
shadows instead of the things themselves,
negatives of photographs.

I want to be the heaven I don't believe in.
I lie on the bed and stare
at the space between the microblinds,
the blink of light I imagine eternity to be
just before the darkness.

I do know this, if it exists
heaven is a circular place;
there are no doors, only windows
and if you fall testing your wings,
you grow a tail and try again.


Eulogy for O'Toole

Tomorrow we bury O'Toole
who is nothing to me, not really
and now past tense, too.
Related only by marriage,
my mother's second husband
he's passed on, just past, and
I think about what he'd say about it
ten years ago when it seemed
all his friends were dying
a funeral every week, and he'd go
and talk in a loud voice
about the poor-son-of- a-bitch,
get drunk in the guys honor.
This was before emphysema and oxygen,
before he burned his house down,
smoking, on his ratty couch,
crying his ex-Navy Seal tears
on the front page of the Beacon Journal
for everyone to see.

The picture today, in the obits is better
but still not good my mom says
a driver's license picture, he looks old.
I don't say that he was old,
that he was old when she married him
that she knew it; I just agree
to go to the funeral,
remembering a good funeral
second only to St. Patrick's Day
as one of O'Toole's favorite occasions.

As for the two of them,
the wedding day photo tells it all
His arm slung jauntily
over her shoulder, as if
she were just another GI in the jungle,
and her, head up, eyes closed,
looking down her nose in
a floral dress that screams:
This isn't going to work !!
his tie is crooked !
For God's sake she won't allow
ketchup bottles on the table !.
He's looking straight ahead.
He knows this is just another hitch
he has to wait out.

I don't ask her if she's going to
do the funeral home preparations.
She does that part-time
at the very home where he'll be shown.
It seems to strange to imagine her
bent over him, going on the way
I know she would, about his unkempt
nose hairs and wild white eyebrows,
holding his hand in hers one more time
and trimming the nails, talking to him,
gently, the way she did after the fire:
Don't worry 'Toolie;
We're almost done here.


.

Tiff Holland