FRIENDS IN DREAMS
The pond flattered the foliage,
and our reflections
trembled at the rim,
as if showing
we were souls
in skin that would fall
from us like these leaves
this autumn.
We no longer breathed
between sand and sky—
we were with friends in dreams.
A kiss disappeared
in the mist near her face,
my palm passed
through his outstretched hand.
One turned the tarot deck,
another walked on his knees
down the center aisle
of the Church of the Typical Inhabitant
and at the rail
lit the wick of a burned-down vow.
in this eternal animation
among friends in dreams,
when the best of them,
pierced by a diagnosis,
called from an office
outside my reverie
with the news
and the need
to leave the world
of make-believe,
asking that I take him home.
And there he was,
at the waiting room
window,
staring into the sheer
sunlit maze
of streets and avenues
that ended here.
==========================
THE SECOND OLGA
My grandmother had eight children,
one of them twice.
The first Olga lived
a mere month,
succeeded by my mother,
the second Olga,
dragged from childhood
each Sunday
to face her fate—
a stone
at Calvary Cemetery
carved with her name.
She treated the maze of graves
as a game, a way
of dealing with the world
that ended
only when she rested
next to her sister.
A lifetime of wishing
the rules clear:
winners and losers apart,
the dead and the living
unmistakably divided
into horizontal
versus vertical shapes.
And gender—
a simple matter
of pink or blue
unlike the tangled impulses
that sparked
her fiery nature as a girl
when she spun
a vicious
cat’s eye marble
off her thumb,
and held her own
in a knife-flinging game
of five-finger fillet.
Street play gave way
to checkers, chess,
crosswords and acrostics,
extending later
to her irrepressible accounting
as a householder
of each spent cent:
TV tubes, sauterne,
sugar cubes and soap.
Her diary a ledger
of lifeless figures,
no narrative,
no spilled memories,
everything measured,
everything contained,
and in the back
of the book,
a floridly engraved
Irish Sweepstakes receipt,
offering reincarnation,
a change of luck,
and the hope against hope
against hope
of being born again.
======================================
PRAYER AT THE MASKED BALL
Be my god,
if you don’t mind
being asked.
And if you don’t mind
being asked
to dance
at this masked ball,
allow me
to introduce myself—
I’ve worn this face
since birth,
and now I want
it off.
I need a god
to remake me,
not in his image,
but in the shape
of boys
I ached to be:
the cresting
wave-like pompadour
of Johnny Villar,
Terence Kelly’s
stiff upper lip,
the name alone
of Artie Robb.
If you do
become my god,
let the chandelier’s
refracted constellations
strut across
each dancer’s mask,
those romantic glances
of cut crystal
giving us
our best chance
of living life
as someone else.
Replace my skin
with a pelt
from smelted ore—
I’m tired
of flinching
from a score
of imagined hurts.
You always were
and always will be,
you have an infinite future
and a past as long—
so, as you glide across
this ballroom floor,
lift your disguise
and show me who you are.
I’m not asking you
to be the god
of a saint,
just of a minor sinner.
And really, who have I ever hurt?
(Yes, but long ago.)
Be my god
and let me recall
the good days
in our home,
not the drama of gin
before dinner
and brandy later,
where hour after hour,
the bear
went over the mountain
only to find
another mountain.
I don’t need a large part
of you,
just that corner
that loves puns,
a kind of school-crossing
god,
the jester
who invented sex,
the magician
who pulls a man
out of a boy
and a new man
out of him.
My god! Good god! God forbid!
God asked to damn
everything on earth—
the lost ring, shut store,
stripped screw
and missing oar,
all who walk
on two legs,
four,
with tail or without,
employ wings,
slide on stomachs,
swim.
God asked to bless
everything we eat
and both sides
of warring nation-beasts.
God,
on whose knee
I will sit in heaven,
please be my god
before the certain curtain call.
I know
I’ve created you,
and I know
it’s the other way around,
but since these are only
pleas on a page
don’t punish me
too harshly
for being,
in a manner of speaking,
your god.
I made you
to remake me
and then
take me
to someone
who will love me,
if it’s possible
to love a man
in a mask
who asks god
to dance
at the masked ball.
===============================
THE HEART HAS REASONS
And I wrote those reasons
on the ruled grid
of an index card
to preserve the moment, Madam,
when the panels of the hotel
elevator closed,
leaving just us.
A sigh and a kiss
did nicely, Lady,
but when the doors
opened again,
you were again nowhere
near, and now
the file card’s lost too,
with its logical
numerical slate.
I’ve misplaced this and that
over the years, Dear,
but the things I miss most, Miss,
are listed on that card.
========================
THE BLUE SEA MOTEL
The bench by the entrance
to the Blue Sea Motel
is where I fell for you again
after so many seasons
building castles
in the sand,
men out of snow
and raising countless
toasts at midnight
in a garden
of ice figures
carved to life
in the old year
and disappearing
hours later
in the new.
Sunrise above the neon sign
seemed a fitting
but unnecessary monstrance —
I was already praying
I wouldn’t lose
my place
among the other placeholders
in your heart.
The splintered bench
seemed the only
steady thing
along that string of doors
unlocked by different hands
with the same key.
The Blue Sea faced nothing
even slightly aquatic
just waves
of warm asphalt
that shimmered
like a mirage
to those looking
at the past
and calling that split-second
of hope
the future.
john skoyles 