Bamboo and Oak

It was meant one day as his coffin,
this box of hewn oak, sanded and oiled
til it gleamed like the moon sailing high
off a black satin ocean.

He liked to plan ahead--
liked the feel of wood, smooth as a woman's
body would feel under his someday,
he once told me.

An odd one, this brother of mine,
his room jammed with time lines and lists
neatly writ on yellow lined paper:
marry at age 22
baby at age 24
house at age 26
company president by age 35

He never did come back from Vietman.
A POW, one witness said.
His time lines drifted by, mark
by mark, till, one day
I inherited the box.

Now, nights when I sense ghosts stalk my room,
I open the lid, climb in,
press cool wood against sweaty back,
imagine him, lying the same, under green,
skin taut across bone, skeletal,
scratching 'death' on his bamboo timeline.

Getting Routered

My tech buddy comes over today to put in a router so that my husband's machine and mine will be independent. After having three blue screens of death lately (I really do hate that term), it means both won't die and I'll have a backup.

I met Lloyd on the Windows Forum around four years ago when I was having horrid problems with a previous machine and had gone through two techs who knew nothing. At the time, he was co-host on the Forum and it turned out he lived about a half hour from me. Finally, when the last tech was telling me that I needed a new hard drive , with no evidence of failure, Lloyd posted that I was to do nothing. He was coming to look at the machine. He later told me that his friends told him he was crazy. I could be a mass murderer. My friends told me the same thing:-) Well, I'm still alive and so is he and he's been a good bud over these years. He helps me with puter stuff and my husband fixes his A/C. So...some internet connections DO turn out well. Here's to you, sotdr! You're great!

Pris

That Old Gang of Mine

The aging hippie couple
at the end of my block
stack sofa, chairs, bookcases
and one table on their lawn;
set a bonfire. Their way
of making a statement
about ownership, they claim,
when the cops rush up.

They grow weed among their
flowering bottlebrush shrubs,
carry brownies packed with
their wares to the sad old lady
across the street.

She dances until midnight
in a red beaded dress, skirt swirling-
a redbird in flight. The neighborhood
dogs howl under her windowsill,
her four-legged choir of fresh lovers.
The other ones lie six feet under
in long ago graves, for now, forgotten.

Pris Campbell
(c)2005

(I've written the below artist for permission to use her artwork on my website with this poem. If she declines, it'll be removed here, as well. In the meantime, enjoy the work of a gifted artist)

Autumn by Laura DiNello.
copyrighted

Her website is HERE

Vigil

By Amy Falstrom
copyrighted

Another painting I love. View this and others, found at The 2004 International Symbolists Art Show

After-birth

Told she would die of
this lump growing in
side her--
go karmic
go spirit
go angels singing
from the realms of glory--
she buys a low
cut red shimmy shammy dress,
seduces the Jamaican lawn boy,
mails her husband's mistress
faked records;

Mr. Jonas: herpes advanced stage!!
Oh, so official.

She withdraws their savings in ten
dollar bills, spends weeks
hiding each bill separately
in the gardenias
the A/c duct
under the carpets
inside every bra, dress, shoe and book
she still owns.

The lump,
this lump, now
her baby
come full term,
implodes,
a whoooooosh
of after
birth taking her with it,
feet first, flying
away from this strict
overplushed house
away from her faux-porcelain
mouthed husband,
only
that wrinkled
hand-clenched
desperate red dress
marking her shrunken
sad space on the bed.


Pris Campbell
©2005

The Wait

Girl On The Shore by Munch
Courtesy of the old Art Magick site






(I'm reworking S1 and it's still not there, so you're seeing a poem in progress)



Tom Hanks finds Meg Ryan-
Empire State building
amd I think of when you said,
'we're magic', babe.
Billy Bob Thornton & Hallie Berrie-
sharing ice cream on the steps
and our old churn, stored in the cellar,
comes to mind.

Movies reel you back to me,
piece by piece. I close my eyes:
You/Richard Gere, kissing
me/Julia Robert appears.

You are the squeak in the leaf
I roll between my fingers each Spring,
the halo of light lingering when
I switch off my lamp, come midnight.
You are the sweat in my gown
and the silence between raindrops
on that beach where you stripped
off my suit and once took me, hard.

Any day now, you will surely
knock at my door and,
kissing my cupped hand,
say, she didn't matter, love;
she never mattered at all.


Pris Campbell
(c)2005

Red Boat With Blue Sails by Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon has been among my favorite artists since I first saw one of his paintings in the Art Institute in Washington, D.C. in the seventies. I simply couldn't walk away from it. Stood there, as if my feet were glued to the floor. I later received a book of his work as a gift from a friend who went with me that day and discovered a whole new world of art. Of course, the subject in this one is close to my heart.

To see a huge collection of his work, click HERE

After the dance is over...

This shot was taken about four weeks after my six month boat trip ended in Florida in 1978. My back had finally buckled under the physical stress of handling a 22 foot sailboat for six months in all sorts of sea conditions and weather. Not yet having a new homebase, I returned to stay with my parents in Pageland, the first time I'd depended on any serious help from them since I finished college.

I eventually ended up going back to Florida with the man I'd been with in the Boston commune and boat, but this respite, this valued time with my parents and aunt in my hometown is one I'll always look back on with happiness. Good Southern cooking again, rest and morning walks for my back, then Christmas with cousins coming to town for the holidays. Here, I'm at the edge of the pecan grove behind my parents' home, a place where I loved to wander out to in the evening and watch the sun slowly drop behind those bare limbs. God, I still miss going home so much!

Queen of the Nile

Princess Vega by Claudine Helmuth
copyrighted and used with permission


On my horizon the sun releases twilight,
as the clock eases past midnight on your
side of the world

You tell me you want to make love by the Nile,
that river snake that slithers silently
from Africa, through your beloved Egypt,
into the waiting Mediterranean sea.

You will lift my gown of a hundred stars,
ease me onto your spread tunic, raise
my legs high to your shoulders, fill
my hungry spaces, as the night sky watches
and the Sphinx purrs lazily
across the dark empty sand.

Anthony and Cleopatra-
center stage once again.

~
A poem floats from my head,
disturbs the blue jay asleep in the elm,
slips through the window next door,
sending an elderly couple running
with surprised haste to a bed unshared
these past twenty years.

My body tingles and I know
you dream of me now, just as
I will dream of you in my own turn,
waking late, soaked in my own sweat
and longings, my gown tossed,
and one star still pressed
to the center of my forehead.


Pris Campbell
©2003

Published in The Women of the Web Anthology 2005

This poem also took second place in the Poetry Board League Competition, May 2003, judged by Steven Mueske, editor of The Burning Word.

Contemplations

(this is a poem I wrote about a year ago)


I once imagined it would be you,
dancing between my thighs
during the days when I first
contemplated my mortality.

What else to think of a man
who brought me glass slippers,
and plaited my hair with sunlight
before spilling promises
as easily as cheap wine
in a brothel?

I no longer wait for hands
now repelled by bared nipples,
a tongue reluctant to explore
moist spaces, a mouth
gone mute to words about love.

We have declined into
silence, my body tumbled
to illness- trapped, with you,
here among the cinders.

Light has been sucked into
the hole where once there was us
and I mark off these charred days
with red on my calendar.

Will I escape you, I wonder;
flee to my pumpkin
before the clock strikes twelve?

Answers elude, but
when gravediggers
line up with shovels
and women perfume my feet
with sage, should one soul
bend and softly inquire
about life's greatest
disappointment, I'll say,

you, dear,
it was you.

Mama said there'd be days like this...

I'm trying to get my perspective back in the wake of yet another infection. I'm so frigging dizzy from the antibiotic this morning I can't see straight.

I NEED to find peace, but it's not gonna come from outside of me. That whirlwind is going to keep right on trying to knock me down. I'm climbing into the calm center of the tornado. I'm my own mood ring. What would Buddha do? What would Jesus do? What would Mohammed do? What would Carl Perkins do?

A poem I wrote in 2003 showed up on my website webtracker this morning...

Booted

Over the edge and fed up,
I bludgeoned him with my boots--
the same ones that walked me
to Woodstock
then sat glass-encased
with the scent of weed and crushed daisies, his

screams now embedded
with Hendrix howls
into my shrine

Pris

All Dressed Up

The photo in this haiga is the official class photo of one of my mother's first grade classes during the Depression era, taken well before I was born (as a surprise). This and other photos she kept rend my heart. Many of these children only had one pair of shoes, which they saved for winter (for as long as they fit) and stuffed them with paper or cloth, the soles were so thin and filled with holes.

Many children came to school with no breakfast in them and carrying no lunch. Mother tried to bring food to share with the poorest of the group, but my parents were also paying rent and buying some food for my paternal grandparents. My grandfather, first farmer,then a master carpenter, had cut off all of the fingers on one hand in an accident and could then only get occasional rough carpentry jobs, since one handed carpenters weren't in demand in days when ANY job was hard to find.

My father, born into a poor farming family to uneducated parents, had planned to get his Ph.D. in Chemistry. The Depression stopped that dream for him, too. He had worked his way through school to his Masters and there also were no part-time jobs for college students, when grown men with families needed work. He was lucky enough to be hired on as teacher at Richburg, South Carolina, and the next year be promoted to Principal. As Principal, he hired a beautful young first grade teacher, one who had been voted 'Most Attractive' in her senior college class and had enough sense to marry her at the end of that first year.

The Depression changed many lives. It destroyed my father's brother, who had made it through college at the time. His attitude was different from my father's, who always tried to make the best of a situation and not dream about what might have been. My uncle found small jobs here and there before he eventually turned to drink, dying when I was still a teenager from liver problems caused by it. He lived with my grandparents and so was supported thus by my father, too.

I learned a lot about endurance from my parents. My mother lost both parents by the time she was 18. In years when most women married as their security, my mother also finished college and made a career for herself, becoming the most loved first grade teacher in the small town of Pageland, where we settled for the duration, my father now Superindendent, when I was three years old.

And that's today's blog.

Poets to Know

Google the name, Carter Monroe. A North Carolina poet, his writing sings! Click HERE to read three of his poems published in Thunder Sandwich.

For an excellent interview of Carter by Tim Peeler, read this issue of THUNDER SANDWICH.

At least once a month, I plan to bring attention to a poet I like, via photo (if I have one) and a link to his or her website or poems online.

Pris

Morning Mirror