Make every day a beautiful day.
Eye on Life Magazine is a Lifestyle and Literary Magazine. Enjoy articles on gardening, kitchen cooking, poetry, vintage decor, and more.
You, the first from our hearth to leave. Speak.
We pause as your disconcerting silences end. Our
presence counts, involved, enthused as we listen
to your crackling reverences and edgy implications
knowing, in our own unfolding, we shall soon follow
The small room seems deserted
With only a dim night lamp
Waiting for a sleepless mind
A mussy narrow bed
Sheets stained with aching nights
Of a solitary lifestyle
Who would choose this ill-lit room?
Is this a sudden awareness that...
I?
I have tried to live here?
The light bulb pops, softly hisses,
And the room is all darkness
Carefully, I walk away.
Every month or so
on a Sunday afternoon
I skip the football game
and get in my truck
and drive out from the city
into farm country
to visit Miss Carol
and get my hands
on her plump dumplings.
Biggest I've ever seen.
Best I've ever had,
terrific with her
legs and thighs.
When she lays out
her chicken dinner
on that white tablecloth
I start drooling before
I even get a hand on it.
A farm girl, she says
she's never met
a man like me
so nuts am I
about her dumplings.
Usually, she says,
men like breast meat,
when it's moist,
and I allow how I
like that as well
but not as much
as her plump dumplings
on a Sunday afternoon
and her pluperfect
legs and thighs.
Sometimes like butterflies,
words land on my ear
and sit there
wings idling till
with straight pins
I attach them
to a page
without disturbing
the dust on their wings.
I watch them and then
name them before
I release them to soar
on a zephyr as if
they were my creation.
What a fool I am.
Some old wounds
can never be sutured
and email is always
the wrong needle to try.
So is the phone.
Fly to your daughter.
Tell her thirty years later
it's time to end the war
between two Koreas.
You're sorry you didn't attend
the wedding she never had.
It's not her fault she looked
so much like her mother.
That was another war
death would end.
The streets are clear,
Gramps admits,
but the intersections
are a problem.
The intersections
of his knees and hips
scream about the years
they've had to tote
the silo of his torso.
His joyful pastor
every Sunday screams,
"The End is Near!"
and Gramps agrees
although he prays
a diet might delay it.
Is that lava or simply mud
dripping from the cheeks
of this old woman asking me
why this library has no books.
I ask her where she's been
for the last 2000 years.
Under a rock? In some cave?
After all, the year is 4013
and now the only book extant
is the Bible and the only copy
of the Bible is in Rome where
a few monks older than she is
sit in catacombs all day
copying pages of it
onto yellow foolscap, hoping
to create another Bible
no one will read, as was the case,
I'm told, when dusty Bibles
were in almost every home
and computers were a luxury.
But then I soften up because
I can see this woman was born
without a cell phone in her ear.
I tell her if she wants to read
something wonderful online,
as soon as a computer comes free
I'll call her even though she has
no cell phone in her ear.
First, however, she must show
a number, not a name,
tattooed above her navel,
the only form of identification
accepted in America in 4013.
It's a 50th anniversary dinner
for Bernie and Blanche at the Elk's Hall.
After dessert Blanche grabs the mike
and primes the crowd by announcing,
"Fifty year's we've been married
and Bernie's never had a sorry day."
Then Bernie grabs the mike and says
"The nights have been wonderful, too.
Despite her orthopedic shoes, Blanche
still has pistons in her haunches."
In fact, after all these years, Bernie has
but one complaint: Blanche never
gets to the point in any conversation.
It's up to Bernie to decipher the code.
Early every morning Blanche and Bernie
sit in their recliners and sip coffee.
Blanche stares into space and then
jots down on a legal pad everything
Bernie must do before their lovely
Victorian house falls down.
Bernie in the meantime reads
the obituaries with one eye
and watches Blanche with the other
and waits for her head to rear back,
a mule ready to bray a prologue
Chaucer would envy.
Many times Bernie has asked Blanche
to give him the bottom line first.
"Tell me up front what you want me to do
and then fill in the details," he tells her.
But with no bottom line in any conversation,
Blanche makes Bernie feel as though
a python is winding around his chest.
"I know what the python wants,"
Bernie says, "and he'll be quicker."
After 50 years of marriage,
Bernie says meandering by Blanche
in conversation is a small complaint.
He'll never have a sorry day as long as
Blanche has pistons in her haunches
because every now and then,
despite stenosis of the spine,
Bernie likes to bounce off the ceiling.
That bounce, he says, is why
he married Blanche in the first place.
He's a chef today but Raj Patel
was once a swami in another life
and a mongoose twice
in other lives as well.
All this occurred in Bangalore
before he came to Chicago,
he tells customers while bringing
cups of foaming Indian tea
and bowls of mango ice cream
to tables in his small cafe,
a steamy oasis on this
freezing Christmas Day.
"Drink up," he says.
"No charge for tea
on Christmas Day."
His regulars come to pay
homage to his chicken curry
as well as to his revelations
about the lives he's lived,
one life after another,
over many centuries.
Every time he dies, Raj says,
he's swept right back
in another guise and he'll
keep coming back, he says,
until he gets life right.
"Every man comes back
until he gets life right.
There is no other way."
Having been a mongoose twice,
and having killed a cobra,
Raj Patel prays every night
that he'll come back
the next time as a sparrow
because sparrows always
have enough to eat, he says.
"They fly around, copulate
feed their young and never die,
as far as I can tell.
Have you ever seen a sparrow
rotting in the street?
I have not but I'll keep looking."
Raj Patel says he'll believe
sparrows live forever until
he finds a fallen sparrow
somewhere in the street.
"Prove me wrong," he says.
"Bring me a fallen sparrow
and you will feast like a sultan
on chicken curry, basmati rice,
mango ice cream and chai tea,
everything absolutely free!
McDonald's will never offer
a deal as good as that!"
There are peeps
from the wren house
high in the poplar
as the sun peeks
over the roses.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
Perhaps I hear altar boys
reciting their prayers
at the foot of the altar
at the start of a Latin Mass
decades ago in a church
silent now for years.
Whether it's peeps
or prayers I'm not certain
until I see the cat
hunkered like a tank
under the poplar, hoping
to receive communion.
Photo by Carol Bales
The Frenchwoman in lace
The one you dream about
when you glance down at your fat wife’s thighs
bulging out of her grandma panties
then look away.
I am a Blueblood of women.
A Goddess who holds her sisters by the hand
And runs in circles chanting beneath the Full Moon.
I make magic for your wife, so she does not live in poverty
While you lust after me in silence.
It's easier for men
these days, Grandpa says,
once they understand
there are two kinds
of women, not just one
as was the case
when he was young.
Grandpa says today a man
can choose between a woman
who wants to go to dinner first
and one who wants to go after.
When he was young, Grandpa says
a woman's preference regarding dinner,
now or after, wasn't a factor.
Back then, Grandpa says,
women were all the same,
as far as he can recollect.
They required a wedding first.
As Grandma told Grandpa
many times while they were dating,
oodles of time for dinner after.
I think and I become my dreams
tenuous fingers connecting me to you,
sparks of azure
wrapping me in ice
to preserve the idea
of us.
I think and my dreams tantalize,
confident fingers entwine,
fireworks of red and orange
set me on fire
burning away impurities
for us.
My dreams make me think
as I stroke your fingers with mine,
an ocean of aquamarine
floating beneath,
carrying the world
to us.
Gray-blue eyes
taken in turn
to my shade of fortune,
please return to me
no lies,
no shame,
no oceans of fire
to burn in
to burn in
to burn in
The drive from my comfort zone
into the city each morning
forces me to think,
Did I do everything wrong?
Has there been anything
I can claim victory over?
Then I see them
like an army platoon
rolling down every street,
women, young women,
pushing strollers carrying
their child,
some with more in tow
behind them like a train.
They march with tentative steps
as if waiting
for the father to join them,
a glance behind,
downturned eyes,
marching on
left right left right left.
The whine that filled my head
moments before
turns to guilt
that washes the blood from my veins
leaving me dizzy in my own stupidity.
The drive into the city
forces me to think
of where I've been
and where I am.
Black bug no bigger
than a pepper grain
rules the bathroom floor.
He's on patrol this morning,
possibly a scout sent out
to determine if predators lurk.
Headed toward my big toe,
he's a slow tank from Afghanistan.
Maybe my toe is his Taliban.
I'm reading the newspaper,
on a cold seat enthroned.
Finally I use my toe to flick him
backward, heels over head.
He lands three inches away,
curls up in a ball
and lies perfectly still.
Maybe he's playing possum
or maybe he's dead.
Suddenly he rolls over,
staggers to his feet
and begins moving again
in a different direction,
away from my toe.
a victim of PTSD.
He heads for the antique
claw-foot tub my wife paid
a thousand for
on a garden club tour.
After a short pause,
he disappears under the tub.
At breakfast I inform my wife
about the infestation of tiny bugs,
species unknown,
that may live in or beneath
our lovely claw-foot tub.
I note they may have come
with the tub, hidden
in its cracks or perhaps
in the cuffs of the men
who lugged the tub upstairs,
groaning and sweating,
both of them sporting gray
ponytails and long beards.
I tell my wife they may be
Haight-Ashbury aliens
from Kerouac's time.
I ask her if she thinks
I should call the antique shop
and have them take the tub
and its bugs back
and demand a full refund.
Silence is her response.
This conversation occurred
more than a week ago.
My wife has been silent since,
a device she has employed for years
when confronted by reason.
She still makes dinner
if cold gnocchi is dinner.
The tub and the bugs
remain upstairs.
Every morning I sit
with the newspaper,
my big toe forever
on silent alert.
Cloudy morning
still dark
in anticipation
of sunlight --
blushing touch
gasps, grasps,
brushes upward
like surf
against sand --
expectation
of rising event
dissipated
disappointed
with sunny
above the clouds
unseen below.
March afternoon the cat sits
on the window sill
watching it snow
while dreaming of sunshine
toasting its fur
the heater kicks on beneath.
From the effort of walking
the man’s shirt exposes
his bulging tummy
outweighing the backpack
all shaded by a floppy
straw hat in rhythm
with the sandal steps…
looking like a boy
running away from home
except for the lawn mower
pushed down the street.
God is everywhere, I know,
but Michael Bloomberg,
the mayor of New York,
is catching up.
He's on TV incessantly,
telling folks about his
new commandments:
Thou Shalt Not Buy Big Sodas.
Thou Shalt Not Buy Big Guns.
He disturbs my neighbor Roscoe,
whose bib overalls encase
a perfect pumpkin paunch.
He likes a wash of Mountain Dew
after double shots of gin
and keeps a howitzer under his bed
in case some nincompoop some night
comes to steal his llamas or his wife.
"Llamas cost big money," Roscoe says.
"but I can find another wife."
Unlike God, whom I have yet to see,
Michael Bloomberg has a face
reminiscent of the four on Rushmore.
I want to yell at him but can't because
the man sounds almost right.
I had nuns in grammar school like him
but they smiled once or twice.
God loves all men, I know,
but I'm afraid the Lord might ask
the mayor of New York to take
the microphone some day
and firmly announce
the End of the World.
At any given moment
Michael Bloomberg is
the best man in America
to handle that assignment.
He was born to separate
sheep from goats.
