Eye On Life Magazine

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.

Seeing through the Fog

In the Shady Lane Nursing Home
Aunt Bea crochets and tells her niece
sitting and listening this Sunday afternoon

that the young ones pushing wheel chairs
changing sheets and bringing trays
must learn to knock because

they’re unaware he’s behind that door
under the big clock in the day room
where the old ones sit for hours

watching television, praying,
writing letters, weeping,
asking to go home.

He's always there, she says,
and he has the answers but
the young ones have to knock

ask him what he wants
because he’s a question
not just an answer.


-- Donal Mahoney

 

An Ode to Heraclitus

It’s true that nothing stays the same,
the lead singer taking over the former
crooner’s place,
learning of death on a late Friday night,
wondering how the weight will fall,
will this result in a withdrawal into self,
watching the slow destruction of the building
where we met and knew each other better,
listening to the words that used to give
comfort, now blaringly shallow and vague,
finally forgetting who we were as children,
becoming whatever it is we are now,
be it husk or full-fledged living creature,
be it static or dynamic character
filling the void of the page.


-- JD DeHart

Art

You are a piece of art they have not decided
to start appreciating, dear, and please forget them
anyway.  They are rabble.
They are too busy worrying about their prescriptions,
their car payments,
their brand-new jobs to pay you any mind.
Too busy learning about new flavors of cheap wine,
they fail to recognize how you take the best
of them, distilled, refined, lip-burning, because
you are their kindest thoughts and words
made flesh, while they content themselves
with the dreadful remnants swimming in their cup,
you are the incarnation of their faint possibility.


-- JD DeHart

What Plato Said to Socrates

He has to know they’ll never
understand, yet he keeps talking –
Why does he keep trying?
Doesn’t he care about me at all?
They’re all too buried deep in caverns,
listening to their juicy music,
thinking about how to earn money
or get into bed with each other,
and he’s going on about the truth.
Dig deep, he tells them, and they look
at him like, We don’t have shovels, dude.
If it’s in them, I don’t see it.
What I see is the mob, the gulp of poison,
then me – aimless wanderer, the guy
strolling around saying, Remember when
he used to teach us?
Remember that?  They probably won’t.


-- JD DeHart

The Journey of Davis

She’s got chicken bones in the back seat
and one of those large decals about Jesus,
His Wonderful Saving Grace,
plastered onto the windshield so one wonders
how she can even see around the neon?
Her couch always smells like cheese,
but like manufactured cheese – not the real stuff,
like what aliens think cheese tastes like.
She’s got hands for going through garbage bags
full of clothes, a mouth that makes excuses
and poems out of profanity at a moment’s notice.
She knows how to work the system,
fake an injury, get out of a ticket,
fill out the government forms just right.
But she has no idea how to redeem herself
or how to give a gift, which is her
wagon rolling, tire thumping tragedy.

-- JD DeHart

In the Desert of Iraq

It took awhile to find Osama.
It will take awhile to find
the Briton with his knife
in the desert of Iraq.
They may bring him back 
unless a verdict’s rendered
in the desert 
enabling the Briton
to discover in a second
all the virgins 
awaiting his arrival
unless he finds 
he’s sitting with Osama
holding marshmallows 
blackened on a stick.

 

-- Donal Mahoney

Dead Brother’s Note to Our Dad

Dad, happy to see
you’re taking a nap.
I’m down at the pier
so give me a shout
when you wake up
and I’ll come running.
The fishing’s been great--
three coolers of pike
iced in the trunk.

You always tell Mom
before we leave
you won’t be drinking
and she lets Tim and me
go with you but
you drink all day
here at the lake.

I'll get my license next year
so things will be different.
I'll drive back at night so
you can nap in the car.
I’ll keep the radio off
so you won’t wake up.
It’s always good
to see Mom.

-- Donal Mahoney

 

On Tippy Toes

On tippy toes
with arms outstretched
my grandson asks

how old are you
and so I tell him
I'm sooooo old

that when I stretch
my arms like his
to exercise them

vultures land and
caucus there.
My grandson says

he puts his arms out
so robins will build
nests on them

and raise their chicks.
He never takes a nap
because he has to keep

his eyes on the clouds
to shoo away hawks
circling for supper.


-- Donal Mahoney

The Poem I Should Have Written First

For he was the morning I woke to find myself missing.

For he is the river into which I stepped twice and twice, always unbaptized.

For he was the bellyache from too much swallowing.

For he was the storm I swam in while lifeguard stands tumbled end-over-end down the beach.

For he was the storm I stood in that blew sand in my face at 70 mph while I closed my eyes.

For he was the storm I planned to sit out until I learned that my ocean-block had been the 2nd block in the ’62 nor’easter.

For he was the wind that whipped the petals off the flowers and blamed the flowers.

For he was the letter that burned the postman’s hand down to the wrist.

For he is the switch in my hand.

For he is the reason I have teeth.

 

 

-- Devon Miller-Duggan

Physics

What was left when I went up the stairs--
stretched out, centered on his bed, was heavy there—
an I-beam dropped onto a pile of leaves,
a granite slab dropped on a bed of pale tulips.
Heavy, liquid, solid, dense, and empty--
an element no one had ever measured or identified--
stayed steady in the grey world while
I lay across the bed and couldn’t find myself,
then broke open. Howling
leapt out to beat against the walls
like some trapped bat.
I wondered how it was
He didn’t slump back into the core
where everything is pressed upon so hard
it pushes back and burns--
just mass and density so far beyond measurement.
No statue I’ve ever seen was this dead.
Freed of the weight of a soul, I believed he’d lighten.

My thick body wears every slap and crack of his
big right hand. He kept slapping handsfull of flesh on me
like a plasterer covering a wall, like a child pounding
handsfull of sand on a castle he knows he’ll kick apart,
smacking all this into place between his hands and
my heart, weighing me down
so I can never move away.

-- Devon Miller-Duggan

His Ghosts

1.
The boy sprints all around in Bethel, Delaware,
wonders a thousand times a day where his brothers are,
blinks the thought away.
He wishes he felt the soft-tilled soil fluff around his feet,
still enjoys his footsteps making dust dust up
as he runs fields. He plans to steal himself some strawberries
soon as he can smell the sugar-waft when sun’s warmed the day.
He wonders if his mother’s found the lump of turnip greens
he slipped into his pocket and forgot to dump last night,
and whether she’ll tell his Dad, who’ll switch him good.
He thinks about the airplane he drew yesterday,
thinks he’d fly the whole way to Alaska,
and take his brothers for the ride, but first
pretend to take off all alone and leave them standing
eyes wide, mouths open in surprise, then
come back, maybe let them board
third time he taxied back around. They’d see
Eskimos and penguins, and eat blubber or big crabs.

He sprints home, hopes at least his baby sister’s there
so he can tickle her, make her laugh until she’s blue.
Or his big sister, and he can sneak up on her while she
hangs sheets out on the line, make her scream
He wonders if his brothers maybe found the cookies he hid
And hid themselves somewhere to eat them all.
Then he’s whistling to himself, but wants somebody
to come out and listen to his day.
 
Some mornings he runs out on the field,
puts his shoulder to the blocking sleds,
picks up the ball and palms it back and forth, practices
throwing it between the goalpost arms,
runs over all the plays he’s ever seen or learned,
walks over every line the groundsman’s chalked,
sits on the bench and waits to throw himself into another player’s solid body.

Some mornings he steps silently as if he were a ghost
through brush and branch, alert for deer, bear, bobcat, all of whom
will only know he’s there when he’s brought up the gun
and thought where they’ll move the fractured second after
he sends the bullet after them.  
He thinks about metal-warm air, the breathing
steam he’ll loosen from the carcass with his steady knife,
how the air for miles around will speak his name, his skill.

2.
Both cats he hand-fed crabcakes see him now
and rub against the air his legs disturb.  
He’s gaunt and looking for the morphine, starved for the drift
He paws through closets wondering why
they’ve hid it, why his wife
has changed the bedroom without asking him
and where his friends have gone instead of here, with him,
with favorite foods and stories
and why the cats are never hungry, won’t sleep on him
and will not keep him warm.


-- Devon Miller-Duggan

On the Irrelevance of Memory

He could never say that word—
Said irrevelant, as if he’d meant irreversible
and unrevealing both. Or revenant twisted together with irreverent.
I remember, in rough order, beginning before I was 3:
      sandpaper graininess the dark rubbed up against me
      a set of wooden blocks with shiny metal snaps imbedded in the wood
      dream about the singing monks who carried me along a rutted road
      visitation by an Indian in eagle feathers
ballerina doll
      the mole inside my elbow
      crib bars
      first time I knew my mother lied about my father
      first time I knew I’d made him angry

Today, he’s gone nine months,
consumed by cancer, destroyed by cures, gone,
and in the wake, what before was made of time and narrative,
now only weather, blowing, or hot and cold, or blustering,
but only ever atmosphere:
      playhouse he designed and built where no one fought
      how I knew he’d slap me if I cried and say he hadn’t made me cry
      his last words to me, ticked off, growling that I didn’t have to push
the glass of water at him after
giving him his first liquid morphine
on the day before his death,
how it was his hands, not mine, pushed.

Hurricanes come up the coast--
waves make havoc of the beach,
blow themselves up into air and salt,
salt and water scour out what’s left of summer,
scour my face.   

-- Devon Miller-Duggan

Just In Time for Rosh Hashanah

fresh graffiti on the walls of Temple Mizpah once again

The kitchens of Auschwitz
are belching again.

Ancient chefs
puffed hats askew

storm once more
the catwalks swaying.

When the ovens are full,
the chefs dig pits

in the kitchen floor, set
silver spits, roast fryer thin

the legs and wings they’ve
cleaned and cleavered. Yes,

the kitchens of Auschwitz
are belching again.
 
 
-- Donal Mahoney

When Computers Crash

Take it from me
sitting on the edge of this star
in the universe with
meteors zipping around me.

Worse things can happen
than having a computer crash
and all your data lost while
chatting in a hotel lobby

with a woman you met in a bar
then having a heart attack
and falling to the floor
having your bladder burst.

You lie there deceased,
a nuisance in a puddle of piss,
as the woman strolls away
and guests in the lobby quiver

until the manager says   
he’s made a phone call.
You don’t need a computer now.
An ambulance will take you away.


Donal Mahoney

Five Poems by Simon Perchik - 9-22-2014

*
You grieve as if this shadow
has no sound yet
though once your face is covered

you let more darkness out
and what you hear
stays, clots the way one hand

clings to this dirt made black
by the other, left behind
to hide in the scent from rivers

that move again, keeps you company
years after as the cry
for water and already this crater

gouged from your mouth
stone by stone, caving in
and your lips boiling over.

 

*

You are pulled and the same darkness
lifts your arm around these stars
spreads out door to door

knocks so your fist can smell
from blood become your heart again
dragged ahead as if you belong

near distances, end to end
                        though this cemetery
has forgotten its dead

holds only the invisible hillsides
                        soaking in stone and narrow alleyways
passed along till they close

and what will be your tears
waits as lips, as the sky brought back
crumbling with not a light left on.

 

*

Even these laces, breathless
falling to the floor without you
and the wait for calm –they cope

by helping you undress
used to shoes that weigh too much
are lowered forever, caressed

and still you talk non-stop
dangle your bare feet
half overboard, half

the way these enormous clothes
lose hold, break apart, then nothing
to heap one on top the other.

 

*

Branching out and this hillside
bit by bit unraveling
the way your shadow keeps to itself

just by darkening, fed the dirt
you once could see through
as if nothing was there to hum

then swallow some old love song
that came into the world
facing the ground still trying

to leave you and night after night
you listen for these smaller
then smaller stones eating alone

as the cry forever struggling
from its harsh stranglehold
to keep up, side by side and stay.

 

*

At the end this sand coming by
covers you with soft flowers
that long ago dried as footsteps

still treading inside some shallow grave
smothered  as afterward and dust
–you loved her the way the Earth

keeps warm and between two suns
place to place what’s left
you walk without looking down

though your arms are closing
have grown together a single fingertip
touching these shells and pebbles.

 

-- Simon Perchik

Waiting

In September
The leaves are waiting
As I do

If this
If that
Pass unhindered
Like old friends with whom
I do not need conversation

This morning

The hands of the Universe
Almost passively
Enfold me
Like a warm loaf of bread

This morning

We wait quietly
Together 

-- Tom Rubenoff