Lois Marie Harrod, 4 poems, one short story

The Bed the Size of a Small Country

      Wyndam Garden Philadelphia International Airport Hotel, July 27, 2022

What am I doing here at the edge

of this wide land, sheeting beyond me,

hills like overstuffed pillows

guarding the north border, or is it west?

I am having difficulty with directions

since you left, though once I was the navigator,

and you the driver who sometimes

didn’t seem to know north from drought,

south from sought, but yes, we always found laughter

in the deserts—and I thought you were coming

with me, and now I am having trouble figuring out

just why I am or how I am going

or where to lay my head in these vacant hills.

Seven pillows, count, and not one yields.

Sitting here at the edge, I look at myself

in a mirror the size of a small lake,

a small woman huddled in a barren place

though someone said, don’t look in the glass,

you’ll get pregnant. Like Abraham’s Sarah,

I suppose, at ninety. Still ten years for that.

Ode to the House That Has Begun to Resemble a Funeral Parlor

            for Lee, 1942-2022

The melancholy transformation began this spring―

or when I decided though not yet spring, it should be spring―

I was seeing rank upon rank of plants at the grocery store, plants impatient for spring―

impatient impatiens, those shady lovers, and I had seen enough shades recently

to populate perdition, too many stamens like ghosts, What man stays? No man,

Nemo, Stay, Man, Stay.  I bought some for my window.

To counter the law of contraries, I bought sun-lovers too, the law of agreement,

pink petunias and Shasta daisies with faces a little too happy

not to contain sorrow, white begonias and yes, desiccated daffodils

which will return to life next spring after a winter rot in their pots.

I bought flowers, lots of flowers, the ones that don't need too much attention,

which is the way I've always chosen flora, sometimes fauna, yes even friends,

knowing the needy are Venus flytraps, waiting to suck the milli-ounce of insect blood,

knowing too some demanding flowers flourish without taking more of me

than an ice cube thrown in their direction once a week.

Look at this delicate orchid on my windowsill: it’s bloomed

four times in the last three years and this time, 22 blossoms.

The Law of Contraries, odi et amo, oh my Catullus, I loved you most of the time . . .

as I loved that orchid which first bloomed lilac, a pale orchid ballerina,

then turned boy, blossoms with pale boy faces

and purple freckles, trans-flowers, the way we are all shift male to female,

woman to man, strong to needy, reliant to self-reliant,

but let’s leave those distinctions for floral philosophers, those fools

who may or may not tell us this too is a corollary of the Funeral Home Effect.

And then because I was feeling rather brave and funereal, or was it grave

and fun, really funny, what are you reeling in now wherever you are or not?―

except I know you aren’t here because your ashes remain in the guest bedroom.

I don’t know what to do with them.

Before you died, we joked about my hiking solo five miles into the Wyoming Big Horns

and dusting the lupins and the Indian paint brush with what is left of you.

I think that was the plan, because you always said you’d die first, and then you did,

as if you had to be faithful to your word,

and now I am 80, and a bit hesitant to set out for the high hills

alone.

So because you are no longer here to hear my incessant babble,

notice I don’t say listen to, you didn’t always, I decided to buy cut flowers too,

carnations, that stalwart funeral flower, they last weeks—a bit like grief.

And yes, I bought yellow carnations, too late for your white sports coat

and pink incarnation, which hasn’t happened either . . .no, these are pale yellow

and I won’t call them sickly yellow because they have already lasted for three and a half weeks.

A few are getting a bit brown around the frills―

not unlike the big bruise on my knee where I tripped up the stairs.

Oh, I shouldn't have been wearing those clunky unisex Crocs,

unisex—another way of being dead, nothing sexy about Crocs

but my knee is the shade of shades, no sex in heaven, OMG,

a bruise the size of a peony—green and yellow and purple and blue.

I know, I know, you told me once, more than once, I shouldn’t wear those shoes,

though I was listening without hearing and once again proved you right or wrong.

Well, I have survived the fall and am surviving in this house of flowers—so many,

too many, and just as I was ready to plant them deep in the earth, aching knee and all,

I got COVID. I stayed in bed, no flower bed for me this week, no bed of roses,

but people kept dropping bouquets on the porch for me to take in and tend.

Flowers now from one end of the house to the other, kitchen, living room, bedroom―

wine-red calla lilies, blue chrysanthemum daisies, ghostly begonias, Eurydice’s coleus.

Last night my doorbell rang, the one that plays Hymn to Joy.

the one I installed all by myself because I am learning to do a lot you used to do,

and at my door there he is, a godling, maybe 20, maybe 23 with dark black hair

and obsidian eyes. And he is holding out a bouquet of red roses and red chrysanthemums,

deep red with a spray of baby breath, another aspect, I suppose, of that wall of contraries

I keep falling from, into, and I say, Oh my God, how beautiful.

And he says, as if he were Hermes, as if he were Cupid, as if he were Hades himself,

yes—as if he were you, Happy Mother's Day, Love.

Love, that fleet-footed messenger with the beat-up van,

the one that escorts us to the underworld, Love, he called me Love,

and I think once again, The wages of dying . . .

The wages of dying is love.

What I Understand Now

*

Those who keep

the room exactly as it was, unmade bed, poster slack.

The ones who lie beside the body as it cools.

The ones who kiss the crooked mouth.

*

And, yes, later

the ones who pack up

the never-worn shirts

and the eight pairs of shoes down in the heel.

Reeboks, the only ones

that ever fit

those Neanderthal feet of yours—

the sort Michelangelo gave his prophet Daniel.

*

At Rehab, Erica

told you to buy new sneakers imagining, I guess

your lumpy feet

suddenly sleek and fluorescent.

Next session

I dug your newest black look-alikes

out of their closet box and shoved them on.

*

You preferred your books to clothes—

though you liked it

when I bought something new, always telling me

how lovely I looked.

Who will I ask now

when I walk into the living room, “Am I okay?”

Sleeping with Love as He Grows Old

He tosses but cannot turn,

something has happened to his spine,

to each little vertebra, to the nerves,

sciatic and femoral, something desperate,

isn’t Love supposed to grow stronger, not weaker?

Love tries, but no chance to rest,

he’s up a thousand times a night, his prostate

now larger than his heart and his heart,

that huge organ he promised forever,

is failing too, Krakatoa, Etna, Vesuvius,

Love’s lava growing cold.

Didn’t he do what he ought, practice

what he preached?—oh he was so kind, watched his diet,

exercised like a madman cycling the globe.

Oh, Love, where have you done,

your body thin as a sheet?

Dickinson said you can do all but raise the dead,

and now you cannot raise a finger.

Schroedinger’s Dog

Erwin hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since he was ten. That’s when he had woken at 4 am and found his poodle Snuffy stiff in his arms. Ever since he was afraid something might die while he was dreaming. Every night he tossed and squirmed until Nancy had tried to suffocate him with the six-foot bolster at the top of the bed. When he woke the next morning, she was gone. Only a note on the table to prove she had been there: Sorry about last night.

Erwin suspected that she was gone for good. Well, she had suggested that they sleep in separate bedrooms, but he didn’t want that. A husband and wife should sleep in the same bed, otherwise what was the sense of being married? Besides, who would he tell, he asked, if he woke up, and the dog was dead beside him.

“We don’t have a dog,” Nancy said.

“I know,” said Erwin, “but maybe we could get one. A little poodle. Name her Toughie.”

“Don’t you remember? I’m allergic,” said Nancy, “dogs, cats, scallops and Skittles. The dye.”

That was the conversation they had every Tuesday.

And today was Tuesday.

They would have had it today too, Erwin thought, if she hadn’t left. There are some things you can count on. Just not dogs.

published in Schroedinger’s Dog. The Radvocate. II:14 (2016), 49.