July
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July - Kathleen Ossip
OCCASIONS
GO
It is a cube, it is red, it is mountainous,
it is a bird of fire, it is the bones of the pelvis, it is a walnut,
it is treasured. It is yellow Saturn wobbling in its orbit.
It is danger, squawking.
It is the desire to sit down with strangers in cafés
and then it is the strangers in cafés,
it is the man with the black T-shirt
labeled UNARMED CIVILIAN and it is the unseeing man with him
and his painful trembling.
Always it is oxygen and more oxygen. It is the fight in you
and the fight in you dying. It is the need for water
and the water that falls from the sky.
It is desperate for a theory and it is the acts you call evil
when you know that inside evil is always desperation.
It is bravery, arrogance, purpose.
It is the pink morning and your smile in the pink morning.
It is a phantom and the thin neck of a tree it
is a little project called loving the world.
It is howling in the dirt it is an extravaganza.
It’s the abandoned sports bra, in the dirt beside howling you.
It’s the windchimes in the thin-necked tree and
it is tonguetied. It is asleep.
It is waking up now. It is a small cat on the bed.
It is the threads of a leaf and it is the Three Graces:
Splendor, Mirth, and Good Cheer.
It is their heartfelt advice:
You can’t let it hurt you.
You must let it hurt you.
It is a careless error and the hotel pool blue with chemistry.
It’s a kiss of course it is a kiss.
It’s an old strange book newly acquired
but not yet catalogued, it is crazy.
It is you, crazy with honesty and crazy with ambition.
It’s the sun that stuns over and over again.
It’s your tablet, which is every tablet everywhere.
It’s an explosion it is every explosion everywhere.
It is pavement, mineral and hot and wet with droplets.
It’s the stars that pitch white needles into the pond.
It is provable, it is a lotion, it is a lie.
It is a baby because everyone is a baby.
It talks to you, always to you, it moves
swiftly, it is stuck, it moves swiftly, it is stuck, it moves
swiftly. It’s the impenetrable truth, now clear as ice.
It is serious, it is irreversible, it is going, going.
It is flying now flying strong enough to know anything.
BLUEBIRD
Today I sing in
a green and golden place.
My little eyes blink
in my little blue face.
My little song says
Truly truly.
The cat sits watching
coolly coolly
and no one minds if
I’m she or him
and my little heart beating
dee-dim dee-dim.
ON BOREDOM
One Saturday (Saturday!
When my time comes, among
my last thoughts will be of how
I did not fully appreciate
Saturdays!), my Aunt Anne,
who died this month, took me
to my first Broadway show:
Fiddler on the Roof.
She took me and five cousins
on an early morning bus
from the Albany Trailways station
to Port Authority.
She treated us to lunch
and then to a matinée.
I ate fried chicken for lunch
(a food I now abhor
for reasons of taste and ethics,
neither of my willed doing
but products of the passage
of time and consciousness;
then, I was beguiled
by the red plastic basket
where the golden chicken rested)
and had an orange drink and
Junior Mints in the theater.
Of the show I remember
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
and how
the three daughters found their matches,
true love which of course came
with the iconic problems
(money, religion, politics)—
but we, the audience, knew
an inescapable pair
when we saw it. I was only
nine but wished that I
could be a pair too.
What a limited life I had.
I was nine. I didn’t
know any Jews (though I’d
later marry a Jew
who has sheltered me
from iconic problems,
who has worked so I could work
on poems that don’t earn money).
Sitting in the dark
full of fried chicken and
sweetness made me drowsy
and dull, my critical sense,
such as it was at nine,
absolutely dulled.
(To this day I can’t sit
in a theater and feel
anything but grateful
to the actors and musicians;
I have no critical sense.)
This was not the kind
of boredom I had felt
the year before at the
Baseball Hall of Fame,
where my father (Aunt Anne’s
brother, who has seen
me through life to this day:
has