The Tarot Cards

Back then when we were young and after I'd had a lover or two
I wasn't looking for a man at all but if I were I'd want one
Who didn't want to fuck me
Like looking for an honest man in college or a bar or a truck stop

But you found the glance with slit eye and the slow slide down
Found your body of great richness and utility anywhere like
The wall of the bar just outside the back door, the bushes plumped
Like pillows for your hips. Strange men, old friends, ex lovers,
All comers. You fascinated me so unlike were we

I was the girl they all wanted to fuck
You were the woman who fucked them all
Married with children, it didn't change a thing
You were the one expelled from the campus coffee shop
Obscene language, solicitation and other outrages and I
Worshipped you. Let me live with you.
I'll watch the children, I'll wash the dishes, I'll be the nanny
I'll be the bait and then we'll switch

You read the Tarot Cards and you were the Queen of Cups.
You drew the The Tower reversed, bodies flying through the air
You insisted I was only a Page. I'd had no children. I would always
Be a page, a child, childless, no matter what my age. A Page
I drew the Devil upright and the Hierophant reversed

For a costume party you would go as Medusa, and knew
Enough to call me Persephone. I was that girl, the mere Page
Carried to the underworld by Hades, another name for Daddy
(I told no one your real identity, Daddy, King of the Underworld)
And yet the Queen of Cups knew the ghost of you in the circles
Under my troubled eyes too damn pretty to really be seen.
Ice girl holding The Devil's hand wearing a well pressed black dress
The Page of Swords in love with the Queen of Cups
I still am



©2009 Peggy Pendleton

Inheritance

The things I got from my family
are a hinky heart and a hot temper,
a dark brooding streak and a propensity
to be alone; leave me alone, but listen

They were aggressively smart people
Good looking and full of seductive power
Careless and hurtful.  Don't take it personally
It's all in your head.  Snap out of it!

The house came tripped to crumble five years
Into the second great depression when I was
Finally left alone in the forest here at the back
Hiding on the alley locked and gated all but invisible

Just me and the dogs waiting
For the loud roar in the quiet of a late summer night

When the house implodes with it's secrets intact
And the roof comes tumbling down

Blackbird

Words dark as a blackbird's wings fall like a stone and are gone
All their meaning lost in an instant
Vanished as if never spoken
All the feelings contained in the words
Lost forever, not even a feather remains
Only the black stone where once beat
Blood red and full of passion
Something resembling
A heart

© Peggy Pendleton

Into The Dark Quiet

I must cut myself off
Hide my need want nothing
I must go back to the center
Dive into the dark want nothing

I must gather myself together
Want nothing need no one dive deep
Into the dark back to a quiet center
Drive want deep into the dark quiet

Here

Here at the pulse where the blood brings a blush

Here at this tender spot

Here is the heat, the scent
Here the flesh awaits your tongue
Here is where I want your lips
Here at the beginning
Here

The Talent

I've sealed myself away from love and ceased
To live with passion, hiding where once I wore
Cobalt silk and saffron, where once I stood
In hot white light and stayed up late to have
Martinis.  Eating mussels at the cool club with
The fashionista girls in full throated laughter
Heads thrown back, necks exposed, lips glistening red
We were the ones, the last of the smalltime superstars
In this cozy little world in the good times when money
Flowed like Champagne at midnight, and then one day
It flew apart, and one after another, life took us by the throat, the lovely
Pulsing throat, the long neck, exposed just when it all comes
crashing down, and one by one disappears to babies or booze,
One gets her PhD, another a divorce, one checks her bottom line
And makes a marriage deal worked out by
Lawyers in a conference room.
In agents terms we were the talent,
We seemed to have it all out there on the
Catwalk in the blinding light, bright women
With talent and brains and appetites flying
Smoking through the evening on the phone
As we drove to the next booking for a big
Show wielding a mascara brush in the dying light,
A flash of red lips and cobalt silk.
You see us in your rearview mirror gaining on you
As the sun sets just behind the island we flash by
We are laughing and oblivious to any danger
We lived on credit like the rest of you waiting
For the good times to return.
And then in resignation get on with living alone in a small house
Kept company, protected by three dogs
Existing only as a cyber link to an outer world I will never likely
Enter again with anything but words typed on a keyboard late at night
In anything but a naked face and beige at the grocery store or the bank

The Sound Of Crickets On A Hot Summer Night

In Arlington National Cemetery the night they buried Senator Edward M Kennedy there were
crickets chirping and the low murmur of voices waiting at the gravesite.
I, an unbeliever, was moved to tears by the prayers and answered aloud
Hear our prayer
Hear our prayer

It grew dark and lightening off in the distance over the hill where
A lone soldier stood gun held in white gloved hands waiting for the
Final Salute flashed off and on as a gentle wind blew the
Eternal flame in the growing darkness
And then it was over

Alas Ms M Has Left the House

It's true I'm sad to say
Alas Ms M has left the house
Sadder still she took fair Roscoe with her
He of golden hair, who came each morning
Weeping at my door at dawn to crawl upon my bed
I'd wake and stagger to the door to let him in, then sleep
The warm safe dreamy sleep of a satisfied Woman.
To wake late, to feed him with the others, to listen
To him moan with satisfaction at his pleasure in the meal.
He's been my daily guard and great companion.  He stayed
With me in salad days through Geeky's autumn death
He was a comfort then.

I'll wonder how she's doing when she stops dropping in
To smoke my pot and then her cigarettes.
There are so few people who'll let a girl get by with that.
I know she's using me.  I'm used to it. This is a trial for her.
It's true I love her but
She doesn't know it yet as she steps back
Into her future full of ambivalence
And dread the hopes, and fears to dream
She needs that weighty warm and living presence
In her bed.  But here's the rub. Roscoe hates to be alone.
Alone he'll be, and howl and weep incessantly

And when he's weeping I'll wake to sob along.
He needs his pack.  We're his responsibility
We're always here, waiting, glad to see his proud superiority
His handsome legs, trotting front to back he covers miles.
To waste away alone to satisfy a selfish girl.
At every step he'll make her life a trial
The neighbors will complain about the howl
She'll have to move and move again
And in his pain he'll tear her life to shreds
As it was in their beginning,
Before they landed here.

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

She Roams

My mother never really died.  It seems
She now roams freely in my mind waiting for the slightest self-doubt
Then she speaks to me in my own voice.  "Stupid cow,
I always hated you."She tells me
I have no gifts or talents, no brains no guts
"Failure!  Idiot Failure!"  "All that potential, my good looks"
"Brains wasted on you." "I never loved anyone."
"You know what I mean."
"You always gave yourself so easily." 

"Embarrassment!"  She screams this in my sleep
Contaminates my day with the echo of that word
"They all loved me best" she says, "even your boyfriends..."
The implication hangs there...
"Ask him, you know who I mean.  He'll lie to you." 
"You're a patsy, you know that?" "You always were."
" I should have given you away."
She spits this last in my face in a thin burning stream
That shoots from her mouth like a serpent's tongue

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

The Z of Time and Illness

The passage of time is a mystery to me
Like the days that pass when I do nothing
And the tasks go undone, the weeds take over
The tree, though topped stands like a hulking monster
It presses on the fence, tangled round it's gorgeous trunk
The upper limbs rank with the scent of early decay and last night's
Rain so rare this time of year I will remember it as April not late
May, early June, my birthday always comes too soon


The sister of my soul, my whole life long, the level headed one
Now puts her fate in the hands of anyone with a crackpot theory
Or so I think, other than the doctor who says, it's there where the
Trachea branches into the primary bronchi just before it reaches the
Fertile soil of the lungs in and out of hardly any oxygen there rests the mass
Growing like the weeds, the vines, the knot of trunk that pushes on the fence.


No air flows and a vocal chord is paralyzed making the voice a high tight complaint
The lack of options narrows down to doing almost nothing, or getting up and fighting
As if all life depended on it. Her blood depleted of breath's oxygen one lung closed
She wants to think it over. Odd that she, the child of a mathematician who was the
Perfect parent, has rejected hard science, medicine, the certainty of numbers, pulse ox
Sed rate in favor of intuition, the spirituality of mysticism, the soul's belief in the souls truth


I can do nothing but await her fate as if my own life depended on this one decision still unmade.

©2009 Peggy Pendleton

Running The Maze

Daddy was an expert at driving the lab animals mad
It was his job, it was his passion. Daddy had talent for it.
Daddy married a woman with a pretty child and no maternal
Instinct drove them to it. Unhinge that child Daddy, see what
She can take. The little whore becomes your slave until she is
Too old. Unhinge that child. What is she but a ticking time bomb.
Call her a liar and she becomes one, threaten the cage again, bind her
Mind with fear like Chinese women’s feet. Women are used to torture
The women her mother hates so much, apron wearing women, domesticated
Dumb cows. The girl will run the hamster wheel of repetition repetition repetition
Until she’s the only one left alive, alone at last. Talks about it like normal life, like
normal life
Like Normal life.

©2009 Peggy Pendleton

Ephemera

We may be but ephemera
Floating through these waters for an instant
Where death drifts common as the dragonfly
No more frightening than life my dear he says smiling
Death winks and he is a handsome lad who carries us in his arms
For just a lovely moment and then off he goes on to other business

©2008 Peggy Pendleton

Women Like Me

I'll never have a friendship like hers again.
There will be a hole in the fabric of my tattered being.
How many holes in this moth eaten looking creature before it turns
To dust, I could be seen as the ghost of the world's oldest pregnant
Woman. That's how little I seem to care about perception,
and yet,
A Pucci top, navy handkerchief-linen wide-legged
Weightless pants, so wrinkled they looked slept in.
They were.
The pedicure is way past over, and terribly overdue,
Red tatters.
I must have cared once.
Who will care or notice now?

Lonely old women are invisible.
There was once a word for women like me
I think it might be offensive,
(If you are a woman like me.)
It's only when I walk my little dog that I'm seen.
Then people think "cute dog", and
"great, she's got a poop bag."

© 2010 Peggy Pendleton

The Time of Illness

I had two days off. No schedule for radiation, but
The tests for clotting factor went on as usual
Without me. I rested like a long distance runner
My drug fueled system humming along as if I ran
On chemicals alone. Did you know that Warfarin is
Rat poison? This is proof to Z that all medicine is poison
To me it means that someone found a really good use for
Rat poison. I take twice as much Warfarin as Z to keep me
From blowing a gasket, to keep my heart humming along
Like a clock that runs a bit too fast, but steady as she goes.
The bruises that cover my arms and legs don't bother me at all.

Z hemorrhaged again last night but refused to go to the hospital.
She determines that she just needs to cut back on the Warfarin
I ask her why and she says, "What can they do? All they can do is
Give me a transfusion." I wonder why that is such a bad idea. I want
Oxygen. I want oxygen rich blood. I think they might give her Oxygen
But keep my mouth shut. I took her fresh peach cobbler hot from the oven
Vanilla ice cream. She eats it as if she were a starving child and I choke back
The truth that the peaches were purchased at the grocery store and were only
99 cents a pound. I make up a perfectly plausible story about my neighbors friend
Drew who grows peaches in Southern Utah for peach brandy. He always has too many
Brings a bushel basket for the neighbor who passes plenty to me for fresh peach cobbler
Thankfully she doesn't ask about the ice cream. It is Bryer's All Natural, Natural vanilla
She eats it like a starving child. I took certified organic red potato soup, organic milk,
Watermelon cut into bite sized pieces and chilled. I know from having spent a lot of time
With Z that she does not get enough fluids to stay well hydrated. I liked the idea that when
She was in the hospital they pumped fluids into her veins. She says it made her swell. Well,
Yes, when the tissue is hydrated it plumps with pulsing life.

I'm a woman who takes a handful of pills every morning with her first mug of latte.
I don't do a lot of research on the drugs I take or study inserts for dire
Side effects.
Life has some nasty side effects. Life can kill you.
Don't we start dying from the moment we're born?
I took so many risks, still do, daring death to take me
Like a lover, who sees an opportunity when I sleep
I should be so lucky

So, the schedule is set for this week. Radiation every day
Clotting factor and food are on Z's agenda and mine
If all her radiation treatments are in the afternoon
I can take her, park the car and wait with a book
Patiently. I hope I live up to her expectations
I hope I don't disappoint her. Today it was peach
Cobbler and vanilla ice cream, tomorrow begins
The hard part, now that the tumor is bleeding
She's no longer just getting rid of the blood clots
In her lungs. Now the tumor is bleeding. Isn't that
A bad thing? I try not to show my extreme distress
I come home and take a handful of pills with my
Evening cup of Earl Grey Tea and smoke half a dozen
cigarettes. I resolve to keep on doing what I'm doing
As if it will protect me from her loss. What are the odds?

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

Death Is An Inconsiderate Lover

It all results in tears
One kind word, one instance of incompetence
That receptionist, anyones disappointment
Spoken, written, imagined, remembered
I can't make my friend
Do the things I think
Will save her life

I must not show my complete disappointment
I'm not sure I can live without her
Last night the tree removal guy called

Words make me cry, like the word deadline
The tree guys were an hour late today and I was
Screaming by the time they got here
Only one hour late for tradesmen
That's not bad, yet I feel responsible
I could not take her
Feed her what she what wanted
She wants so little in the larger scheme of things

She wants the food she wants from the store she wants
Is that so hard? The tree guys were only an hour late
They worked fast and efficiently without damaging my roof
Or fence and their competence makes me cry
My sense of guilt makes me cry.
Why must I always be guilty?
Never quite good enough. Is it like my mother said?

I offered them fresh cold watermelon cut in bite sized pieces
Cold cokes and water and their thirst made me cry
In seconds the watermelon was gone and I feel so sorry
That they don't get better treatment from women like me
And why do I assume that?

This is disappointment mixed with a dash of terror
It should be me. I'd decline all but hospice care
Not because of cost or debt or obligation or estate
Is it because I've chased you death like a needy lover?
So now you strike my innocent friend. Is that how we play
This final game of longing and regret? Does it all end in disappointment?

Death Not Poetry

Death stalks my sisters,
And I, having courted death all my life long
Know if I were given a death sentence
I'd feel relief that it had now been taken
Out of my hands, my need for relief from the illness
The longing for relief from the illness stalking me
Finally done with living, done with pain, done with
Longing dead at last

Yet I take the drugs that keep me going
Without which my heart would kill me
My mind would have killed me long ago
Gassed like Sylvia poisoned by the life I'd led
The bad bad bad daddies and my only Mother
The genes I carried for crazy crazy crazy hearing
Voices of grief so filled with sorrow
There is no room left for life

I'll take to my bed with a book and read this sad life away

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

Sisters (for Jojo)

We are sisters under the skin
We are members of a tribe of knife wielding women
Fierce in our understanding of trust and what it doesn't mean
Betrayal becomes the thing we do to keep from ever being left again
Or vulnerable or lost or used again and tossed away like a used condom
Like the scalpel, like the stirrups, like the old man looking who says
"Mind if I give it a go?"

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

Robert Graves I Covet

This link... turned me into a thief
Perhaps I always was a thief coveting
That which I never had like that poem The Cool Web
The one by Robert Graves who lived on the island I coveted
In that one too short day exploring Majorca. May I not live here too?
Why only you?

In 1965 it was the place to take my breath away
The sheer beauty of it all, the men slitting glances so like
Predator and prey. And you were there writing love poems on that day
Like the cool web the island cast on me. Writing love poems to whom?
Why not to me? Had I only known then what I know now, I would have left the ship
and looked for you. Why not me too?

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

I Run

I run hot and cold, sweet and sour, sometimes naughty
Even haughty, blunt too, rarely nice but often true
I run my errands in blackest black or very blue
But only in the darkest hue

I have withdrawn from most of life,
To feign a certain cool disdain
Avoiding strife, and it's illusion
Yet believe that this protects
Me from myself, and hide I do
Despite a need for human contact
I run, I run, I run from you

©2010 Peggy Pendleton

Death by Intent

If I have died and you missed the moment
Know that I went peacefully in my sleep
Of my own accord and timing, by my own
Hand which could no longer pound the keys
Pull the ropes, the weeds, the rabbit out of the hat

Let it be said that "she was a woman who had great timing"
Take what you want and we'll say I gave it to you long ago
It will not matter to me now, and who's to say it wasn't my
Intention all along

© 2009 Peggy Pendleton