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

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 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

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

Mother's Love

It is her image of herself as better than us all
We mortal daughters, imperfect, malleable, left
Like a poorly smithed shoe leaving a limping foal
Always wanting more than she was willing to give
Sold cheaply for a reputation as a good horse trader
To the man in the white coat and hat with the PhD,
The country club, the Cabin in the private gated canyon
So exclusive were you that you would never let yourself in.

© 2009 Peggy Pendleton

Daughters Are...

Daughters are their mother's memories of themselves
Trapped for a moment like a bug in amber then
Left for dead or worshipped like the god she is
To herself, the creator, the first mover, the one
And only after death comes and goes and
The amber of your mother's memory of
Herself becomes clear to you
Do you realize
You loved her

©2009 Peggy Pendleton

Details

Stone, a new leaf from the Chestnut
Trees, dirt work done on
Ones bare knees

Dirt under the nails and into
Lines of the hand like dark rivers
The tiny cracks the tributaries

Stones the color of rust, color of
Weathered wood, color of mother's dead blue eyes but warmer as the sky

A pink like baby's cheek
The leaf a pale lime green
Stripes in stone meander like

the throbbing at the throat

©2009 Peggy Pendleton

Alone With Longing

Life left me alone with longing
Pretending I need nothing more
Knowing why I am unloved

At heart an unmet need like hunger
Eats at me and I grow fat on pain
Leaking tears like famished babies

Old, alone, no longer wanting joy
Cracking jokes that no one hears
Waiting for the end of one more

Days of empty longing deaths
Freedom from this rending sorrow
Nothing mends nor ever will

This heart keeps beating without
Meaning why awaken to do nothing
Lasting or redeeming transformation

All the work with time undone
And in the end left to crumble
Alone at last with longing

©2009 Peggy Pendleton