Ruth Daigon - Honorable Mention

Back

(How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was? - Satchel Paige)

1

Back
reversing the flow
back through the looking glass
up from the rabbit hole
in from out there.

Back
into the stunned silence
of snow, a gray quiet
a stripping clean to the roots
and our breath making perfect circles.

Back
to Main Street
with summer twilight
spreading like fire in dry grass,
the soft susurrus of a slow leak in the day.

Back
My hands
stretching like antennae
now in this street
now in that.

Back
to wrap that child's universe
around me once again
and warm this woman's frame.

2

A door in a sudden garden swings open
and everything comes back.

Ma's wheedling: C'mon Cookie.
Smile for the camera.
Sing a song.

The rock I'm standing on,
smooth
hot.
The sun bouncing off my Buster Brown,
I sing and Mr. Shucket
hands me a dollar.

Pa, just up from the city,
crouches in the lake
washing his arms past
his carpenter tan.
Then, swimming with eyes shut,
he splashes everyone.

Friday, I can hardly wait for Friday.
Every other day's like
jumping up and down
on one foot in the same spot
but Friday pa arrives from the city.
Friday the butcher come to kill chickens.

Stay in front, Ma yells
from the back but I crawl
through dirt underneath the house
to watch the headless chickens dance.

I spin like them,
flop in the grass,
split a blade down the middle,
whistle through it
and the sun spills its miracles on me.

If I never learned to count,
I'd be back in that feathered time
with nothing to forget,
nothing to recall,
starting all over again.

3

I walk in. No one knows I'm there,
close the torn screen door, move
through the kitchen where something's
always bubbling on the stove and find them
in the dining-room, reading, playing cards,
pasting pictures of old movie stars on
unpainted walls. A dead man sings
"Pagliacci" on the old Victrola.

Mother's out in back hanging up the wash
because it's always Monday. Father's
in his bathing suit lugging pails of water
from the pump. Brother's in the outhouse
reading last week's funnies and the next-
door boy bangs nails in our roof. But I'm
looking for that nine year old building sand-
castles in a made-up country at the beach.

She's the one I've come for. Her days
run together in one, sun-struck
afternoon. I'm here to borrow it,
to soak in the heat, swim out to the pier,
skip stones over water or lie loose
and easy wasting time. For this,
I would give up all my other lives.

Ruth Daigon was editor of Poets On: for twenty years until it ceased publication. She won "The Eve of St. Agnes Award" (Negative Capability) 1993, and was runner-up in 1994. She's been widely published: Shenandoah, Negative Capability, Poet & Critic, Kansas Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, Tikkun....Internet e-zines include Ariga, Crania, Cross Connect, Zuzu's Petals, Switched On Gutenberg, Recursive Angel.... also Poet-Of-The- Month on The University of Chile's Pares Cum Paribus (an "E" chapbook in English and Spanish) and Web Del Sol (a chapbook of her work that appears permanently on the WEB) Her latest poetry collection is Between One Future And The Next (Papier-Mache Press) 1995. About A Year (Small Poetry Press in 1996), Gale Research published her autobiography in their "Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, 1997" and she won the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, 1997 (University of Southern California).

(Editor's Note: Ruth has a new book, titled The Moon Inside coming out from Newton's Baby Press in December!)