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Sandra Kolankiewicz - 5 Poems

11/16/2013

3 Comments

 
Picture
Quantum Parenting in Three Dimensions 

How were you supposed to recognize a 
vibration housed in stone? This was your first 
time, the furthest you’d made it into breath 
and life, twenty-one years which to you seemed 
eternity but to your mother was 
always a moment that went too fast, like 
stepping into an elevator shaft 
she knew was empty and for less than an 
instant comprehending flight. Others tried 
to warn you: Pick this stone, not that. What you 
need now is sedimentary; forgo 
metamorphic until you understand 
it. We never told you to avoid the
elements you weren’t ready for, matter
not a chart but a library ladder. 
Make clear it’s sturdy, we should have said. Be 
sure you know all of shelf four before you 
jump to shelf six because otherwise too 
much will be missing, even for a jazz 
musician or a poet. Instead we 
said you're pure only when you don’t exist,
this turning from wave to particle comes 
with consequences and detractions and, 
yes, once you arrive, you’re stuck till you’re not 
here anymore, filled with that desperate 
yearning for light when only mass will do.


-


Ode to a Book

Oh, book, I am afraid to ease back your 
spine. You might make me sad; how can I take 
another story such as the one 
on your cover, all illustration? You’ll 
rip out my heart or burn me so angry 
I don’t sleep, which makes it hard on my kid 
early in the morning when neither she 
nor I want to be awake, but I’m in 
charge. They write books about it. Books about 
what it is not. I recognize their names 
when I reach for the chewing gum. Even 
at the free book give away, I drift toward 
only the recipes for what’s going 
in rather than the end result. Except
when I pick you up and open to the 
middle, the sentences so beautiful 
I’m inside an orchid jungle and do 
not want the heat to stop. Forget the rug 
burns on the knees or the bladder problems
afterwards; I cannot take your beauty, 
worse than the ending when the words are gone. 


-


Unbound as Rebound

The absence of pressure makes a twitch so 
severe you think only of something else, 
ignore the claim that, if unexplored, a 
wound heals over just at the surface 
like an abscess a cat can’t keep open with 
his papery tongue. Lack of push rebounds 
to encephalitic emotions like
a baby’s head grows too big after a 
vaccine. Nothing to resist in the hole 
which sucks you in as sure as if you had 
thrown yourself there. Pump it up! we should shout 
then, like a red balloon! Stretch the neck first 
by pulling so you don’t feel tight in your 
glands. If the rubber is good, you’ll get faint 
powder on your fingers. Without breaking 
blood vessels on your cheeks, exhale until 
just before the point of its exploding.


-


When We Heard the News

By the time we heard, everything had been 
finished with for a long time. Still, I would 
pause at the rim of dusk to consider
what I imagined the sequence to have been, 
how each moment sent out tendrils that wrapped 
around our ankles, even mine this far 
away, standing at the edge of the dock, 
staring at the sky, thinking about a 
plunge but suddenly afraid of what might be 
at the bottom of the lake. When the news 
reached us, all was already ended, the 
outcome known. Nonetheless, we imagined 
their struggle as if it were ongoing 
because it is, carried in our pockets, 
wrapped in the cellophane and tin foil of 
our lunches, swallowed with the water we 
yet take for granted, the trickling off the 
mountains as if glaciers last forever.


-


Monday Morning 

All moments are filled with the promise of regret 
or possibility. Within me and without, in the 
space between synapses, the invisible attraction 
of opposite poles fuels a status that does not exist, 
making and unmaking. The answer is not to 
address but to become. Do you know what it 
means when I say my ears have become as long 
as my great-grandmother’s? And not for the 
same reason as the Buddha’s ears are long? Each 
morning I clear the path, another stone. Every 
day I resolve, one more slip. I cannot help but 
fall into life, called to the deep by a hand print on 
a wall left by a body discovering itself absorbing 
and expelling cells within cells inside a warm 
cluster of organs cradled by a slick structure of 
bone, covered by skin and greeting others.
3 Comments
Charles Sergeant link
11/17/2013 02:47:18 am

It is easy to get lost within the stone as there is almost an infinite maze of pathway to return to the light so one must be careful upon entering and beware of ducks eating the trail you so carefully left to navigate. It is not easy inside whining rock.

Reply
Sandra Kolankiewicz
11/21/2013 11:34:34 am

dooglie wooglie bo-booglie: i appreciate your efforts to get Trev out of the stone..xxoo

Reply
Bruce Malesk
10/27/2020 08:36:05 am

Very nice and refreshing, food for thought....

Reply



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