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MY NIGHTMARE
is looking for you, dear.
It wants to stretch out next to you on top of the sheets,
wants to put its marbled hand on your forehead,
and open its mouth over your eye. When it breathes out,
my nightmare, it will sink into you through that eye.
It will cue up a whole nervous symphony, singing
through lips and claws, clacking. It will throw you to them,
the wild chargers, the tsunami surge. It will take
you to the complicated houses where you lose
someone over and over, and leave you there.
You will fall down with it folding around you,
but the wind will not scream, it will sound soft, like cloth ripping.
NOTE TO MY FATHER
with appreciation to Matthew Zapruder
Today you will pick me up at the one-room airport.
My heart feels like a room of unreleased birds
My heart siphons directly from the mother keg of cowboy songs.
I will color myself dust, like a gulf lizard.
I look forward to showing you my taste for single-malt.
I look forward to drinking booze from coffee cups,
you are in your green chair trying to remember a song,
you are humming Yellow Rose of Texas and deliberately mixing up the words cabesa and cerveza.
I wonder if you now can molt?
I wonder if your feet touch the ground now?
I remember when you wore white shirts with toothpicks in the pocket,
sharp but soft, not unlike the bones of little birds.
All our known animals are asking after you,
so let's not worry that the dunes no longer protect us.
Let's not break too fast like pool balls hurrying into pockets.
Come out of your cave with your Louis L'Amour books and nightcaps,
your 474th combat air crew photo hidden in a box your old cat sleeps on.
I am stepping off the plane into the green and oil-smelling night.
LL House studies poetry with Lisa Bellamy at the Writers Studio in New York, is a former dancer and newly-minted lawyer, and moonlights with a wildlife rehabber where she specializes in giving subcutaneous fluids to possums."
Email: LL House
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