Tiare Picard
For Greg B. (1963-2021)
1.
Denver
The bees are out in summer
late eighties
sonic Madonna
You and your whiskey hair
dirt in my martini
Coltrane on the turntable
Coltrane in our heads.
We watch the bees in a nest
that grows out from the corner of a windowpane.
We watch them as we watch everything
else from the inside out.
I remember the interiors
a couch
a leather chair
(Decades later, I buy one of my own
and paint the walls in muted colors)
the bookshelves
and the crates of covered vinyl on the floor
(in the early 2000s you store these on your phone and embrace
the new tech
as any well-oiled commie would)
You keep the lights on low
not for any particular reason
but simply because the mind works best
when the world dims.
and even in these seemingly quiet moments, our voices
loom just above the norm – our hands gesticulating
at the air
at the cat
at Ollie North
at the noise in the notes
(Coltrane again)
at the cook at Dolcamino’s
at the dust
and the farms and Willie Nelson
(at the cornfields in Nebraska
at the ʻāhiu along the makai fence –
the naio wood posts leaning over barbed wire)
at the cat again
at the poems or the stories or the books we swallowed that day
at the wallpaper and my disdain
(which you tolerate – egging me on with some sort of grin)
at the bees (not the ones outside my window, but the ones inside the machine)
We are young and full of mind-honey.
2.
A year or two or three or four push forward
You call and say you are in town
and we speak for hours again. Time
leaves without passing
You and I and Rogelio or Les eat
on a card table
on the front porch
of the Logan house in the fall –
when the Rocky Mountain Maples molt
and the bumble softens for winter
and we drink to the maddening lines again
We drink to surprising twists
We drink while the smoke webs spin from our mouths
We drink to the crumbling wall in Berlin
We drink to the bees who chisel their way through
We drink peppered Stoli to the new Russia
(and still, you tuck the red card in your wallet)
We drink as the map sheds its skin
3.
I would never see you again
A decade or two or three pass by
and I make my way south across the border
Guanajuato León DF Puebla
back up to Michoacán Morelia Pátzcuaro
I make my way across the Pacific again
Home- not back to the rolling hills or the white on one mauna or the purple on
the other one at dawn
but here where the mud thickens when it rains
even between the miles of concrete and noise
Kona side Lihue Kapaʻa Mānoa Aiea
and our lives run parallel along each coast
because bees are bees
and now we are cogs you and I
hyperlinks you and I
– subtexts
there is much I leave out
left out with you
there is much you left out with me
– the interiors
again
mattered only as far as the chair
4.
Sent by Greg via jesus phone:
links to Tool and their Forty Six and 2
(more shedding – more skin
thinly laced and transparent
ancient and fragile
all that history self-contained)
a poem by Ashbery
popbitch
or a bit on S. Palin in tweed
Obama’s so hot I write
your reply: for you – a Garth Risk Hallberg diagram
of his sentences
the video of a cat leaping off a desk
and missing its mark
not funny I say
too soon? you chuckle
you always chuckle
or the latest by the Survival Research Labs
(-a flyer of a guy in a hazmat suit
and the drills and the cranes and the trash and the chains and pianos
the dirt the oil the fire the sting!
a footnote by Greg: it is impossible to have progress
without conscience – R. Rauschenberg)
or you send a random quote by Will Rogers
or your recommendation for the blues:
a selfie holding a long matchbox
labeled cannabis in all caps
5.
And you call or I call and I hear of
Tennessee wood
(more maple more red)
and broken institutions
the wasteland ghettos
or the frozen one in Anchorage
and the time you kicked out a cab fare
for badmouthing Alaska. I threw his baggage to the curb
you said and left him in the fucking snow.
(we fathom links between your place and mine)
of your woman and her half-baked hair
sprawled across pillows
smiling back at you – the lens
in your focus
(later she would pass, and
I hear you sob for the first time – a cry
that would shake the wings
off a bee).
6.
And you return home
to Scottsbluff
to Nebraska
to the library across the street
to the quiet, broken nights
and your lungs – failing
for all of the living you had breathed
Tiare Picard’s poetry appears in End of the World Project, Shadowed Unheard Voices, Whetu Moana II, and Tinfish 18.5: Poetry, Puzzles and Games. She enjoys working with her colleagues on this journal and lives a quiet life in ‘Aiea.