Village Streets
Mary Ann McDonnell
Village Streets: Poetry by Mary Ann McDonnell
Copyright © 1991 Mary Ann McDonnell
Cover photo by Eric McRoberts.
A print version of Village Streets was published in 1991 by Zeugpress.
This electronic publication was prepared in 2014 by W. R. Rodriguez of Zeugpress.
Table Of Contents
I
Village Streets
Some Things Old Men Do, Day In And Day Out
Longing
Lonely Room
Hospital Night
Ether
When Visiting Hours Are Over
Votive Light
I Am Very Tired Lord
The Day After The Funeral
New Widow I
New Widow II
The Pause That Refreshes
Who Is That Knocking On My Door?
I Remember When Uncle Frank Took Aunt Rose To Live In The City
Collectors’ Items
Rainy Night
Amnesia
Missing You
Cold Night
II
Whitney Museum Special Showing
A Coin
Good Looking Guy (All Of 17 Years Old)
Jukebox
Girl On Saint Mark’s Place
Whore
The Traveler
The Games Go On
The Last Out
Sorely In Need Of A Lie
Hm! I Wonder You Silly Clown
Arts & Crafts Exhibit
Snow In The 9th Precinct N.Y.C.
What If I Went To Ireland
In Castledown Square
To Wake The Dead
The Old County Champ
Dreammender
Evening Comes To The Backyard At 1802 Redwood Lane
Pussywillows Make Me Feel So Sad
First Frost
Autumn
Come Fill The Cup
The Thief
No Pets Allowed
Forecast
What Do Little Boys Keep In Old Cigar Boxes?
Noise And Violence
The Great Debate
On Tides Of Passion, Or: The Lovers
The Rejected Juror
Ode To A Cucumber
(Your) City Property (Park)
The Relative Account
They Are Not Sick, They Are Dying, A Most Natural Thing To Do
Dedication
For Eddie
and all of our children,
those born of us
and those who have come happily
into our lives,
and for their children.
I
To wonder and to still accept in faith
Is faith as it is meant to be
Village Streets
These are the streets we walked along
A long time ago.
I walk them now alone.
I look in shop windows we looked in then—
“Old George’s antiques.”
I see he sold a few pieces.
Ah, but the Chinese console table
With the patina of dust
Is still just as it always was.
I can still see your face so clearly darling—
I don’t think I’ll ever walk down this street again.
Like George’s Chinese table
I find
Some memories are best left, undisturbed,
Covered gently with dust.
Some Things Old Men Do, Day In And Day Out
Very early in the morning
They rise
Tread familiar steps
To the bathroom
Perform their ablutions
Then
Put on the coffee pot
Spread generic jam
On generic bread
Reread last night’s newspapers
Talk to the bird
Feed the cat
Take the dog out
Exchange a few words
With their young neighbors hurrying off to work
Then
Back to the house
Water the plants
Some of them (promised their wives they would
The wives who died first
Leaving them alone)
Then
They take out the garbage
Throw the spread across the bed
Take books back to the library
The laundry can wait till tomorrow
Old men are busy, busy, busy
Attending to all the tasks
That hurry their days
Till the ten p.m. news
Then they can wind the clock
And tomorrow they must
Take the laundry
Longing
The days go by all quiet.
Sabbath to Sabbath
Another week—
Yet—
Constantly I seek
To hear a word
If only a whisper
From one who could not speak.
Silence, soft as China silk
Fills every room
Of the apartment with nothingness.
Silence trapped—
Holding its breath,
Waiting—
Waiting for the sound of two heart beats.
There is only the beat of one
And
The faithful old clock on the bureau.
These sounds don’t count!
He isn’t here—
Lonely Room
Sh!
Listen to the falling rain.
Loneliness is here,
Loneliness lives in the shadows of this room—
My lamp gives little comfort,
The rain keeps falling,
My tears are falling too—
My heart asks where are you?
Hospital Night
Doors open and close, open, close.
People come and go.
Life centimeters along in unquiet rooms.
It rides gurneys
Up and down hallways through the night—
Some nights are so noisy—
Suddenly a sharp stab of pain.
Astonished I hear myself cry out.
I ask for help—
Exposing a frightened, naked heart—
A nurse comes, she is talking to me,
I know she is, I can see her lips moving.
Why can’t I hear her?
She raises my bed then leaves the room.
Sweat is pouring baptismally from my head.
Salt burns my eyes, flavors my lips.
The nurse has come back; she hands me a plastic cup.
I can hear her now, she says words
Like codeine, morphine—
words that have become my bread and water
My life—
When morning comes I am getting out of here!
Too much death—
Too much life—
Ether
Down, down
Deep
Deeper
Into
That gyroscopic world
Of
Anesthesia
Numbing the pain
Making frenzied the brain, that cavorts
Madly in dayglo colors
Racing wildly
From star to star.
When Visiting Hours Are Over
Dear old man,
Lying there in your metal crib,
An aura of fluorescent light
always shining down on you.
You ask us, “Is it day or night?”
We tell you it is nighttime,
But you don’t really care.
We must be quiet—
; You doze off—
But! we don’t want to be quiet, we
Want to lift you in our arms, and
Tell you out loud how much we love you,
Tell you that it takes all our strength
To leave you here in this hi-tech
Medieval place, knowing you
Might slip away—and we won’t be with you.
What do they do to you
When we go?
We pray they give you a needle of kindness
To free you from the pain for a little while.
Visiting hours are over!
There they’ve told us again,
We must go now—keep sleeping darling—
We go down in the elevator, dragging your
I.V. pole, your kangaroo bag, your monitor
And all the bleeping machines
With us.
They stay in our minds; we take
Them home with us.
We’ll bring them back first thing
In the morning.
Good night, dear heart—
Votive Light
Low soft glow—
Candle in the chapel
Flickering,
Making little piffle noises,
Dying
Going out
Leaving only
Tiny waxen tears
In
A
Little red cup.
I Am Very Tired Lord
I got to weeping today
I missed all those who left me—
Family and friends who went away.
They promised we could meet again,
Of course I know they couldn’t tell me when—
I should go now Lord—
Really I should—
No one would miss me,
Except maybe old Tabby here—he loves me.
He is old and all alone too.
My head and hands are shaking quite a lot lately.
Please let me go now, Lord take me!
There will be no wake, no Kaddish, no one to notify—
Oh, I am so very tired Lord,
Give me a quiet grave for sleeping,
Then let me waken in your keeping—
The Day After The Funeral
The day slipped—by—by strength of will
Willing the minutes into hours.
Hurry, hurry, hurry into night.
One day less—
Time heals—
Night—be blind, give sleep, give dreams,
Hurry me into that time that heals.
Give me sleep and a dream
That I may journey back again
If only now and then.
New Widow I
Out of the shadows of this night,
I will rise at dawn
And wonder—
How the sun
Has come again
Now that in all this world
There is no you.
New Widow II
When the night has died
And the dreams have fled
And you waken again to a half empty bed
You call his name
But
There is no answer.
You lie quite still—until
You remember he is sleeping yet
The other sleep—
So you get up and start your day.
Widows have found
It’s always been this way.
The Pause That Refreshes
When in body, mind and soul
I grow weary and sore distressed
To renew myself
I send my mind awondering
And—from the coiling, resting roots of faith
Branches spring anew!
I am refreshed,
For answers come to me—
To wonder and to still accept in faith
Is faith as it is meant to be—
Holy mystery.
Forsaking All Others
Some marriages get better and better,
The newness becomes a familiar
yet everchanging pattern.
There are the ups and downs and the plateaus.
You live and grow and experience all
the stages of life together—
That’s the wonder of it all.
After years, decades,
You reach a zenith where old and new
and everything along the way
Become the norm.
One day the play ends.
Death who was always in the wings
Enters center stage.
On cue one of you
Must exit.
One is left—
Then one day both of you will
Be opening again, some time, somewhere far,
far out of town.
Who Is That Knocking On My Door?
Just this morning there came a knocking on my door.
It was a most insistent knocking
I had never heard before—
I called out rather timidly, “Who is it?”
A voice called back to me,
“It’s Old Age”—
Quickly!—
I turned the key and slid the bolt,
And said,
“Go away, the lady that lives here isn’t at home”—
Then the voice of Old Age answered,
“That’s quite all right,
My dear—I’ll wait.”
I Remember When Uncle Frank Took Aunt Rose To Live In The City
Don’t look in the rear view mirror Rose,
You’ve seen it all before. The farmhouses with their
Wraparound porches, the trees, the gardens,
What’s to look at? Old Joe’s tune-up garage
And gas pumps? The corner saloon, the
Cannon and flagpole on the green?
No, Rose, you’ve seen it all—
Don’t look back, Rose, look ahead, look
At it this way—you won’t have the big
Old house to keep up now, no more
Gracing things and mowing the lawn, it was
Enough to break your back.
You can get out more, visit the museums,
Take in movies and plays. They’ll be sidewalks
And you will be able to walk around all
You want, you’ll be doing new things
Meeting new people—believe me Rose
you’re going to like it—Don’t look back
Rose—
But Rose did look back, and cried,
Strong Aunt Rose cried! God, how he hated
It when she cried—she never used to do
That, but just this last month, what
With getting all her things together, and closing the
House down, she cried and cried.
Three months later Rose found her way back
To the hard-to-take-care-of drafty old house in the country.
Back to friendly old ghosts and evergreen memories.
The family was very upset with her
But in time they came around.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if years
Down the road one of them might
Just find what Rose found in
The old place.
Collectors’ Items
Why, oh why do I do this?
Heaven knows I must stop!
Seems to me, I am always saving things.
An ornate old mantlepiece clock
That ticked its last tock
Thirty years ago. (One more thing to dust.)
Faded old letters with expired dates and authors,
Four baby shoes—
One for each child, now an adult.
Why do I keep these old things, things obsolete?
Remnants of broken rosaries, prayers long ago ascended,
Pretty buttons,
Odd shaped stones,
A brown gardenia,
All these little bi
ts and pieces of my life
Ratpacking down memory street.
Rainy Night
I listen to the rain—
Whimpering, then roaring all night.
Outside my locked door
It beats a wild staccato on the glass windows
With wind powered fists—
Frantically seeking entrance inside this house.
Does the rain wish to come in out of the storm?
Or can this noisy furor
Be the specter of some old sorrow
Seeking quiet for its tomorrow?
Amnesia
I wrote my Paris memoirs of you
Last night. Wine made the adjectives
Flow and the verbs turn blue.
I wrote and I wrote remembering
Everything about you—you—you—
Ah! But, I wrote with mock pen,
In invisible ink on onion skin.
I wrote it all down—
Everything—
I remembered about you, you, you!
I wrote of you at dawn, at sunset,
In the rain and the summer sun—
I told the whole wide world
How beautiful you were when
Moonbeams played across your
Face—
Yes, indeed I wrote all about you,
you, you—
and
it’s
driving
me
mad
I’ll be damned if I can remember
your
name!
Missing You
Gosh, how I miss those mornings,
When we would “coffee cup talk,”
“You tell me your dreams
I tell you mine.”
I miss those times we’d become so into
Each others’ words and thoughts
We would miss bus stops.
I don’t miss bus stops anymore.
I just
Miss you, miss you, miss you—
Cold Night
Brrr! But it’s cold tonight.
The moon shines down all golden bright—
The air is clear.
Swift moving clouds
Grace the landscapes of the sky—
And
Here am I
Walking alone—
On a city street.
My heart recalls another night,
When our universe stood still
And
We warmed our little world
Just walking hand in hand
Counting stars—
II
Perhaps I’ll find another face
That I’d know anywhere
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Village Streets Page 1