Checking the Exit Signs

And every time she says yes to you,
she starts inventing ways to say no.
How about dinner, Sunday? Yes.
She spies the dust on the bookcase, the
clothes to be ironed, and the dog hasn’t
been brushed in days. Sunday, maybe

She’ll get a head cold, that bronchitis
that persists, stirred up by the motes
dancing in the autumn light streaming in
her bay window. Maybe the drawbridge
catches on the roof of her mouth and
she can’t speak or kiss, so no stays

stuck in her throat.

Every time she says yes, she is
saying no.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Please share your thoughts. My instinct says the last stanza needs to go. What do you think?
Thank you for reading.

Succumb and Last Hurrah

Succumb

Starved stems
brown and bitter blossoms
beset by vermin,
overcome with
pestilence and disease.
Even a hardy
plant withers,
is better dug out,
truncated, than to
linger.



Last Hurrah

Amid withered limbs,
anemic spent blossoms
and aphid savaged leaves,
is the tender blossom.

Blushing blaze red
and flourishing
bud, on paltry
stem. Dew nestled
in delicate
folds, promising
one last hurrah.

Meet Me in 1972

Meet me in 1972
In the damp Maryland pine
lined basement of my mother’s
rowhouse. Follow me down

Winans Way into the woods,
where Leakin Park hides
the fairies and discarded corpses.
Follow me to the trickle of the Patapsco

snaking at the lowest ebb. Soft earth
pillowing every step, moss dense,
emerald clotted, and sunlit gems
swimming through the leaves.

No one comes here.
Follow me to 1972

In hip hugger bell bottoms,
Hirachi sandals, jasmine scented
wrists, steel convictions, walking on
ether and the Doors; substantial ground.

The canopy thickens, the moss lush,
gather up my hair in your fingers,
braid it down my back, pull my shoulders
toward your chest. Circling

our arms, like a moon cycling
full within a grove of old Maryland
oaks, within our embrace, peace,
quiet, comfort, rapture, joy.

The falcons circle
mistaking us for carion.

Meet me in 1972, before I
ran away.

My Mother Stopped Sipping

My mother died. Yesterday, today?
Everyday. Every day I cancel the writing
class - the only one I ever cancel -
to go see her. Every day, I get
up early, put on my blue jeans,
white cotton shirt, my flats.

I slip on my miraculous
metal to please her, a
talisman from my childhood.

I rouse Sara, 14 years old, and
say, "Dylan has had breakfast.
Watch him. I am going to visit
Grammie."

"Why," she stretches, a butterfly
escaping the cocoon. "Will she
know the difference?"

"She'll know." I turn on the
bedroom light, lacking kindness.
"Get up."

Long grey pavement turns to
coal black asphalt as the sun
rises and tall trees cathedral
the avenue.

Five miles away, I stop for a coffee,
no cream, no sugar,
I am doing penance.

Every day, black, no cream,
no sugar.

She is dying. She dies. I am
sipping piping hot Kona coffee
and turning the keys in the
ignition and my mother
stopped sipping.

My mother is dying,
yesterday, today.

Here is my best gift . . .

Silence, quiet, the long
absence, the end
of the echo.

Here is the hollow,
the carved out portion,
chambers emptied.

Buried in the muddy
bottom, stilled, calmed,
sounding no more.

Take a Writing Course with Mary this summer - C'mon

Have you missed our time creating new works? Do you enjoy the company of other writers? Then come join me for one or both of the following summer treats.

WRG-313-301 Creative Journaling 6/15 - 6/29 Tuesday 6:30-9:00 PM
This is not a class to teach how to make homemade journals or to document your vacation. This is a writing class that uses journal activities to awaken the creative spark, to mine the depth of an undeveloped idea. The journal becomes a unique treasure chest of material. Surprise yourself. This class focuses on the artistic process and resources include Walking on Alligators and The Artists Way and several Anne LaMott exercises (plus some unique ideas of my own - challenge your creativity).

WRT 312-301 How to Write/Sell Short Stories 7/13-7/29 Tuesday and Thursday 6:30-9:00 PM
The short story market is one of the expanding markets in publishing. Digestible media (given the sparse time that consumers have available after work and family demands) that can be enjoyed is increasing in demand. Short story construction is sparse, tight, with close attention to meaningful details. Come write and polish a short story and get it into the marketplace in just three weeks.

Visit AACC to register.

Reading Tonight: b.b. bistro, Annapolis 6:30 PM

Come hear "Just Mary", and others, orate their writing prose. Then join Mary with a "Prosst" at Heroes, thereafter.

EVENT: Poetry reading followed by drinks at Heroes
Friday May 14th at B.B. Bistro, 110 Annapolis Street
6:30pm, Six meat-eating featured poets, listed below in height order:

Barbara DeCesare, who is her own worst enemy (which makes the restraining order very difficult to abide by)
Deanna Nikaido (who doesn't really eat meat)
Mary Bargteil (Just Mary)
Rebecca Gonzalez
Mike Snider
and
Hiram Larew

with special musical guest Naked Blue!

Each Friday in May, a different Annapolis coffeeshop will be hosting a free poetry event, with six featured readers, open mic, some music, surprise mystery guests and potentially naked Albanian jugglers, but we’re still working the green card issues.
Join Cliff, Rocky, open mic readers and a penetralia of past featured poets for THE CORNER OF POETRY AND MAIN , a celebration of five years of bringing the region’s best poets together with the Crabopolis community. Come and enjoy a brand of entertainment that is honest, unique, semi-spontaneous, and, at times, just plain weird (in a good way). Featured readers and open mic participants (that’s you!) will be recorded, and a compilation cd is in the offing.

Poet bios:

Just Mary is published in poetry, short story, and novella. Mary Lorraine Bargteil is troubled by her name, artifacts, and alignment. Frequently inconsistent, her creative efforts have resulted in publication in poetry, short story, novella, and essay. One of her creative objectives is to make books from existing materials and to excavate territories and characters where the artifacts are sketchy at best. Her most recent poetry collection, “Artifacts” was discovered when she was reading the unsubstantiated account of Lilith and broke her grandfather's Baltimore and Ohio railroad official china egg cup. She finds significance in things that are broken.

Mike Snider has written mostly rhyming, metrical poetry for 41 years and played music for 39 if you don't count those disastrous piano lessons at the age of 12, but only remembers one song of the three he wrote in all that time. Fortunately, he gets to perform the aptly named "Solitaire" with the eclectic folk-fusion band Fractal Folk. He blogs at Mike Snider's Formal Blog. Google knows the band and the blog.

Like so many poets, Hiram Larew is in love with all that isn't said. It's what's implied, sensed or downright absent that sticks around, haunts and teases. Leaping from place to place is good, too. So, of course, his favorite poet is Chopin and his favorite songster is Gerard Manley Hopkins with Dylan Thomas as fine backup. Larew is real short and squat. If you want to know any more about him, try yawning.

For want of a nail. . .

There is no easy way back. My
name is disappearing as I type,
each previous letter fading into
white.

Everyday more rocks in my
pockets, warming in my hand.
Does the water burn inside out?

Financial Forecasting

"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."

Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224
Brutus

Blackberry Eating

It is haircut time of year; new shoes, back to school, a bouquet of freshly sharpened #2 pencils, a brand new notebook, and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper (they always taste better to me).

So I got a haircut but I still need to get the notebook and some wax paper to wrap sandwiches (and Oreo cookies but not applesauce). I put a new sticker on my car, University of Maryland for my beamish boy.

And the sun is setting just a little earlier every day, every day until the winter solstice (my favorite night of the year). Then the nights will grow leaner and the daylight hours more full. It’s the defining moment. Another favorite, like September. I wait for September. It's okay to begin again now.

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry - eating in late September.
- Gallway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating

Eliot Leads Me Back

In 1985 I studied T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and it became my bible. I have a paperback edition that has followed me into every classroom, that stays in my car when I'm not teaching, that is rarely beyond arm's length. The whole collection is always teaching me - and right now this is the passage from which I am learning, again.

"You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

This is a work in progress

Shirts and Skins
The oldest is a white wife beater
narrow ribbed, hugging my hips,
tightening at the rib cage,
made for hot summer nights
in the deep south.

Here is the foil, all black, long,
extra long, high neck, long-sleeve,
still ribbed, but wide ribs and not
constricting but loose, catching on
the lift of my breast when I reach.

Next is the thread thin flannel
in red and black and white,
formal collar, buttons, cuffs
folded back, grazing my thigh
and the bottom of my buttocks.

Then a extra large denim blue
t-shirt, the Ellicott City emblem
nearly disappeared. Best worn with boy
shorts, great for napping and washing the
car, for when drying off from the shower,
answering the doorbell.

This on has the Harley emblem, not
yet faded. Long sleeves, rolled back,
an extra long for the tall, burgundy so it
conceals wine stains and blood. It taps the
very top of my thigh, the cups of my cheeks
slip out without discretion.

Night companions, comfort clothes, shackles
better burned. But I keep them, my polygamist
weakness seeking the one for this night and
that one for tomorrow.

Approfondement

this is the nature of this man,

I like to watch him reach,
his arm extended, lean and
purposeful, the apex exposed, the fingers
already curving for the object
he will lift, carry, cover; rare
flesh, railroad vein lattice, care
in smooth skin,

the moment just before, the
breadth of circumstance. I like to
watch him reach.

I like to see him stoop,
coming to the place of
eye sight with the flower, the
willow stem, the child, the
pup, the woman,
the lips and eyes that are
up reaching toward his, toward that
scent, visage, voice.

this is the nature of this man.

On One Foot

I can't help it - I like Sasha Cohen -
I don't mind that she's fragile
or that she falls down -
and I like the Russian Woman
with the name I don't know how to write and
the Japanese skater
who I call the dragon but is no dragon at all.

It is so difficult to be satisfied.

Neena

Blazing willow,
Worm hole path beading
Through sunlit bark
The sun in winter
and the moon at noon.
Extraordinary, blonde, paint
brush and ink.
Original.
Master piece.

Seven Stages

Shock
Denial
Anger
What the hell comes after anger?
Because I surely am not guilty
and remorse . . .

I'm sure acceptance is what everyone waits for
but for me, it's some other stage
Some other landscape than acceptance.
Because this is unacceptable.

Wholeness in aloneness
Complete. Round.

No missing pieces.
No bruises fading.
No thundering heart.
No echo of vile voice
knelling through the night.

A solitary landscape
unpacked and unlimited
where the moon and sun
occupy the same sky
without complaint.

Perfect Mistake

If I started as a mistake,
and some thin circumstance
like a bead of liquid from tip to
tongue held on and sustained
me - - -
then it is reasonable it is
all a series of beautiful mistakes
mounting like the arches
of a rainbow, the
blood and bruises coloring the night
with morning
glories
is absolute
perfection

Premonition

'Twas a year ago and the moon was bright
(Oh, I remember so well, so well);
I walked with my love in a sea of light,
And the voice of my sweet was a silver bell.
And sudden the moon grew strangely dull,
And sudden my love had taken wing;
I looked on the face of a grinning skull,
I strained to my heart a ghastly thing.

'Twas bit fantasy, for my love lay still
In my arms, with her tender eyes aglow,
And she wondered why my lips were chill,
Why I was silent and kissed her so,
A year has gone and the moon is bright,
A gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe'
I sit by a new-made grave tonight,
And my heart is broken--it's strange, you know.

~ Robert Service

Lilith

The Authorized Artifacts of Lilith

Exhibit I:
A tattoo of Jehovah’s name
over her razor sharp left
clavicle.

What they said about me was inadequate.
Someone had to get there first. I was put here first.
See my footstep here? Two wells joined by a high arch.
It is sold for the privilege to light on this spot,
dirty your sole, slip it back into your
sock, your shoe, your sandal;
the sand biting, insidious as pollen on the back
of a wing. Til you wake, middle of the night,
dig your teeth into your husband’s
shoulder, your lips grinning and the knowing,
the knowing in your head burning, hot, hot.

Exhibit II:
Two missing ribs discovered
in a high bird’s nest in the Andes,
solid as titanium.

His name came to me like a pulse knocking
on the door of my hips, my hips rocking,
untamed, knowing. What they said about me was in
adequate. My bones would not burn and though
heat kissed every femur and tibia and my hair
fumed with oil, my eyes hard as stones, my flesh
crisp as dried camel tongue, they could not burn me.
Shivering, they huddled him with Eve and punished
men to shiver always, to burn and never cool.
It is not enough.

Exhibit III:
Thrush fetuses nested in
blossoming dogwoods
every spring.

Eve bore him sons. Though my child is lost. Still born.
Eve bore him. Eve succumbed.
The knowledge pouring through her like mercury
lighting her inside. Inside me, Adam had lit, curled
night and day, earth, water, and fire. What they
said about me, fire. Yelling fire. The cry – to
burn. Fire. Blue cooling to burnish yellow, nostril flare,
horse running, red rising to snap the air. Cain. Abel.
Inadequate. The wife over the hill, my daughter.
Not Abraham, but I. More than the stars
my children’s bones.

Exhibit IV:
Scrolls sleeping
in the Gondwana
sands.

They found my likeness in the lost city,
narrow burning rock passage,Bedouin women
turn my image to the wall; the wall will crumble.
What they say about me
is inadequate. A bit of fire burning in the brain is
my foothold, my talisman, my privilege.
To sit like a smoldering ember between your ears, your hips, wetting with spit and blood, icing to heat, ruining civilizations,
one beautiful sole with sand on the heel
after another.