Blue Architecture

This house should be painted blue
But it's white, and the paint

Is peeling and it's not
My house, anyway.  It's a long, drawn out

Sigh.  It's my deaf upstairs neighbor
Playing the same evangelical rant

For the third day in a row.
I can't hear the words

Unless I open my door and lean
Into the hallway, but the tone of anger

Drips through the ceiling.  It's a winter
Of the usual betrayals, a winter

Of keening wind, of longing
For home—you know, for love.

Where Charlie Parker called home
Was the place he went to

When the needle did its work.  Maybe
You arrive at the thought: they don't come

For the music but to gawk
At the most famous junkie in the world

And it breaks your heart.
Maybe you grow tired, as Elvis did,

Of being Elvis.  Or maybe you fistfight
With a few white men

Outside the club, as Billie Holiday did, after one
Of them stubbed his cigarette out

On her fur coat.  Or maybe
You just decide you are "tired of living"

As my great aunt wrote to her sister, in Polish,
From a North Dakota farmstead in 1925,

Shortly before taking the 12 gauge to her husband
As he slept, then stepping to the dresser

To down some of the blue bottle
Of morphine.  Maybe the land

Was as bleak, cold, and treeless then
As it is now.  Maybe the chores

Seemed endless, the farms all around you
Failing, and the husband, heartless.  Maybe you knew

That your brother caroused like the others
And would not get home from the dance

In time to save you.  Maybe you left
The hundred dollars next to the shotgun

In the attic, with the spent shell,
Because, what was the use?

Maybe you looked up at the moon
From the front door, just before collapsing, and it looked

Like a pale, silent, suffering face
Imprisoned by those spindly branches

Of the fragile line of trees
Planted there for windbreak.  Maybe

The moons of your three
Children's faces, floating in their beds, accompanied

You, the comfort of knowing they would be
Taken in by relatives nearby.  But did

The thought of lying side by side
With the husband you murdered

Occur to you?  A town so small, there was
Only one funeral parlor, and one

Viewing room.  Then, to be buried
Side by side, to descend into hell

Handcuffed to each other.  Oh, Susie Q,
What did you think you were doing?

Would you rather, as Elvis once said, feel
Nothing at all than feel such loneliness?

Maybe I read the newspaper accounts
At the microfilm machine

In a dim, quiet, basement room
Of the university where I was teaching, and it made me

Shudder, as when one opens the door
During a blizzard, and falls inside

With relief, because the name
Of the murderess is exactly my own.

For Lack of a Vision


It thrilled my grandmother to be yet on this earth
When they elected a Pole, Pope,

Horrified her
When someone took a shot at him,

Though it was thought to be
A fulfillment of the mysteriously

Withheld Third Prophecy of Fatima.
Or was it Lourdes?

So much, forgotten.  So long
Since I gave up on

Ever being granted a Vision.
It was not holiness I prayed for,

A bloated and self important
Therapist once told me, but fame.

Possibly.
It was my grandmother who heard the rapping

At her bedroom window
Late one night

As my brother hitchhiked home from California,
A mere ninety pounds, retching

From food poisoning, and recognizing
It as a sign, called my mother to tell her:

"Your Mike's in some kind of trouble."
The only Polish I learned

From her, two imperatives:
"Give me a whiskey"

And "Shut your big mouth."
And I've forgotten how to say both.

In Polish, that is.
Sometimes I think I would prefer

To just survive like the cockroach, that Methuselah
Of the insect kingdom.  I would be happy

To be able to cut out my heart, my main one,
The one that flares and bleeds, the one

Pierced by those thin, sharp daggers
In the "Mater Dolorosa,"

The print my grandmother's mother
Carried with her on the ship from Germany,

The one buried in the coffin with my grandmother,
At her request.  The last time I saw her, in the nursing home,

She walked me over to the wall, pointed to the picture,
And told me the story.  Though she couldn't remember

My name, fretted about forgetting her Polish—
"I go over it, at night, in bed, in my head"—she knew

I was one of the great brood
Of the fruit of her womb, a child of one of the six

Out of nine who survived to adulthood.
Yes, I would like to

Cut out the heart of desire, switch over
To one of the auxiliary hearts

In each of the six legs, feeling my way
Over and around the endlessly

Confusing obstacle course of this world.
Or, even better, use one of those

In the antennae, sniffing the air
With a rapidly beating, tinny, little heart

My longing turned, finally, toward simple direction.
Is that how she got through it, the cruel

Necessity of having to bury three babies in a row?
Turning to my father, the youngest

Of the survivors, for comfort?
Softening him

To the rigors of this world?
Possibly.

I watched her pat his pale, sunken cheek
In a gesture

Of profound tenderness, mother to child,
Before they closed the lid of his coffin,

Before the chords came crashing down
From the balcony behind us.

A favorite rosary
Looped around her other hand.

SUSAN YUZNA is a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami.  Her first poetry book, Her Slender Dress, won the Akron Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.   Her recent book is entitled, Pale Bird, Spouting Fire.  These poems are from the collection she is currently working on.  Ms Yuzna is also doing one-on-one tutorials, that is, reading manuscripts and commenting upon them.   She charges $75 an hour.  Anyone interested can email her at Yuzna@aol.com

Click here to read more poems by Susan Yuzna in ForPoetry.com and here to read Jacqueline Marcus' review on Pale Bird, Spouting Fire.

                                         
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