#NAPOMO #POETRY #GUESTBLOG Featuring Six Poems by POET, TIMOTHY DONOHUE

SIX POEMS
Timothy Donohue

AT A GRAVEYARD BY AN ORCHARD

We know how

The slight rounding

Of a high corner

Means the headstone

Has memorized the wind

We can raise a yellow-gold apple at dusk

And trace with a cool finger

Where the sunlight sat for hours

We are much more invisible than that

We are a name halved backwards

A thousand times

Living changes lives

Until who we are

And who we were

Are less known

Than what the wind

And sunlight did

The day these bodies

Were covered with earth

We are all energy and invisibility

We are all someone

We can only imagine

DEATH COMES IN THE KITCHEN

Death will come in the window

You thought was locked all these years

The one in the kitchen

The one right above the sink

Death will be tired

And hungry and wanting

A sandwich—all that gravity

Works up a good appetite…

Light from the refrigerator

Unspools on linoleum

Like a break in the clouds

Or a temporary shroud

Death leans into the light

Looking for cold cuts

Spongy white breads and mayonnaise

But you’re too healthy for any of that…

        

So the door closes

And the darkness returns

Until death finds where you’re sleeping

And drags you to your absence

         

Complaining of a certain hunger

LIVES IN A COMA

  1.

Sometimes I wonder

If there was another way,

An ending we might have missed…

It was late morning

It was the end of summer

Cars came infrequently past that motel

A dog barked

Then silence would return,

Coating our lips

And closing our eyes

   2.

We played hooky from real love for so long

We lied about our whereabouts so often

Sometimes we forgot our real names…

Everything outside that room was always boiled

Inside we pulled black curtains

Against the heat and falling bombs

Of sunlight and friends…

  3.

No. There was no other way, no other ending…

It was late morning

It was the end of summer

We hugged so hard

We put our lives in a coma--

And left, in separate cars

INVISIBLE

1.

I stood in line behind a fragrance.

It was you. Your face was invisible,

But it was you.

This was a long time ago.

2.

An electric door kept opening and closing.

Pushing your scent deep inside me,

And urging me to say something clever

To the back of your head.

3.

Inside everyone is a door

They will not open,

And a door they will not close—

Choices must be made.

4.

I should have made you laugh.

Said some nonsense about

Your oolong tea or the candy bar

With the same name as your father

But I remained invisible.

NOTES FROM THE LAST TIME
I SAW FERLINGHETTI
       "there's no there there."                 
            -Gertrude Stein
  Everybody's Autobiography

Weekend-ending. Runway-runaway

Dallas to San Francisco 1:10 a.m.

And where I’m heading it’s 1986,

But it’s still yesterday

So much for the times of our life

I have made a mess of my life

Mixed the mess and painted with it

To outline voices in frames of silence

To take the waiting-for, out of wonder

To hear silence, with new ears

Like a poem, and making

That kind of sense, you left

Ferlinghetti in your Texas college town

And headed to his. You see his motel

Room stuttering, repeating itself in his sleep

Forty-five degrees south by southwest

The machine turned, pointing

A wing at Dallas another

At San Francisco. You hear someone

On the ground pointing a finger

At you. Feathers will fly

 The flight attendant leans over

Picking up a napkin. You use the word

“Callipygian” for the first time out loud

She smiles, looking backwards

She is happily confused. She will be

Your friend in the sky

Baudelaire said he wrote to

“Find the why of it; to transform pleasure

Into knowledge.”  I do it differently

There is so much

I don’t want to know

Between friendship and love

Comes conversational botany

A kind of plant-talk develops

Between a man and a woman

“Nice day.”  “Yes. I was tired of the rain”

“I see that bridge we were on”

Says a boy to his dad in the seat ahead

When you turn, it’s not there anymore

Your lips taste like a woman’s cheekbone

Communication from the neck up

“By definition, the poet must be

An enemy of the State” said Ferlinghetti

Afterward, you drove him to where

He would sleep, perhaps to dream

Against the state of Ramada Inn

Tired and unmemorized

You are up to 30,000 feet

And 36 straight hours

You’re slipping deeper

Into ball turret 36B

A fish turns in your stomach

It hears the desert below you

It hears the cacti and it hears

The coyotes below you.

There’s a “there” there

It’s just that whatever is unclear

Must be so cleared away, it takes the waiting-

For out of wonder.  Like hearing silence

With new ears.  Or seeing Ferlinghetti

Ten hours before arriving where he wasn’t

Thirty years ago

THE PREFERRED EMBRACE

On a sidewalk,

Snow falls between

A man and a woman

Struggling against late December winds---it’s obvious

Their separateness is pre-planned

The snowy gap is precise

And irrevocable.

There is no touching now in these lives.

No looking back, nor at each other.

Just a wobbly march forward,

Into more and more invisibility.

What was the word that sawed them in half?

What failures of desire

Would make falling down,

Alone, under a winter sky,

The preferred embrace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Donohue’s publications include Invisible ~ Poems And Aphorisms , with an afterword by Laura Kennelly (Mandorla Books, 2016) and Road Frame Window ~A Poetics Of Seeing  (Mandorla Books, 2015), that he coauthored with Dennis Patrick Slattery and Donald Carlson, with an afterword by Stephanie Pope.

A native of Lorain, Ohio, he spent a number of years in Texas, where he received a MA in Creative Writing at the University of Dallas. In a professional career spanning four decades, he spent the first 20 years as a writer, producer and sometimes teacher of print and broadcast advertising in Texas and Ohio. He spent the next 20 years as a managing administrator and Communications Director for non-profits dedicated to providing services to individuals with mental illness, developmental disabilities and chemical dependencies. He realized, over time, that poetry could quit him any time it wanted to; but he couldn’t quit poetry no matter what he did. Recently he founded Donohue Words & Works, LLC, which he describes as a “transfusional place for words on purpose and works on canvas.”

 Visit Timothy Donohue at
donohuewordsandworks.com 

He can be reached at donohuewordsandworks@gmail.com

BOOKS
Invisible ~ Poems And Aphorisms , with an afterword by Laura Kennelly (Mandorla Books, 2016)
Road Frame Window ~A Poetics Of Seeing  (Mandorla Books, 2015), coauthored with Dennis Patrick Slattery and Donald Carlson, with an afterword by Stephanie Pope.