Karen Paul Holmes
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My Almost Date with a Cowboy, Polebridge, Montana Maybe an ex-pro-hockey player, now cattle broker doesn’t qualify as a cowboy. And him trailing my girlfriend, her husband, and me from the Bandit Saloon to the Northern Lights Bar at their country club isn’t what you’d call a date. So I guess I should call it my almost date with an almost cowboy, though he did have on needle-toed cowboy boots. He’d been watching football while throwing back beer or maybe shots all day, wore a Montana Grizzlies sweatshirt and wasn’t that cute. When he ordered a Jägerbomb so loud everyone in the fireplace-lounge could hear, we felt like crawling under the table. Plus my friends had briefly considered setting me up with him but thought better because he always strung along at least two women, one in Canada and one or possibly two here. All that said, he was the first man to flirt with this newly single woman who hadn’t dated since 1977. He being so drunk he wouldn’t remember slurring once every three minutes, “You’re hot!” and “You’re leaving tomorrow shouldn’t?” have flattered me. But it did. ** This was first published in No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018.) ** “The sunshine that was you floods all the open door” for Chris, 2017, after lines by Louise Imogen Guiney There’s a bit of thunder in the gunmetal mountains, and the sky is silver. Instead of gold, the sun’s path on platinum water is silver, and I want it to be your silver-white hair. I’m tired of this making do, as Webster’s says to survive, to manage to live without, to use whatever is available. Your T-shirt is a little dress on me; it could be you brushing my bare breasts. I want the far-off rumble to be that sound low in your throat, but I am trying to get by on this dock—low sun soaking my skin instead of you. I read these lines, “Beyond the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live,” and want them to be true. I want to stem this lip quiver and tear brim, don’t want to slug up all those weathered stairs. You won’t enter our cabin with me, won’t enter in the silver-black of night. You need to find a way to come back from the dead. ** This poem was first published in Eastern Iowa Review. ** How I Would Change the Endings of Perfect Tragedies I cannot watch Romeo and Juliet without hoping this time Juliet’s lids will flutter before Romeo sips his poison, nor read House of Mirth without wanting to shake some sense into Lily, beg her to forego the excess sleeping draught so Lawrence can declare his love the next day. And when fifteen hours of Wagner’s Ring draws to a close, please Siegfried, don’t take the potion making you forget Brünnhilde. Just go somewhere safe with her forever. Yes, that would negate the enthralling Immolation Scene, where she sings the longest aria in all opera, rides her horse into your funeral pyre, and burns up Valhalla, consuming all the gods. And yes, your deaths leave humankind redeemed by love, which I’m all for. But these days, the real world has all the drama I can stand, what with lovers leaving, dogs limping, bills piling, politicians stabbing, big toes stubbing, wrinkles slicing deeper and deeper into my face, once as smooth as an apple fresh from the tree. ** This poem is from No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018.) ** For Caroline on Her Birthday Love is a way of being in the world. Dr. David Hawkins Like trying to name the particular colour of the sky over these mountains and how different it is from the lake or how much the same, or how it has changed in this October light, I cannot describe you—cannot classify, catalogue, label you. My sister, friend, mentor, wonder, butterfly, bird—all fall short like the orange leaf caught in a silk web on my window. And love, even when pronounced in uppercase, is not a large enough word. The world calls you Caroline, but you have no name in this heart—you’re just there. And in my solar plexus, crown chakra, and in the air. Yes there: You are. ** This first appeared in Eastern Iowa Review. ** To My Husband on Our First Anniversary, 2021 Sac-ra-ment: a thing of mysterious and sacred significance; a channel of divine grace In my floral robe, wrinkled and faded as a dishrag, dragging my 67-year-old self down the stairs to the living room where you’re pressed and dressed and have already calmed clients on the phone, but now you’re singing Here comes my baby--that bright-eyed bushytailed thing you do each day. It could be too much, this boosting me into morning. But I laugh, can’t be a cranky rusted gate because, well, those sea blue eyes, your rosy beam, arms unfurling peony-like (and I, the ant burrowing). Plus, the French press you’ve kept warm for two hours and the oven ready to bake frozen biscuits. Like you do, I want to make tenderness a daily sacrament. Love is, wise ones remind us, also a verb, and I thank you for your patience while I practice. I want to verb you like you verb me. ** This first appeared in Eastern Iowa Review. ** June Bugs on Saint Constantine’s Day, Flint, Michigan It was the first warm night of spring and the only time our parents let us play outside after dark. Dad’s favourite peonies nodded heads, pink-red under the porch light. At a card table in the den, men with Canadian Club, black olives, kasseri, and Balkan bread muttered poker bids in Macedonian, while wives played canasta in the white living room for pennies, ate poppy seed cake, drank Mogen David Concord mixed with Squirt. At Ellis Island between the world wars, our dad, Constantine Papazoff had become Carl Paul, but everyone from the Old Country still called him Costa. This was his Name Day, and the year I turned eight. June bugs carpeted window screens, an invasion we kids had never seen. Easy to catch: we liked the way their sticky legs clung to our fingers and arms like a hug. Why does anyone want to capture living things, just to let them go again? But we did—our jar, large as a world globe, full of leaves and our brown-armoured pets. Next day, we freed them to fly, not knowing they were pests, enemies of peony leaves and mom’s lilacs ready to bloom. Each year, we waited for the thrill to begin. Our nights never buzzed like that again. ** Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has two books: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich). Poetry credits include The Writer's Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume. She’s also a freelance writer who teaches writing at various venues and conferences and hosts The Side Door Poets in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. https://karenpaulholmes.com |
