Melissa's Poems

These are lyrics I wrote in July of 1968. We had just met again. We had spent a little less than a week living at my friend Mike Potter's house in Woodmere. I had forgotten about them...the lyrics. I don't remember enough about those days at Mike's house. I wish I did. But the lyrics were a surprise. Wonderful and awful. Which, of course, isjust like life. Wonderful and awful.

July 1968                      

Melissa talks to my heart when I’m sleeping

 Melissa talks to my heart when I’m sleeping
Tells it tales I’ll never hear
And I awake feeling grace and grateful
Feeling her warm and quietly near

Child Melissa feeling naked and holy
Singing her songs to the rhythm of we
Catching my eyes with the silence she told me
Covering my body and calling me free

For Melissa, for Missy, the songs never ending
Perhaps never spoken but kept to ourselves
For poems lose meaning in the distance of reading
And my love fits Melissa so gently well

There’s no need to whisper, “I’ll never leave you.”
I am here for tonight and tomorrow it seems.
And tonight is forever and tomorrow its sister
I am yours Melissa, my poems love and dreams

1998

Is that her? Is that her?
Standing over there stretching after having been in the car too long
Stretching while her gas tank is filled
on this hot August morning
on the New Jersey turnpike.
Aren't those her glasses?
And aren't those her legs?
Isn't that the way she would or did wear her hair?
The blouse certainly seems one she would love.
And what if I walked over there in this blazing sun
and just said, "Melissa?"
Would she turn and say, "Well, it's about time."

Yes, it's about time
the time that's passed since I woke one evening
and didn't have a wife any more.

Could that be her? Could that be her?
Walking two small children across the street in Bryn Mawr?
Isn't that the sort backpack she would wear?
Old canvas and leather and well held together?
Her jeans loose and baggy and just the thing to wear to dig in the garden
or find the dog in the woods after he got out the back door
left open by one of those two small children.

And if I parked the car a block or two ahead
and walked back to meet up with her and said, "Melissa?"
Would she say,
"Here are the kids. The kids we were to have.
And here they are and our daughter befriended a duck today
and I was sure she would find a way to coax it home.
And our son thought to build
a paper boat and float it down that stream in Haverford to see how fast it would go.

Or would she say, "Ted...can it be you?
I thought you were dead."

Because, perhaps, I am the ghost. I am the ghost.
And in some place she walks a street
or sits at a cafe' in Bryn Mawr and sips some coffee
thinking that I might pass by any second
because I didn't really go anywhere
for good

1990

There was a chill
in the air
in August

 
and it doesn’t take much of a chill to get me to build a fire
so I did
with twigs from the yard
and a catalog from some store as kindling
birch logs
I found in the
garage
and wood left over from a bookcase I never built

 
I listened to Satie
Trois Gymnopedies
and then she is the next room
reading Verlaine
or a block away
picking the wild mushrooms that have bloomed
because of all the rain we have had

In my fire
I see her simple wood peg coffin
burning
and turning
into fine white ash
to be thrown on a field
of wildflower seeds
so when Spring comes
I can say, “There springs Melissa in red
and there she is in yellow.”

There was a chill
in the air
in August
and it doesn’t take much of a chill to get me to build a fire
so I did
with twigs from the yard
and a catalog from some store as kindling
birch logs
I found in the
garage
and wood left over from a bookcase I never built

East 18th Street

1976

The guitar slipped off the chair.
It was my fault

I was tired and not careful.
It slid and the
cobalt
blue
bowl, the small one,
fell off the chest
and then it was fragments
and you don't walk barefoot untill even the smallest pieces are swept up.
The bowl was hers,

Melissa's.

I stared still at the shards
as if they had fallen from another existence and time.

(memories I cannot remember clearly
permanent but half forgotten.
If they fade, though,
nothing will fill these spaces

nothing will fill the spaces)

Preservations in deep translucent blue
broken because they stretched too far

She is more dead now
in the firming of
the past tense.

June 2007

why couldn’t she come home tonight?
it’s late and warm and dark and raining
teardrops are crying to the pine trees
puddles resist the wind
stars smoke in and out of the clouds
the night is not permanent
it is this and that
I have had no wine
a little chocolate a cup of tea
I am clear but tired
leaning on the screen door and breathing in early June
and thinking
it would be fine and easy
if she came to the door while I am writing this
and walked in and stood behind me
and asked what I’m writing
because

well

why couldn’t she come home tonight?

slowly to a halt all the going forward did not
offspring imagined and not conceived never reached the naming
a sailboat with inconsequential sails and an ill imagined rudder
became nothing of much

and the house
the house
with the path of pine soft flat
and the house
the house
with the windows of breeze
froze at her last labored exhalation
that bloody wind
blowing out the heat
that was needed
to keep
it kept
repeating

“there are no dreams….there are no dreams….there are no dreams.”