Three Poems
Dan A. Cardoza


 
We All Float

We know what makes
a balloon float,
clouds without string too.

After all, we built magic
way up there, if just to compensate
prayer.
 
All things ascend somewhere,
someday, somehow.
 
So much so,
the dark vault we call sky
impossibly sags.
 
Then, the clouds buckle like
riveted steel beams, exposing cracked
seams, regrettably, impossibly so.
 
For now all the patched stitches
won’t sieve, though a few of us
believe it’s only a matter of time
and inflated faith.

                               

Farm in Ireland

It’s my anniversary day, seven a.m. I’m late by any measure, a soup spoon a bowl, the milk in the cows, twelve hours old. So full, utters churn cream and butter. Chores multiply, breed like wild March hare. My feet can’t seem to find my shoes.

All I imagine are the armies, as they advance in divisions of sycamore at the end of the far pasture, along the tracks, ablaze against the grey and platinum walls of November. In the top of the trees, fires climb ladders in the sky like a new religion. Seasons are something we shared.

There’s a half moon hanging, as white as any broken tooth. It’s near the horizon aching its down. I imagine the sun too ashamed to rise, ride its bright stallions in its ceaseless skies.

There’s a cemetery nearby as full as a freezer, a nineteenth century convenience for those who believed in the preserving souls.
I don’t, and that’s why I still sleep with a measured mist of her perfume. In bed each night my body betrays me, it tosses and turns, feels like an affair.

When she packed honey in the Ball canning jars, she said a tiny sprig of Rosemary blossom kept good luck. I’m mindful of that, but not enough, as the day breaks my broken heart.


Teal Screen Door

It’s platinum November, the bouquet of the Fourth of July BBQ lingers, even the scent of missing you.

The chipped teal hue is emotive. Who knew grandpa would someday speak
the linguistics of acrylic some twenty years gone.

How can I forget last summer when the hinges swelled like a molecule conventional, stiffening the crackle and guiro as tight as a caw in a crow?

It’s been a while since you died.
Tonight, in case you don’t know, I am drinking Jack Daniel’s, sitting on the redwood bench we built, and smoking unfiltered Camels into the deep tar of night.
The rusted door knob changes channel’s every time I take a leak.

With each in and out, dust wafts out from its cage in the screen, smelling as sweet as the sky, forgiveness, and the stale whiskey we drank at the beginning, on our failed wedding day.
And now I wait for the purification of funerals, the ones they say help you move on somehow.

But I only awake in the dawn's early light from all the white noise.












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About the Author: 
Dan A. Cardoza has a MS Degree in Education from UC, Sacramento, Calif. He is the author of four poetry chapbooks, and a new book of fiction, Second Stories.

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