Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
My Father’s Business, poems by Perie Longo.
My Father’s Business
was the church of singing mountain streams,
low notes hiding rainbow trout.
You didn’t so much catch one, as dip the pole
gently in, not to crease the water’s stillness,
a worm threaded hook at the tip,
and when you felt a tremble in your hand
you’d lift the fish up almost as if it were
the most fragile thing on earth, like a child
out of the bath, that kind of reverence.
His other business, besides the flock
of five kids he called his little Peppers,
was his writing when not exploring beneath
the crannies of earth to probe what lives
beneath the skin of things.
Yesterday I showed my granddaughter,
after her first day of biology, his book
authored a lifetime ago, The Science of Zoology.
She lit like sun on water, “Cells!
Just what I need!” Like time I mulled,
flowing into a thousand infinite energies,
she carrying splashes of his passion. The book
snuggled to her chest, I caught the sound
of his old Royal tap-tapping in the far distance,
mother calling him to turn off the light.
The Warming Hut
We should be skating
for our boots we will need in more ways
than we can imagine, years laterto grip us like any cold snap,
you letting go of my hand
as I reach out in the dark to catch you.
Fall risk
Soon after hip surgery repair,
ball in socket kind of thing, 2:00 am,
I try to turn over. An alarm shrieks.
The night nurse rushes into my room.
“You can’t move,” she says,
“you’ll wake the dead.” I’m not?
A red plastic bracelet tells the story:
FALL RISK, also printed in black
on the wall chart above my bed.
Without my name. Is this what’s left of me?
Why do I keep throwing myself
to the ground, three times this year
as if in supplication. Not on purpose,
mind you. I once read when our woes
get the best of us, kneel down on Earth
and breathe troubles into her arms.
She’ll manage everything. I was young then,
always one with patchwork clouds
tinted gold, and hawks holding court treetop
at dusk. Now look at me, a Fall Risk
imprisoned in rehab along with Earth choked
in all the ways we’ve reduced her to parch.
When I found myself immobile on asphalt,
I figured a gremlin’s hand had reached up
to punish me for some unknown transgression.
I was alone, feebly calling Help. No response,
yet there was a fleeting moment
I felt part of so many others around the world,
all of us falling one way or another
connected beyond anything that makes sense.
I breathed out and somehow came to be
on the other side of the sirens, raising the ire
of the night nurse. As she wheels me
to the rest room, I tell her I have a whole list
of other more interesting risks, if she’s up for it.
In the backlight, she bursts out laughing
our revelry real as any prayer.
© Perie Longo
Perie Longo, Santa Barbara, CA Poet Laureate (2007-09) has published four books of poetry: Milking the Earth, the Privacy of Wind, With Nothing Behind but Sky: a journey through grief, and most recently Baggage Claim as well as poems in Connecticut Review, International Poetry Review, Miramar, Nimrod, Paterson Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Salt, and others. Since 1984 she continues to lead poetry workshops for the Santa Barbara Writers Conference as well as privately. A psychotherapist, she facilitates poetry therapy writing workshops at Santa Barbara Hospice and is Poetry Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Magnificent at every level! Takes a pretty darn magnificoess to pour out love and tenderness touching our hearts and minds! Thank you dearest Lioness! My love and gratitude to be a friend and fellow Lioness
Bravo Perie.. Your poems never cease to amaze me!!!! Beautifully crafted and exquisitely written… Love how you bring us into your world!
So happy to read these beauties and be nourished by their vision and yours!