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Tim Mayo
As if in Heaven
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For Amelia X.
My lover has taken my picture: I am standing next
to two bodiless heads floating above the floor. They are
part of a mobile of the many dear departed we don’t know.
They hang from filaments normally you can not see,
and except for the twinkling brass hooks in the tops
of their heads (and the lack of bodies) you would think
they’re as real as I am. One head even looks like me.
It faces the same direction I face, though the eyes look
elsewhere. My lover has waited a long time for this
moment to align, balancing on her good leg, with no cane,
her camera clutched and trembling in her one good hand,
and the anticipation has left me with a smirk she catches.
Then the head like me, his cheeks a little fuller, his eyes
a little older and filled with the memories of things I may
never see, sets his mouth firmly and continues his long turn
away: just as a heavenly body would in a real heaven.
And the other head, the one I haven’t described at all,
filled with that attracting force all heavenly bodies have,
looks away from all that is mechanical: the camera,
the quick click of what we often capture, and my lover’s
leg brace with its polished steel joints winking in the light;
he looks at me as if all this hanging and turning still hasn’t
let him forget what it was like to walk to and fro, up and
down in the earth, feeling every inch of the body’s pain.
(This poem, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Redheaded Stepchild, an online magazine, which was hacked and thus has disappeared from its online place. It was subsequently published in my full-length collection Thesaurus of Separation by Phoenicia Publishing, Montréal, 2016)
The Third Little Pig
They say happiness is an invitation
to your own pig roast. Not since the wolf
stopped breathing heavily at my door
have I had a visitor, an invitation.
I know--I know--pigs are not exactly popular.
And the old sow said there’d be days like this
sitting by the fire looking through snapshots
of my two brothers’ disaster-ridden houses.
Still, you can say construction has been
very, very good to me. It’s kept the wolf
at the door from coming inside, although,
I sometimes think it would have been better
to be wanted, to have felt hunger’s
hot breath on my neck just once more
in my life, to have been consumed by fire--
fear--love--the apocalypse--or even the wolf
at my door--anything--but this lonely, comfy
boredom without even a good, bedtime story.
(This poem first appeared in The Atlanta Review and was subsequently published in
my full-length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities by Mayapple Press, 2009)
The Frog and the Snake
When I was young, I came to a garden pool
and watched a snake swallow a frog.
I have meditated long on this
not wishing to leap to the freedom
of just any conclusion as the frog
must have wanted to do,
how I saw death’s
turbulence reach out touching many around me:
teachers and a woman who pretended to be
my mother, and then not long after the snake
swallowed its prey, my own mother also died.
What I know now was, when she did, I felt
nothing more than I felt watching that frog
move into the mouth of another world,
the marvelous drama of flesh mouthing flesh
and before that, the frog’s immobile wish
to be invisible while the snake flickered about
searching.
How the frog must have struggled
more than my mother did
when she picked up the pistol by her bed
handling it with that casualness in her loose wrists
that comes from drinking too much, and then . . .
the bang.
It was all over faster than the frog
who had a good half hour to contemplate
as first one leg disappeared, then the other,
until finally his head, eyes bugging impatiently,
backed down the serpent’s mouth into the belly
of its transforming future as if bowing
after a long and well played performance.
What I want to confess, though you cannot see,
is that I blinded myself and wandered about
the kingdom of my possibilities for many years.
(This poem was first published in my full-length collection The Kingdom of Possibilities by Mayapple Press, 2009, then republished in my chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper by Kelsay Books, 2019)
A Brief Explanation of the Psychotic Universe
This is how it works: the invisible
cause and effect of the universe,
that Big Bang no one has ever heard,
emits its waves of singular commands.
Then the voices ripple through the cosmos,
one by one, whispering their secret orders,
which only I can hear, for I am Cassandra.
I see them slipping into my ear, shifting
with each surreptitious twist of air, skating
the thin line between wind and waft until,
with a flutter, a momentary lull settles
into my head telling me it’s time.
Friends, penitents, suffering pilgrims,
all blessed in your hospital blues,
listen, for I have heard the universe,
the first echoes of its birth, nearing
louder and louder with each new gust,
and I alone have escaped to tell you.
(This poem was also nominated by Nine Muses, a now defunct online magazine for a Pushcart Prize and was subsequently published in my chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper by Kelsay Books, 2019)
Self-Storage
It’s not really the self, that’s in there––
more like all the forgotten parts of your life
you intended to revisit:
the swimming trophy you crawled miles to win
or the gold stars on a third-grade calendar
marking the few days
of the one week in your life you behaved.
Then there’s those pants
you think you’ll sweat yourself back into.
They lie folded among the paste trinkets of time,
the jewels of your memory.
But what if you could . . .
just cinch up the whole girth of your life,
then flatten your beliefs
right out of your gut
(ironing out those wrinkles you keep stumbling over)
and fold your whole kit and caboodle of a body
(brain included with all its loose connections)
into some old snakeskin suitcase lying around
with its rusty lock and faulty hinges, then wait
the long humble moment it takes
to, at last, be carried away?
(This poem first appeared in San Pedro River Review and was subsequently published in my full-length collection Thesaurus of Separation by Phoenicia Publishing, Montréal, 2016. It was also included in the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, edited by Sydney Lea & Chard deNiord and published by Green Writers Press, 2018)
Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, River Styx, and Salamander among many other places. His poems have received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. His first full-length collection of poetry The Kingdom of Possibilities was published by Mayapple Press in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award among other honors, and his chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books 2019) also won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
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