Bev Tappan

Month: June 1987

  • FRIENDS: SCHOOLING

    Seated at desks, our students
    Bow their heads to assignments.
    Paperwork gives the cocaine
    Dream its fatal enchantment.

    We chain Prometheus until
    He eats his heart out.
    Then Hercules stalks our streets
    Burning, raping and mugging.

    In Vienna young white horses
    Levade, courbette and capriole,
    Their coltish leaps and gambols
    Encouraged into dance steps.

    And kittens spring onto draperies,
    Laughed at and applauded,
    Or ricochet off chair arms
    Practicing rat entrapments.

    Not, like human children,
    Rebuked into passive conformity
    Which will issue in a ninety-year-
    Old silent scream.

  • FRIENDS: TO A STUDENT WHO READ HER POEM IN CHAPEL

    Your words are so damaged
    I am compelled to suspect
    They may be poetry

    As Emily Dickinson knew
    When the top of her head
    Began to come off
    That she was in
    The presence of a poem.

    Your images
    Ignited by resentment
    Exploded in our heads.
    Your laser sentences
    Melt down our cool.

    Your atomic words
    We fear
    If the reactor overheats
    May self destruct.

  • FRIENDS: THE LESSON

    On the last day of classes, she and Lisa
    Came up to the desk. For our most patient
    Teacher, they began. Patient? I,
    Who at home rages at my children’s litter?
    “Wait,” said Lisa. Eleanor has made you
    Something to suggest patience: a single stalk
    Of ripened wheat finely drawn in ink
    On gray rice paper matted and bordered.

    Yesterday I snapped my fingers and laughed
    At Eleanor’s faraway blank stare during review.
    Often she came in late from art class.
    I recall her running up the stairs
    In painty smock, her champagne hair tied back.
    One day she wore a blue-green-yellow
    Batik dress dyed, patterned, cut,
    Fitted and sewn by her own hand.

    At the spring arts festival my child and I
    Watch a boy with smiling eyes insert
    Her flow-dyed filter papers in her lighted
    Viewing box. The soft colors glowed.
    Her last theme told of a girl who ran
    Out of the house to watch a spring sunrise
    And found in the meadow a second sun, a daffodil.
    This lily of the field will light up my memories.

  • FRIENDS: ON THE BEACH

    Here is an English garden of sun – and water-
    Loving annuals. Tenderfooted, we step
    Along beach towel borders enclosing clusters
    Of marigold heads, pansy, faces and petunia mouths.
    Johnny jump-ups explode in our path.
    Cockscombs posture casually alert for photographers.

    Clouds of dissonant sounds billow and swirl
    In a summer camp kitchen: a helicopter eggbeats
    Sea froth, surf launders jellyfish on the washboard
    Of the sand, voices tinkle and clatter, like a swashing
    Sinkful of enamel cups and steel utensils.
    A delivery truck beeps like a microwave oven.

    But as we wade along the shore, fog
    Like stage smoke transforms the scene from circus
    To hobbit barrens sparsely interrupted by turrets,
    Moats and bridges, earthform architecture whose small
    Engineers scurry to mound up dikes faster
    Than tidal dragon breath can melt them down.

    Venus-like vapors convince us we are treading the strand
    Of an ocean planet where alien life forms
    Sprout from the soil: two halfsize humanoids
    Rooted at the waist, a monkey face necked
    To a sanstone pyramid. But we are reassured we are still
    Earthbound by frequent gleams of video lenses.

    Reluctant to return to roles of cookery and housewifery,
    We splash on until for brief interludes
    We are the sole inhabitants of moonscape dunes.
    Then we reverse course and teleport almost
    Instantly back to the parking lot, pausing
    Only for a fortifying shot of diet soda.

  • FAMILY: CHANGES

    What are these trees with pale and blotchy skin,
    Like adolescents scarred with acne,
    Whose brown Christmas tree balls hang down in early
    Springtime above the hired
    Van outside my son’s condo window?

    Rain suddenly splatters
    The sill from gray cloud ghosts rushing
    Under blue sky and scattered
    Cumulus ahead of tree tossing March
    Winds. It is time to get moving.

    The bed has left and the crib, but still I stand,
    Abstracted by castor marks
    In carpets and one hanger swinging in a closet.
    This is a sycamore husk
    The seeds carried elsewhere to go on growing.

  • FAMILY: CONFESSION

    Like a koala bear on eucalyptus, she clings to her mother’s
    Leg, howling. Her father plucks her loose
    And carries her to bed. He says nothing. Enough
    Words have steamed the air from the pressure cooker
    Of the long day’s doings from nursery school
    To carnival. I recall, if he does not,
    A time when he too cried unconsolably
    All the way to the doctor’s office and back
    Because a new and tired mother slapped
    A toddler who had thrown her glasses on the floor. The
    prescription
    Issued by an annoyed pediatrician was aspirin for her
    And more tolerance for him. I tell this tale
    To my daughter-in-law, who is sponging magic marker
    From the carpet with regret for the scolding she has given my
    grandchild.

  • FAMILY: A WALK WITH A THREE-YEAR-OLD

    We stoop to look at ant hills.
    Her small finger closes the holes.

    Toting their eggs and leafbits,
    Ant workers scurry this way and that, unperturbed.

    “I break them,” she announces.
    In her other hand she holds three straggly

    Buttercups and one lupine.
    Clovers or Bouncing Bet she tosses aside.

    Tickle grass lifts her chin.
    “Let me make me laugh, Grammie.”

    I upend the stem
    To prod a hunting spider, who toad-hops

    Into poison ivy.
    Her ziplock sandals pursue a narrow

    Cement wall, a childsized
    Promenade under a hemlock. Last year’s conelets,

    Brittle and seedless, cling
    To the studs and joists of this cool dark chamber.

    Rapelling past its apertures
    On slender nylon climbing ropes swing

    Casual gypsy caterpillars.
    Bon vivants, they have littered the drive with their leavings.

    Relentless Jenny erases them,
    Stamps them into oily exclamation marks on the tartop.

  • FAMILY: TIME SHARING

    Borrowing my daughter’s apartment
    For a family snowshoeing holiday,
    We find appliances intractable.
    In her absence the coffeemaker
    Does not start, the dishwasher
    Stalls and the gas oven
    Ominously clicks before warming.
    Worst of all, the satellite
    Antenna transmits static.

    Possessions, more permanent than persons,
    Protest abandonment by their owners.
    As our dog barks and assaults
    The pen when we depart,
    Her vacuum cleaner coils
    Its cord around our ankles,
    Trash barrels flip their lids, and
    The security alarm rings
    Unceasingly when we set it.

    An audience is sought by the copper
    Musical antique car
    Playing “On the Road Again.”
    Ruby wine glasses wink
    And blush to catch our eyes.
    Things, less transient than humans,
    Fear people may disappear
    Leaving them like seaglass on the beach
    To be repossessed at. public auctions.

  • FAMILY: WOMEN’S WORK

    Bluebirds windchiming in the Jeffrey pines
    Make background music as I hook up
    From beneath the burlap white and yellow
    Petals of lotus flowers. Conifers
    Spread green fingers in the sun.

    In Egypt, land of lotus and papyrus,
    Nomadic women day to day
    Weave goatskin pads they stitch
    Into tent sidings, one forever
    Needing replacement. But Hetup-heres,
    Daughter, wife, and mother of pharoahs,

    Rested slender fingers on graceful
    Arms of carved and gilded chairs:
    Borne above the dust by slaves
    And Hatshepsut grasped the crook and flail,
    Herself donning the pharoah’s beard.

    In 1986 Before Christ,
    A scribe advised his son, “Do not
    Become a weaver. They sit all day
    In the house at their looms unhappy as women.”
    My daughters the engineer, the supervisor and
    The shop owner are making their choices.

  • FAMILY: PHOTO OPPORTUNITY


    You are a camera who
    Freezes my picture in poses
    I never intended. “Wait!”
    I cry. “That isn”t me!”
    But you snap the shutter
    And finally mount the prints
    Forever in red leather albums
    Like flies dead in amber.

    Create me instead on videotape..
    Showcase my best or better days.
    Feature me friendly, zestful,
    Dancing or singing. Today
    The pond is a frozen mirror
    Inviting any skaters design.

  • FAMILY: BOSTON FLOWER SHOW

    Blown down the parking lot
    We have come in to a forced
    Spring. Through arches of sunny

    Acacia chains we see glimpses
    Of enchanted nooks: Mole’s
    Beloved boat moored

    Below Rat’s shore –
    Sheltered bungalow: a Victorian
    Broad-brimmed hat

    Under an arbor; Farmer
    MacGregor’s rows of lucious
    Lettuce eyed by Peter;

    Max the wild thing
    Starting a rumpus in the dark
    Forest corner; a cypress-

    Cooled Moorish patio
    Reflected in the tiled pool and
    Helicon beaks from Hawaii

    Garnishing luau fruits.
    But most alluring are jellybean
    Walks between marshmallow cauliflowers,

    A cabbage patch doll,
    Decorated carrot cakes and
    Cookie bushes inside a gingerbread

    Fence: These entrall
    The children and invalids in wheelchairs
    Propelled by aged relatives

    My mother and I, sharing
    One hundred and fifty years,
    Buy pussywillows as we leave.

  • TRAVELS: MEMORIAL DAY IN SPAIN

    MEMORIAL DAY IN SPAIN

    The water tastes like death in the Valley of the Fallen:

    Franco’s cross casts a long shadow

    Between the hills.  How many mothers’ sons

    Are stacked like cordwood in that vast basilica

    Where roses, those old deodorizers, exhale

    Funereal fragrance.  Here the wolf and the lion

    Lie down together: brothers in blue and gray.

    They choked on mule dust and blew up bridges,

    Wearing the delicate stitches of machine gun

    Fire.  Here the Olive barons of Seville

    Do penance once a year for their Contra,

    Their freedom fighter: Franco the Frog, he’s called,

    For all the reservoirs he built that could not

    Wash the taste of death out of his mouth.