Exit, Stage Right!
We donned her TrissaTo be different,
Then Tatiana after a little
Princess who was rumored
To have foiled fate long ago,
Only to learn she did not
Dodge the missiles.
But low, ours was favored
Above that innocent namesake.
Our's was then,And is now, words
That dissolve into tears
At the very thought of any harm
To her, Trissa Tatiana.
Time has brought its inevitable changes;
Blessings and sorrows
Replete with tides of tedious rituals
Of That farce we try to play out
So well, too often to little avail.
We've had luck- made and shaped
As we contrived the need for it.
Now, each of us can go comfortably
Into those head lights,
High-beamed into that night,
Where with luck and deliverance one can exit,
With grace and good timing-
Stage right,
And dare not look down or back
For the fear of it!
© 2010 by E.D. Ridgell
____________________________________________
Wanda
Tom dubbed you Gloria Swanson,
Seeing you carry away gladiolas
From the Syrian Mosque.
That you were an act
of grace was always evident.
You started
sorting lines before I did.
You stopped at the DAR;
Grand-mothered your loved ones in,
All between bridge games.
I
shoveled just a little deeper;
Found that link, followed
the yellow brick road.
I delved into the blue veins. I rattled
bones under armor.
I took it beyond the pale. It was the
least I could do.
Now it hangs around
our necks
A long necklace of names and personalities,
Divers and sundry histories,
Not to be worn as adornment but to firmly ground us.
You go to rest, at last, with him-
The
young artist, the husband and father
Taken too soon-his lineage
Fairmount,
Oriole, Deal Island-fair, fair, faraway England.
I started my line, my lineage, when suddenly,
Our ancestral graves were bumping up against one another.
Coincidences- too many, don’t you feel-
One of those meaningless miracles with meaning?
He was Maryland, the sandy gritty, high tide smell
Of marshy Maryland. I am Maryland.
Your only
daughter’s only daughter is Maryland.
The great-grandchildren
are washed-way sediment of Maryland.
But you
were so much a link in a longer line of history,
Henrico
County- Williamsburg Virginia.
How came you to be born in
Texas?
What in the hell were you doing in Elizabeth, New
Jersey?
What of Delmarva? What of the Governor's
Palace?
There are so many questions we leave unanswered,
By right, by neglect, by our tightly held secrets;
Those secrets that would explain so much.
Tom lays within the green, cut, Green, waiting.
I could not help shared roots dug into my ground or was it vice versa?
Did I trigger memories of your heart’s deadening?
So
many troubled years before-did I trigger secret sorrows?
Two
artists from the same school, one a husband,
Another a fast
fleeting son-in-law? It was eerie. It was awe.
We may have
been more entangled than we know.
I have my secrets. I am
the lonelier for them.
I’m grieving
a whole bloody peninsula
On the other side of the Bay,
That he with the sudden, broken, beating heart,
May have shared veins to that now closed artery.
Remember Exmore?
You
and Dad could not have been more different,
And yet there
was a connection. Well, one obvious thing,
But it was more
than that. You were of the same generation.
I
have a photograph of you at Exmore walking back from the Bay.
You
were happy, but you were lonely.
I realize now that Dad was
lonely.
Everyone is lonely at the core.
It all means less and less, I know. Even to me, I no longer need.
I just wanted to say farewell. Now, there is one less scribe.
We will carry on. We will root out and record some of those secrets.
You now are privy to the greatest secret of all.
Unless the dead do read, you will never see this,
I did not want to burden you. I have never wished to be a sink box decoy.
I write this for time to come, a reflection of time gone by. I
scribe.
It is meant to honor you. The long journey of life
is over.
Have no fear for those left behind. Pray
for us.
Your worldly pain is over.
Thank God, hey? Anyway,
Well
done, Wanda! Well done, indeed!
©
2010 by E.D. Ridgell
[Dedicated to an elephant eye, high name on a shiny, black wall]
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell!
Don’t
ask
Of when you discover you’re one’ a those freaks
The other kids are slinging pejoratives about.
Don’t tell parents of those innocents
Who
kill themselves, secrets strangling school tie necks.
Don’t
ask
Society’s, scapegoat divorcee what it’s like
To have loved but not lusted after.
Don’t
tell
The kid two hearts were not broken.
Don’t ask
How you struggled up, out
of the their dung,
To stand stalwart ‘fore the sacrimonious.
Don’t tell
Of enlisted
resurrections for fear of more crucifixions.
Don’t ask
The names of friends and lovers
Blamed
for a plague not their making.
Don’t tell
Which part of a heavy, crowded heart houses these relics.
Don’t ask
About history's hoards of the unconsecrated,
Except beheld in the golden eye of God who “doesn’t play dice”.
Don’t tell
Of that
lonely pain of bent would be widows and widowers.
Don’t ask
The indentify of my soldier lover
Drowned
down in a rice field.
Don’t tell
Less they strip away a memory gone dull- never sullied.
Don’t
ask
Of this wise old fag’s bemusement-
Walking pneumonia reverent at a recent ceremony.
Don’t
tell
Of light bulb on, muffled guffaw “fore The Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier.
©
2010 by E.D. Ridgell
