Ellyn Maybe

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE

It is the color of mint mixed with sunflowers.

I flew over a city once.

Even though I was afraid of heights.

I was more afraid of lows.

I went to a balloon store and found the animals made of helium.

I watched the way a poodle could become a giraffe just by the wrist and a twist.

I slept on the moon one week in May.

I slept on the Milky Way and drank almond milk and cookies.

I had insomnia when the world told me to wake up.

I was already tying my shoes.

My parachute has a parakeet and a deck of cards.

I unraveled the map with laughter and a gift for navigation.

I saw the patterns the fields of childhood made.

The cities full of eucalyptus and platypus.

From the sky I heard the music of the Victrola dogs breath.

From the moon I learned an alphabet of alchemy.

From the astronomy of one comes the astrology of many.

From the moment one opens their eyes, sleep is around the next corner like a jazz club

luring one in with sunset and daiquiris and curious dinosaurs.

When my parachute is around me I become very giddy.

Talking to strangers all over the hemisphere.

When my parachute takes its lunch hour,

I fly on my own.

My endorphins singing to the dolphins that have lifted their tails to greet me in an opera of

water and glittering, abundance and song.

My parachute is in a library and in a house and in a cheese sandwich and in the words that avalanche

like a skier in love with cocoa and snow.

KAFKA

I saw Kafka lurking behind the Old-New Synagogue near Old Town Square.

He was beautiful, frail, an alphabet weaved through his hair.

When I told him how long the lines were at the Foreigners Police. he said same line since 1916. 

Look closely.  Someone's aunt is escaping the famine's in Ireland.

This city of comings and goings.

Someone's leaving Prague.  It's late '68.

It started with guitars and ended with calluses.

Smetana and I sit with opera glasses.

Heaven has box seats for the human condition.

We don't need a program by now.

History repeats itself more often than a cliché in a murder mystery.

Smetana piped in, we are walking in a city made both beautiful and tragic by people.

Don't you see the buildings full of paintings, sculptures and moonlight?

Our bridges, cobblestones, our stories unfurl as magnificent as a sailboat on the Vlatava.

We were given another chance.

Red is the color of blood, but it is also the color of velvet.

Kafka said my sisters wore the former.

He became transparent.

I watched all the emotion the body is truly made of from head to heart.

He said my father and I never saw eye to eye.

It was more stiff upper lip to quiver.

He said it's natural.  Fathers don't understand.

They have a practical bone.  A cruel bone.

Artists instead have a wishbone.

He smiled and shrugged as he walked past the Franz Kafka Cafe, the Franz Kafka Museum and the Franz Kafka arcade.

He said artists may go hungry, but will never truly starve as there is always some wish to chew on.

Then he winked.

And was gone.

POEM FOR SOMA CITY

All that's left in Soma City is the frame of a house.

The outline of a window where people saw the sky.

And the water rushed in on nature's speediest skateboards and then there was nothing.

All that's left in Soma City is the soul of the world,

in the crack of the ceiling, where the dreams recede.

All that's left in Soma City is a memory and a mint when life tasted sweeter.

The grandmas and the grandpas and the parents and the kids singing of home.

All that's left in Soma City is the future unwritten.

Time dances over the landscape like a ghost, but

healing is time dancing to its own rhythm.

Not to be rushed.

Not to give up.

Open like a book with all the world's wisdom and pain.

Soma City is a map where a magician can still pull a nickel out from someone's ear.

Someday laughter will return.

Sometime hope.

The schools will be filled.

The pencils will sharpen.

And Soma City will write its name on history's wall with tears and more.

There's always more where there are tears.

And Soma City will be where water and Earth danced a cruel tango which turned into something else.

As a wise one once said to me, everything turns into something else eventually.