Uncle Phil
Doesn’t everyone have someone who committed suicide?
In my case, it was a young uncle.
Family was always ‘waiting for the other shoe to fall’
which I didn’t understand early on
but it became the foundation for metaphor
and the reality of Uncle Phil.
Kind, gentle, shy, smart. Taught me ping pong,
golf swing, and clean sparkplugs —
the latter outmoded in electric cars.
He survived a psychotic break but not
the blindness from a fall from eight floors.
He phoned the night he overdosed. I was busy
and didn’t understand. Do I now?
Niagara was a Coral Reef
Long ago, Niagara was a coral reef at the Equator
under water now rushing from four Great Lakes
over its Falls, gusting gulls above its mists.
Long ago, squid had shells before octopus
evolved, and no shark yet swam in any waters.
No one could count to one nor imagine billions
of years, of cells, of quantum entanglements.
We are so distant, we move together only in
memories, a dance older than the minuet.
I held you closer then than now – no, here you are
in mists that cloud my eyes, and I cannot tell
which one of us is mothering the other anymore.
Pegasus
White-winged horseson of snake-haired Medusa
was Pegasus, sired on the Gorgon by Poseidon’s rape,
he whose waves were horses, whose horsemanes were oceanfoam,
and when stampeding across the steppes, were earthquakes bringing death.
Pegasus was born to carry thunder and lightning from Olympus for stormgod Zeus.
Or, Pegasus was born from the blood of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her
with the sword of Zeus. One or the other of the brothers or through one’s son
was her usurper, requiring her body or her blood.
A New Yorker living in Rhode Island, L. Shapley Bassen is a multi-published & prize-winning author of fiction, poetry, & drama. Editor at CRAFT. For more information, visit the author’s website and Poets and Writer’s Directory information.
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Pegasus 