D e a d P a p e r

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MARY DILLON was born in Henderson, Nevada, and passed part of her childhood in Salt Lake City. She spent her adolescent and university years in Florida, graduating from the University of North Florida with a degree in Spanish. She traveled in Europe, mainly in Spain, where she completed her senior year of undergraduate work, and in Paris, where she has just started graduate work in Spanish Linguistics at the Sorbonne.

 
 

MARY DILLON

The Love Song of a Bus Driver

I tried to drive you out today,
But the sun set stubborn,
Its fingers flickering through the roadside trees,
Like hands
Once searching out depressions of my rib cage.
The swaying-dried-and-summer-grass
Recalled the ends of afternoons,
When near a darkening sea,
My body lit at whispers near my skin.

In the reddish pinnacle of sunset,
I blindly curse my windshield
Where wastes a crust of pine pollen,
A dust of long gone love
Whose small remains
Sometimes burn like madness.

MARY DILLON

The Love Song of a Fern Gardener

With palms like tree bark,
Blistered, bled, and cured,
I have left my lifelines callous,
Despite the pair of leather gloves
Hanging in the hallway.

I began to grow the ferns,
On the weekends when my wife was gone,
In between unwrapping frozen dinners,
And avoiding visits from the neighbors,
Who blandly came to understand
What routinely took her.
It was the only small rebellion
That I could afford.

I later found in them a strange attraction,
Hidden two-toned in pine-shadows,
Unflinching in the thunderstorms of heady afternoons,
Their secrets so discretely printed
On the undersides of waxy leaves,
They were unlike all her exposed rows of red hibiscus,
Those showy unforgiving things.

One evening, summer-drunk and lawless,
I stumbled off the porch
And myself folded, sinking down into their bed.
Gritty with their dirt and dampness,
I called out her faithless name
And memories of her just-loosed-hair
Unfurled like fiddleheads.

MARY DILLON

The Love Song of an X-ray Tech

In youth, I swore that love was in a meal of flesh
The fullness of a mouth against hollow of my neck.
The warm roundness of a hamstring, gluteus maximus...
The blood-filled feeling racing down my swiftly tightening legs.
But once, on my rounds,
I massaged a heart.
It was an ugly organ,
A dripping mound of once-electrified muscle
Too soon worn out by moving blood.
With this discovery, I left-
And hid for years inside a dark room.
Lulled by the florescent hum,
I took populations of morbid pictures
And there discovered love's architecture.
Bones
Are
Essentially unchanging, opaque, monochromatic
They hold their shape despite hanging skin
They stay beyond the silence of the heart,
Those thin and arching two hundred six,
Which are so loath to turn to dust.
 

MARY DILLON

The Love Song of a Violin-Maker


The world walks reflected
On a café glass-door
Hands, suits, and tatooed-garbage-workers
Pass at impossible angles.

From the morning's metro window
The city streams in silent grey
Of cast-iron-and-terraced apartments,
Shattered only by a scarlet flash,
Geranium.

Not everyone has seen this city though,
As I, alone in a black rain,
The streets not strung with headlights,
The raindrops rolling off the breasts of blue-and-oriental-girls
In the fountains at Concorde,
The city-lights all drowned in rills
Which run from cobblestone and bridge,
Reflections morphed and carried down
Into the waters of the river,
Which in the storm,
Lies unmade
Like a bed.

Perhaps I have grown old,
For I have never felt so cold in summer
Or so cathedral-lost and colored stained-glass,
In a dissonance of centuries
Which rounds each candle's curling last request.

Sometimes in midnight moments,
I understand why the son of man
Was said to spend his thirty silent years
At the work of wood.
I have then dared to wonder whether
I could come to reconcile
Your love and death
With congealed sap, dried xylem
And the fingerboards of violins.
 

Copyright 2008 deadpaper.org, Tim Gilmore

Jo Carlisle, contributing editor and web design