.jpg)
Linda Bratcher Wlodyka is the Massachusetts, Beat Poet Laureate, 2023-2025. In the summer of 2023, Linda was chosen as a contributor to WordxWord a summer poetry festival in the Berkshires where she collaborated with a team of poets creating a very large poem that was read aloud for the audience at The Mount. She also has held the position as a docent at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s summer home in Lenox, MA from 2002 -2006. She retired as an educator from Mt. Greylock Regional School District in Williamstown in 2020. Linda’s poem, Secret Cottage, was voted Best in the Berkshires in 2012 and she was invited to the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA to read that poem. Linda also has had three poems published in Red Barn Volume I, in 2016 after attending Peter Bergman's workshop at Arrowhead the historic homestead of author Herman Melville in Pittsfeld, MA. Linda has 3 chapbooks previously self-published, Her Spirited Cameo, Voices from the Blue Room and Tick Tock. If Brambles Were Bookends Collected Poems, is Linda’s first full length poetry collection released September 2023. Her poems have been widely anthologized throughout the United States. She is a member of the Florence Poet’s Society and has recently been involved reading and choosing poems for publication in the anthology, Silkworm and Naugatuck River Review.
Days Infinitesimal Like the Lives of Mannequins
“It’s strange how time can make a place shrink, makes its strangeness ordinary.”
-Veronica Roth
Sunrise unzips another dawn, days infinitesimal
I count time in hours, minutes like a clock
that ages this ragged world. If all clocks
stopped, would I know of time and its essence?
I imagine time standing still like the lives of mannequins
in storefront window casements of uninhabited
businesses. Sometimes clothed, often naked,
their posture is unhuman-like, bent in erratic
eerie positions, while their vacant eyes gaze
endlessly, focusing on nothing, complexion flawless,
figure slight. A purse dangles from a wrist ready for an
outing, a date, a chance to escape this window’s prison.
Another wears a wristwatch not set to correct
time a convenient denial. Time is just a construct
to manipulate history and human activity.
Sundials an ancient time teller clocking the day’s
passing seems an appropriate alternative.
Sundown zips up another day as dusk fades to black.
I watch night’s stars flicker, a comet soar, an
orange moon appear from behind a mountain’s
crest, a falling star. I ignore time and its passing,
revel in the black sky, the illumination of fireflies,
their ability to create light within their tiny bodies
never bowing to sunshine, married to the night.
Palette
It was the gray furniture I chose to buy.
The pandemic caused shortages.
I wasn’t sure the likes of elephant skin gray, dolphin gray,
or tree bark gray could wow or enhance my living room.
I say, “It’s the yellow walls that matter.” Benjamin Moore
paint offers a Hawthorne yellow which glows amber.
It is also an exterior color seen on two hundred year old
colonial houses. It suits my walls.
I chose poetic pillows: “Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
Not that I love throw pillows all that much. They cannot replace
a bed pillow for comfort. Decorators call them accent pillows.
Leave them on an unoccupied chair, accent complete.
A crafter from Etsy made them. I presume they saw this room.
The pillow is gray, yellow, white and black, patterned in swatches,
a random collage. Butterflies, three black chickens, (which I could
have sworn were crows from the online image), vines, leaves, flowers
and a hashtag of stripes comprise this collage. My curiosity kills me
when it comes to the chicken wire fence. It looks like the chickens
flew the coop proudly perched up on that branch.
I add some furniture scarves which are the same color as the pillows.
Tiny flowers, berries, vines, kittens, butterflies and tiny black, white- haired
nymphs which appear to present as female sit amongst the flora.
I believe I chose this wonderland to keep fantasy alive in my living room,
lend some magic to a mundane moment.
New lamps seem to be in order. They are metal, donning black leafy vines,
with white shades. I imagine the cats and nymphs will someday escape their
lair, hoist themselves onto the vined lamp, sit pretty grinning at me
like the Cheshire Cat. Then they’ll swing off the lamp, plop into my
cold drink, talk gibberish while swimming in my Pino Grigio.
Uprooted Persimmon
More than the silence I ache for a whisper
wanting to know why all these turquoise bottles
were packed in a box too heavy to be moved
and why the linen napkins were now
posing as packing material when they belong
with fresh tablecloths and the shirt you wore
when I saw you last year.
More than the silence I ache for an envelope,
expressions of polite gratitude, a complimentary
high five to your recent successes, but there were
none to be had in a world so troubled by doubt, fear,
anxious people wanting something to reach for besides
another day of solitude preferable to the loud screeching
of tires that sped down the auto raceway three houses away.
More than the silence I ache for familiarity
the smell of clean laundry drying on the line
rose scents wafting across the meadow into a yard
so bright with orange lilies and yellow sun drops even
a caravan of carnival actors could not appear this brilliant.
Remembering a cascading waterfall coupled with our
drenching hair last summer, is all that I can fathom now.
More than the silence I ache for a small token,
a shiny bauble like a crow would place by your door,
a lost charm from a broken bracelet, the engraved message
now worn, weathered, beaten down by time,
hidden for years near a culvert where a young girl
climbed off a young boy after kissing him on the mouth
snagging her wrist amongst the grapevines where lovers hide.
More than the silence I ache for the taste of luscious fruit a
riper than ripe peach, strawberries, sugared rhubarb, fresh mint,
and the oolong leaves you placed in my ceramic pitcher, iced to
perfection like the cubes a bartender drops in a cocktail glass.
I recall a ten dollar bill that was left on the bar the last time I saw
you. You, always a generous patron. I was already out the door
walking to a place that I call home hoping you were in pursuit behind me.
More than the silence, I ache for another page to turn,
I read your stories, a familiar poem you finished for me when
tears flowed down my cheek, landed against your forearm.
Even now you still blot the streaks of fluid that leave a salty streak
against our flesh, your tender kiss like a tincture. This poem survives
in all its first line repetition, like a cherished relic, a coveted object.
If it were not for the uprooted persimmon I’d call out your name in tongues.
If Brambles Were Bookends
If brambles were bookends,
my hand would gingerly slide
three leather - bound volumes of
your original poetry books off
your shelf. Each word I read aloud
would place emphasis on your
interpretation, never mine.
This shelf, a mesmerism, shared
by bibliophiles, poets, sages,
wordsmiths, etymologists, and those
indulging in brambles, is a stoic shelf,
not meant to cast doubt. One
might inquire as to its architectural
stature, its organic origins, its ability
to protect itself. Like poison ivy it
innately lies in wait for its victim.
Each bramble nods as if to agree
that its purpose for being is more
than your poems, more than what
I meant to say, as if the beginning
never mattered, more substance
given to what lies in between.
And what lies in between feels
coarser than words spoken,
more trying than the discourse
between the end and the middle
of poetic words. The ones you
once made reference to as
pretentious; words brambled.
If brambles were bookends, I could
place a wreath adorned with blossoms,
not toxic fragrance like Rappaccini’s
daughter exhaled, but fragrant like
honeysuckle, dew of nymphs. Each
blossom would enhance a bramble,
expose its prickly fibers,
tempt others to touch them.
If brambles were bookends, your
books, your words, would be
believed by every naysayer known.
No matter what scorn one feels, it
would be revealed in your words.
One could drink from the cup of your
poison nostalgia, interpret each phrase as
a critique to live by, secretly abhor the
temptation that your bramble belies.
I would return the three books.
I would place them spine side in,
revel in the fact that none of your
words were anything but bumbling
idolatry admittance of your innermost
phobias, deserving of a shelf of
scrub-brush bramble.
If brambles were bookends, I would
dismantle the barbs, allow them and
your books to fall away through the cracked,
rotted floorboards, to an eternal doom,
the lost language of you.
