Two Poems
by Gabriel Orgrease
Hands
Up to my face in dreams,
holding palms of left and right
with power to turn them,
like windmills or pipe wrenches
to their backsides and push them out
to the world.
One of the practice exercises for astral projection is to learn the power to turn one's hands when in a dream state from the topside around so that we can see our palms. Once that threshold task has been completed it is a fairly short jump to learn to fly. All things, including hands, are not always as they seem.
My Mother-in-law's Lawn Furniture
On and off, her legacy,
she wanted a cast iron deer
and the mansion to go with it,
but she left me a daughter
that drives over things
cheerfully, without seeing them.
Lights on, or off,
she already knows every word
I know or can forage
from hundreds of pages
gleaning one more obscure,
"bathetic," I cannot expose
in my personal dictionary
scholarly pretensions,
but she knocks this over once again
flip handed, easily
while shooing simulated demons,
like pet deer run after.
—then I feel this
this bathetic
sense of being frozen
a klutzy kitsch awkward
caught in our rough yard,
white snow, ice
a venison bred
in a cast iron bath
—my idea to drag the tub home to park.
I'm wet hair wide eyes
caught unawares
lights on, or off.
Gabriel Orgrease was raised in Northern Appalachia and now resides on the south shore of Long Island halfway between NYC and Montauk. His blog can be found at orgrease-crankbait.blogspot.com and he can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].