Bad Day

I anticipate a bad day when, saying “good morning,”
you answer “What?” Told I may create negative exchanges
by my dire prognostications, I know otherwise.

Today, for whatever reason, the synapses are off.
Today you will muddle more, have more accidents,
be terribly missing, stare blankly, manifest anxiety.

I come from six hours of medical tests, stressed, subjected,
wanting concern; some interest at least. You greet me –
if so it’s called - “The TV’s broken again.”

Confirming that even masked so that your remote choices are
On, Off, Volume Up/Down, Channel Up/Down it is too much for you.
Masking pain, I hug and soothe, find a show

(any one: you do not care) make supper, get into the shower
and scream and scream into the waterfall
which is very safe because, remote myself now,

even if you should hear me,
it will seem to you a laugh track: nothing to do with my
neediness, desolation, loneliness, despair.

Another Spain

This Spain doesn’t touch me.
It’s hardscrabble bare earth no longer
abrades under my breastbone as before.

Coming this way, also by train, thirty-odd years ago
raw with discovery, scarred as though
I had been dragged over it,

that Spain entered into me. Now it seems
time, loss, experience have leached the passion out –
out of the place and out of me.

And passion was the point of it.
I am just another tourist, aged,
dried, too dull to glory as once I did,

my attitude in tune with this modern,
cool, demythacized place.
Another it. Another me.

Ellen Peckham has read, published and exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. She frequently uses both art forms in a single work, the text decorating and explicating and the image illuminating. Her archives of drafts, edits and art are collected at the Harry Ransom Center For The Humanities and a seven minute visual biography, Parallel Vocabularies, is available on DVD and via her Web site.