Daybook ii POEMS
Toni Ortner
deerbrook editions
published by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions
first edition Š 2020 by Toni Ortner All Rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-73438840-4-2 Book Design by Jeffrey Haste
Table of Contents
On a Bright September Morning Most of the Flowers News The Way It Is Dream of the Planes If I Could Be Something Else Warning The Logic of It The Hum of Night Time Dream Of Virtue and Vice Browsing Real Estate Ads Snapshot of His Summer Residence Year 2026 For My Cat Willow The Pruners Have Come I am a Shadow When She Died Photograph of Toby on Facebook Easter Island Gone, All Gone Time is the Tide Orient Point There Was a Time A Day Like This Inexplicable Email to a Friend Oak Avenue The Books She Writes Do You Remember Performance Artist A Day in the Life of Me Weathers Memory, 1943 All Soul’s Day
9 10 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 45 46 47 48
Key West 50 Predicament 51 The Laughing Girl on the Swing 52 Last Words 53 Lies We Were Told 54 For Mother 55 Photograph 56 The Night Breeze 57 For Ellie 58 We Are All Refugees 59 For Florence 60 The House with the White Picket Fence 61 Klezmer 62 Dear Dad 63 What I Dreamed Mother Said 64 Walking Towards God 65 Acknowledgments 67 About the Author 68
Preface The Daybook series is inspired by the Diary of Virginia Woolf in which she said, “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something . . . so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes to mind. I should like it to reflect the light of our life.�
Daybook ii
On a Bright September Morning 8/2/2014 On a bright September morning, I turned off the East Side Drive at the 96th Street Exit and stopped at the red light behind a gray Jeep. There were two men in the front seat, and two men were in the back with a girl wedged between them. When the Jeep rolled to a stop, the girl kicked open the door, flew out, and raced down the street. The two men leaped out of the car and ran after her. She screamed and hurled stones at them, but she did not get far before they caught her. One man yanked her arms behind her back, and the other slung her over his shoulder. They carried her back to the car and shoved her into the back seat. They were cursing. I thought I should write down the license plate and call the police, but I did nothing. Thirty years later I wonder what happened to that girl.
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Most of the Flowers 8/2/2014 Most of the flowers are wilted or dead, but some are still fresh. They preen in the still sunlit air. I cannot bear to throw them out, so I place them gently into a glass of water where they float. Ten hours later the flowers are perkier than ever, even jubilant with pink petals raised to the edge of the glass, waving hello. I wonder what they see as they look at me. They are so small and delicate while I sit here pounding these keys.
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News 8/13/2014 A 39-year-old man murdered his five children. “Cold blood,” the reporters repeated, leaving it to the viewers to imagine how. Next I saw a young woman in handcuffs being led along by two cops. Her head hung down. It was a typical small American town. The morning before the woman posted on Facebook that she had a good day, because she found all the school supplies for her l2-year-old son and her l0-year-old daughter. That afternoon the remains of a six-month-old girl, a three-year-old boy, and a five-yearold boy, were found surrounded by piles of diapers in a locked room in her basement. The children had starved to death. The next door neighbor was interviewed. The neighbor said, “We never saw her pregnant. We had no idea she had other kids.”
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The Way It Is 8/26/2014 The famous author interviews the man convicted for murdering the pregnant movie star. He had slashed her throat and wrote her name in blood on a wall. The comedian we love dangles from a rope. The kids on the block smoke dope. With a wave of a hand another war begins. A young boy howls, because his father died of Ebola. When they carried him into the hospital, they were turned away four times, because there were not enough beds.
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Dream of the Planes 8/26/2014 We froze when we heard the sound. It was like a swarm of bees, but right away we knew it was planes. It made no sense. We are a neutral country. Fascinated, I watched them fly in towards the shore in a huge inverted V like a flock of Canadian geese. “Why are they coming here? Can’t they see it’s the wrong target?” I yelled. “They must be idiots. Don’t they have maps? There are no military instillations here.” As they came closer, all of us rushed around scurrying to find the best places to take shelter. Nothing like this had ever happened before. We lived in a peaceful country. Suddenly there was too much glass, too many windows, and not enough walls. There would be flames everywhere. I told the others to huddle in a ball, but no one was listening to anything but the loud sound of the engines of the planes as they made their first run. “They are strafing the kitchen,” I yelled. Then we were covered with flour like clowns. A jar of peanut butter was shattered but, thank goodness, no one was injured or killed. “Idiots,” I yelled as we watched the planes bank and come in low to make a direct hit on the kitchen. “Throw the assholes some loaves of bread,” Brett yelled. “Should we run into the fields holding chicken wings? Is it the food supplies they are after, or us?” This time the machine guns tore through the windows and shattered shards of glass. The President appeared. He was wearing a three piece suit and strode right in holding a huge black cigar. We were choking on flour. “What I am after is a girl, a good looking girl,” he said. The maid stood up and brushed the flour out of her hair and began to dance and twirl, but he shoved her aside and strode further into the kitchen where 13
the chef ’s daughter, with blond hair and blue eyes, was hiding in the pantry. “Open that door,” he demanded, so one of us did. There she was naked as the day she was born with that blond hair streaming down to her waist. “Dance,” the President said, and keeping the black cigar in his mouth, he held her gently. Around, and around, and around, the kitchen they waltzed. Like they were at a ball. The sound of the planes faded into the distance, and we began to sweep the floor.
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If I Could Be Something Else 10/01/2014 I would never want to be a wall. They take themselves too seriously. People are lined up and shot against them. People write rude things on them. They keep one person in and the other out. They separate nations. They become symbols. There is a right and a wrong side that changes depending on the viewer. No matter what they are made of, they crumble or are torn down. Being a tunnel might be different. People go in one side and come out the other. Some rush through and some go slowly. Still there is light at the end of a tunnel. Being a stop sign might have more significance, but not everyone stops when they should. Being a green light, I could give everyone the go. If I were a bulb, I could be eaten by a vole. If I were a tulip in a vase, my petals would wither and blacken. If I were glass, I would have no privacy since people could see through me.
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Acknowledgements
The following pieces appeared in vermontviews.org. “The Comedian” “Dream of the Planes” “Performance Artist” “Gone, All Gone” “The Water Wars Have Begun” “The Pruners Have Come” “Memory, 1943,” Write Action Newsletter, April 2020.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Toni Ortner was an English teacher at the University of Connecticut, Monroe College, and at Bronx Community College, as well as at various high schools in New York state. She has had 26 books published by small presses. Her most recent is Daybook II by Deerbrook Editions. She lives in Vermont where on the fourth Sunday of each month from 5- 6 PM, she hosts the Write Action Radio Hour on l07 7 FM and interviews writers and has them read their work. She is Vice President of Write Action which is a nonprofit group that supports writers in New England through a variety of events. Her recent work can be seen at vermontviews.org at Old Lady Blog along with reviews of her published books. She gives readings in bookstores and libraries in Vermont and New Hampshire.
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