Origami Microchap

Poems 

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Cover photo of Tom Park

by author

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Temple Cat
   for Tom Park, who Appeared

I visit a temple
Where an old monk
Brings me brown tea
In a silver cup
               A bell  rings
A small cat appears
Who is all things:
Temple/tea/monk
Brown/silver/cup
              A cricket  sings

Sweet Cat

        for Sean

He is a sweet cat.
His leap, his pounce, his claws,
his hunter chi go unused.
He doesn’t know
what those are for.
His brothers tell him
to be tiger fierce, show some fight,
but he cannot.
The world is his friend he believes,
the world is wondrous.
He widens his
sea-green eyes at the sight
of snow, of birds,
of slanting sun, falling rain,
of rabbits in the moonlight.
His brothers tell him
to spit & hiss, show some fang,
but he cannot.
He is as sweet as a soft peach,
Buddha-round,
his sea-green eyes
opened wide,
filled with bliss.

The Altar on My Bureau
    for Tom Park

The landscape of my bureau
is a beach of dark wood & objects
that I hardly notice anymore.
I light the tealight in the golden bowl
that is my altar.
The photo of Tom Park, my late cat,
tucked beside the old brass Buddha
in the bowl, suddenly speaks: Regardez-moi!
I didn’t know you knew French,
I answer in surprise – Tom purrs,
I picked it up along the way.
Tom has had many lives like the
little white & brown shells that I
tossed in my altar years ago,
& forgot about. Regardez-moi!
the shells suddenly sing out
from their tiny shiny mouths
so I really look at them,
hold them in my hand.
I picked them up along the way
at different times
on the sand that’s never dark –
the beach a golden bowl.
I notice again the silver
on Tom Park’s beautiful face.

First appeared in Lighting Out, a Beautiful Dragons Anthology, 2021

Tom’s Time Museum

There’s Joy in Repetition – Prince, Graffiti Bridge

Tom touches my hand
(years later)
in the Time Museum.
His silver paw is soft
and he purrs under his breath
as we wander through the rooms.
We discover the Girl with Orange Dress
by William Thompson Bartoll.  The girl
holds her cat loosely, the way
I always have.
This was us, Tom says.  I raise
my eyebrow and he nods.
Us in another life.
I laugh, tell him he looks nothing
like the cat in the painting.
He grins like a Cheshire, murmurs
I am in the orange dress.
I smile, ask him what number
life are we on now; I don’t remember.
             Tom doesn’t answer.

First appeared in The Ekphrastic Review’s Cats Contest, 2022

The Bird         for Jet

We bury our black cat in a box,
alongside the appurtenances
of his domestic time with us: his bowl,
some cat nip, a toy. We remember
his civility. The box is missing, though,
the one real, true trophy of his measured,
quiet, house-bound life.

Once, our black cat caught a sparrow
on the balcony; he broke
its neck expertly. I ran after him
and seized the bird from his
clenched jaw. His sound was fury,
his outrage fierce. He hunted for it
for a long time, narrowing his
green killer eyes at me.

Our black cat may be a panther now,
running like a Serengeti wind,
stalking his prey - no mere birds -
in the Paradise of Housecats.
And if we meet again, I hope
he forgives me, shows me mercy,
before he bares his long, white teeth
and suddenly           leaps.

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Tricia Marcella Cimera © 2022

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Cover: Sensual Plums by Lauri Burke

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Go Slow, Leonard Cohen

I had a dream Leonard Cohen
was my first and I was his last.
Go slow don’t hurt me, I whispered.
Go slow don’t kill me, he warned.
He taught me why the yellow dog
howls when the pink rose blooms
in the dark of night while the rain
runs in rivulets down the window.
He showed me that sometimes I
would be the dog, sometimes I
would be the rose. But both of us
were always the rain. And to
go slow. The end would come
soon enough.

Appeared in Autumn Sky Daily, February 2017

Leonard and the Nightingale

I ran into Leonard Cohen
in Amsterdam; this was after
he died but there he was,
writing poems in the square.
We drank cups of black tea,
we walked and talked.   He
held my hand like it was
     a tiny-boned bird.

   Life is all love and death —
he sighed, pressing against me
in a doorway, stroking my breast.
We heard a nightingale sing
out insistently, then stop,
a fissure        in the air.
I looked for the bird in the
Linden trees but Leonard
shook his head, quietly said —

   Baby    it’s gone

Published in Watch the Birdie print anthology, a Beautiful Dragons Project, 2018

plum poem

for Leonard Cohen

you didn’t create
the tree
       that was you

but you made
the poems
       that fell

like plums
from your branches:
       all purple

in the long grass
where god
       is found

Bed of Leonard

A poster of Leonard Cohen
hangs above my bed.
The Man in Amsterdam 1972,
a present from my love.
Leonard surrounded by pigeons,
looks upward with a smile.
     Sometimes when we roll
and grapple, I can hear
those pigeons on
the cobblestones coo.
And sometimes I hear Leonard,
the lawyer of Sex,
laugh at us, at the way
we lovers can’t help but
      do.

Leonard Leaving

Do not say the moment was imagined
                                             - L. Cohen

After I heard that
Leonard Cohen died,
I walked by the river,
thought how no one
held Sad up to the light
the way he had.
I sang Alexandra Leaving,
threw a dark stone
into the water deep as
his voice,
saw a blue lotus flower
float on a wave,
watched it move
unwaveringly        away.

Appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, June
2017 in a slightly different version

cohen kōan

where can you find cohen?
in the black raincoat that never dries.

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Tricia Marcella Cimera © 2019

Boxborough Poems

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Boxborough Story

In 1974 my family moved to Boxborough, Massachusetts and we lived in a nice new house, a Colonial. I was ten. We lived on Guggins Lane surrounded by fir trees that rose up darkly all around us. There was a brook with smooth stones nearby. My father planted sunflowers out front. In my school there was a boy who caught bullfrogs and jabbed pencils into their stomachs and the captured frog’s eyes were like my mother’s eyes when we went to visit her every day in the hospital psychiatric ward and she would look at us helplessly and cry. The frog’s soft, punctured belly was like my heart. And the boy? The boy was like the neighbor who found out my family’s sad story - the story that I knew was called Your Mother is Crazy, the one I desperately wanted to hide - and told everyone on our block. Everyone.

Previously published in Foliate Oak, 2015

Mrs. March

In Concord, Mass. I saw Louisa May
Alcott’s brown Orchard House.
I loved Little Women, Jo most of all.
All the March sisters came to life
in that house, I thought with awe.
I never gave a thought to Mrs.
March Marmee steadfast Mother.
Did she stay in bed mornings while her
daughters glanced at each other uneasily?
Did she sit quietly on a kitchen chair
staring out the window unseeingly?
Did she rise suddenly from the table
leaving the meal she cooked untouched,
night after night? In our brown house,
my mother did.

Day Trip

One of the best things
my family did when we
lived in Massachusetts
was when we went to
             Maine
for the day: The rocks,
the ocean, the gulls with
their eerie cries that made
me feel even lonelier.
Real starfish. Real
friendly people who
smiled, said hello without —
hesitating.

Walden

We lived in a town
in Massachusetts
not far from the
famous Walden Pond.
My father took us there,
my sister and me;
told about Thoreau
who worshipped solitude.
No one knew
I hid in my closet alone,
crying a pond         a lake
an ocean of tears
during those days of
my mother’s depression.
No one knew that at ten
I felt older than Thoreau
with his walking stick,
weary of the human world.

child wood

for the two
boxborough years
my child hood
was a child wood:
trees
stones
ferns
guggins brook
birds & creatures
earth & me.
every leaf that fell
fell for me
i believed.
god — or someone —
loved me
in those woods.
there, i understood
what i was.
i was not invisible.
i was nameless but
necessary   as the rain.

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The Sea and a River

Mudflat Woman

Panama Hat