Galveston Blues
Pacing the hard sand of Galveston
two miles to the eastern tip
you thought a sprawling shrimper
was a broken airplane
sinking in the fog-bound distance.
You called the Coast Guard
who were too polite to doubt your S.O.S.
out loud.
Maybe they did send a boat.
We probably ate the guy’s catch
later that night in the Juju
listening to the blues.
This island knows how to sing them.
Wanting to wail and cry
in Mardi Gras drag
with the keen guitar.
Lost souls,
like the 6,000 swept away in the storm
that shattered the island to splinters
on the brink of their glory.
Time seeped away from them then,
— the surge that battered them all night
left them dry and wrung out before dawn.
No two singers sing the same blues.
They sing the same words
even the same tune.
They dig over and over
with the same phrase
but cut through to different pain.
When we left Galveston for the mainland
we heard those Mardi Gras blues
singing the tankers and the rigs
and the cruise ships
lighting out for the glittering south
and the voices left behind
on the sea wall
staring into the fog’s mouth
singing one blue note
over and over.
• • •
For My Children, Who Hate My Worry
Every minute you’re trapped inside the burning building
I scream at you to save yourselves
but you stay in the shower for 30 minutes
you straighten your hair
you play another round of that hideous video game
and you get late detention
you miss the bus
you flunk the test.
The screaming face is not my face,
I swear
but it’s the face you’ll remember
the face I remember on my mother
though today she talks softly and laughs,
hardly able to remember her own face.
Today I renounce that face
I renounce the shriek
I renounce the vision of you in flames.
I want to take on the face of the young girl again
wakened on Saturday morning
by a shaft of sunlight
who wandered through the magical woods
all day
and named every stone, every thick tree,
every turn in the bright creek
before the woods were cut down.
I have the face I deserve.
Still, I’ll rise on Sunday
in a shaft of light
and kiss you on the forehead
and wish you well
and wander out into the woods
around our house
and find the wild turkeys
and laugh with them –
I swear.
• • •
The Lost Whaling Museum
The jawbones of whales
should be buried here.
They hung from the ceiling
of the old whaling museum
weeks ago, it seems,
though it’s decades.
With all the loot from the Kendall,
they were shipped off to New Bedford
like countless whalers before them
centuries ago.
Now peace reigns
over the green lawns
of the Kendall.
The stone mermaid
under her gray bench
watches pensively
over the field she defended
where priapic mushrooms
once spread
now ravaged,
they were scraped clean
by Puritan blades
at Thanksgiving
— the mystery
of their riotous uprising
lost forever.
I live here.
Once I pored over the journals
of old whaling captains,
gazed at the wooden mastheads
carved to resemble
wives and daughters
left behind.
I tread these woods
under a Renoir sky
in December
wondering what artifacts of ours
will remain
tools of our trades
memory chips and wands
pixels logging voyages
through dreams
or nightmares.
Where will those who come after us
send our remains?
To some bustling star
or to a deep cave in the earth
they left behind?
• • •
Karen Henry collaborated with director Herbert Blau and Kraken in writing Elsinore, based on Hamlet, and Crooked Eclipses, based on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. With composer W. Newell Hendricks, she received NEA grants for her librettos for the operas The Cell and Ascona. Co-founder of the Boston Theater Group, she currently performs and writes for Row Twelve Contemporary Music Ensemble. Her poems have been published in Crosswinds and by Zoetic Press on The Literary Whip.