MYSHKIN'S BLUES is a physical and emotional travelogue that takes as its patron saint Dostoevsky's holy fool. Organized into a double album in the manner of Cream's "Wheels of Fire" or Jimi's "Electric Ladyland" or Guns n'Roses' "Use Your Illusion," the poems of Mark Fogarty's questing work walk through the valley between folly and wisdom, relying on the magic of the blues to transform painful experiences into joyful ones!
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By mark fogarty
Oct 15, 2009
"The Lost Child" THE LOST CHILD -for Patricia- How I measure the time is my girl had grown to half my height. What the year was I don't remember, the light was bad for measuring. It was one of the quick ones, the whisk years, we'd moved on our own down the river like corks. Frankie, my uncle, tipped me to a place, shaking his head I didn't have a husband. The seasons jumped like a bear in the circus. I was sawing myself in two to see if I'd reappear, scrolling scrimshaw on the teeth of dragons, using a needle I dipped in sailor's ink. I kept the hours rolled up in a cupboard. The light was a filter for picking up smudges I sponged out of the side of my bench. I fit in my place like the sprockets of a wrench. My child flowed on, a shimmer out of reach, as I ran to the corner, and I ran to the train, Brooklyn brown as the straws of a broom, banging my heart on the stitches of my coat, running as fast as the sand in the glass, til I saw myself in the window of the train, the... More > door shut hard and I lost a tooth, I didn't recognize my own face. The day I found him they'd turned back the clocks. My girl was off and running, always was, late for school, a blur across the park. The leaves were pulling from the sockets of the trees. I caught a flash from the corner of my view, swept it cross to a bench where I saw a lost boy, tiny, all of three, dark, Puerto Rican, an orbit of curls, sobbing in the beam of light through the trees. I held him til his heartbeat calmed, covered him in my favorite scarf, echoed for him with a whisper a place where the world was warm as sand. His eyes were round as marbles in your hand. My child came up to my waist, she tugged at me, curious but late. The boy was wet, he needed changing. I wanted to take him to a world I ran, but nothing would wait, not the light, not the beat, not the clock. I walked her to school as he yanked at my hair, watching my girl as she skipped up the walk. I loved her more than the sun or moon. I could sketch out our lives with pieces of chalk. His hair was dark as corners of the night. When it took the light I could see it clear, dark as my own, and eyes that looked at mine. But I kept him an hour, not a lifetime. Police soon found his crying mom, she shook my hand, he left with her through a swinging door. His head bobbed up, then down. His eyes were deep as agates on the floor. And now my girl is grown away, half my life is done. I never saw the boy again. I feel him some on the colder days, when I tighten my jaw in the clenching wind, a kid in a scarf I never got back. Somewhere he's whistling, carving a tattoo. He tugs at me some, when I wonder what it means. I'll have no more children now, but my self looks back at me from glass. I'm learning the names of the rivers of the world, cutting their forms with a circular saw. The light makes a stream, and I keep it in view. Somewhere there's a child in the circle of a maze, orphaned for the time the trees start to unwind. I'll look for that child an hour, or my life, moving like a train on the way down the line. I start, I stop, brushing loose along the track. I measure my shift by the distance here and back. Copyright 2009 MARK F. FOGARTY from Myshkin's Blues< Less
