<div class="line">While I write,</div>
<div class="line">I play Shearing</div>
<div class="line">on Dave’s stereo.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">God, I remember</div>
<div class="line">those last few weeks,</div>
<div class="line">him plugged into this,</div>
<div class="line">his life support.</div>
<div class="line">How he main-lined Penderecki.</div>
<div class="line">I imagine his C/T scan showing</div>
<div class="line">these tuneless passages</div>
<div class="line">as strange hieroglyphs,</div>
<div class="line">metastasizing.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">A lab tech would spot it</div>
<div class="line">as abstract art,</div>
<div class="line">sell pirated copies. The Guggenheim</div>
<div class="line">would showcase</div>
<div class="line">this unsigned masterpiece,</div>
<div class="line">“Penderecki’s Soul.”</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Cryptologists, musicologists, oncologists</div>
<div class="line">who came to witness the aberration</div>
<div class="line">might have thrown up their hands.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">In the O.R. no way they could</div>
<div class="line">carve out the cacaphony.</div>
<div class="line">If speakers were attached,</div>
<div class="line">he would broadcast</div>
<div class="line">the collage of eerie sounds</div>
<div class="line">through the hospital. Terrified patients</div>
<div class="line">would stuff cotton in their ears.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">I suppose he really heard music</div>
<div class="line">in those CDs—</div>
<div class="line">some orchestral battle.</div>
<div class="line">The clash of percussionist armies</div>
<div class="line">against yearning cellos and violin angst.</div>
<div class="line">Or maybe just any barrage of loud noise</div>
<div class="line">would fill the vacuum: his entourage</div>
<div class="line">of students, gone. Friends, gone.</div>
<div class="line">His doctors and me, all he had left.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Tympani battalions only masked</div>
<div class="line">his real war. No succession</div>
<div class="line">of specialists could quell</div>
<div class="line">the insurrections.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Any more than I could.</div>
<div class="line">A pair of hands.</div>
<div class="line">An empty form.</div>


Four Haiku

Seeing My Father’s Penis

Penderecki’s Soul

<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Poems torn from<br />
my eighty years,<br />
scribbled on scraps<br />
or typed on my Mac</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">now lie piled in files, stored<br />
in drawers, stacked on tables,<br />
copied on floppies,<br />
saved on my hard drive.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Still, I pictured them scattered<br />
by a thoughtless flurry<br />
of wind,<br />
drenched by winter</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">showers. All<br />
my meticulous metaphors,<br />
melted. My carefully crafted words,<br />
reduced to meaningless blurs.</p>


Does World Literature Exist…

Quantum Physics

Unsong

<p style="padding-left: 0px;">This morning my glasses weren’t<br />
right by my book<br />
where I left them last night.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Nor anyplace else I looked in the house—<br />
by the computer mouse,<br />
even in the fridge where I once</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">found the sugar bowl, AWOL.<br />
My sapphire-blue sweater,<br />
heisted, I’m sure,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">by some mischievous poltergeist.<br />
I once saw a Cairo airport photo—<br />
a mountain of luggage, unclaimed.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">I imagine somewhere there’s a tower<br />
of my treasures, un-named,<br />
long since spirited away—</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">maybe my seed pearls, crystal beads,<br />
my dragon kimono,<br />
slinky silk, Chinese red.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Ten satin scarves, hand painted.<br />
Two cashmere coats. Twenty-one<br />
umbrellas left on busses and trains.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Still, another hypothesis<br />
I have yet to prove—I believe<br />
the atoms in my glasses came unglued.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Just flew apart, all over<br />
the blue carpet.<br />
Even the ceiling, the walls,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">invisibly messed<br />
with recalcitrant optical particles<br />
refusing to stay coalesced.</p>


HOW TO MAKE A BIRD WITH TWO HANDS

<p>a dime to sit through a Fred Astaire movie<br />
twice, kids to play with after school,<br />
parents who loved me, and four sisters.<br />
June, in college, juggling boyfriends, May,</p>
<p>just two years behind, sang<br />
at all the ladies’ clubs. Eleanor,<br />
way ahead of me too. Thirteen.<br />
I tried imagine being so grownup.</p>
<p>Sure, we quarreled, but sometimes<br />
we had such fun making fudge, dancing<br />
to Glen Miller’s Boogie Woogie,<br />
in the upstairs hall.</p>
<p>It was my birthday, my first party ever.<br />
We played musical chairs, upset the fruit basket.<br />
And for once, I was the center of attention.<br />
I remember two presents,</p>
<p>a tiny glass vase of jeweled flowers<br />
that shone blue and red on my hand.<br />
The best one, a real diary. It even had<br />
a little gold key to lock up my secrets.</p>
<p>After everyone left, I went up to my room,<br />
closed the door and told my diary,<br />
<em>I can’t believe it. At last.<br />
I am ten years old.</em></p>


THE DRUNKEN BOAT AND OTHER POEMS tr.

Do You Have the Poem?

Everything I Wanted I Had

<p style="padding-left: 0px;">
My son came home from camping<br />
in the Humboldt Redwoods        fresh green<br />
sprouts springing from his head.<br />
Before the end of day I felt<br />
my own saplings push up<br />
prickly stems.<br />
In spite of attempts<br />
to uproot them      my fast-growing sprouts<br />
stayed firmly planted.<br />
One after another      the experts passed<br />
on me      doctor to botanist<br />
arborists to psychiatrist<br />
and finally to the Department<br />
of Communicable Disease<br />
who threw up their hands.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">But the word had spread.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Hearing a hullabaloo           I looked out<br />
to find <em>paparazzi.</em><br />
swarming the yard      the street.<br />
<em>Phyllis, how did this aberration begin?<br />
Can I touch them?      Will you give me a sprout<br />
for my garden?</em><br />
<em>Can you explain why this condition didn’t spread?<br />
How does it feel?</em>      I snapped the blinds closed<br />
and took a pill.<br />
The graft of pippins and cloning permission<br />
I turned down.      Though I sold the movie rights<br />
to MGM for a mil<br />
I wanted the whole affair to disappear.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">In the morning<br />
such a heady lightness<br />
the yard         all quiet<br />
any hint of redwood scent         gone.</p>


Lips

SHARP STARS

The Redwood Plague

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The parent of the node. The parent object can be of various types

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name

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Product variation SKU (Stock-keeping unit)

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Connection between the ProductVariation type and the ProductVariation type

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Cursor used along with the "first" argument to reference where in the dataset to get data

Cursor used along with the "last" argument to reference where in the dataset to get data

The number of items to return after the referenced "after" cursor

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Unique cache key to be produced when this query is stored in an object cache. Default is 'core'.

Term ID to retrieve child terms of. If multiple taxonomies are passed, $child_of is ignored. Default 0.

True to limit results to terms that have no children. This parameter has no effect on non-hierarchical taxonomies. Default false.

Retrieve terms where the description is LIKE the input value. Default empty.

Array of term ids to exclude. If $include is non-empty, $exclude is ignored. Default empty array.

Array of term ids to exclude along with all of their descendant terms. If $include is non-empty, $exclude_tree is ignored. Default empty array.

Whether to hide terms not assigned to any posts. Accepts true or false. Default false

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Array of term ids to include. Default empty array.

Array of names to return term(s) for. Default empty.

Retrieve terms where the name is LIKE the input value. Default empty.

Array of object IDs. Results will be limited to terms associated with these objects.

Direction the connection should be ordered in

Field(s) to order terms by. Defaults to 'name'.

Whether to pad the quantity of a term's children in the quantity of each term's "count" object variable. Default false.

Parent term ID to retrieve direct-child terms of. Default empty.

Search criteria to match terms. Will be SQL-formatted with wildcards before and after. Default empty.

Array of slugs to return term(s) for. Default empty.

Array of term taxonomy IDs, to match when querying terms.

Whether to prime meta caches for matched terms. Default true.

Connection between the ProductVariation type and the TermNode type

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Connection between the ProductVariation type and the shippingClass type

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October 8, 2012UnsongPhyllis M. Teplitz

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October 8, 2012UnsongPhyllis M. Teplitz

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Penderecki’s Soul by Phyllis M. Teplitz

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Everything I Wanted I Had by Phyllis M. Teplitz

The Redwood Plague by Phyllis M. Teplitz