When Sunday Is the First
Tridecaphobes beware
This should not
Be your day
A day for black
Cats
Ladders
Broken mirrors
Cracked backs
(awful!)
Bad thirteens
Judas
The thirteenth follower
Somehow
With Christ dying
On a Friday
Too
Though the bad
Day that pegs it is
Just inside
The fourteenth century
When on a Friday the
Thirteenth
A trap was sprung
Upon
The Templars
Arrested
Tortured
Executed
And the king of France
Who started the campaign
No longer
He decided
Had to pay the ruined Templars
Back
Then again
The origin could be African
Or India
Or from the Americas
Ancient Greece
Or Atabia
Where the numbers were invented
So
Good
Day
Inside
Or should you dare outside
Where black
Cats will be set on ladder steps
To sing in fiddled fashion
Of
The hours
C L Couch
Photo by Zhen H on Unsplash
[not unlike “Croatoan” on a certain tree, also a subject of suspicion]
(x = space)
x
x
Triscuit Decks a Phobia
x
I keep forgetting
That when the first is on a Sunday
There will be a Friday
The thirteenth
I have to pay attention
Though I’m not afraid
I find it interesting
The day
The superstition
All our reactions
When we realize
x
There’s the Irish in me
Or you
Or the Italian or the Russian
The Kenyan
Or the Māori
Part of you
x
Loki
Raven
Anansi
All the mischief-makers
Plus phantom pronouncements
On the cracks
Under the ladders
With the black cats
Passing by
x
The weight of superstition
Better to wear it lightly
Over souls
Keep a thought
Let it drive you
Toward civility
With an interest in
What drives an utterance
Of the Scottish play
Inside the theatre
In another play’s production
x
Maybe ghosts will tell us
Why it matters
Since the ethereal
If not the numinous
Is attached
And coursing through
The old sources
And our own,
Both inventing things
For cautions
In our day
x
n. b.
x
Be nice to black cats
They are not superstition;
They could have stanched
The plague
x
C L Couch
x
x
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
x
Stops
I was waiting
Under the roof of our bus stop,
A structure built of brick
And heavily painted many times
A weekday afternoon, after school
The PAT bus arrived and I got
On
The bus moved on the winding
Way that was Mount Royal Boulevard
Downhill through Etna
Onto the Ohio River road
Crossing the Allegheny on
The George Washington Bridge
Downtown in Pittsburgh
I left the bus through folding
Doors near
Mellon Center
Walked to the Alcoa Building then inside
To find my father in
His office on an upper floor
We had dinner somewhere in
The city
Then walked to the Stanley Theatre
For
A showing of Kubrick’s 2001
Seventy m-m on a screen
That was maybe silver
I was thirteen; it was my birthday
The movie plot was long
And deliberately enigmatic
I liked the
Sci-fi scenes
And then it was all over
All of it
There would never be another day like that
I suppose
Suburban adventures
Don’t happen
Like this anymore
Too far, too dangerous
Too much for one child to negotiate
But on that day
Nothing bad took place
And my year turned
Just the same
C L Couch
clcouch123 
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