Whispers from the Unseen

after Thomas Merton

As I pulled away slowly
feeling so holy
God knows I was feelin’ alive

And now the sun’s comin’ up
I’m ridin’ with Lady Luck

Tom Waits

Life is on our side.

I have one little cell inside

that I can’t track down.

I hope he is the one

that sings

when the sunlight lifts

your eyelashes

across the horizon.

I would like to see you

this way, on the tip

of my brush,

not yet on the canvas,

about to come alive

beneath breath and whisper.

But you are the one,

the one I can’t track down.

It does not matter.

I can see you

just down the road.

I can hear your voice

cut through the wind.

You are beautiful,

and life is on our side.

You were drawn out of nothingness to be here, to come to this place, and now you write alone. Alone—all mind, all spirit, all fire—nothingness was your home, now write as your mind begins to sizzle with lightening. Notice the sky is alone above you. Pale as skin, alive and terribly unknown.

Alone. You are the candle tonight. Pick up your pen. You need no one. You need nothing but the haze dropped down from the sky. Walk outside without your shirt just once, on a night full of cold blades, and then smile. Later, you can pick up the pen, but for now, just stand there and smile. If you are lucky, a wind gust will come, literally from the emptiness of space, and knock your breath back into nowhere. And if you are not so lucky, just smile, because you can be sure someone, somewhere, is inside, trying to stay warm, and they will never find it. To turn blood into starlight,  the fire must come from within.

Death, yes, death will come with blue fingers, licked cool and soft to the touch, but today you will write alone and you will be happy—happy that you are alone—happy knowing that you can write even to the edge of death itself. You meet death alone, even tonight, like a distant star. Put down the pen for a moment and say hello to yours. There is no getting away and you know it. One star is yours alone, and it knows your name. Since its light died millions of years ago, it wants you to stay silent.

The stars, shining after death, already know the meaning of silence. You do not need to learn it.

They move quickly out of Manhattan

via the Holland Tunnel

into the desolation of eastern New Jersey:

abandoned factories, railroad tracks,

dying towns—stop to rest

where the light enters broken

windows.

They find Gealie’s still open for bad coffee,

unfiltered Lucky Strikes, stale donuts.

They move at night,

and by day huddle in dark

hollows and rub each other’s backs.

When in doubt, they follow

alpha markers: poets know they can rut

out of season and still exchange

syllables. Words are born along the way

and held in their arms

to be unraveled later,

if they find time.

They cross the Ohio on stolen barges,

and move into the lower hills

to find cover with the deer. They understand

the dangers involved: to cross fields

unseen. Occasionally a poet dies—

they leave a line or two in the soil

to mark time and place:

language and landscape blur

under the bleating sky,

and another stanza is left

in the unnameable spaces of language.

Later, they are seen herding west

out of western Arkansas into the lower

grasslands of Oklahoma.

From our helicopters, they look like

crawling Chinese letters—their black tags

give them away. We take them down

with dart guns. They breathe close

to the ground, like puddles

of moonlight: the skin

over their ribs stretches and glistens

rabidly.

Our task is easy: clip thumbs

tongues, index fingers. Some schools

of thought say we should

take their feet as well,

for they could scrawl the earth

with heels and toes.

Maybe it is pointless:

with six fingers left

they could still press thoughts

into flesh. Maybe

the wind and rain

will wash away what we call

rutting, but for now,

the only language left

will be our own.

A grumbly stretch of river spanned

by railroad, highway, and foot bridge.

Cliffs swagger above the gorge,

moss patches smutting the granite.

A filmmaker plans a drama here.

He has entitled it River Sad.

I’m to star as the bad guy,

an elderly doper who kidnaps

a brassy young couple, drugs them,

ties the handsome blond hero

to the railroad while he ravishes

the woman in primary colors.

The man frees himself and rushes

to the cabin where the doper leers,

but a flood crushes down the gorge

and flushes everyone out to sea,

where unless we spout  fins and gills

we drown in wide-screen glory.

Silly plot, but the filmmaker pays

in cash. I knot the drugged young man

to the railroad, then drag the woman

to the cabin. As we pretend

to destabilize our bodies

before the groaning camera

a diesel horn toots. Surely

the director warned the railroad

to stop all trains for the day.

We dash to the bridge and discover

only certain parts of the actor

we left writhing in his bonds.

I peer down the length of the gorge

and detect a rumble of train

retreating, satisfied, and notice

that where the river dips underground

a rope-pull ferryboat crosses

and some grinning fellow waves.

I find myself ordering today’s feature:
Peanut Butter Mocha,
the Pina Colada of coffees.
I place it on the table
alongside my plain, black spiral
and sharp number twos.
It feels awkward, diamonds on cardboard.

Hemingway would scoff, a steaming mug
of Big Buck in his weathered hand
to carry him through paragraphs.
Bishop would lean on Sumatra’s
rich and earthy flavors.  Yeats might
choose Black and Tan out of spite.
Collins, Four Seasons-he was
just listening to Vivaldi
this morning while shaving.
Everyone avoids Jamaican Me Crazy,
its Hallmark name
the kiss of death.

I take one draw, through fluffy whipped cream
and leave it alone.
I think ahead to lunch,
the notebook again on the table,
and the prospect of its simple cover
perfectly complimented by the yin-yang
of a Co-jack grilled cheese.

I embrace you – this argument

of bent trees in darkening autumn

light, shadows against

your cathedral pillars, holy

echoes sounding of your reveler’s

Word as reverie. I want

similar things to Dream – want

what I kneel before to mean

the resistance, itself a stream

before dawn – light that does

not know me yet but

believes better of us still –

our hands clasped around this O

so your embrace destroys me

into remembering where you were

fire, and I was glad to walk

among those cattails

smoldering toward water.

I step in, bare branches gnarled

and on either bank

the need to know.

No one’s watching you, and to faint stars,

you’re just a blur amidst the orange glow

of cement plant lights where mining never stops

you from thinking big city, better life – any life,

but this small town has been huddling

around a bon fire fed by car tires

on the shore of Lake Huron, bracing itself

against its only wealth – bitter cold

and limestone.

When you first realized the idea of north,

everyone here became a bad Polak joke

bundled up in used parkas and knit hats:

predictable and never funny. The idea

that this was God’s Country made you imagine

god as a drunken Polak who’d summoned

Pete Kaszabuski into a fishing shanty

with a full flask for three days: the task to catch

a grand revelation. Pete staggered out

on the third night with one:

drink till you puke, smoke till it’s gone.

God smirked and burped – called it good,

but it’s the other four days of the week

in this town that has you reeling

amidst the sound of winter’s white-capped waves

with their heavy machinery blasting you

past going-out-of-business signs

on the main drag; past your narrowing future

at the end of this dirt road – all the windows

of the house darkened – the drive empty.

It’s easier when we cry
in our beds, sheets pulled up tight
against shadows of whipped trees 
in the yard. Simpler to burn
the wings off moth-angels
because our wings were torched too. 

I love what you’ve done
to the earth – your loins, fine
draperies over her windowed eyes
so that it’s possible to block 
excruciating light that comes 
to remind us of how it will fall
even in translation.

I am not interested in Lima bashers, especially ones who have never lived here.

Lima is a town, not unlike many others, with problems such as unemployment and the accompanying increase in crime.

Lima, Ohio is not just a place. It is home to so many people with the good sense to be born here, and possess its wonderful midwest values and no-nonsense work ethic. No, Lima is not a place, but home to good, kind people. These are the people, the neighbors, who send meals and cards to you after learning that you are having a rough time.

Lima is a community filled with glorious wheat fields, rows and rows of sweet summer corn and the best home grown tomatoes in the land. Lima is where so many of us grew up, went to GREAT schools (mine, LCC, sends over 90% of their graduates on to college). Lima is marching bands, summer parades, lovely parks, reserviors, and farmer’s markets. Lima is home to “set up housekeeping,”  raise your children and, if you are real lucky, walk in your home and look into the beautiful face of your sweetheart who you grew up with and married right here in your home, Lima.

For Suzan Lane Bastow

Maybe you read the words in prayer

as your mother and father huddled there

on the shore of Grand Lake. As you were

waiting for water to know you wholly,

I wanted to believe in Christ.

It was your gone body demanding

waves at our toes against the shore –

I must go. I must go on alone.

We were buoys up to our shins

your sister’s water arm in mine

as we poured you gently in – a hush –

all of us swimming and swallows

quietly singing in the oak above

and you, at last, breathing in.

Day of the Dead

In Mexico City, the heat rises

like the dead.  Unseen but felt

in quiet corners.  Tourists crowd

the streets, snapping photos of

dancing senoritas and faceless

vendors moaning behind masks of

boredom.  Stray dogs trail behind,

snarling over the largest scrap of bone,

marrow still intact.  In an alleyway,

behind an iron gate, a tired maid

cradles a dead fetus.  A scarlet river

drains into the gutter on the street.

Bloody footprints walk away from

the scene of the crime.  Skeletal

bodies reach out to foreigners,

begging for coins, water, a piece of

salvation.  Mad roosters pick at their

toes mistaking them for ears of corn.

While hens lay deformed eggs.

Shells cracking, spilling spicy red

yolk hot as lava.  This is not the day

of the dead as seen in postcards

for sale in hotel gift shops or flyers

nailed to wooden cantina doors.

But it may as well be.

Hourglass

Grandma always wore knee-high

black socks to bed.  She claimed

they kept her legs warm; short,

brittle bones resembling fragile

timbers that could crack

at the slightest awkward tilt.

Every morning, I helped her discard

the sweaty socks.  Slowly peel them

off like snake skin.  In the process,

grains of sand seeped from her toes,

sprinkling salt from their flesh covered

shaker.  I thought it odd but blamed it

on her feet which were always traveling

with no direction.  In the afternoons,

I would spot her rummaging through

linen closets and dresser drawers.  I

reasoned it was due to her dementia.

Meanwhile, an hourglass sitting on her

nightstand tap danced to the music

of confusion.  Knowing that it was only

a matter of time before the sand

would stop spilling.  And the agony

of vertigo would finally end.

While walking alone on scarlet stairs, pondering eternity, the lifespan of words, and where they go to die, I offered up a prayer to help find my muse. The song of a siren to help locate a place to crawl ashore and be eaten alive would do. I have never asked for much. Here, at this time, it was enough to feel warm, like blood sausage on a chilly night. I looked up toward blazing flames (which I mistook for the sun), and discerned a piece of paper floating along on down-swells of alternating heat and cold. I reached toward the yellowing print, and I read these words:

Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately? Had he uttered the great words and songs he had in him? He had not. Unwritten poems were killing him. He had retreated to this place which sometimes looked like Arcadia to him and sometimes looked like hell. Here he heard the bad things being said of him by his detractors–other writers and intellectuals. He grew malicious himself but seemed not to hear what he said of others, how he slandered them. He brooded and intrigued fantastically. He was becoming one of the big-time solitaires.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, p. 25

Then I laughed. It was time to call Joe. Snap.

To be continued . . .

I’m sweating the outside of a soda can
and yogurt’s running down my leg.
Alan de Botton just told me the best way
to travel is to stare out train windows,
don’t even de-board, just be thought
in the half-face of a farmer pitching hay
or the child throwing a ball in the park
to no one, at least, a figure you can’t see
the way Charles Baudelaire
used to sit in airports, or so then wrote,
for hours with nowhere except in passing
to go. After jet fuel, for any reason today,
I keep bleeding through the bright holes in shadows
as if the other days didn’t count;
I’m not a showy person but gelling syrup star red
calls a kind of attention to how people often
mistake me for a desirable coat where
only a knit sweater could do the trick.
You know, it’s an education really at how
intensely persistent things fit
like we are this fruit shape or we taste
in five senses or the matter lies
in another material’s sentence we can’t describe
such as eternity’s organizing infrastructure
or how the cherry returns to the tree bud
after melting its tart skin on tongue.
I say these things to you, not because I’m forced
or informed but only to recall that
the best happens in sidewalk cracks
and by the rims of mud puddles. The sun comes out
during lunch, over siestas and cold beer it shines,
not during the office hours’ work day
that evaporates or in the face of a ticket we hold,
palm tight, but when the foot moves & mouth opens
just to enough to let the body’s earth enter
and pass in the small sweat of a sun cloud.

I watched a film tonight

about a suicide note

and thought of you, mother-

a husband’s ink-stained hands,

a hole shot through two souls.

It said, “Listen to your heart,

I will speak to you there,”

and I remember you yesterday-

making coffee with one steady hand

as the other clutched your chest,

the faint smell of smoke

wafting from the toaster.

At the time, I thought you were

simply trying to get hold

of your dangling bifocals.

Robin-eggshell sky blossoming lapis sepals,

billowing cerulean cirrus petals;

azure-iridescent morpho butterfly-wing clusters,

diaphanous-veiling serene center-stamen eyes,

shadow-swept seductive by indigo hurricanes,

swirling deep-ocean midnight desire; a poet’s

offering to the Muse, transcendent, defying death,

endless as a river of love immortal,

flowing forever deeper, penetrating mauve

grottoes of yearning-hearts’ servitude,

vena cava blood-rushing indigo,

tattooing the soul violet, lavender-piercing Night,

opened scarlet, mortally wounded, resurrected

by a blue-hour dawn’s eternal promise

to be the one and only one,

her Adam, his Eve; Eden’s naked outcasts,

now heirs defiant, reclaiming paradise lost,

as equals in the midst of Omnipotence.

You’ve returned to my daydreams.

I am distracted by body parts—

shoulders, hands, neck—

your shell.

One silent week

in Bora Bora is all I desire—

walking unfamiliar beaches,

you in your mirrored sunglasses,

me wearing

my insides out.

“Water, if unstirred, will become clear.”

Soygal Rinpoche

The people splash

stomp through puddles with

blinding yellow Wellies

cannonball through space

spraying, sloshing, soaking

stir up mud, making opaque

all thoughts, reason

rain dance

summon tsunamis

dive deep in

awkward rubber flippers

hurl rocks off bridges

drop pebbles into wells

build elaborate gutter systems to

direct flow

push plungers

add bubbles to baths

circle straws in glasses

add whirls to their pools

I am staring at my moat

waiting.

So Glad It's Winter Here

The snow fell like a soft ode

as we drove him North on U.S. 23

toward Alpena, Michigan, our destination.

He sat in the back window seat

next to Anne and Jan.

Julie drove and eyed him in the rear view.

His body seemed small and rumpled

in the Jeep, just the way we wanted him.

We gave him Vitamin Water, XXX,

and a travel pack of Xtra Cheddar Goldfish.

We wanted him alert, pacified.

We crossed the Au Sable, then hit Greenbush,

and he said, “I am so glad

it’s winter here—I can see steam rise

from the coffee cups.” We smiled.

Of course he did, but we didn’t listen.

All of this had a purpose, you see,

we had bills to pay, we had to get out of debt,

pay off the sitter, hide the grays,

buy new shades, rotate the flywheel,

fly off—Papua New Guinea— fly

on a bright white canvas full of humping

sea-turtles, that’s right, and an army

of Howler Monkeys on the beach,

and they are doing it too—everyone

going somewhere or doing it,

but what the hell, it was Tuesday,

and we were kidnapping Billy Collins.

We passed through Harrisville,

and Billy watched a bald man with no hat

scraping the ice off his truck.

He said, “Every face I see is a snowflake.”

We looked at each other and we knew

we had him, now we understood

this was going to work.

Maybe Billy knew, too.

He seemed relieved in the back seat,

looking out the window, his soft,

childlike face without a care in the world.

Softly, he said it, over and over,

the thing about the snowflakes,

and we moved forward all the time,

heading toward the city beside the lake

where we would tie him up and make him pay

for all of it,

for everything he was doing to us.

A tapeworm-thin man steers

his cow wife to a chair in front

of the large screen – orders

onion rings, mozzarella sticks,

three full baskets of wings

and pretends to watch

the game. Out of his pure

bald mind he calculates calories

on a bell curve while she swallows

the equation – numbers and all,

chasing its deep-fried texture

with clear beer. He scoots back

in a chair – swallows what’s

unfolding whole.

He lies awake next to her

heaving hulk, listens to flab apnea,

imagines mounting her – slit

the throat like a downed sow –

instead he prays

for log-jammed arteries to freeze

ending the winter of his discontent

as her veins congeal

in one last gasp caesura – curtains.

Heaving back the folds, ear to heart

near sweaty left breast: nothing.

Excited fingers grope carotid –

pressed until blue:

nothing. Nothing will come of nothing

so he stands over her hulking mass

exultant arms raised in a V, fists

unleashing their fingers

into thin air.

My soul has kidnapped me and is in the driver’s seat. She looks like me but wears hot pink jeans with rhinestones and her hair flies around the steering wheel like Isadora. She flashes iridescent sparks in the twilight and smells of rosewater, sweat and coffee grounds.

“I’m the one who should drive,” I shout but she stares straight ahead. My eyes grow dim as the road passes.

“You have no right to take my car,” I say.

“Oh, is that so?” she laughs over the roar of the engine. “What are your few years of wisdom compared to my thousands? ”

I grab her belt but it burns my hand.

“Hey, you better put the seatbelt on,” she says. “You’re in for one helluva ride…”

Her laughter peals over my head as she drives by a graffitied church. “Do you know where your soul is?” Uncle Sam asks, aiming a painted finger at me. The writing on the wall fades as we race past twisted fig trees, towards a cliff. Flames lick the wheels. I grab my soul, hold down her arms, struggle to control the steering wheel. She spits at me.

“Since when does a soul spit?” I ask.

“When a body doesn’t listen,” she says and slaps me. “Wake up for Heaven’s sake! Those gates won’t stay open forever.”

I dig my nails into her hands but she laughs.

“Slow down! I can’t think,” I shout.

“You think too much,” she says.

“Take me home,” I beg, arms now wrapped around her.

“How can I? You won’t let me.” She slams her foot on the accelerator, swerves to avoid an oncoming car and crashes into metal side rails.

I hear her moan as she lies skewered on a rosebush, shredded over thorns, hot pink jeans ripped, rhinestones crushed.

“I surrender,” I say. “I surrender.”

“It’s too late,” she whispers. “Now, you must travel the road alone.”

A fog descends and the rosebush vanishes.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnets from the Portugese”

I knocked many times,

but God would not let me enter.

It was the right decision.

I was not ready to see a wish

curl into little wisps of light

and come true. I was not ready

to see the tiny knuckles of your hand

reach toward mine, or hear your voice

say my name the way the wind

leaves the leaves

before you are gone.

The Way the Wind Leaves the Leaves

Fine things await me
across the bay.

Hot sun casts its glittery shadow
atop swaying waves
sparking corroded wires

level head plunges
beneath its white path

marathon legs grow scales and
propel fluid bricks of lake
under eager skin

heart pumps through
fish schools to reach Bird Island
where you wait

with hard arms and soft breath ready
to answer any question
yes.

There is a warbler stuck in my throat
just above the Adam’s apple.

I can only breathe when he sings.

He pecks at the original rind.

He creates holes for my soul.

He enters this fruit,
the landscape of my flesh
where words are rolled
like dough.

If only I could allow him
to complete his work,
all would be fine.

Instead I strike stones together
to create sparks.

The words travel up my arms.

I strike them harder. I like it.

I like what I am hearing,
but they do not become wings.

I stumble into my bathroom at five, turn on the light, start the shower. When I look into the antique mirror my mother’s face stares back. What the hell?
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” I say.
“I don’t feel like sleeping.” She reveals two crooked front teeth in a raggedy smile.
I grab a washcloth and wipe the mirror but it streaks soap over my mother’s face. She grimaces. I spray Windex and wipe it clean.
“You know,” she tilts her head sideways as if examining a picture. “You’re starting to look like me.”
I lean against the sink. “Jesus, what does that mean?” I examine deep grooves along the sides of her mouth, mismatched jowls, red spider veins on her nose, a tanned hide. “How long have you been standing there, Mom?”
“Years.”
“I can’t get ready with you staring at me!”
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me,” she says with a frown.
“Why can’t you leave?” I ask.
“As long as you look like me I can’t leave.”
I turn out the light, but she is still there when the light goes back on.
“You know dear, you really should start using night cream. It helps save face as you age.”
“Mom, this conversation is ridiculous.”
She starts to cry. I reach out to touch her but the mirror gets in the way. “How did you get behind there anyway?”
“I’ve always been here.” She smiles.
“Go away,” I shout at the mirror.
“Don’t worry. I’ll look better after you start using cream,” she winks.
I look into a hand mirror to get a clear picture of myself but there’s my mother again. I hang it on the shower rod behind me but now hundreds of mothers stare at me …in front of me…behind me…staring from all angles…so I rip the mirror off the shower rod and throw it in the trash can.
My mother frowns, furrowed lines, memories of time spent in the sun. “You can’t get away from mirrors, but you can pretend it all isn’t happening.” Her eyes fix on the night cream.
“Will you go back to sleep if I use it?” I ask. She nods.
I unscrew the lid on the jar, dip in three fingers and slather cream over the mirror.

Thank God
he sees her
for what she really is-
lazy, uninspired
wanting to be carried gingerly.

Watch your step.

Pale, lackluster
she is merely a thinker
drained of unrealized potential
coddled, old-fashioned-
a smile on her cute, dimpled face.

She would never take
care of herself.

Spoiled rotten-
rotting
rotting still
still rotting.

They were betting trifectas. This means you have to pick all three fastest horses in the right order. They already knew who would who would win and who would show, they were only worried about who would place.

“Madam Butterfly or Mary Jane’s Last Dance?” Juan asked.
“Most betters are going with Madam Butterfly but I don’t know…”
Dave looked down at his race sheet.
“…Remember Marshmallow Martini was favored in the last race–and he didn’t even place.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Damn everything starting with an ‘M’ is bringing us confusion,” I say.
“Shut up and let us think,” Juan answers.
They were right. I was a terrible gambler with no knowledge of the mathematics or madness dancing like pin balls inside the minds of the addicts. They were scientists of the sport, and I was merely an admirer of the beauty.
“You go get some fresh air buddy,” Juan says. “Let us think for the last minutes we have to place this bet.”
My shadow was hovering across his race sheet like a ghost. He was scared and so was I. This was the last of our money: five thousand pesos. This was our last chance and though I couldn’t contribute anything to their discussion I certainly didn’t want to be blamed for the outcome.
I walked outside over to get closer to the track. I wanted to get a good look at the horses as they waited to make it into the stadium.
Madam Butterfly was black and very masculine, not at all feminine like her name suggests. She kicked at the dirt with her long legs, picking up sand as her jockey patted her head and kicked his heel into her chest.
I tried to find number four, Mary Jane’s Last Dance. She was golden and fantastic. One of the finest horses I’ve ever seen. Her legs were nimble and strong; longer than Madam Butterfly but looked much calmer, trotting slowly in little dance steps as her jockey smiled and spoke softly into her ear. Mary Jane’s Last Dance was worthy of earning her name, and I knew she was going to place.
I tried to find the two favorites. There was the number one horse, The Sky is the Limit off in the corner with his head down. He looked like a doctor just before surgery; complacent and confident in his capacity yet completely aware of what was required of him, not paying attention to any distractions. He was a brown stallion, and very large and it looked as if that horse was made to run like hell and do nothing else.
“Number two is going to start off strong,” Juan said. “But then he’ll be a goner and ‘il fall back at the end ‘cause he’ll have nothing left in the tank.”
Dave agreed.
“Hell yes,” he said. “The Sky’s the Limit will be spent by the time he reaches that final corner–and that short final straightway will be when Violent Storm gets into full gear and takes over the last couple lengths.”
“It’s designed for Violent Storm,” I said.
They looked at me like I was an idiot.
“What?” I said. “That short straightaway ending is designed for a horse named Violent Storm.”
“Please don’t talk,” Juan said.
I walked away to watch the horses enter the stadium. I always love it when they come out. There’s always a crazy one, with legs in the air, howling like a wolf.
“Errrrrrr,” bellowed Sugar Tequila in the corner. They were struggling to get her into the starting booth. The filly didn’t want to enter and her jockey was nearly knocked off her neck a few times. He was screaming at her, swearing in Spanish and sweating like a pig wrapped in bacon frying in the heat of the sun.
“Pinche pendejo chingona,” he said. “Vamanos–por favor Tequila–ahorita odale pues guey!”
They final got her inside and continued down the line at the starting gate. The Sky is the Limit was the next to enter. He did so with no hesitation at all; head bobbing back and forth slowly. I knew that colt was something special from the first time I laid eyes on him. Silver mane shining beneath the sweltering noonday Tijuana sun he danced leisurely onto the track. He was graceful and methodical and a vision to watch. Looking at the scoreboard the betting odds had her paying five for ten, and slightly favored over Violent Storm.
Madam Butterfly was paying thirty to one and Mary Jane’s Last Dance was thirty-seven to one. I didn’t know who we wanted, but I knew Mary Jane’s Last Dance was going to get it. I knew we would make a lot of money on the trifecta if we won. Winning: that’s all that mattered.
All the horses were in and ready to go. I looked back but couldn’t see Dave or Juan. Everybody was standing up and ready for the final race of the day. Almost all the money was on Violent Storm and The Sky is the Limit and rightly so. These two took off strong in the number one and two positions, inching ahead of the pack and then pulling further ahead after the first corner. They passed my position flying so fast it looked like their feet barely touched the dust.
There was no way anyone was going to catch them and The Sky is the Limit looked like he was pushing so hard he was trying to launch himself into space. But then his head started shaking lower to the ground and more violent. I was watching the jumbotron to get a better view and Violent Storm was making up ground fast as they made it around the final turn.
In the pack there were two horses fighting for third. They were trying to get ahead and both decided to go for the inside at the same time. The horses’ legs buckled in slow motion and “agggghhhh,” swept through the crowd like a broom rubbing across the faces of the patrons grabbing their mouths and chests.
An accident took down a couple horses, tossing anorexic jockeys through the air like rag dolls. They landed on the track and were immediately smacked like a piñata, horses somehow managing to continue as if their bodies were nothing but shadows.
The two favorites crossed the finish line and I didn’t even have a chance to see who won. The whole pack was fighting to place, five horses jockeying for one position on the platform. They crossed the finish line in a furious cloud of dust, whipping the horses with madness and hatred.
I sat back complacent and waited for the scoreboard. After a few seconds, number eight, Violent Storm, was posted in the highest position as the winner.
“Wooooooooo,” roared through the crowd.
“Yeeeaaaahhhhh,” I screamed.
Number two, flashed in red lights in the place spot right beneath number eight. The Sky is the Limit did it. They were right and I knew it would be awhile before the final number was posted. Everyone was waiting, frozen faces and no more shouting. A few women were laughing and a man drinking next to me tore up his ticket and threw it up into the air. His face looked sick and I had to turn away. I ran up the steps looking for my friends. We came to Mexico with twenty thousand pesos and this bet could double that if all went well.
“Come on Madam Butterfly sweetie–come on number seven–come on Madam Butterfly, come on girl…,” Dave said.
“Why is it taking so long?” Juan asked.
Juan wiped the sweat from his face. He was red like a lobster, sun burnt so bad he was glistening, looking quickly back and forth between the screen and the heavens like a demented lunatic. He was praying and pinching his cheeks, lips moving; saying nothing. Something had to happen.
Number 7 flashed across the screen in the place spot.
“Goddamnit,” Dave said.
“Ayyyyaaaaayyyyy,” Juan said, “Noooooooooo…”
Juan sunk back to his seat in silence. Dave pounded his chest like a gorilla. Now we had no money for tequila, only a little beer and tacos and weed. No heroin, only sunshine and senoritas and promises of better trifectas. I decided to brighten the mood and break the silence. This sadness is madness and we should have planed this trip better.
“Same old story–mañana, mañana, mañana–but I would have went with Mary Jane’s Last Dance.“

The Jumper, Kingston Bridge

The flowers left by the spot
where he jumped have dried,
his memory unable to keep them
alive. The cards are dog-eared,
ribbons have begun to untie
themselves. I do not know him,
why he chose to jump. All I see
whenever I look down are swans
curling their wings as if carrying
something precious. And the river,
folding itself in the shape of a mouth;
waiting for answers to be given.

Fair Weather

From the kitchen I watch
the view turning into a scene
from a Wordsworth poem:
Serene sky, pearly clouds.
The chestnut tree outside
my block rocking in the breeze.
I prepare a bottle for my baby
son and carry on watching the scene.
A group of girls wait
at the bus stop across the road.
They cannot see me watching,
noticing the slow swell in their
bellies. Soon the vapour
will thicken, start to kick.
Their mouths will dribble rain
in their sleep one night
and the sound of erupting thunder
will echo across neighbourhoods.

Downpour

Clouds open
like music boxes
at night, filling
streets with the sound
of nostalgia.

Stray cats dash
under the protection
of parked cars; commuters
watch their newspaper
umbrellas collapse.

People watch
the downpour and think
of their childhood – times
when they stood outside
and tasted each drop

on their tongue, rolled
around in the newly formed
rivulets. Their adult
skin remembers those times,
weeps with the thought of loss.

From the flower’s mouth flows liquid whispers
murmuring mellifluous lullabies, mermaid-poured
into dreams of sailors lost at sea, floating
blue-hair entangled in Sargasso seaweed

combed by fimbriate, pink fingers undulating to the
rhythmic tide; sentient, delicate tendrils, quivering
star-glistened memories embraced by currents

swooning mute onto deaf shell auricles
static-scattered on the silent, ocean floor,
and secret music kept locked in a conch,

breathing damp against your ear;
white noise of a Siren’s voice,
cold, cryptic, and calling you to listen.

We lay down in bed
with our books
the night light on. Cricket opera
through an open window. I hear you chuckle
and lose my place, scowl –
so you unscrew your head
and use it as a bookmark –
your long, dark hair flops over
both covers. You take your hands
off. I reach over, turn
out your light. Jesus Christ!
I say
as I take your book
in both hands and try to slam
your smirking lips shut.

Everything you need know, you merely need remember.
Rodolfo Cortizar (1910 -2005)

I open a window in mid spring
and the morning hands me something:

men and women rushing for themselves so
they move horizontally. One cabbie
flips off another. Someone screams No! Crowds wait
at corners for green — somehow it always comes.

And red.

In this picture, a man is blurred –
turning away from her
it becomes difficult to tell who
fouled whom while a street vender
stares down into a stainless steel cart,
the red and black umbrella faded by endless months
in sun missing something. An unseen baby is caught
in mid wail around the corner
where every corner
is the future.

I stand here frozen too — in the picture
just before turning back
toward a room
where somewhere in the drawers
of a desk there is an x between yellowing envelopes
and a y between letters
on a dog-eared page of a book I haven’t read in years

and as I turn amidst a city’s groan
I listen
for the equal sign.

After Your Cremation

After your cremation the sky
lights like a kerosene lantern.
By that glare, Rick and I loot
your desk, finding scissors and paste,
tweezers, eye drops, toothbrush, pens
with ink in six colors. At last
the mother lode: a drawer full
of cream letterhead stationery
embossed with logo and address
of the company you founded
and ran in secret. Treeline,
you called it. Rick and I divide
the stationery, planning to run
the business in your absence
although we don’t know what products
or services you sold, or to whom.

The air tastes sooty and greasy.
A strong wind billow from the south.
Rick’s uneasy. He wants to box
everything in this dusty office
and sell it by the pound for scrap.
I turn and look into your eyes.
In your long black velvet coat
you seem as sturdy as a prism
of basalt. I hadn’t understood
that allowing your ashes to rise
up the chimney into the ether
would allow you to reconstitute.
As you smile your little viper smile
your shadow so intensifies
that Rick and I fall through the floor
and crash-land ten feet below.
When we peer through the hole you made
you’re laughing down from a height
much greater than we’d expect,
and you occlude the light the sky
had generated in your honor.

Mushrooms and Orchids

When I joke about your obsession
with mushrooms and orchids you gaze
with inhuman flicker candid
as a reptile’s. The Sunday light
refracted by your smile hurts
the churchgoing crowd you despise,
and like me they regard you
from the corners of their eyes as if
afraid some curse will apply.
Some claim you sleep under toadstools.
Some even whisper that the pink
of the lady slipper tempts you
to a devilish sort of excess.
Yet you’re harmless as the flora
you admire, excepting the toxic
amanita, the flesh of which
is tough and white as your thighs.

Where Derrida’s Buried

Why are we sighing over books
when a short walk away the sea
exhales a thousand shades of gray?
The cottage can’t hold us all.
One bedroom looks so haunted
with four-poster bed and quilt
indented by invisible corpse
that no one wants to enter it.

And the kitchen fumes with propane,
causing headaches, and the parlor
offers a shelf of best-sellers
from the Fifties, plus board games
missing half the playing pieces.

So why slouch around indoors
quoting Derrida at each other
when we could bend ourselves to the wind
and walk as far as the lighthouse,
scouring the tide-line for shells?

Tom, Jared, Kate, Nancy, George–
come on, someone walk with me.
Despite the resetting of clocks
to Standard Time and the wind-shift
to the east the air’s bright enough
to open your pores and fill you
with legends of shipwreck and drowning.

We all could use the exercise.
Remember that Derrida’s theories
killed him because he sat too long
over his brazen French grammar.

So let’s step out and brave the world–
and if the cloudy light should strike
the sea at just the right angle
we’ll see around the curve of the world
to France, where Derrida’s buried
in the rubble of Marx and Kant.

Seed Worms

Seed worms have become scarcer.
This autumn I’ve dug up so few
I fear the war can’t continue.

The seed worms are the males. Often
people expect the females
to carry the eggs, but because

they’re so highly explosive
the males tote them underground,
so deep that if they explode

by accident the earth whispers
rather than erupts. The worms
are parasitic. They penetrate

without pain, reside in the heart
where they sample the blood flow
and alter behavior. The crimes

they prevent by inducing stupor
go unrecorded. Only when war
breaks out do the worms perform

public service. The eggs become
the subtlest form of hand grenade.
Sprinkling them on the enemy

produces shocking results.
We no longer use artillery
or train recruits to fire rifles

but pepper worm eggs from above,
from helicopters. But the lack
of seed worms this season compels

hiatus to our favorite war.
Today we have to hunker down
at the polls and elect a new

and younger commander-in-chief.
A worm’s already in his heart,
already in all our hearts.

The blood-thirst of the worm becomes
our own hunger, and we live
and die by it. The dry weather

rustles like money, and the bones
of our exploded enemies
lie gloating wherever they fell.

Photo by Alexander Scott Mosel

Reanimating Lenin

First we unseal his mausoleum
and toss him in the back of a truck.
Packed in ice, he arrives in New York
safely. In a lab in New Hampshire
we apply electrodes and spark
his pickled heart. Lifting his dome,

we massage his brain. Spiders
have nested here but scamper away
in the blue fluorescent glare.
Lenin opens his eyes. They’re glass
but see us anyway, his spirit
returning in a long gray tide.

He coughs up a clot of Russian
and thanks us in brittle English.
Having conquered death he’s ready
to run for U.S. President.
Reborn here, he’s a citizen
and eligible. His huge forehead

intimidates all conservatives.
His love of violence impresses
liberals, transvestites, religious
of every persuasion. Stalking
on rigid and upright dogma
across the nation, he advocates

bulldozing all those institutions
that coddle inept intellects
and let women dress like men.
He advises selling our parks
and forests to private enterprise
and shooting bankers and realtors

in front of their cringing families.
On Election Day he pockets
a mandate to run the nation
as he pleases. But his structure
quickly decays. We can’t prevent
liquefaction although we pack

his pores with canning wax. He sighs
and implodes. We package the mess
in a freezer bag and declare
a week of national mourning.
The Smithsonian will preserve
his remains until a new era

requires a strong man and attempts
a fresh reanimation, perhaps
by pouring him into a mold.
We’re glad we tried, his expression
rumpled as ancient papyrus
and his glass gaze big as the sea’s.

Photo by Alexander Scott Mosel

Naked on the Common

Convicted of infamous libel
I’m forced to stand naked, shivering
on the Common where the east wind
fumbles in leafless English elms
and commuters clutch leather cases
as they elbow to the subway.

The cold seems more impossible
than the libel I published to prove
you conspired against the dignity
if not the life of the senator
who fathered your favorite child.
The poor creature sported antlers,

complicating birth, but surgery
resolved his headgear. The senator
paid the hospital bill and tipped
the surgeon with a new Mercedes.
The article I published claimed
that sex with the senator triggered

a fatal earthquake in China
and helped melt the Greenland icecap.
The senator couldn’t sue me,
his public persona too grim
to place before a jury. But you
with your weepy blonde cunning

demanded a criminal case,
regardless of established law.
A panel of judges sentenced me
to spend twenty-four hours naked
in the stocks. Dusk falls. No one
notices how blue I’ve become,

how eerie the early snowfall
looks in the blurring lamplight.
At last you stalk past grinning
like a brush fire. You testified
in court that I, not the senator,
fathered that pitiful child.

But no one did. You reproduced
through parthenogenesis,
finding no male ripe enough
to please you, and none brave enough
to get so close to the grimace
with which you wither the world.

Bobby’s mind is convoluted.
From dark corners, specters
chase monkeys. Black bananas
grow mold. Subconscious urges
embrace the dark foreboding things.
Rationality is a weak twin sister;
proud and pretentious, it lives in
the dirt. Ivory towers are made
of mud. Napoleon leads the
light brigade. Impotence is
a tacit king. Ah, but the sun
a shining while it’s starting
to snow. The snow delights
my hedonistic eyes. Look!
The snow is green.

A Nazi youth corps has broken through our lines and captured our flags, including the French flag and the German and Italian flags we had previously captured. We flee south with the remaining flags. In a previous episode Hitler had been trying to kill us personally but our elevator got stuck between floors, leaving him shouting hysterically just above us and pounding helplessly on the locked door. As we flee south we run into the young King Hussein moving north. He had previously been allied with the Nazis but is now allied with us. Farther south we meet up with Queen Farah. We promise her to look after the king and also to bring Condoleezza Rice in safely. Just as I say this she arrives and there is much relief. I continue south and am told by Ehud, my commanding officer, that I am being put in charge of Camp Qui Vive because my mom and dad will be staying there for the weekend. I am to relieve Gen. Darnell Worthington, the first black general in the U.S. Army. I arrive by jeep and spot him right away. He is to be my deputy now. I ask him to brief me. He starts talking very fast and I wonder if I should be writing everything down and even search my pockets for a pencil. I tell him that I am really not qualified to take charge of the camp. He puts me in the hands of Col. Babcock, his chief of staff. At this point I wake up, wondering immediately if I can use any of this material. It is as I am considering this that I decide to call the general Darnell Worthington, thinking of Denzel Washington, whom I saw in the news talking about the screen writers strike, though in the dream the general is white. There is no Col. Babcock in the dream. I put him there because Babcock strikes me as a nice name for a colonel and once I have the name I need the character. Because I have made up these names in the margin of the dream, so to speak, just as I wake, I consider them an integral part of the dream.

The dream is so vivid that I go downstairs to write it down. It is 5:30 a.m. As I am transcribing it I decide to call Hussein’s wife Farah, though I know that this is the name of the Shah’s wife. Or perhaps this was already her name in the dream. I can’t be sure anymore. In any case I am thinking of Farrah Fawcett. I call the camp Qui Vive after Jeb Stuart’s camp in winter ‘61. The elevator comes from my old building in the Bronx. I don’t know what Hussein is doing in the dream. He looks very young and has his familiar mustache, though slightly thinner than in later years, and is probably wearing his red checkered keffiyeh. Condoleezza Rice is in the area talking to Olmert and Abu Mazen. Ehud is Ehud Barak. The road south is the road from French Hill to Ramot in Jerusalem, which actually runs along an east-west axis. I call it south because this seems a more appropriate direction for a retreat.

Dreams are a wonderful mystery. I rarely analyze them. I prefer to record them and leave the mystery intact. The dream transpires in an imaginary dimension of the world that can only be entered in sleep. If you attempt to resurrect this world in a waking state it loses its magic. If you imagine yourself acting in such a resurrected world you find that you have passed into the realm of fantasy, which has its own attractions but, paradoxically, none of the reality of the dream, for a dream, like a hallucination, is real on its own terms while a fantasy is merely willed. In a dream the world is given, and though we inhabit it as constructs of our own minds we act in it as we might act in the real world. Of course, when we are in a dream world we do not know that we are dreaming and there is nothing about this world to suggest that it is not real until we are awake. Were we not to awaken we might dwell there permanently, albeit on somewhat different terms, under a different kind of harmony, and live a life no less satisfactory, and perhaps more interesting, than our own.

Within the dream world everything proceeds with a certain logic and our minds operate along familiar lines: we think and feel just as we often do in the waking state – we reflect, we have insights, we engage in introspection, we are aware of belonging to ourselves, and we believe that we are freely exercising our wills when we are in fact being borne along. In this last sense, and again paradoxically, the dream is very much like life. In the real world too we are borne along, not by the forces that actuate our dreams but by the forces that rule our lives, though many would say they are identical. Say then that life is like a dream, not in its transience but in the way in which we are locked into ourselves and compelled to be what we are. In life we are the prisoners of ourselves just as we are the prisoners of our dreams.

The illusion of freedom lies at the heart of the human experience. We live with it as comfortably as the blind live without light. It is our condition. We know no other and are not equipped to know another. Consciousness does not make fine distinctions. It embraces the whole and calls everything within its sphere the self. It is in a sense coterminous with the self, inseparable from the self, and yet not the self, just as a mirror image is not the thing it reflects. When the mind has a thought consciousness is conscious of it and simultaneously throws it back on the mind as a datum of consciousness. Consciousness and the data of consciousness are coterminous too, so that when the mind conspires with itself to create an illusion, consciousness is deceived as well. The mind works behind a veil. It throws out thoughts from a dark place that come back to it in the purest light. If an image is tarnished it averts its eyes.

The mind protects us from ourselves. It stands guard over us in our waking hours just as it does in our sleep. It will not let us perceive ourselves as we are. It hides us from ourselves so well that we think that what we are is what we see. When we are moved to think a thought, want an orange or a woman, or perform for company we think we are free, for these urges, and even counterurges, are experienced as unmediated expressions of a will. In fact they only express habits of thought and social reflexes, all the unseen connections of the unconscious mind, and the imperatives of our nature. The will is the loudest voice. It reflects the balance of things behind the veil.

In the dream we slip behind the veil. Here too the world is given, but in the dream the world is my representation and as I enter it I am drawn further and further into myself. This is the final frontier. At each turn in the road a world vaster than all the universe opens itself to me. I am there. I think. I feel. Do I dare to step across the line and lose myself in the country of the dream? Do I dare to be free?

The road to Ramot, mirrored in my dream, is the road to such a country. What was going on there? Who were these people? What was this world of unexplored possibilities, opening doors I’d never imagined? And a war being fought and the enemy approaching and Denzel and Babcock and myself sorting out the chain of command and Queen Farah perhaps inviting me to tea and nothing holding true anymore. I see the camp now. It is full of activity, vehicles and men in constant motion. It must be winter because the ground is muddy. What will I find there? What lies beyond? It feels a little like my life.

I’m ready to synchronize
entire orchestras of starfish wanting
to blend waves of animal mortality
with crystalline victory’s consigned
ardor.

These lived elusive times,
our spans derived depths of brine,
tear lakes together in puddles,
so magnificent as their aquatic flowers blooming
beneath.

Only so many meteors might fall
until the ocean belches
more that it whispers
when waved winds acquire
depth.

Chance’s coach reigns white horses,
shape-shifters, meant to tweak convention,
to distress the requiem
of shadowy literary forms
forever.

                          for Henry R. Schepp (1908-2001)

If you had been beside me, sleepless
or chilled by the sudden violence
of the winds, maybe you’d have walked
here with me, or come after
to see what kept me standing in the night–
you’d see nothing. Only, what
dissolves: dark to dawn, shore to wave,
wings to fog, branch to light:
the vague design that doesn’t come
from me, yet holds me
to it, just as you might, another time.

David St. John, from “Until the Sea is Dead”

                          1

Strike a match, the century is almost over. The dead
     sit up in their chairs; willows fan out to listen.
Rocking chairs creak: a long awaited sigh
     moves across the porches of the world.
People are ready for travel: empty seats wait
     for everyone at J.F.K. International. . .

I worked three jobs and still had no money:
there is no time or place
for love. I stood staring for hours
at death: heads of corpses, wheelbarrows of ash
nodding toward the waiting Earth.
My grandchildren sleep inside of me.
I will never forget my Mother’s
sense of humor. I will never
forget anything.

You were stoned and beaten
     in New York’s Lower East Side,
a young Jewish immigrant
     only eight years old. 
You walked home, wiped away the blood
     and sat down to read with your brothers,
who shared with you
     the truth of the written word . . .

I loved her brown eyes and dark Irish hair. Sometimes
at night
I swear I could see the moon
rise in her skin. We met
because I was selling shoes
in Akron, Ohio, and she loved shoes.
I could count on her coming to the store
at least once a week. I swear, the first time I saw her
my heart was lost forever.
Anyway, she must have had an eye for me, too,
for she invited me to play bridge
one Saturday night with another couple. Would you believe
that both this couple and she
didn’t know a thing about bridge?
So I spent the rest of the night teaching them
to play bridge, and I fell in love.
My oldest brother, Red, told me years later
that he knew we would get married
the day he found us
on opposite sides of the living room
sitting on davenports, each of lost in a book.

The air around us is heavy
     and sweet,
like a fine mist of oil, and smells
      like a kettle
of soup left on the stove

since early morning. Church bells
     rinse the trunks
and branches of the sycamores:
     a congregation of leaves

left on the ground.
     The presence of God
is everywhere, like the unseen
     language of a dream: people

cut roses and pick
     tomatoes: a young couple washes
a dog in a baby pool. A black widow
     is busy at work on its web

which blooms between the gutters
    of a two-story colonial
and a young red maple. Every natural
     occurrence

is a state of mind: the sky’s ability
     to sing throbbing down
through the branches
     and out from the lips

                         2

You are late, strike a match,
     the century is almost over. Newborn children
stop crying on cue: even the guns
     are quiet, the air around them moving
through the leaves
     like hands sifting through grain.

You unloaded boxcars of watermelons
     in Akron, Ohio, sometimes earning a dollar a day
and sometimes soup and bread.
     You never complained: you dressed in rags . . .
The century watched as you turned sixteen
     and stepped on a train bound for Chicago, Illinois,
unloaded a shipload of Canadian whiskey
     and a stranger handed you a hundred-dollar bill.
In America, he told you, no one can touch you
     if you have money.

Imagine the looks on our faces
when the drill sergeant told us to grab a bridle
and go get ourselves a horse.
Most of us were from the city
and had never ridden a horse. A few of the braver men
ventured over the fence and started chasing horses.
Most guys ended up with a mouth full of dust
and a lot of laughter in their ears. Before long, however,
most of us were out there too, chasing horses around.
We were a sight to see.
Did you know we were the last
of the cavalry? After us,
the army phased us out for good.

What the hell. Everything ends sometime.
I suppose it’s like that when we pass away.
We are each given a bridle and told to go out
and pick a horse. Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter:
riding horses is hard work.

The light appears to bounce off the rooftops
and the blue jays begin to dart and screech

as the sun rises and burns
away the stars. I think

I can see her watering carnations
beside the house, her feet

covered by a puddle of grass,
her legs set off by a backdrop

of marigolds. Across the ocean,
in Africa, I board a plane with orders

for the allies to invade Sicily.
Never again would I feel myself

to be such a part of the breadth
of the world, never again would the memory

of that light bring so much:
this small town with robins and marigolds,

her words in my pocket a game of chance
only time would unfold.

                          3

Strike a match, the century is almost over.
     The gray whales
from Alaska to California
     change their songs — everyone begins to drink
black coffee and read Chaucer, forgive
     each other’s sins, and ride bareback to mountain cabins
without running water.

The ships that left the United States on their way
to North Africa
were packed with soldiers.
The worst place to be was below deck, sometimes up to five
decks below the surface. Down there,
you could count on getting killed
if the ship was hit by a German submarine. I can remember
placing my hand on the metal, the ship’s side:
you could feel the water rushing by, the sheet metal here
less than an inch thick. I will never forget that.
It scared the hell out of all of us.
We spent most of our time
gambling: huge crap games that went
into the thousands of dollars. The winners
would run immediately to the chaplain
and give him their money
in case they were killed.

                          4

We come here, ship after ship,
die on these shores, and still

we are left without answers.
Why do we pray?

We ask, again and again,
if we find ourselves dead

on this hill, beneath these stars,
how long will we sleep?

                          *

You will sleep beneath a black moon:
I will take you in my arms and breathe

into your eyes. You must believe
there is a rhythm, a sequence

you must follow: your home
the horizon

which is never far: your body
a little puddle filled

with sky.

                          5

I believe in asking questions.
A person who doesn’t think about the world
is going to end up in trouble.
It has always been this way.
Is the world a frightening place to you?
I remember
it was to me, when I was your age.
I’m old now. I’ve outlived everybody.
I remember when I was a drill sergeant
in charge of the firing range
a young soldier ran up to me
and stuck the barrel of his rifle
right in my face. I grabbed it, moved it out of the way,

and it fired, shattering the drum of my left ear.
I was so god damned mad
I nearly killed him. What the hell.
That was a long time ago.
I can hear all right. I like to sit here
and look out my window,
wonder why everyone is in such a hurry.
I can’t complain. I have everything I need.

Believe it, burn a candle — sing — the century
     is almost over.
The painters have cleaned their brushes;
     the guitars are in tune. Now, it is time
for dancing, for anything
     we haven’t done before,
                                                  for everything we’ll do again.

                                 for Ana Rina

Time was once a fluttering bird
inside your body, a flicker
that sends the love in your eyes
the unwritten commands that make
you a mother.
                             They sleep
apart from you now, in beds
warm with their own little
lights.
             When they dream
you can sense them in your own
guarded sleep, for your love
has built invisible threads of starlight
which the angels use to safely guide
every wish you hold for them

to their waiting souls.

Tonight you will shave
and get ready for your death.

Trouble with you,
you were always afraid of dying,
always afraid to let go.

Remember, the dance floors
are vast in paradise.

The first time you heard the word
you could feel its reality
slipping away,
like the first time you heard the word
infinity
and suddenly everything
became uniquely finite.

A shame to be spoiled by words,
to let words be spoiled by shame.

Death is a nursery story.
There is a lesson at the end.

Lift your shaking arm and shave.

                         for Joe Bastow

My soul cries out for every undiscovered dog
who still crawls toward birth
in the sexual water
in which we swim, breathe, dream.

Kay Nina (b. 1939) Soul Dog Soul Fish

                          1.

Dogfish in the shade of the stream,
tails and scales: here
in this dream of water,
water ladled under the body
like a puddle of memory
we swim through to return
to our lives.

But we are afraid to return
to this swamp of graves.

We are afraid to remember
the crawling dog-spirit
at rest with its nose
on the edge of the sea
after eons of gill-song.

How easy it must be
to feed the dog, feed the fish,
move your hand over the water
or drop your donation
in the basket.

You can nibble and bark,
tow the line guard the house:

Hallelujah brother dogfish!

                          2.

Dogfish has his mind on simpler things
this evening, enough
of all the lawn mowers
and sprinklers, he thinks,
this suburb needs a paint job.

It’s time to go caving.

Look at dogfish!!
He’s in the caves, brother!!
Dogfish is in the caves!!

Neolithic drawings of fat
wounded animals graze
through his hungry mind,
and Jesus bides his time
next to a fire only heaven
can put out. Dogfish thinks,

Brother, this fire is too warm.
I need to get wet
and chew bones.

Still hungry, Dogfish jumps
in his ‘63 MG convertible
only to catch Jesus and Santa Claus
in the rear-view mirror
directing a chorus of tight-lipped
sea monkeys through the gospel
Take a Lap around Mt. Sinai.

And just when you think
this crazy gill brother’s done it all,
Dogfish goes back home
with his tail between his fins

and has a beer and a smoke.

                          3.

He’s trying to sort it all out:
charcoal grill, baseball, Buddhism.

The Olympics come and go
and Dogfish loves the synchronized
swimming — underwater breath
barks. What intrigues him

is the image of Buddha
at the bottom of his favorite
aquarium, head bobbing open
and closed,
letting out air. Dogfish thinks,

Buddha should have a gold medal.
He’s been down there longer
than anybody I know.

He leans over the aquarium
and hears each bubble-bark
as it pops: yah-blup, yah-blup.

There is an unmistakable
gill glory on this muzzle
as he barks this song
he knows too well:

scales on the doghouse wall.

The language the day summons
steps inside us

and unfastens the curtains of memory
where everything lies down

in the grass and finds the sky
refracted and human:

pictures we see
more than clouds,

lives we inhabit
more than atmosphere

where reflected sunlight
from a nearby star

holds us down,
the weight of lingering grief

alive
in the jet stream,

words on the lips
of the dying

like unsheltered open wells

The way you stand, curved
in the doorway

enters me like the still
light of a pond

at rest in my mind:
you ripple through

the room, the pebbles
I toss from my eyes

to set your image in motion
have lost their origin,

and move over the landscape
of your country

to the shore,
where the waves bend the light

in your eyes to a whisper
only beauty can hear. Darkness

follows, now moonlight
the canvas your words bring

to life: dewdrops from a star
you drop not by note

in this poem.

We decided to meet under the stand of durian trees

someplace dangerous
where falling fruit can kill – but everywhere in me is
sturm und drang in full gallop
racing through full moon’s albino night.
Getting to fruit
is treacherous – you say
it takes treachery to know it

so I steal under palm fronds, lean against
a tree, the darkened Sulu Sea
chanting at my back – its waves rush and retreat
under this hulking sky. Stars gloat -
Clouds bloated with whimsy. I hear fruit drop
as if monkeys are beheading themselves from above.
Your shape slithers between trunks toward me
snakes for hair, eyes afire -

a staccato accent whispers:
every three minute, volcano somewhere erupt
Cicadas hush. Breeze inhales. Arms wreathe. I say:
I’ll stand up next to a mountain
chop it down with the edge of my hand. You sink
a stiletto heel into porous bark at my waist, prop
yourself against me all breath
as nocturnal birds screech Malaysian Stravinsky.

As our noses touch,
strange shapes swirl in your eyes – a double helix strip.
Our mouths gorge. I try to utter Ya but you pull back,
lick your lips:
Never talk with your mouth full.

He sets his book down,
and now the window is his open territory.

There is the church, the trees, the cars
moving by: he can see the things

that matter little to him now.

The light on his face
gives him an ageless appearance:

he has been alive in each decade
of this century, and looking back,

he says, is like looking into the shapes
and forms of himself

he can now hardly recognize.

As he talks, his hand sometimes
caresses the top of his head,

smoothing out the hair that remains,
and sometimes he closes his eyes

and tilts his head back,
the memories rushing in so strongly

there are no words left
to bear them, no words

to frame them, and it is here
that we embrace and part –

I am left with the image
of light on his face,

his closed eyes heavy
with the years inside them.

I am a certain failure,
unable to write the next word

or stop my life from turning
into a tumbler of fear.

The cops wait for me
in the driveway, the phone

is tapped — I might as well
flip on a turban

and stretch my thoughts
back through the centuries,

where only the symphony moves
forward, somehow reaching

for God: I have seen one hundred
ways to die and chosen none –

the bourbon on my lips
looking for your kiss

that remains an elusive memory –
sunk in living room pet dander

and stale air.

We are the Other Mothers-
The ones for whom this role
does not slide
like putty-soft gloves stitched
onto our warm and open hands.

We wince
when a broom falls
a couch slides

Wince
at the moments that pelt us
the screams bangs shouts

We are the ones who can’t see
the brevity of the storm-
only wince blurrily as we
hunker down
and wait for it to all be over.

We are not the
family portrait people, not the
Christmas letter writers.

We are the ones trying to
notice that when the light hits us all
just right
we look beautiful
together.

The Smallest Detail Gives Rise to Insight and Nourishment

     There are people who can turn a system upside down. They are artists really, working on the palette of the American landscape.

     The concept of a free refill at a fast food joint comes to my mind. Here is how it works. The establishment offers a free refill. Only some people take them up on it. The rest are timid and lame for not even taking this simple freedom as their own. However, out on the fringes of fast food artistry, there are consumer artists who take it to a whole new level. They return weeks later with the same cup, and simply request what is theirs: A free refill, only delayed. Possibly months have passed: a new war has started, people have died, a new cancer has begun to fester and then be cured.

    The poet works with the same delayed refill as a starting point. Life is lived and then memory begins to work its games with the mind. The poet, when filling the palette, is essentially asking for a refill of experience. Emotion refilled in tranquility. Take it now, they say. No, the poet says, I will be back in few months. I need to walk my dog. Welcome a new child into the world. Stare at a cloud. Catch a fish. Later, when it is time to ask for the refill, the words are charged with the flavors of time itself.

Antiquity as Birthright Juxtaposed by Experience

     . . . And there is whale song in your ears. Unlikely as it may seem, we should study their songs and learn not to take from them but give in to this music, add meaningful notes, and discover how to think of language as something beyond the cerebral, the communicative, the citation on experience. The ancient act of symbol, movement of stars and the act of creation, even procreation, speak beyond the limits of perception. Language can be the spleen of experience, our minds sifting through the images we take and create, antiquity itself juxtaposed with our present lives in this constant interchange. Think, antiquity my lineage, my beauty, my poem, and the spleen begins to filter: I give you the color blue, and you give me 

the curved outline of earth adjusted with prayer; 

I give you my anxious heartbeat, and you give me 

my father’s eyes lit by green leaves and sawdust; 

I give you cold whale song, and you give me

a wee word in the tide of baptismal water, the ocean, birth.

     We were born for exploitation and exchange, born to art, wed to creation. A sacrament of touching pen to paper is not a taking but simply beingness, synthesis, song.  

Glowing with Thought Itself: Linguistic Neurons

     They are tired. The day was meaningless, full of thoughtless transactions, stolen newspapers and wasted smiles. The police were called and people were taken away. Coffee was consumed in quiet corners.

     November. A perfect day. Staring at the swollen sky, the poets dreamt of stoplights in space. It was time to hope for one and to believe with reverent abandon.  Intelligence in a vacuum. Everything depended on the ability of a thought inside the skull to exist at the same time as a beam of light in another galaxy from another sun, in a future so distant even the breath our children, passed through unborn lips to unborn lips, may not reach. Probably should not. Really, should not.

     Well, it must reach this infinite place and then go on past the infinite to come back to us again as light and touch this coneflower in the poet’s hands. Imagine a true appreciation so great that a petal is suddenly glowing not with sunlight, but with thought itself: linguistic neurons.  

     Well, here you are, if you are there. They, the ones who go here, just came back. Now go write down what they say. A perfect day. The way. . .

Black dog on back porch is whistling again. It’s nothing
the human ear hears, but I can tell he’s doing it
by the way his jaw drops, his panting ceases
and the tongue slaps drool from lower lip to nose.

The animal isn’t calling out
to a neighboring beast in heat,
nor is he regurgitating scraps of a melancholy tune – he’s synchronizing again
with some distant, impossible nebulae as a dog-beacon
for those who have just met their end
and can’t find the window to the Great Passing Through.

Not again, dog. I bark at it to stop. Not again.

What happened to Angels’ harps, violins, violas?
Where is the Great Bright Light or the tunnel’s gabling end?

For this, I’ve considered giving black dog away,
yet his slobber drowns carpenter ants, and his eyes
remind me of what’s loveable about flexibility.
Instead I wipe sweat from my glass and, gulping,
prayerfully beg the canine to cease. It cannot.
Why doesn’t Jupiter place vibrant-colored slides
in front of itself to guide the newly dead?

- green for go
on that way
- yellow for wait
for further instructions
- red for stop
return,

yet there is nothing but this fool dog agape,
whistling, licking at air
and anxious traffic passing out on the boulevard.

There is no conversation
one may hold with death. I want to say something
but the ice cubes have melted with me
and the telephone is inside.

Damn summer afternoon.
Asshole Jupiter. Fucking dog.

He stops then smiles before glaring at me sardonically,
promising he’ll pause if I simply let him off

the leash.

Not Again, Dog, Not Again

Language is the Midwife of the Unknown

Poets are  in constant artistic motion, moving backward in time to go forward with words. The poet is a crustacean, a crab in heat, and is equally comfortable on both land and sea. We all need to become crabs. If you cannot accomplish this, just go catch some crabs, nurture them, and you will feel better. If you are not willing, or able, to go there, here are some guidelines to ponder when you consider crabs and poetry:

1. Consider the integrity and movement of the line.

Lines of poetry can and should be able to stand alone and hold intrinsic meaning. Certainly some lines are better than others, but it’s the same with crabs, so what the hell. For example, if you look at “Insinuating Revival,”  written by Joe Bastow, you come across this line:  ”the chimney — you want me.”  A good line of poetry moves a poem and carries some rhythmical pattern forward for both reader and writer.

A great line of poetry, like this one, stands alone, and creates intrinsic meaning of its own nature. First, you have the obvious phallic nature of the chimney, combined with the sexual overtones of “blowing smoke up” from the preceding line. However, this is then combined with a classic second movement–similar to the movements of a classical piece–”you want me,” and combined with the chimney, creates a line that resonates long after leaving it behind, especially for the patient and careful reader.

 2.  Use language that re-mythologizes the everyday world. 

As previously noted in the post in “Myth and the Poetry of Creation,”  good poetry hits the world head on and creates a new mythology of experience.  A dog barking annoyingly in the distance can become something much more significant to the eye and language of the poet. In this way, all of experience is open to this re-mythologizing of the world. It is important to note that the poet is not engaged in the act of recognition and framing of the world–no, far from it. The poet, here, is engaged in actually creating a new segment of the universe. The willingness to go to this place, experience it somehow in a mindful way and then return with a means to communicate a new truth is the life-work of the artist.

3. Remain infatuated with the tangible and in love with the unknown.

The poet begins with the objects of the world. Some call it the palette, the medium. The world grabs us by the tail, to borrow slightly from Yevtushenko, and infatuation nestles in to do its work.  A lot of good poetry is written at this interchange–object, infatuation, language–and there will be more incredible poetry written at this level. However, there are those who are willing to take the great leap–most do it without knowledge of it–into the unknown, into love itself:  “For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal”  (2 Corinthians 4:17-8). The act of creation is an act of love, and to create something that lasts, something eternal–something which outlives the creator–this is the real poetry. Poetry that returns to the eternals to make sense of modern living is essential right now. Infatuations are exciting, but ultimately puerile in nature. Think high school romance, and you are there.

We have had enough of this drivel in poetry lately. The unknown, the unseen, what we crave–the poet must fall in love with this other, this mystery, and be willing to fall in love with that part of the self where the unknown intrinsically lives, and waits, for language to breathe life into it. Language is the birth-mother of the unknown.

The Viridian Glow of Foliage and Sky

A flummoxed Dr. Quigley
crawls inside a smell.

Vanilla, he believes,
is a good place to begin,

the long dark bean
reminds him of the trails

he walked when young,
cool and dark

beneath the viridian
glow of foliage and sky.

He believes he can find God
if he can cross the rivers

inside his mind:
there are answers

there, he knows,
and crawdaddies

in the slow water
near the sandbanks.

If you could see him there,
he just scratched

his head, his finger
just a centimeter away

from the water
that covers his brain:

questions left
unanswered

and a smell
he cannot name.

A Forehead Made for God

There’s rhapsody 

in a left eye
glancing Shakespeare’s heaven
where nothing will come of nothing

and rhythm
in chords of discord
lining crumpled paper-bag eyes,
cheeks – a forehead made for God.

Though his ears are blurred, it’s obvious
families of sparrows nested there
chirping nightly
psalms and daily halleluiahs.

The real music is on
his lower lip: violins and oboes
temper the blasting brass
behind gnashed teeth

determined of victory. In the end,
though, it’s the cheekbones’
insisting flesh thinning
to another vacant skeleton -

one whose peppered hair and beard
will soon outgrow the decaying face
of a nation’s propriety -
where hymns exult what’s born in blood.

Whimpy Had It Right

Dr. Quigley moved away
from hamburgers.

Lately, he decided to eat
Indian food:

Korma, Vandalu, and Naan
have a way of lifting the soul

of a man and then some:
warmth enters the room

to illuminate figures
dancing together near the kitchen

window: their bodies
painted blue, almost a ripe

nudity, eyes swollen
with faith

toes pressed
with blood,

but Neruda
baking Odes

and Rilke
sifting angel dust

caught his attention
in the end,

a translucent layer just enough
to spell heaven

with his finger,
or at least a place

where he could believe
in the eschatology of things:

he had never had a view
of the universe

that was entirely satisfying.

No Thump in the Book for Him

He is tired of letting it all
get away from him.

He stares at his book on the shelf,
admires something in his hand,

and he lets go:
if you were a fly on the wall

you would not see the warts
on the backs of his hands,

but Dr. Quiqley believes in them,
he knows what they mean.

He is concerned about the world,
and he is tired of writing books

no one reads, not even his mother.
He walks the streets,

and the women he sees
are all beautiful to him:

if they only knew, he thinks,
I love even the fat ones

with varicose veins! I love them!
The Golden Rule is no thump

in the book for Dr. Quigley,
he is concerned about people.

When he looks in the mirror,
he sees decay,

after all, he studied it; he knows
his eyes are eggshells

stamped with cracked
scroll dust, thin lines leading

to the place where Adam lay
down on the ground,

his bloody rib
ready

for Eve

Here Is What You See Into

     Unlike any other view from your house, here is where you see into and beyond everything you’ve done,will do or have dreamed and let fall. This is the room that, in all certainty, finally stands you. It stands you at your most purposeful – flush with a potential meal or fully engaged in the digestion of one. Here water runs through your fingers as you gaze hypnotically out beyond, noticing idiosyncrasies of a season, sometimes your own, noticing your day and its potential, its successes, its failures. Here you are allowed to have the whole of your life fully at your back – all you’ve built, all you’ve denied, all you dream, all you concede. Staring out your kitchen window suddenly, you are nomadic, wild, undomesticated – if even for an instant – and the miraculous possibility of a morning, an afternoon, an evening fully wash over you. Standing here, things come clean and soap suds acknowledge your transportation – into a life you’ve chosen, and continue to choose. To be continued…

You Know the Line She Rides

She’s started showing up again
after all this time – started bumping into you
in places you used to frequent together: public
libraries, seedy second-hand stores,
questionable bars. Always looks surprised,
too, after a long hug and crooked smile.
Says the two of you should reconnect -
catch up, swap stories.

She’s dating one of your buddy’s coworkers

- has been for awhile – and she knows you’re on
the lamb from a series
of bad breaks, tough runs,
long droughts. But that’s Grace. She always loved
you most when you were up against it -
gave her more leverage – more control
far as you could see.

But this time you’re convinced you’re stronger.
You see things as less fuck
more fuck you. You know the line she rides
and can drive yourself alone – no question.
But then again, maybe you’ll meet her
one Friday after work. Load her up
on whiskey shots, escort her to her place
and meet the will of God face to face.

The Spaces Inside Your Brain

A dangerous thing, poetry–
the occasional timeout

is proof, just listen:
you can hear the bad ones

mumbling softly, rebelliously–
I will not say bone, I will not say stone,

Until the mother-poet comes to let them out.
She always takes what she will:

misplaced syllable here, alveolar click there–
like death, she waits,

disguised as the young mother,
bringing even the old to the breast

to taste their own demise.
Look for her, at times, in the spaces

the squirrels leave inside your brain
after nesting;

yes, the soft hole is what they want,
for outside it is raining again,

and down below, well,
there are rivers to travel

with just the right orchestral feeling
to make it all seem so swell.

Have you remembered
to click for her?

The squirrels will love you for it,
and when you feel them staring

at the barely visible zipper
around your neckline,

remember to sing a carol or two
and drink a glass of wine,

remember not to touch it,
even though you need to–

so desperate is your desire–
remember not to say it,

for above you they are waiting,
they are listening closely

for any sign of weakness:
what matters

is not what goes in,
but what comes out.

Lit Candles Whisper You Into Trance

Angels plug in Christmas
tree lights across the street. Baby Jesus is
a cardboard cut-out in Mary’s arms
suction cupped on your front
door. Inside, carolers bleat

predictable standards from cheap speakers
next to the fireplace and
you kneel, blowing cigarette smoke up
the chimney – you want me
to stare into your wine-glassed eyes
and speak in tongues

over the blizzard nostalgia
piles on your porch. They’ve already closed
all the schools – which one
are you from? Repentance
is in season as lit candles whisper
you into trance.

There’s no trusting all this light
as you begin to undress – I’ve seen your copperheads
twisting tails around your arms before.
I steal a candy cane from your tree
instead: it’s the only fruit here
that grows.

I  will remember the stars in your smile and the moon who circled your laughter

Remember me when I was here, loving you so much that we both knew we had something special

I will remember the notes I heard in your words every time you picked up the phone and heard my voice

Remember all the fun we had, the crazy things we did, said and thought

I will remember we could do no wrong-even the trees would bow to see us together

Remember how we both struggled to be “left-handed,” with all of our right brains so fully engaged

I will remember on the left side of time I will always find the right side of your soul

Remember how summer began with “Let it be so,” and so it began, and how we loved it

I will remember how a simple day of water and sun could last as long as your words in my heart

Remember my opinionated kindness with a side portion of  “festering wound”

I  will remember how time changed you into a work of art on a canvas made of pure spirit

Remember that angels do exist and they came in the form of two little boys

I will remember the sun rose with your heart that day and chased the dark away forever

Remember that I am always with you and only a flick away

I will remember your words in my heart are written with the ink of love

Remember me when I walked, danced, ran, clucked and loved upon this Earth

I will remember how you always changed God into a verb and never kept this secret to yourself

 Lines of Italics by J. Scott Mosel

An Appetite for Beauty

All the neighborhood hounds
begin to howl. I swear

I was about to tell you
what happens when we see

beauty, but the notes
seemed to tame me

as I went along
framed by things.

I could stop here,
but this poem

is a dog. Lift you hand.
He won’t bite, but you may

find yourself
lifting your leg and stepping

into the canvas.

Now we are getting somewhere.
There are two squash

on the windowsill, and three leaves
falling above them

tickled by light. It’s true,
too perfect

to be real: this poem is a dog.

Someone actually says,
It’s amazing what can happen

with a brush stroke
and an appetite for beauty.

You become curious, desperate,
and step forward for a better look.

There, out in the courtyard,
below the window in this painting

of squash in sunlight,
a dog walks an obedient old man

from puddle to shadow
after a rain. The air is fresh

and cool. Steam rises
from the asphalt.

It would be nice
to call this beauty,

but the dog and the man
have disappeared,

and you’re alone
with your squash.

He Built It Himself, with His Pen

     I am not talking about Joseph Bastow, the man who now lives in a house made of stone somewhere in Michigan and frequently writes for this site. I am talking about the Writer (Actually the Poet, but that is the subject of another story), who was born in the house that you see here.

     Unlike human beings, Joe had a mother who was made of the most intensely beautiful ink, and a father who was made of languge not of this earth. Shortly after their wedding, which took place on a blank page in Heaven, they bought this house. Soon, little baby Joe was born. His mother nursed him with the alphabet. They were very happy. It is a sweet house, no stones or bones, and there are lots of beautiful activities that occur inside.  Come on, don’t be shy. Let’s take a peek.

     If you look through one of the front-door windows, you will see Joe as he sits near the fireplace. He strokes his beard, stares at the flames, waits for the magic to come back to his pen. Occasionally he walks around and runs his hand along the wall, and then he scratches his nose and beard. When he does so, he catches the faint smell of graham cracker and candy cherries on his fingers. He smiles and sits down again, for the smell, you see, has begun to help him to write once more. He touches the pen to the paper, and he writes for an hour or so, but to him it is complete rubbish. He wants to find that voice again. It is a voice he knows well, but he is reluctant to give in to it, almost as if he is tied to a leash of his own creation.

     Even for a truly ascetic monk, sometimes it is difficult to have faith, and it is no different for Joe. As he questions his faith and all of its multitudinous structures and formalities, he becomes one of the most religious people I know, especially when he writes. So after abandoning the voice for long enough, he returns to the objects of his faith and finds the neighborhood around him dripping with the sweet ink of the voice:

Angels plug in Christmas
tree lights across the street. Baby Jesus is
a cardboard cut-out in Mary’s arms
suction cupped on your front
door. Inside, carolers bleat . . .

There, in the language of object juxtaposed with veneration, he finds reason to praise. Maybe he has not recognized it himself, but in finding the voice at all, he elevates us, and gives us, the most fleeting of all, reason to praise.

     Reason to praise. Maybe this is why I have frequently called him a religious man. Outward appearance, here, means nothing. Only in the infinite spaces inside the unseen, where the eternals wait to be called forth, does the writer find himself and, simultaneously, elevates the spirit of humanity. Joe does this in a house made of his own faith. He built it himself, with his pen. 

     Some people never begin.  

 Note:  the most fleeting of all is a reference to poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

I Think I Mean It This Time, Stars

Once I finally arrived, I nodded

to the Doug Firs – hello, hello, hello -
descended to the dock, dropped a cooler
and a fishing pole next to the seat cushion
and shoved off. The high half moon meant it was late,
but I needed to be in the middle of something
without moving lips, without expensive shoes, without hands
always reaching to shaft, shake or take.

I rowed for a while and the yellow highway lines
disappeared beneath lily pads. All the cosmopolitan humans
starved for nakedness and assimilation swirled under
whirlpools oars made. Even your latest fuck you!
broke over the bow as a small-mouth bass jumped in the distance.

Have your city windowed in muslin draperies.
Have your big-dollar tabs and high-browed intimacies.

Here, singing bullfrogs
make more love and money between passing clouds
than your old-time decorative storefronts ever will.

So, I’m alone with two oars and a fishing pole -
some beer and night
not needing to be coaxed
from her clothes. Alone in a boat that floats over
what’s real and wet and alarmingly close
to what I’ve always wanted to get away from: you, so
small-town big dream, so awkward, unrefined,
disinterested and
apologetic. But now, under this sky, I think I really can
learn to love from where I’ve come. I think
I mean it

this time, stars. No shit.

Thinking Red, Wanting Blue, Knowing Black

where a stern voice from behind
the tall-backed leather chair

orders me Stop. I do. What color
is the sky? he inquires. I pause

thinking red, wanting blue, knowing black
and stab odiferous? Ha!

He grunts and swivels
around in his chair

with a jerk, glancing me above
spectacles before scrawling in a rectangular pad.

He says nothing, hands me a prescription,
swirls back in a swoosh

toward the window flush
with green leaves.

Good day, sir, he announces. I turn.
Walk out and read in his cryptic scrawl

Scent is the color of jazz. Which is the instrument
of your chosen sky?

What Does Salvation Cost?

Carefully, like giving a balloon
to a child. You can tell them

all you want: hold on tightly,
don’t let go,

but the result
is the same: someone on the way

to heaven, someone lost
in the clouds,

someone barely visible,
a dot now

in memory, someone gone.

What does salvation cost,
he thinks to himself,

how long does it take
to rise?

There are deep craters
in the eyes of some patients.

Places you do not want to go.

Call out the darkness,
he remembers, give it color.

Close your eyes tight
watch the blood swirl

out of the iris and form
a kaleidoscope of cells

in your mind. Give it a name.
Name it the last thing you remember

as true. Call this
the color of the sky.

An Aesthetic Invitation

Imagine nothing belongs in the house but white daisies
catching the autumn light
on the dining room table:
This is the reason
we are in love, she says,
as she walks over to her favorite painting:
an aesthetic invitation
to go sailing
and have lunch near the water.

Imagine there is more here than art
taking shape from her desire:
there is a room full of birds
flying in circles
near the ceiling, a forest
where the echoes of a chain saw splinter
the kitchen’s perfunctory order.

Imagine she closes the door and draws water
for her evening bath. Her husband
goes out and returns
with cold milk, white eggs:
she thanks him, they kiss–
they watch their son read
about a train chugging up a mountain
loaded with fruit and bread.

Imagine, outside, their daughter builds
mud pies and talks to dogs and toads.

Imagine that soon, only moonlight
will find them,
only darkness will know
their names.

While the Poem Waits

Notes of the mundane
chime in my brain
while the poem waits.

Hope is the last pick-up line
I have, dawn’s drum.

I can hear it in the house,
Salvador’s rain tapping
the rooftops of old stanzas.

Books line the shelves
unopened, little heart beats
without ears.

They won’t listen.

They have already been
where the rain is going,
and I don’t know
how to stop it.

I Want What Everybody Wants

Porch. Chair. July -
late afternoon.

Stillborn
flag. Neighbor’s pole. Clouds
gathering.

I want what everybody wants -
a drink. Fireworks. Some sex. Instead
it’s stars
and stripes forever

fucked. Mother and child
bike helmeted by
a strong belief
inevitable peril.

Trees sag. Cars pass out
on the relentless boulevard. A small town dreams
of its dead. Ice cream melts
onto the hand of surprised child
who will grow to be shocked.

The author of this is laughing somewhere
behind the sun
handing out flyers
for re-election

reminding his angels
that all employees must wash hands.

Our Need to Be Here

They move in shadows
and voices beyond us who do not
speak or hear this language:

the silence the earth
wakes up to in whisper:
the stories of humpbacks
who call to each other
in the dark blue, luring us

softly down, where our dreams
intermingle with the shape
of the water, the pull
of the moon: our need

to be here
stronger than our need
to breathe

or understand.

Still Life by Alexander Scott Mosel

                                 for Peg Mosel

Start with the curve of his cheek
that points the way to his eyes-
two black coals that steal light
from heaven with every blink
and lead us home.

Now, he jumps and skips
in place, each step closer
to what he knows is just one bounce
from eternity, or at least enough
to make a well-trained boxer jealous.

He leans into his smile
with just the right amount
of tease: holding back a little
means he loves you a lot.

Soon, he learns to draw flowers,
his fingers holding chalk
meant for Picasso in another time.

Here, he is ours, for now,
his art like rose petals
just behind my eyes
that move slightly in the breeze
when the dream that sleeps

there, for him alone,
begins to stir.

The Fool Thing Curls Its Tail

The poem is an attention-starved pet
that races to the door to greet you
after a day spent muttering
with shadows elbow deep
in someone else’s forced march
of language.

You’d pat it on the head, go in
take a piss, grab something cold
out of the refrigerator, remove
shoes and socks – stand
in front of the kitchen window
with a vacant stare
as it waits patiently.

Then, as you finally muster
the energy to sit down, the fool
thing curls its tail
around your ankle,
purring
one or two rough-tongued licks
away from this bowl

of light: its stray eyes lost
for words

Language of Crystal Formations

You will never find it
if you try,
but know that if you walked out
to look around for a while
it would be happy.

This is language written in crystal
formations, icy lines, cold logic,
and when it catches light
its stanzas change:
it moves into an ode,
or gathers a new voice for a moment:
something that should not be said–
even here, with all this quiet
light–

Come over here:
it likes to see and feel
your warm breath,
but not too close,

not now, you might change it
into something else, something
darker, with another tone:

the poem you must find alone.

I Didn't Want to Say Blue by Juan Pablo Vieytez

You can blink and imagine
the motion of a belly dancer,
the executioner’s eyes,
or the haze of distance, if you like.

I didn’t want to say
blue: there is so much
we hand out anyway:
our bodies, credit card
numbers, secrets
on the telephone. Pick it up
and already your name is carried
out by the tide
to a distant country,
where bananas and camarones
are sold at the intersections.

But this was going to be a poem
about the sea,
the way the dark
shadows across the water
warm by belly
back into song.

Nothing is impossible for words.
Give a child a coin
and you can hear the “gracias”
slip in and out of you
like a knife: words
here will never be as strong
as the empty hand in the street.

Faces in the rain
pressed like wet leaves
against your window
remind you
all dreams are possible.

A Flash of Red

There are decades between us
now. Even echoes
quietly fade outside
to find shadows
beneath the trees,
watch strangers pass
on cracked
sidewalks.
                   I think of you
as I sift through a song,
but you are not
the notes that dance
in the branches with a flash
of red, or the bit of silence
that warms itself
on a leaf,
here in my hand–you are alone
in a window
on the second floor.

I can see you move the curtain
back, and there
at last, the red
sweater is visible,
just for a moment,
before you move away.

You must do something,
and I understand.

I will be you, in a few more
stanzas, and we both know
the poem ends
in red.

This Remaining Light

Speaking of stars, the lights are out -
no one has time for an invisible equator
and a jungle that pulses near
extinction. What I want
is this candle
lit with the brevity of your one-time eyes
to exacerbate our fleeting moment
where there is no word
for if or no gesture that can mimic
planets in rotation: only you gyrating
out of your tight jeans
as the late movie in black and white stirs
it’s slow plot. Grab what you can
in this remaining light – morning wants
its own coming. Before birds start
we must believe in ours.

The Virgin's Crimson Cloak

The Beetles of Our Lady

In the first few hours
there are no spots.
                             Then

they appear one
                              by one and
quickly.

There’s pith beneath
the virgin’s crimson cloak.

                            Pest slayer,
twice pierced, doubly
double, double marked
and marked again;
                              savior

of crops and bellied with luck
and sometimes
                            sucked up
into a vacuum

 
Dent-de-lion

The light is sun pulled,
its rays drawn to the edge.
Wherever it settles, it is.

The light is not chirm, but
quiet. White flanked
by lance shaped spikes,

and up. We sing it, curse it.
Grave-shallow and slack,
it’s taproot gnarled and splayed.

Leaves, toothed like a
clever carnivore and green.

The light is bold and fierce
like the beast of its dreams.
Whatever it needs, it takes.

A Sly Tropical Breeze of Violet, Aquamarine and Sunshine

Fuchsia, the color of being self-satisfied and over-easy. And gold, like the robe tassels of Nigist MaKeda of Sheba, empress. Sometimes eyes are dark purple like spilled wine and I tremble. Yes, that is you, an olive- drab demeanor, the yellow-plum humor of a lingering bruise. Around your head, concord-grape colored thoughts so loud you wear a hat to hold in the noise. And when you don’t, and the neighbors call the police you simply turn up the green to mute it; fingers, the bronze color of Incan spear tips, caught in the cookie jar. That is you, a sly tropical breeze of violet, aquamarine and sunshine; you, so fuchsia, you seek out birds before they seek you.

Out to Sea by Juan Pablo Vieytez

There is so much sadness moving
out over the water.

So much desire. The waves
try to bring it back
and fail. The clouds
catch onto it, change shape,
and glide on. It moves down
the coast, finds fresh
water, and spawns.

Desire takes it out to sea.

Huge chunks of it break
off the glaciers
in Alaska: they never travel far.

We buy tickets
and try to see it,
but never arrive in time.

There is so much
to embrace, so much
to disregard: we sleep,
work, watch movies:

talk about money.

We mow the lawn
or bake cookies.

We are afraid
to sit still

or be silent.

One Cannot Tame Sky

Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherized upon a table

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

     There is much to be said of sound and song in poetry. In fact, it was Robert Frost who proclaimed in his essay “The Figure A Poem Makes” that sound “is a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem” and how utterly important it is “to have the wildness pure.” J. Scott Mosel intuits this notion, lets it swim within him, and what results is a poem that bursts into song. From “Words in My Pocket”:

Strike a match, the century is almost over. The dead sit up in their chairs;
willows fan out to listen. Rocking chairs
creak: a long awaited sigh moves
across the porches of the world. People are ready
to travel: empty seats wait for everyone
at JFK international . . .

The musicality of this stanza is obvious in how the iambs weave into the piece. The reader becomes the willow, that “fan[s] out to listen,” and what we hear are the dead sitting up in their chairs, the creaking of rocking chairs and “a long awaited sigh.” Nothing is contrived here, and the result is the wildness pure.

     Our lives are spent in the taming of this wilderness, but Mosel has become the evening spread out against the sky. One cannot tame sky. One cannot forfeit blue, even as it forfeits itself to oncoming night. One is lost to endure the relentless badgering of stars. So look up from your position on the table – open your eyes – lick your lips – you can pretend you won’t go under, but you cannot avoid the inevitability of Mosel’s work; no more than you can avoid a purely wild tune.

     The lyrical quality drives the movements of Mosel’s multi-layered meanings to degrees that in one instant the reader is whisked toward the rhythm of ocean swells and in the next is left holding the stem of a wine glass – the bowl shattered at your very feet by the near piercing of a single note sustained.

     An undercurrent to all of this music in Mosel’s work is a deep affection for the subjects which drive the poet’s composition. It’s almost as if each word is a revelation, a coup d’états, the singular atom, a lover’s last wish, a holy refrain, the wafting scents of a standing rib roast. Regardless, there can be no doubt that the poet is lovingly transfixed by the better angels of his nature to transform the temporal, lineal progression of experience into a whole made up of many moments and the love song becomes tangible. Let’s listen:

. . . and now that we know
why we are carried
out past the ice-burrowed
trail of the Hocking,
curled like a shoelace
beneath the snow-
colored hills, the chalk
grey ripples
in the gathering
sky, and now that we can
see the breathing
rows of herbs
lean toward the music,
can we not believe
in this world?

The poet’s great affection for the details here carefully paints this scene – carries the reader “out past the ice-burrowed trail of the Hocking” where each word delivers us toward a music of such force that we must lean in, hear it, and in hearing believe in this world – believe in how it may be remade, renewed, reborn through song. What greater love could their possibly be?

     To be sure, Mosel’s affection for language, and more specifically lyrical poetry, cannot be misconstrued to be one, two, or even three dimensional – he’s not just writing poems sunny side up. He’s synchronizing again. His love is expansive enough to include the bizarre, the arcane, the iconoclastic, the derisive, the debauched – for all possibilities enunciate deliberately within range of his leering eye and ear. After all, one’s love does not retreat into itself: it echoes as it includes – even if that echo clicks in an odd alveolar.

In “Three Dogfish Poems,” the reader again is etherized:

Still hungry, Dogfish jumps
in his ‘63 MG convertible
only to catch Jesus and Santa Claus
in the rear-view mirror
directing a chorus of tight-lipped
sea monkeys through the gospel
“Take a Lap around Mt. Sinai.”

And just when you think
this crazy gill-brother’s done it all
Dogfish goes back home
with his tail between his fins
and has a beer.

or as in “The Soft Hole Is What They Want”:

. . . remember to sing a carol or two
and drink a glass of wine,
remember not to touch it,
even though you need to -
so desperate is your desire -
remember not to say it,
for above you they are waiting . . .
what matters
is not what goes in,
but what comes out.

Not surprisingly, these love songs cover a terrain that is constantly shifting, collapsing, renewing. The poet challenges the reader to recall surreal desires, to remember the absurdity of restraint, to erase demarcated lines of perception in order to experience “sea monkeys through the gospel” or, even more, that “what matters/is not what goes in/but what comes out.”

     Above all this, Mosel’s poetry is not a poetry that needs to be unraveled like Eliot’s “Wasteland” or disinterred from it’s own erudition like Pound’s Cantos (with the exception of Mosel’s Dr. Quigley series). What’s delightfully surprising is how buoyant a Mosel poem is – how breezy, how casually it wears its knowledge, its wisdom. From “The Jacket”:

Perhaps this is the morning
the light slept on your shoulder
in the still hours before dawn,
when you stood quietly
to face your life, a silent river
of unspoken commitment.

While the focus is in the moment – this temporal light – it is the music that stays, that resonates, then lingers as it dawdles as “a silent river/of unspoken commitment” which is ultimately sustained. Not only are these the refrains drawn beautifully from the soporific voice of Mosel’s speakers, but they are also speakers of great authority, wise in their discoveries instead of haughty in how the discoveries are revealed.

     That these are mere love songs is a gross overgeneralization and fully beside the point. That these are pure renditions of great affection resounding in the musicality of a wild experience is not. As readers of poetry, the search for freshly invigorated voices is unending. In J.Scott Mosel’s work, we find just this: a voice whose song is rich and whose range is unexpectedly expansive – what’s more, it is a voice of one invoking a wild tune pure.

     As Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream proclaims: “If music be the food of love, play on!” Play on, indeed!

Take That One Step Down

Find me on a slow whining saxophone
in a small dim lit bar
where the walls are midnight green.

Take that one step down
eat Burtha’s mussels
call Mr. McCoy;
he’s looking for a fat lady with a typewriter.

Charles will be there on most Friday nights
playin’ his crazy guitar.
We’ll drink a few steins
roll backgammon dice
and watch people
mezmerized by the music.

I took Mary Lou there a long time ago . . .
she didn’t like it
reminded her of Pittsburgh.
I happen to like Pittsburgh.

The Filth That Is You

     How much fun is it to work outside in the dirt?

     Now, I am not talking about a little dirt … here and there. Oh no. The kind of get down dirty I refer to is slogging around in the dirt, becoming literally covered from head to toe, including hair, shoes, face and all parts in between.  The soil and filth about which I, and others (you know who you are), refer.

     Oh the pure joy of it! Could there be anything better for us grime-loving earth lovers of dirt? I really don’t think so. I like it best when it is not too wet, nor too dry, but somewhere in between. It can be loose, not too tightly packed, but not sand.

     Yes! To be in that abject manner of impurity, so dirty you don’t want to stop, come in the house and clean up; yet not dirty enough to have satisfied the filth that is you. Some onlookers may stare, most likely thinking, “Now, how did she get so dirty?” To us dirt lovers, we take not a notice. We prod dirtily ahead knowing that we are in one heavenly state of uncleanliness.

     I am soiled, stained, and yes, muddy. That is the mantra of the dirt lover.  Dirty, yet joyful, content in the knowledge that they are doing exactly what they have been born to do. Their destiny fulfilled, their sense of raw defilement satiated. How much fun is it to work outside in the dirt? Just about the closest thing to heaven here on earth and every grimy, filthy, mud hole in between.

Misty, Candice, Bridget?

Breathe softly
so this pen can move with the pulse
of my vision
and somehow not falter
in blood or in time
and be willing to say it:
say it like it should be said.

Sip slowly this bottle,
say its name
with grace
and no longer be a fool,
say Cotes du Rhone
and still be far from Paris,
and to want you, to want you here
with each sip,
seems a wish beyond wishing.

Touch lovingly
this rat, clean it
for once, give it
a manicure, crop
its tail
like a boxer puppy, leave it
to bathe in a shower stall
with scented perfumes
conditioners, comb
its hairs, paint
its nails, whiten
its teeth, give it
a sexy name:

Misty, Candice, Bridget:
botox lips sown shut.

The roil of alligators in the pond below finally
made her face beautiful
before she jumped from a concrete ledge
beyond fencing. A child shrieked, she
turned, saw horrified men in green uniforms grab air
instead of arm, hair, yellow rain slicker.

Moments before she was the infant panda staring blankly
at herself through a cage – both of them again
alone – no nature wild, no loving god. In dreams
she set the panda free. 

Through the gate, the attendant ripped her ticket,
it’s characters strange hieroglyphs – Tokyo Zoo.

She was so light, the cab door barely closed. Handing the driver
all her money, it stopped. Through the vibrant city
she imagined the passing buildings laying down
on their sides. Sleep. Sleep. Even Sunday throngs
moved in rain-soaked slow motion. She got in. A yellow car waited.

She turned the white vase of red hydrangeas toward the window,
opening the blinds. No stitch too conspicuous -
she dressed as she always had. Its round face
studying an acreage of dimpled scars.

She held onto a mirror
during an extravagant bath. She was not afraid and
looked into it.

Her Face Beautiful

Etcher of Interior Walls

swimmer in shallow pools
etcher of interior walls
to the songs
ancestors recant
from some impossible beyond
where the darkened room
with its fleshy walls
insists a warm-blooded perfection
we on the outside
would gladly return to
were our biology
and horoscopes
to mysteriously realign.

your language is ancient gesture
to the gravity your coming preserves:
light falls, fruit drops, destinies descend
toward this ground
your feet are ready for breaching
with a quiet grace
gaping mouths and widened eyes
quietly await

We will greet you
as monuments of humility
to which you may
forever return

Before He Passed Out of Sight

I saw a naked boy in the street
asking for money from passing cars.

He reminded me of death:
covered in dust,
looking for what the living
would give up.

The kids on the bus
threw candy at him
and laughed
when the pieces hit him
in the face,
as he scrambled
to pick them up
from the dirt.

The kids on the bus
were laughing,
and I was afraid,
knowing that death,
being naked,
has no shame.

Before he passed out of sight
I noticed the boy
was not laughing.

He was looking for more.

The Country We Were Born to and Love

Roads go on forever
in our minds, in the country
we were born to
and love, each rise bringing us

back, each curve bending
along the slow edge
of memory, where we find the roots
of every un-harvested field

we ever walked, where we discover
each other in tall summer
grass, searching in the fading light
for answers we would never find:

the trees too far away to touch,
the miles too long to remember.

How Did I Get So Lucky to Be Dancing with You?

                          for Jon

She walked up to him.
He could tell she liked him.

Let’s hold one another
and feel the music.

Let’s see where it takes us,
she said, as we moved

to the rhythm
slowly feeling its pulse.

You smell delicious,
she whispered in his ear.

He smiled.
You are yummy too.

The music continued.
Was anyone else around?

Well, were they?
Did it matter?

She moved closer into him.
He did too.

Their bodies
so meant for one another.

She pulled back and looked deep
into his beautiful green eyes.

You are the most beautiful
man I have ever known.

You are, she said.
How did I get so lucky

to be dancing with you?

I wish the music could
last forever, he thought,

as he felt her soft cheek
against his rough cheek.

Words were not needed
or invited.

We both thought the dance
would be wonderful.

And for forty one years,
it has been.

This sweet, sometimes fast,
sometimes slow,

always together dance,
our marriage.

Softly Reaching Upward

A fine flower
knows no hour of discolor
no shaky state on distasteful soil
her only toil to be fragrant
with supple round petals
softly reaching upward
against the ashen sky.

My heart throbs.
It could be thick supermarket coffee or
thoughts of you following me down aisle three
where I catch my hungry reflection in the freezer door.
There is a twofer on waffles.

Maybe you prefer pancakes-
a slippery square of butter sliding right of center
real maple syrup rivers running, a taste too pure for me.
They make pancakes for the microwave now.
I wonder if you would like those.
Your wife probably makes them from scratch though
I like to think she cheats
a bit with Bisquick.

I can see you after breakfast in bed,
the scar above your left ear dark
against the hotel’s crisp white pillowcase
a drippy grin on your mouth.
We’ve met just this once because
she might cut corners in the kitchen but
that’s as far as it goes.

I don’t know how I will ever see pancakes the same again-
a billowy short stack looking just like the pillows,
the syrup your brown skin
and that pat, buttery smile.

-during Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”

Your erect index finger
pressed to thinned lips
from the other end of the table
means I’ve gone too far again

and suddenly nothing
is good anymore: not the candlelight
the calamari, the cabernet.
Everything’s predictable – the music
all wrong – even laughter is
a forgery.

It doesn’t matter
that I’ve hidden
a resurrection in the backyard
under this derelict sky
just above the third branch
in a vacant swallow’s nest -

each morning walking out, I
look up and extend a finger toward it,
expecting God and His angelic throng
to reach back – instead its this vast distance
between touching what’s never meant to

touch that reaches in
swallows me.

Never Quite Certain

You wipe sweat from your forehead
with a shirt sleeve, return a wide-brimmed
hat to your head, pull out binoculars and there
across the heat rising in a blur
across the desert plain
watch thousands of bronzed bodies in white loin cloths
heaving against giant square slabs of rock.
You’ll stay here for one hundred years – under
this ridiculous heat, standing in sand shin-high
and watch the pyramid take shape, watch
as the final block caps the top
focusing in on the dark-haired figure
as she dips something into a wooden barrel
draws it out, and clenches two fists
above her head tilted back – chapped lips
quivering in the promise of seven
slow drops of water. Then she’ll collapse
finished – you through your eyeglass
never quite certain if she’s praising its beauty
or spent from the effort.

into a word. They said
I might not be happy

with the choice, for it sticks:
there is no going back.

As I write this, I still do not know
its name, but I need to write-

after all, we forget invitations
and go places we are not welcome:

dead fingers, held in place
with the same wires hidden inside

to make a fake tree look real
but cold: there is no disguise

for death, and frigid fingers hold
nothing–no secrets, nothing–

and this is the easy part:
the dead know where the rain

is born, they know the last
word breathes life into the first–

but all I have is the promise
of a word that is still not here

and may never arrive
in time–in fact, I hope it stays

right there in hell.

I. Painter, Maker, Musician

                     No poem is ever completed
                     No dance knows the perfect
                     Beat of his heart when the dancer’s feet are toeless and so
defeated
                     But we go on, we go on and act

                     We go on and act
                     Now that the circle is drawn

                     Now that the circle is drawn
                     You can see the dim outlines of dawn

                     You can see the dim outlines of lawns and a dawn
                     On the horizon of our faces
                     And each who follows will follow a line and trace
anew a new shape whatever the line he retraces.

                     Each who follows will follow,
                             will follow a line and trace anew,
                                       and trace anew a new shape–
                             whatever the line he retraces:

                     Mountain, or ocean, or fire, or the sky’s grey arc:
                             he will wield a palette of possible poems.

Johannesburg at Dawn

Not Even a Breath Could Alter You

Who did she resemble?
We will never know.

Our sweet baby fresh and new,
A babe so innocent and pure–
Not even a breath could alter you.

Why was your visit so short?

We couldn’t wait to hold you,
we were so ready
to enfold and unfold you.

A little room readied with
gingham and lace.
It is nearly time,
everything is in place.

Most likely eyes of brown or green,
sable curls waiting
to be stroked and cleaned.

So much love waiting here
for you–so wanted.
Did you feel it?
Do you feel it?

Once we meet you,
will we be able to play?
Why did God send you?
And take you away?

                                                   (Jy’t my gekierang, Dolie)

                  I can’t remember, baby,
                  What colours were your eyes;
                  I never came so near to
                  You to realize
                  Their deep intricacies.

                                                           I met you once, remember,
                                                           And you mistook me for
                                                           Another–but I tremble
                                                           When I recall that your
Body looked so young for eyes of such deep loss, such deep remorse.

                  Remembering that meeting
                  And how your passion took
                  The breath from me, I know your bleeding
                  Death must be a dark mistake
                  Numb hands stole from a book.

                  Baby, bodies fumble
                  Through agonies of self
                  And others who dissemble
                  Life and identity: they halve
                  Our love. But can dead hatred help?

                                   You sang of a dead baby
                                   A simple lullaby.
                                   You sang to a small body
                                   Of life. How could you die?
                                   You told us to remember. Why?

She Said She, She Said

She said she
felt trapped inside herself, as if she

was really someone
else who needed to get out, or else.

I listened for a long time, kept feeding her
drinks to get to the bottom of it.

I told her go see a priest and she said she
had tried and failed, she

ended up in bed with him, or she
thought it happened a long time ago when she

was little and everything
seemed. She seemed

angry suddenly, with me, and I
told her that I had to try

and help, after all, I was her
great grandfather’s sister’s

niece, and I knew
about it, in fact, I told her, I knew

someone who knew someone
who knows, therefore I know,

I am an expert
a priest, I said. She said she

felt trapped inside, as if she
was inside, as if she

said she, she said.

This is still life. A framed bowl of fruit
or an elderly man – head bent, hands clasped “Grace”
before a loaf of bread. They stare from a wall in your
grandmother’s dining room where everyone’s gathered
on some Sunday evening reluctantly
stilled by oppressive silences, mothball inquisitions, a droning
television, winter stars. These clichés have been following you
your whole life – want you to
take comfort in an irrevocable distance: god, prayer,
delicious-looking apples. Eat through what you cannot say
about drudgery; about inane histories of place
settings; about stories no longer clever. Pretend
not to notice how everyone notices you: head down -
a mouthful of food, closing
your eyes against the bananas cuddling pears
in a wooden bowl as the pictured man whispers amen -
everyone sees you as you see yourself: breaking
for the door to stare up at the dizzying stars.

This Is Still Life

Shave Off an Inch or Two

like a piece of furniture
dragging me from one room to the next to see
which corner I would fit into,
muttering about impossible measurements,
where you might shave off an inch here or there to
get a perfect fit. Eventually you quit
leaving me in the middle of the largest wall-
prisoner awaiting firing squad-
neither in your way nor
out of it.

I see your profile on the jacket cover and can imagine
you in bed smoking,
talking about daffodils
as they lean toward the window eavesdropping with their
earhorn blooms, wondering what poets find
so interesting about them, how we spend time
gazing into their sun-bright petals
marvel at the way their short-lived beauty is
indispensable in spring.
I laugh when you say you would plant
some in my hair if they would grow, that
together our shine would be unrivaled.
As it is I never wear yellow, my fair skin made sallow
against its magnificent glow.

But you will put them there-find an unusual
link between my asymmetric smile and their Greek name,
make a witty comment about how we both
break through frozen ground to stand
blazing for a few weeks before giving way to
blooms with real stamina like echinacea or day lilies.

For now you sink down beneath care-free sheets
staring up at the chipped ceiling, smiling because
you are in no rush to get anywhere and ask me
to bring you a cup of coffee on
my way out.

Our Shine Would Be Unrivaled

Welcome Back

You’ve delivered a season of balloons
and I want to thank you – they’ll carry
me off this porch into lazy cirrus clouds
where color doesn’t matter
as one by one they pop. I’ll become
an unrecognizable bird
in my return – arms flailing in delight
over the shoestring Mississippi – seconds left
gulping a rich, delirious wind
contemplating the ghost of Thoreau
sizing me up for each word
stitched into my longing
to get back to beginnings
without a bone in my body forlorn. Land
approaches, earth grows
and I swallow a galaxy of flies
just above the tree line. I’ll think your wry smile
into delight as earth opens its mouth
in a gnarled bramble of branches snapping -
the smell of Cypress and a welcome
back moist on its muddy tongue.

You might be the ladder
I was looking for,
the unsettled image
rising out of a black line
on the sea. Stand there, try
to ignore the wave tips
wonder who placed the lock
on the highest rung, the one for

God. I need you
to be in this tower. It is quiet
a place for poets. The air moves
just a little, enough to feel the lights
hinder a grey sky
from becoming real. So much for the eye
on the horizon
filled with dashes of orange and red
brush strokes–the last to see Pompeii–
you have been here forever,
here you will stay.

The Crown of My Head Its Only Point of Contact

The sun is relentless-
trying to pry open
my clenched eyes to
the opportunites of the day, but
I hold fast

looking down, the crown of my head
its only point
of contact, determination
repelling its rays for
some unknown hero with
superhuman optimism
to absorb.

My will
lassos a far-away storm cloud,
tugging at it
like a leashed dog
who wants to linger
under a maple.
I pull it close to me,
its dark beauty my
gun-point companion,
though it has flowers to feed
rivers to fill.

I need it more-
the staticity of its pent-up drops
my mirror
as I savor the sour taste
I let sit, thickly, on
my dry tongue.

I know this cloud will not
hold its water forever, but if
I can stay here beneath it-
spoiled child with black balloon-
it could eventually
provide me a fine
wet blanket.

Holy, Polished, Pure

Driftwood

We are two limbs of tangled driftwood – spin
and stumble through the narrow rivers, twist
in faster currents, drown in driven mists
of falling water. Rocks are closer, lichened
river sandstone, loosened, stumbles free.
How do I not break you, our throes violent,
austere? Commingled boughs are bent -
I could snap in half, take part of you with me.

But water makes us softer – we are blending,
a blur of bark and heartwood, older, harder -
our sharper edges smoothed, severe refining.
Even pebbles once were upstream boulders.
The knotted whorl left over in the widening
estuary rests holy, polished, pure.

Being a Marigold

Being a marigold, I should flower long,
but blossoms dwindle, shiver back to bud-
shape over and over. I am willful, strong -
I arch my back and stretch my roots in mud,
the sweat of summer does not make me weep.
Spider mites and spittle bugs consume
my orange and golden plumes; my lifeblood seeps -
it’s so much harder than I thought to bloom.
In fall I tan, turn stiff and brittle; sisters
with their plantlets wonder, pity, will
I never loose my seeds, children scattered
beneath me? I am weary, tired, kill
the time by counting all the fallen splinters
of my flowers, like prayers, scattered into winter.

Skimming Wine-Dark Seas Beneath

Hazel eyes are vessels
skimming wine-dark seas beneath.
A gale wind fills them
With sleepless nights and dream.

An ordinary mouth
Made remarkable when closed
House gnashed, yellowed teeth
And a coated tongue
Wet with unspeakable rain

While just below the lower lip
a spit of dark hair
is island to the nose
whose flared nostrils and clenched jaw

summon disappointment
over deserted farmland’s forehead
whose old rows
weather well-stayed feet of crows’
dancing dirge.

Hands fold into churches’ people
on left knee
crossing right
as posture bends by gravity
Of books in dim light.

Worn brown shoes
Acknowledge scuffles
Between doors
Kicked in. Slammed shut

As legs in worn jeans
Sense their good luck
In being able
To stagger away

From five o’clock shadows
That stay.

The Beach, Though Beautiful, Had Nothing

                               “The imperfect is our paradise.”
                                 Wallace Stevens

I was only thinking when I wrote the poem-
you know the one
observing the sand shifting on the beach, clouds
caressing waves at the horizon.
You could really hear
the surf, feel its freshwater breeze, see
North Point’s green tip across the bay.

Months have passed and no one
has appreciated that piece like you.
It was enough for me too
until this morning
reading his poem about carnations-
about a poem about carnations,
pristine bowl cupping perfect blossoms-
when I realized that
the beach, though beautiful
had nothing
to do with the loneliness I felt that day-
the way I wanted to run
across water, hop onto
uncertain clouds and ride
away from the shore
where all expectations of me
stand-
hollow wind through stone fort
near isolated elm.

lo venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto;
The stench of wet coal, politicians
. . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,
And with them. . . . . . . r,
a scrupulously clean table-napkin
Tucked under his penis,
and. . . . . . . . . . . m
Who disliked colioquial language,
stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with sh-t,
And behind them. . . . . . f and the financiers
lashing them with steel wires.

And the betrayers of language
. . . . . . n and the press gang
And those who had lied for hire;
the perverts, the perverters of language,
the perverts, who have set money-lust
Before the pleasures of the senses;

howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,
the clatter of presses,
the blowing of dry dust and stray paper,
fretor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,
dung, last cess-pool of the universe,
mysterium, acid of sulphur,
the pusillanimous, raging;
plunging jewels in mud,
and howling to find them unstained;
sadic mothers driving their daughters to bed with decrepitude,
sows eating their litters,
and here the placard ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ,
and here: THE PERSONNEL CHANGES,

melting like dirty wax,
decayed candles, the bums sinking lower,
faces submerged under hams,
And in the ooze under them,
reversed, foot-palm to foot-palm,
hand-palm to hand-palm, the agents provocateurs
The murderers of Pearse and MacDonagh,
Captain H. the chief torturer;
The petrified turd that was Verres,
bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria!
black-beetles, burrowing into the sh-t,
The soil a decrepitude, the ooze full of morsels,
lost contours, erosions.

Above the hell-rot
the great arse-hole,
broken with piles,
hanging stalactites,
greasy as sky over Westminster,
the invisible, many English,
the place lacking in interest,
last squalor, utter decrepitude,
the vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk,
waving the Christian symbols,
. . . . . . . . frigging a tin penny whistle,
Flies carrying news, harpies dripping sh-t through the air.

The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authori
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,
hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,
the drift of lice, teething,
and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.
And Invidia,
the corruptio, fretor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, fretid combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge.
obstructors of distribution.

A Room with Too Many Mysteries

In order to uncover epiphanies
for art, they told Dr. Quigley
the spoon must be shiny
and clean, so they gave him a new one.

He began to ladle the air
in the room and then lift it
to his eyes
to see which colors appeared.

Certain rooms are full of red,
maybe a spoonful if you are lucky.

He wondered the house for days,
looking for red, but he only found blue.
He scooped the air again and found darkness
which he brought to his lips
to sip for the first time.

There is no reason
to believe this. Some never do.
Fine. He has seen light fall
in chunks around them as
they sit on frozen chairs
and wait. They never hear the flutter
of wings near the ceiling,
they never see his spoon swirl
with a trace of feathers.

Dr. Quigley is not surprised.

Who could question the flight
of birds in a room full
of so many
unsettled brush strokes?

Look just past your doubt,
where, even in the dark,
all colors merge and become
nameless, free from blame:
here, up to his waist
in his favorite lake, in a room
with too many mysteries to name,
the colors on the water
are the only words
he needs to hear.

I never thought of it as dark-
confused, cynical, leery perhaps.
But dark? Dark is burnt toast, a scar, charcoal,
Death itself.

I admit to embracing wickedness some days-
basking in bitterness, apathy, judgment.
Doesn’t everyone?

Edgy-
now that seems more appropriate.
I like to teeter on the cliff
above the valley of oblivion-
write things down that won’t
make sense to anyone
not even me.

Better to be on edge
than in the dark.
From here I could jump
over to the camp of optimism, odes, the overt.

Probably not.

We bring our children to the cocktail hour
with a bag packed full of toys-
blocks, books, board games, binoculars.
We want them distracted, occupied,
so there will be opportunity to talk.

They play quietly on the floor near the fireplace,
orange glow on soft cheeks.
We sip sweet manhattans,
nibble herbed chevre on toast points,
discuss the charm of our new president and how
he will make American life more dignified.
Some weigh in on the Superbowl, remodeling,
the great foreign film one of us
fell asleep to last week.

I catch my four-year-old eyeing
our familiar pre-dinner dance,
a wise smirk on his face,
comparing his games to ours-
as we continue distracting ourselves
from the determined gait
of single-minded Death, who will
inevitably leave children in charge
of packing their own bags.

     The history of light fills many volumes.
     Forget wisps of breath and birdsong.
     Look for broken pottery under layers
     Of silt if you must. Look for the dead.

     Try to remember
     History records many open windows
     And only one constant: light. 
                L. Astorelle (d. 578) The Mystery of Light

                                1

I let paint move where it wants-
within reason there are many rooms.
Later, my hand will slow into shadow,
determined to lift the life of object
into substance. I want to add notes,
if I could, but they do not let me.
It is not time. The leaves catch little
of me that remains here, and later,
rain will fall. Happiness comes
and goes–I  need
sleep, and sweetly, soon.

                      2

Slanted, I stretch across the open
window–the child is almost born.
The mother is flushed with screaming
blood. The hands follow me
into darkness, where god waits-
they know what to do.
No one is outside. Here,
with water, clay jars, linens and milk,
there is time for one last look
at the stars, then I am finished.

                       3

They torture me slowly, of course,
with a knife that is blunt on one side.
My screams stop at the moment
I become animal, still gurgling
after my head is gone. The windows,
covered. The chanting, goes on.

                                4

Without thinking, I curved
love into a ribcage, little
by little settling into form
and measureable language.

I knew time would lift
hidden designs to a suitable fate.

As I walked on sand,
I thought of wet
grass, distant stars,
and oil, soft gurgle
of hidden elements
that wait, sometimes,
forever. Eyes, I know,
find all the answers,
and lips, lips
never tell the truth.

                                5

I was her only salvation,
the mineral
inside her skull,
the miracle, mirror, masquerade.
Now she will touch mortality
for the rest of human existence,
and I will touch water and soil
before I pass beyond the visible,
before I reach the unseen,
where other worlds wait
to be born
and no words exist
for this, or anything else
that hides in darkness
and sleeps.

                                 6

I made sure the fields were warm
and shadows beneath the foliage
cool to touch. In the open,
I could hear vultures
cry out with meaty beaks.

It was a good day for killing,
and from what I understand,
a certain glee engulfed the survivors.

I remember one, wiping his mouth
on his sleeve after it was over,
and then he stared at the sky
for a long time. Our eyes met
somewhere miles beyond
the horizon, and I was unhappy
when he looked away to kiss
the ground.

                                 7

I stretched out my arms
to meet a weary traveler.
I knew he was ready.

I saw his face through the open
window, and his eyes
never left mine. It was
time: I could see
clouds move in his
iris, and each one spelled
a different word
for Now.

Photo by Adam Jeffries Schwartz

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

     Albert Einstein, What I Believe, 1930

. . . and this question from Nick (four years old): Where do the colors go at night? Suddenly, everything you thought you believed begins to unravel. You find yourself, after a long journey, finally standing in the center of where you have always been: inside a poem, finally alive, no longer seeking, but finding. Language will take you where you want to go if you simply listen. Hollis Summers, professor and writer from Athens, Ohio, once said, “A poem is everything I know about being alive.” Alive, the writer must learn to live in a room full of darkness searching for colors that only come when spring arrives. Alive, the writer must ask the questions that language itself may not be capable of answering. Alive, the writer becomes a conduit for answers to questions that may never have been asked in the first place.

Is there really a place where the colors go at night? Is God hungry? Are you strong enough to kill that monster? I have been listening to these questions, and I do not have all the answers. I tell him the colors are tired after a long day of delighting our eyes. He wants to know about delight. I tell him de light is good. He wants to know what we should give God to eat. I tell him milk is a great place to start, because it is white, the color of God, and they make it all the time, even in our sleep. He wants to know about killing monsters. I tell him the biggest, scariest monsters fall hard when you use language they do not recognize. I tell him this is how we dream in color. I tell him this is what I know about being alive. I tell him this is poetry. . .

   I do not need an altar.
   Echoes did the dirty work,
   language told my lies,
   desire hid my footsteps.

   There is only one element
   left to find, but I cannot
   remember its name.

   I have no lips. Smile for me.
   It is not too late.

   F. Lystrander (1168-1224) Metaphysical Elements of Praise

                                 1

I cannot remember the world.

I hear the sounds of a guitar
echo from the walls of houses.

Colors from the market
sift through my body,
smells of coffee and warm
carnations satiate my spirit.

I know the world is not mine.

There are no doorways
I can open. I have nothing
to sell: my thoughts
have no meaning here
without language.

Dust falls on cobblestones
and shadows take flight
into hands the valley
will never touch.

I am lonely without the world.

Dancing, dressed
only in the scarves of memory,
I appear in an open courtyard
fated, fickle, formless.

I show them everything
and change nothing.

                                 2

I scratch a quill on parchment
that will someday open unborn
flesh. I know you:

instruments where instinct
cannot hide. I see
how so much dust in the air
never reminds you of a final
flicker of breath. I move

hands until they wither
into fingers on new hands
writing old words
on new parchment
in a dead language. A new tongue

is all I need to move rocks
into position

and wait for praise.

                                  3

I know where echoes sleep.

True, the toil to carry language
is theirs alone: syllables weigh
the most just before they find time
to die.

I know when they are ready.

The air is heavy before rain,
before wind opens her lips
one last time.

I look for the last place on Earth.

Go ahead. Try to find answers.
Look in the hollows,
look in the sadness of my eyes.

If you know where they are born,
you do not need me.

I will understand.

I have patient hands.

                                4

I wanted you to continue,
fly through my body,
find your home in my breath.

Our existence is fragile.

Yours is made of tender air, blown kisses
that find a home beneath your wings.

Your shadow on the ground
is all the proof I need,
and now, without you,
I will warm your body,
even in death.

                                 5

I have certain limits:
I cannot pass through solids.

Imagine the mess inside flesh,
the damage I would do, the unexpected
revelations as cells burn for me.

I mistake each cry for help
as a song. Inspiration is pure
when its origin is forgotten,
taken for praise. Think of a dam,
pools of heat that rise unseen
next to trees, boulders, torsos.

At night I trickle back to nothing,
each particle of my being moves
through blades of grass and up
the trunks of trees that lift me
into the open sky
where I rise
above everything I touch
and call it day.

                                 6

I sculpted your body.

Each wrinkle felt my lips,
each blemish felt the brush
of my hands.

My fingers made a rosary
of your body.

When they placed you
in the ground, I pressed
my eyes into the soil.

I wanted to see
the hidden language
where flesh is born.

I wanted to hear
my name, where no one
can go,
not even me.

                                 7

I saw you wash your hands
in the open. You tried not to look
at them. The clouds that day
spelled forever in every tongue.

My happiness was complete.
Today, I could see
through flesh, and nothing
made by human hands
would stop me.

I began to sing
as I passed through clouds,
and I could see every pair
of eyes turn toward heaven.

When metal and blood
came together at last,
I began to hear your words
soak the ground.

I entered the earth
at last, the hidden places
opened up before my name,
and even death smiled.

Up the Road Apiece by Christopher Woods

  I am looking at a picture
  of wheat fields flanked by woods.
  There is a cloud for each mystery

   that cannot be described.
   Down the road, there is a group
   of words huddled together
   near the railroad tracks.
   They are about to make love.
   They have no problem with infinity,
   and either do I.
   Come on, let’s go!
   J. Spanos (1933-2009) Crossroads of the Infinite

                                  1

Of all the places
I was given to love,
there is a place made of water
where I return
every time language fails.

I remember to stay here
a little longer
than the rest of the Earth.

I like the way the leaves
glide, as if the current
is holding its breath.

Some words take longer than others
to surface, and this one
is worth the wait.

If nothing else, I can chase
my shadow under the trees,
or follow the cardinals note
by note through the underbrush.

They know where they are going –
I do not need to understand.

                                  2

I can see the hole they cut
into the Earth. At night,
it looks like a pool of black
water where ghosts swim
on their backs, long strokes
that stretch moonlight
into wavering fingertip threads.

They are afraid of the water.

I can see them huddle along
the edges for warmth.

They take the little of me
that remains and change
into a game the dead
play on vacation.

I see them blowing rings
with my breath.

I hate them. I want to
stop them, but I cannot stay.

They have nothing to say.

                                3

I see you making love.

I cover you with everything
I have. I cover you

with my silence,
and when you move,

you sing together a music
that holds me here,

where your notes and your key
echo my desire

to be human, to linger.

I turn you lovingly
into living sculpture,

warm to the touch.

I measure you carefully,
your flesh in my hands like clay.

I never learned the difference.

                                  4

I do not remember my origin.

I know one constant: look forward
into the void.

I wish I held a string in my hand
and could follow it back
to its origin,
but I might not like what I find –

I know only two letters by heart:
alpha and omega.

I would rather stare forward
and travel into the places
where a language is never born.

Here I begin, each time
I open my eyes.

                                 5

I want to whisper
to tips of trees as twilight

recedes and ripples
into memory: the first time

I touched atmosphere
and created color.

No one was there,
but I can still see the way

the leaves turned in my arms
as I pressed again

and again
into the language of vein and cell:

I never let them down,
never lose my touch.

                                  6

Early July, a breezy afternoon,
and I am outside looking at flowers.

As I remember
now, beneath this bubbling splash

of rain, I tried to step
into your tiny blue

eyes, to touch the sharp needles
of the pine trees beside the porch,

taste the green perfume
and watch the kaleidoscope

inside your eyes twinkle
as I strain to part clouds.

I can almost hear you speak
a wish, a whisper,

a wisp wholly human,
but I am not permitted

to remain — I move
out of range,

I sleep on the edge
where your dreams

are born, where the light 
you see

is your alone.

                                 7

Look at me
passing over your madness,

water and grass
so much of what I love

I forget to shine.

I become a snowflake
that cannot find its way South,

my life for a moment
alive in a wordless flame,

the constellations writing
the only words I believe,

Spring dropping its weight
into the medium

my life becomes.

You should have seen the faces of the onlookers
as I tried to bring the bird back to life.

I figured this was my chance to make something
of myself: a life-changing chance to give life.

After all, this was Easter week:  I knew M street
could survive another resurrection.

First, I rubbed its torso down the length
of its beauty, careful not to disturb the feathers.

I noticed how my fingers could not sense
death:  like a lover, sometimes they are the last to know.

Then, I pulled its claws and let go –
I watched them delicately spring back

into place — rigor mortis
had not set — it sets, like the light we tender

as ours, but here, on this patch of sidewalk,
I let go of my desire and watched its colors

fade — the same light in the same way
that will someday claim mine.

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

It started with a backbeat
that Danny laid down on a pair
of garbage cans and a couple of street signs.

Then Billy expanded on it
with a bass line he thumped out
on an old wooden telephone pole.

And Johnny joined in, strumming out
a rhythm on the telephone lines
stretched across the black velvet sky.

Jerry did us proud with a screaming solo
wrung out of the wrought iron
fences lining the cul de sac.

And I, for my part, sang some maximum
rhythm and blues dredged up from
somewhere deep inside a dark night of the soul,

My voice joining with the band, a siren’s song,
summoning the demons of rock and roll
to seduce heaven’s horniest angels from their hymns.