Note: Poem Titles Marked with a Double Asterisk (**) Have Been
Published or Accepted for Publication.
NARCISSA PEÑA SWEEPS HER PORCH, FOURTH AND D STREETS**
If I solely confined myself
To constrained streets in angles,
And curbs and corners kept us
Closed, I could not notice
The Coast Range at sunset,
The Sierra at sunrise,
In their glow defining there
For my measure, there to lie
Invitation to horizons elsewhere
And otherwise still belonging.
The old family land grant, running
To each east, each west edge,
Clenches me yet, no matter time’s
Alternation of building and falling:
My free gesture touches the mountains,
And their freer gesture touches me
Retrieval.
** In Entering: The Davis Poetry Anthology, 2011, (Davis: 2011), 48.
CATARACTS
This is no precipice, no incessant
Rough, hissing water in Scotland, cheering
A curious Mendelssohn, beguiling
Bruckner, but there is vapor hanging in
Vapor, a gray soft chalk, powdered, gone fine,
Suspended in my seeing, my left eye
Become stone, a way to perceive, yes, but
Dimly. God in his humor let the weak
One harden first, over months I had
Not noticed, the right in compensation
Covering for it. And now I visualize
What I will sometime be a cloud, a noiseless
Sound through the strain of air, the pull of earth,
Haphazard, vague in its spin, surge, eddies,
And, on occasion, whirlpools swirled backwards
ASSIGNED TO WALK MY GRANDMA HOME
From my case–hardened, San Franciscan,
Italian Grandmother I learned
Pace is just illusion, others’ flowers can
Be gathered–stolen–if they are
To wrestle meaning from their mere,
Grounded stems and rediscover pure
Life at her belonging, that Dickey
The careless yellow canary
Trills not for any missing mate,
But for a sweet plush provision
To my Grandma.
ORCHESTRAL WARM–UP
SAN FRANCISCO, 12/6/2014
If their music will be later joined,
It need not be so now: a difficult
Magic will do, chaotic interplay,
There is chat, spar, there are random spasms
To appear, there is weaving among stands,
Wandering a way among stands’ ordered
Plantation; they take new pictures of each
Other cradling unlikely lengths of wood
And bright brass or glossy silver. The First
Cello gimps, seats, and once again lengthens
His spike—he, too will exercise and probe,
Add and elaborate; later he’ll belong,
But now he has his notes, and they proceed
Out of touch with pieces of melody
Fractured surrounding him.
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
I as a pale boy stood outside our Ford
And splashed some water there where the sign said,
“Continental Divide,” hoping to see
Rivulets part eager, flowing off to swell
Both Atlantic and Pacific—it spread
Some two yards, stayed, surface tension and rough
Earth allowing it no further—I thought
I’d learned mastery is pernicious
Disappointment; yet now I know those smooth
Molecules, some of them, are even yet
Six decades on, tumbling East, coming West.
It’s not just cells that by dividing gain:
Fire, earth, air all break their bonds, reassemble,
Collocate great, roiled masses in their time:
We too imagine that our liquid, spilled
Psyches make for larger magnitudes, and they do,
But only later.
TOP KICKS AT FORT ORD, 1973
Sure, let them take those thick steaks out
The fort’s commissary kitchen home—They
Are the Army, not clueless officers
Ruined from deciding by college, parents
Cherished them. These Sergeants, Midwest morose
Before then, thin, no–jawed, they left
Homes empty of all but booze and abuse,
Found a place in bases just as drugged, tight
And abusive, so familiar; but Dad,
Woozy and terrible, Dad wasn’t there,
And they could have a better, if still caged,
Replica of home. So they tow their wives,
Hauling out those Japanese, Korean,
Viet or Filipina women grown
Pudgy like them; and though the men now lost
Soon on too easy seduction, their stripes
Meant stealing bloody meat could well serve them
A sacrifice.
AND IT IS PASSING SHIMMER
You can tell me / where are Jack, Lucy, and Elaine,
Who squealed in convulsions / over the Brothers Marx,
Jumping and hooting / like miracle–play demons,
Roiling beyond the confines / of their flesh,
Young and pink and vibrating / inside a riot:
All narratives stand memories / unreal, untouched,
This way happened, / this way did not happen at all.
Go this way, do not go, / just effervescence has
A truth, this does not, / and yet you know where they have
Done.
YOUNG FLUTIST, PRETTY IN PLAYING
The cool, straight, light–streak flute, itself as art,
However it commences horizon,
Bends and curves, anticipating the rise
Of moon–drawn flood tides, of night–birds that glide
In phase to planetary motion, all
At once still and swooping and emerging
From her shifting small form, such pure silver
As carry stars in waveforms, galaxies
In glass, comets’ polished sheets.
NEVER DIFFER WITH YOUR DAUGHTER
Never differ,/argue with your daughter
Or if you must,/ try remonstrating so
Tentatively,/packing in such weaslesome
Subjunctives, just/as many as syntax
Might allow, so very/wistfully she may
Not even hear it,/ if you’re lucky. There
Might be comfort /in your knowing, if strained
Comfort you seek /on such an errand, that
She hasn’t shifted /fealty, doesn’t
Now belong to some/off, seductive voice,
Some other’s system/ so unlike yours as to make
“Alien” insufficient,/ no, she doesn’t
Belong over there,/ take this taste comfort:
She never belonged,/ either, here, to you.
BEETHOVEN’S BIRTHDAY: DECEMBER 16th
The worse day on which to be born.
Yet there are worse–by human rough
Aberrations, and other days
Might brood more, and be less moving.
Here the sun, just short of solstice,
Nearly horizontal slants flame
Across rooms, impinge on random
Motes, as less–than–obvious flow,
And measures impel them, as sharps,
Flats, spheres like droplets composed
On a score. You know that seasons
Have each their own glorious tides,
Their reasons; that triumph is choice
Allowed the sun, seeking ether,
A glass incarnate, or obscured
In enshrouded cloud covering
To glow under, but bursting above,
Ready for your eyes to lift up
To it.
AMATEURS
“After all, we are amateurs as we have not lived our life before”
—Jack Weiss, 10/25/2015
Seekers keep searching on new worlds
That proceed from their belly–taut
Mother suns, innocent pure fire,
Hopeful as bird swarms, cavalcades
Of pulsing mountains, wind–stirred waves.
What cannot be observed can stand
Assumed, these new
Bodies, emerging still, begin
Cooling as welcome in all
Affectionate intertwining
Through galaxies umbilical
Tied into each other, a time
Earlier than this has never
Been, become conceived possibles,
Stretching risk, spinning fresh love
ANOTHER ORCHESTRAL WARM–UP
If their playing, later, grows united,
Music need not be so now: just haphazard
Magic will do, intercourse in Chaos.
Here they chat, there they’re weaving through their chairs,
Searching for some way through the stands’ ordered
Plantation; they’ll take new pictures of each
Other cradling unlikely tubes of wood
And gilt brass, or glossy silver. The First
Cello gimps, seats, and once again lengthens
His grounding spike; he exercises and probes,
Seeks and complicates: soon he will belong,
But now he has as his course procuring
A free heart, cured in practice but aflight,
Out–of–touch with other melodic shards,
Fractured, surrounding him: A life commits
To symphony, humbles tenor; but starts
Sound no one’s solo but his own.
THE PAGE–TURNER AT THE PIANO
For Jack Weiss
The only piece he’s playing mandates
Rising a bit too early, or just right,
Separating the score’s two slick, stuck sheets;
Note after each enchained note, he consumes,
Cures, but turns only when he’s nodded to.
Yet there would be no music but for him.
As editors, Jack, this is what we are,
Turning another’s pages, the one who’s
Praised in type, imprinted programs, when we
Are but thanked elsewhere, in prefacest’ last
Unmarked paragraphs, for our aid; if we’re
So whole indispensable, why must we
Afterwards gather up those loose pages,
Self–consciously, then slither off the stage?
RICHARD
Richard Johnson, English Department,
Loyola University, New Orleans
Nobody should die, least of all you,
Dick Johnson, who burned so many
Sophomores with heart–heatedness
In one short story, recasting
Their ungiving and pragmatic
Cool into radiate, flow–out
Through dynamic—Saint Antony
The hermit showed Greek Philosophs,
Coming to mock him, for his books
An open window to desert;
You, Dick, drove those young unaffected
Onto that desert, to cull life
From scorching, streaming sand, energy
From the riffles seeming devoid,
Sparse, expanses of passion.
LA VEDOVA: THE WIDOW
It has been so many months, years it seems
She’s traversed unremarkable two–lane
Roads, to the hospital to wait and watch
In loving scrutiny, accommodating each
Smiling, gyrating staff and pursed doctor
For whom death is familiar: it isn’t
Familiar to her, stages undergone
In decay scarcely noticeable,
His face–lines deeper, but then they’d always
Been too deep.
PUTTING AWAY DISHES:
A KITCHEN WALTZ
No Strauss could have orchestrated this waltz
Better, no moustachioed young Hussar
Dangerously tamping a most lovely
Partner’s corseted waist, of melted eyes
And overflowing breasts, either, as our
Constant crossing in the kitchen time,
Stepping through vacancies appearing, just
To, in seconds, disappear: The passion
May now be running subtle, yet a waltz
Is itself no step to passion, to heart–
Beat, drawing to the other, closer heartbeats;
Rather, circles unconscious, still in hand,
Slight, almost impalpable, inward twists,
Acknowledgements of all that meaning is.
“I KNOW THEE NOT, OLD MAN. FALL TO THY PRAYERS”
Crowds still shout at me about Allende,
Cambodia, Nixon, yet Allende
Was a Commie, Cambodia, the dark
Enemy used it, shouldn’t I abuse
It? The past’s a mist, no one can remember
What it was like, in grave rooms called for war,
Where gravel in voices crushed some dim lives
So that we were proven right–I have not
Outgrown power and seduction,
Stymied fitness for presidency, I
Travel and am puzzled that crowds appear
To hate me; have they not wealths of nations
At my earning? I’ve no reason
Acceding to the flaccid, wasted man’s
Temptation to confess, bent down, “Master
Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds.”
ON IMAGINING THE DEATH OF AN OLD ENEMY
Though we tangled in another life, I’ll
Mourn you now, knowing that, had we not been
At Dachau on guard, I would be glad not
To be in Russia, you’d be simply glad
Just to obey; even if you knew them
To be crazy, still your loyalty let,
Combined with my cynicism, children starve.
Now you are among them, and I soon will
Be as well, forgiven by them, but not
By each other, not by ourselves, so damned
If no one else cares enough about us
To do the damning.
COMING UP POWELL STREET,
SAN FRANCISCO
MARCH 14, 2013, 5:47PM
“Note that when it [Romans 11:36]
says ‘all things are through him,’
the sense of ‘through him’ is that he
is in all things”, Meister Eckhart, Sermon IV:
The Feast of the Holy Trinity, 20.
In the passage of so many, the crowd
A clump standing, squatting, surround the white–
Haired still man, scarlet, not burgundy, blood
Splashed about him, it was not his heart’s blood,
But there were cups of it, and a policeman
Heavily stood over it, him, confused,
Perplexed, awaiting: he could be still, still
Alive, he could be still, though, glimpsing I saw no
Breathing, no tremble; but there starred God shone
In that unmoved pyramid, the cool wind’s
Spirit whispered, recited still, more
Unknowable stories.
“THE CRAFT IS FROM SOMETHING,
THROUGH SOMETHING, TO SOMETHING, IN SOMETHING”
Blackbirds whistling as swinging some red
Rusty gates, presenting each self a scarce
Reason to socialize—each must have fed
And drunk, each must have arrayed its feathers
In hard sufficient gloss, and had no more
Impetus for flying. At spaces they
Fill a tree, and slurry their souls’ burden
In music arhythmic, wildly atonal,
Pitched to comforting only on themselves
MELODY
Neither so roundly nor so long
Curse old Dixie and old Dixie’s ways—
My landlady hated niggers
And yet she was a Christian woman,
And hired one to cut her lawn.
She said, “They’d as soon rape you
As look at you,” and here she spoke the truth:
He couldn’t look at her,
Pasty as a dead fish in the water,
But still he stood his ground, staring
Only at the greasy outstretched quarter
She offered him.
Old Dixie was a sweetly swinging scale:
Getting all that money took a mind.
The trick was harvesting by hand,
Using a sickle left for time
Deliberately to dull, cutting
To the height she might
In charity accept (weighing in, of course,
The trouble it would take
To find another nigger),
And leaving just the depth
To have him back there often.
The sun and flesh that friend was to the grass
Provided lubrication.
And so he prayed at each swing of the sickle
Pardon from the grass for what he had to do
To keep his job.
Now, since that old Dixie died,
The grass in paradise allows him down
To grind his silver sickle
In my landlady’s skull,
To leave her gasping and agape,
Mowing her brains, but not so many nor so much
As not occasion having
To come back
Often.
DISPERSED HORSES STANDING
Crossways at orders beyond imaging
Impulse and motivation gravity
The sole reality determining space,
Their time, affection binding them as cell
Welcoming strangers and drawing such sweet
Sustenance from unities of spare
Difference, directed by air–sorted calm,
Rolled by music too slow, much too unheard
Upheld by a breast–laden easy earth
TRAIN RIDE
TOWARD THE SAN JOAQUIN
“From the dawning early morning
To the shades of night returning”
Arn’s “Arthur”
Touching the light in land chilled by seaward
And over from the Delta and a far
Verdant reproving moon, the faraway
Scent of early, it proceeds in gardens
Nor does it dissipate as deep lengths
WAITRESSING
“Older Italian men, with their big families,
tip the best.”
—A Former New York Waitress
Perhaps the urging reason is a young
Woman’s smile in pleasure, but more, his wife
Thinks, because his Father’s Father cropped stones,
Farming Calabria, could not have done,
His Father did not, cropping every cent
From sandhogging, digging ditches, draying,
Gratuity might have seemed a waste; now
An education, standing, a fine job
Within the accepting soul of the huge,
Polymorphous city, a wife who knows
She’s cherished, a church to hold him, softball–
Sized spaghetti to wind about his fork,
Sharing his family’s vast fecundity.
CALIFORNIA SAVANNAS
For Jack, Feeling His Age
No desolation, but contrast rather
Rules stubborn oaks, crowding the arroyos,
Solitary oaks, golden showers upside,
In sun eternal graduating down
Through branches to darker caverns gray–green,
Then to clear black smothering a trunk
In umber: this is the slope of sallow
Grass, sea–like waves of withering shag–straw.
But stanchions steady as iron anchors,
In a tired time, an opening of ochre
Summer back to rejuvenation
A POLICEMAN’S LIFE IS NOT A HAPPY ONE,
BUT THEY GRIND EXCEEDINGLY SMALL
No amount of watching
Withholds a crime
Empty houses are for hatching,
Outside lights only show
Where the thief is sure to go
Videos record the tops of heads
To bored, unnoticing, watchers’ beds.
And yet afterwards, justice wakes,
She takes
Evidence unrolling slow,
Compounding patience, having time,
To gathers specks, convicting hair,
Here and there.
THE FRAGILE BALANCE OF IRISES
Sanity steeps from wholeness, yet wholeness
Isn’t parsimonious, not enwrapped
To its own arms, blanketed against wind
And fierce rain: rather, space, like that of great
Baroque palaces, churches, twisting out
And enveloping shy, receptive air
In flourish, in circumnavigation,
Petals flying like eyelids on triumph
Sensual saints, banner and crevices,
Both proud and tender in a surge of grace.
THE FLESH INTERNAL
A core’s tissue is hard, yet weak
In probing, soft against the beat,
Battering conflict, drear decay
Muscles, ligaments’ strands might fray,
And tumble in its pumping parts;
But always love will there so stray
In that slight nub where vastly stay
Eternity of sparks, hopeful hearts.
A MERRY POEM FOR JACK WEISS
In a hexameter wrench
Each breath is wealthy, each snore, joy galore,
Each heartbeat sweet, each step, all steps yet gone before,
Each awakening, a long night’s dark foresakening,
Each vertical, a semicirculally, each
Horizontal, a frontal, each meal, luscious feel,
Each sight is bright, each course of blood, an act of love,
Each longing swells songing, each pain keeps you sane,
Each tomorrow, one to wallow, each bird’s a word,
No matter how, in its ending, still befriending,
Not absurd, indifferent: referifferent,
And significant, spendoriferent, superb.
COMMUNION
“A bird with a broken wing still resists falling to the ground.”
—Jack Weiss, 2018
Regret may rest in weakening
Though the strong sun berates
Our feeble brokenness, still skims
Stiff horizons, waves in broad seas
Stir, let their swells bear against winds,
And firm earth heaves, slips and shudders
In living, yet there is love, Jack,
Holding the oceans and lands kept
In subtle unity, affection that draws
Each motion into axial
Peace.
LI–PO MOURNS SPILLED DROPS OF INK
Oh, that the Yangsee were poured in my inkpot,
And the Three Gorges full of characters,
Waiting for me to bend and kiss
My unwritten poetry, scrawled in impatient
Sheets of paper.
PERSPECTIVE
The crooked ambiance of middle–aged
About to wheel gray disability
Into the clinic, a paper towel
Cross–wise in her mouth to keep her from tongue–
Severing, and all apparent in three
Seconds, lifetimes of germination, stretched
Suffering and caring Mother to Child,
That has come to this: travel whose ending
Stays undeserved, absolute, they transverse
A pavement already hot by one nine
And still hot when another nine returns.
Large children, and a thin, scattered notion
Of the creature, waiting in the car while
They retrieve her appropriate carriage
ANA– KAI KATABASIS: 1812
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book 3, 2; Book 4, 14
Not Tolstoy’s condemnation, but there was
His wonder: Napoleon at the brim,
Too occupied to mark Polish Ulans
Gamely plunging the Vilna, exclaiming,
“Vivat!” some of them slipping in to drown.
Did any one of those, as he and horse
Went down, reconsider what that “Vivat!”
Meant, whether the horse and he deserved some
Equal attention?
Perhaps, but later,
Such surviving Ulans, longing for that
Same Vilna, crusted, crunching, might cheer less
Pregnantly at a marshal’s fogged carriage
Rumbling by; and one man, one night, might edge
Quietly, away, to set himself off,
Turning toward a thin–lit farm, a distance
Too far for looters to rape and return,
And, tossing his weapon, come to a house
Holding no surviving husband, father,
For him to be both, with the added prize
Of what—pocketed loose, bright, round rubles,
Of Czarina Katerina, Czar Paul,
Czar Alexander, liberate from far–
Off Moscow.
THREE YOUNG SCHOLARS
“VII. Le premier dit: “J’ai bien dormi.”
Le second dit:“ Et moi aussi.”.
A ajouté le plus petit:
“Je me croyais au paradis!”
—A children’s Saint Nicholas song
Compactness requires no explanation: the boys
Are gleaning wheat, in and out, lost in dusk.
The butcher to lodge them, by verse two, kills
Them, mincing and pickling them as pork
Might be. Seven years pass in fewer words,
Nicholas asks to be lodged, needs supper
Small some salted fare, seven years in brine:
The butcher flees, unpunished, as evil is,
Nick’s three saintly fingers raise, from their tubs,
The boys exclaiming, from whom the smallest
Knows death is not sleep, but pure paradise.
It might have been misreading an icon
From far–off Greece, Nicholas saving three
Princes from destruction, with the grateful men
Rising in thanks from their towers, whose dwarf
Aspect’s most like three tubs. The princes cramped,
Nicholas looms, in blessing. This is no
Ring–dance story: rather than gleaned, the diced
Scholars are but whole, marvelled miracles
Of life beyond a nightly, steep sleep,
From which belief rescues them from terror,
And places them, from the smallest, in sure
Paradise.
COLLAPSE
The massive towers of Los Angeles
Will fall, as did those better–codes ones
In Mexico City, so showering
The pavement with stone and astonished
Dead—yet less quickly but as certainly
Our mere houses will disassemble, the stucco
Tumble to pieces of rock, eroded
In time to sand. This sour air betrays
Time’s wasting, the weight of age and the tired
Tendons’ loss.
MIRRORS
Upright mirrors facing one another
In infinite regression, dimming faint
The self not altogether disappearing,
But ever less recognizable as the who
I might be, nothing because I had tense
Timidities to look.
JUSTIFICATION
For every Catholic family saving a Jew,
There must have been fifty, betraying yet
Another with nods, smirks, understanding
Shrugs—sending them to dying, but themselves
To their own probable damning. I say
‘Probable’ because their ignorance had to be
A chasm, and there is no Jewish curse
Adequate for their stupidity. So,
It were better, Father, to forgive them,
For they did not know where they were going.
SWAMP–TREADING
Coming home to a house dark without you,
I touch my way through the garden, not gray,
As Virgil writes, but dull green and death–still
As the sky, morose with polluted stars.
The grinding of engines’ oppressing drone:
Loneliness sickens, depletes the dried heart
Of its last crumbs, fills eyes with dirt, lungs hurt,
Imploded, skin slipped, slimed, like swamp pools,
The stench of fear, infected emptiness
THE FIVE–DOLLAR BILL: DANTE’S PURGATORIO:
THE STAGE OF AVARICE
She’ll not remember what the five was for,
Keeping it, when others in the room,
A circled discussion group, passed
It, to make the point that greed seemed
Impolite in public, so each
Refused, passed it, sure, wanting it,
In their secret, but too aware
Of what what would be thought of them.
She, starving, no longer caring,
Having no breakfast to carry
Her into still looming classes,
Knew she needed that blueberry
Muffin she bought after, to last
The next lectures: well, it was sent
Around to prove Dante’s dictum
All greed adheres to dirt, credit
Is not paper but believing.
And what would that slim fiver be,
If the one at the register had
Said, “This isn’t yours”? But hers
It was, great mouthfuls of muffin
More than dirt, the joy adhering,
To meet a need, and make the next
Stage up, the realm of gluttony.
NOT JUST NOW
Not just now, let it not be just
Now, the tumble of transforming
Let it be, just the beginning
Of it, but not just now, the part
Chasm, and eventual abyss:
It will be in any case, it
Will be, will be, but not just now.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
Item: “The [Chinese] State Religious Affairs
Bureau Order No. 5 prohibits the reincarnation of a monk
without a permit.” (Barbara Demich, Los Angeles Times,
printed in the Sacramento Bee 7/6/2015, 3B.
Incarnation, once again
Certification must pertain,
Bureaucrats, enslabbéd, judge
He whom Buddha gave a nudge
Into altared states of being
Those with other eyes for seeing;
Protocols will right respond
To requests to fetch beyond,
Certain is the Bureau that
He’ll return to where he sat,
Younger, yes, but still so loyal
To the politburo’s moil:
No Tibetan freedom matters
To the formers and the latters.
Harmony is sure celestial
When the soul’s not there to wrestle.
MOON HAIKU
The moon turns nightward,
Farther from the sun, the more
Lost love shows her face.
MEMORY
All of us need to be remembered, just
Nine billion elegies: as we shuffle
Among life and lack of it—nine billion,
More, microbes do our internal business,
A matter of symbiosis to humble
Us; thousands of times nine billion stars swing
In our ordinary, accidental
Galaxy; to which the night adds merely
A trillion elsewhere, and we pretend we’re
Too many for obituaries, when each
Of you is in your burning, cooling self
A grand service meant to be instructive.
ETERNALLY WHORRLING ROSES
Mater dolorosa,
I need to know the joy in sculpted sorrow,
Agony in mass executing clean
Children, their blood red and pure, elders
Quaking in hard air, and then going still,
The poor littering roadsides, the sick ones;
And yet the rich, privileged kill themselves well
Through indulgence, and they too are pitied,
They too are victims of their arrogance
Through excessive humanity. Passion
Signifies suffering, desire, waiting
Both in nightmares and soft liberation,
I need nightmares and light liberation.
I need your welcome and your diamond tears,
I need belonging, I need refusal,
I need sore feeling, I need dismissing,
I need recognition, I need memory
I need affirmation, I need painful
Sighing, I need your silk, gold and streaming
Robes to drench in my harsh heart’s sanded cords.
BALLET IMPERFECT
The purest perches over what’s most flawed,
Most dangerous, foreboding, less free,
Less rigorous, disciplined, and most bent,
Asymmetrical, imbalanced, awkward,
Steps approaching scrapes, ungainly gesture,
Perceived wobble, arms not sufficiently
Statuesque, the thighs held in pinched quiver,
All anticipating events of sure
Gravity’s gluttony. And still the heart
Is most moved, through fears this moist misfortune,
To be confronted to concentration,
Hoping to the best humankind allows:
Of all making, through all the instances
In which we breathe, rough, irredeemably,
On purpose dare to ruin an innocent
Canvas with guessed disfigures, tear harmless Silence
With vague, snow–blinded poetry.
MY COUSIN PETER
That is no languorous moon, but rapid
Increasing and decaying, slipping through
The month’s gauge and the sun’s diurnal roll
Waxing at night, waning at day, and still
We breathe and move about, as if there were
No diminishing, slipping down as lungs
Fail, breaking a hip, plaque enshrining nerves
And death courts inevitable.
Peter, you
Traversed skies of strong music, you surveyed
A newsroom in devoted interns rich,
A home hospitable, long in laughter,
Years of alternate hope and loss of hope,
To then find love, hope in dearest Rita;
You are now beyond our time, no longer
Subject to moon, sun, tides, loss, but happy
With grace, song, with the warmth of memory,
That your Mother, Mike’s Mother, both of them
Diminutive Italian women, both
Five months along with you and Mike inside,
Antoinette, the smaller, bullied a dense
Jubilation on Market Street, V–J
Day, to crash their way to the doctor,
Marian, her equally determined
Close cousin, traversing with her, the crowd
Made open now for their delivery.
TEMPUS FLUTAT (Time Floats)
“ut scilicet non vere dicamus tempus esse,
nisi quia tendit non esse.”
(https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/latinconf/11.html)
“Thus we can affirm that time is only in that it tends
towards non–being.” Confessions, Book Eleven, XIV
(Trans. F.J.Sheed, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006], 243).
Only a few chapters later
Augustine reverses himself:
The past exists, the future lies
Not as in being, both in sites
From which we flow, to which we are
In death, certain to be; in life,
Certain we have been, the two times,
Chronos, Kairos: linear tracks splendid,
Awful, uncertain, transcendent Heights.
CONCERT
Allegro
“One either lives toward God, or does not”
—Christian Wiman. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
What stand as unattended sticks,
Now wait attending sap to crawl
Up through the phloem and it lives,
And it will thrive in time, for this
Year it has heart, beneath the earth,
An earth to which it must return.
Adagio
“One either lives toward God, or cannot imagine that he does”
Days in a plague era have no
Coming, no going, the sun’s old route
Means nothing—dawn is sunset off
On another ridge, calendars
Mere gray unfolded scraps of ash.
But an hour’s waste and loss still breathe.
Allegro ma non troppo
“One either lives toward God, or does not recognize that he does”
Inhabiting the common dream
Is accusation, a scarcity
Of dripping gold, of fire, of joy
And yet the blood works keeping us
Edging into hope, mastery,
Might, not over life, but in it.
IL MARINAIO MOLTO VECCHIO
His forearms, still big, shudder, blighted,
His hands, still wide, now desiccate, compound,
Expressionless, eyelids thin as crepe paper,
Cheeks worn, pink as the air in a sunset
Gone dusty, fragile as sand–worn seashells,
Concave, the mumbling a low chant beating
Wings in a slow wind. Nearby cast–off trash
Fish gulp and see and mind, measure, and lie,
And he sees and minds, each stroke of breath, tears
In all their eyes, for every reason, yet
They are the same, the same quivered waves,
The same salted sea.
BATTING CLEANUP
For My Father, Catcher for Triple–A Beaumont
With an early–in–the–inning run, now
Two outs, the empty bases stand useless,
My bare single waiting for a certain
Double play to call us back to field, start
Over, and yet at least three screaming balls
Will break past me as I guess where they might
Be if I swing. Maybe I could slam it,
But that’s not what I’m here for, team is more
Than things, a composite of thought, of plan,
Of expectations, coordinated cause:
A lonely teammate, stuck out there on second,
Waiting for that sizzling single, straight through
Third and short, would strengthen my purpose,
His chatter, jumping, hooting, provoking
The catcher into calling for the ball
I Want, this is what I’m here for, at the plate,
To make all my many pieces matter.
MORS MAGISTER
Not an ending, not a terror,
Not heroic, not cowardly,
Loss, release, ultimate horror,
Not grinning, not setting selves free,
Not expecting, not eternity out of machines.
There is safety, Joy in not simply accepting,
But welcoming, more than passing,
Going, more than peace, more than rest,
But rather an inevitable state of being.
ANNIVERSARY
My gift, in this most desolate
Time, is trying inadequate
For my desire, that knows no start
Opening a childish, frightened heart,
Sullen and shriveled in neglect
Weeping, groaning, I can’t detect
Differences, but still I grind
On, lurching, stumbling, find no sign
To make ways out, and surely stand
Blest. Still I pray dear Jesus’ hand
May touch you now, though there’s more burnet
Sorrow, wrenching, lessons unlearnt.
But pregnant earth, expectant rain,
The motion that has lessened pain
Means mercy finding every eye
Open to touch intended sky,
The spread of leaves that bear the ground,
The owls’ tender, soft–soothing sound,
So the Spirit floats us over,
Finds me true your faithful lover.
ABANDONED BANDSTAND, WINTERS CITY PARK
Past notes, imbedded in peeled
Rafters, could we extract them, found
What music there, if no longer
In our taste, in our life’s vibrant
Present—could any of the joy
Of live music forming us all
Through rounds of breathing and dying?
What would we learn about summer
In a time of fans waving set
To rhythm as against swelter?
Were our someday cells bent to listen?
Those who are feeling no song,
Must be feeling no empathy.
WARTIME FANTASY
NOTE: towards the end of the Second World War in
Italy. The prisoner–of–war camps for surrendering
Germans and Italians were so crowded that a message
was conveyed to America troops to dispatch any more
of the enemy who gave themselves up.
Rather than shooting those smeared German boys,
As orders mandated they had to do,
The almost equally young, beardless Yanks,
Both squads of them umber in Pennine mud,
In the absence of an officer, they
Told them to take on off for Switzerland,
And if they met Fritzies, have a story:
Were captured, lost their Mausers, but there’s
This M–1, only a little beaten,
Taken from their guard, emptied in escape,
A trophy proving their native courage;
And if they were then taken back,
Perhaps a commendation awaited them,
And sent home, to repair a broken land,
And if not, find yet another lucky time
To surrender.
DEATH OF A TREE
“The cypress, because of its dark,
evergreen foliage, has long been
a universal emblem of death.”
—Meinrad Craghead, The Sign of the Tree
Trees die slowly, but inexorably,
Not to be rescued before it begins;
If a cypress, dark leaves, dark leaving, dark
Brown rusted blood, then, and self–snapping dry
Limbs, needing no more than white air herself
To bless the last vestiges of sap trapped
In the roots, still embracing his Mother’s
Connectivity, her beloved bacteria
Wefting a shroud. She regenerates, there
Will still be cypresses stalking the heights
Above all Tuscan graveyards, and sharp fields’
Edges, but in this present, fragile slight
Shadow of this second, mourning is what
Most calls us to kneel, and keen in waver.
FRUIT
A myth of the Maidu tribe of central California, tells how
in the beginning earth was a mass of fire which gradually
concentrated at the center. The roots of trees remained
connected to this fiery core, so allowing fire to be bored
from wood.
—Meinrad Craighead, The Sign of the Tree
If all ends lie in beginnings,
All beginnings have to be there
In all ends. Trees start first with fire,
Set in burning, welcoming depths,
So those drinking roots’ hot arteries
In heart hidden, channelled up through walls,
Immersed in sparks, enabling smoke,
Through long, rough hardy hand–friction;
For anything that has heat has
Life in its strength, thick torso trunks,
Arm branches to entangle the stars,
Twigs as hands, buds’, flowers’ finger
Tips, they stretch for random volumes,
Perches for black grandfather crows:
Enough energy to gender
The fruit that will be falling, that
Must, as the earth’s gift, be eaten,
And flame a replicate womb’s core.
A BLIND, MASSIVE ALSATIAN, IN COUNTY CLARE
For Séamus McElroy
A dark dog in the car park in earshot
Of the sea, in his purpose crossing lanes,
Spaces set apart, and no one sees
He cannot, no one wonders at him there
Crossing through dim ocean shuffle, stone
Scraping, scents of pickle, onion, lost blood
Of remoter times, when all knew blind poets
And blind dogs knew their way, our way,
The clean of the sea’s way, the land’s somber
Minutely pulsing, granite–slipping way.
GOOD FRIDAY, 2021
They linger at the cross, a tape keeps them
From touch or lovers’ kiss, their prayers hard
In pandemic, empty life, work, intimacy,
The space stretches: liturgy might portend
Consolation, ‘sacrifice’ means to make
Sacred, not to lose, but here there is loss,
Loss disredeems, snaps the will, cracks their faith.
And now they kneel at length, the wood lies stark
Against their own sour souls become to die,
As the streets rage, and all their hearts’ life pours,
And it is finely in delay all rise,
To stand, stride, traverse the via backwards.
The scissors cuts blood between helplessness
And help, between hopelessness and hope.
WHITE IRISES
The custom in Islam is to plant white irises
In cemeteries
No irises are planted in rubble,
And still Allah knows the dead children
Lie close in His heart, in clusters as tall
As banners, as sun–stretched sails, as seagulls:
As aged are, before His eyes. Life stays
Slender, however taut the ligatures
Binding it, grim mourning mounts, and rolls out,
But avoids the irises, their supple
Innocence by an accident, yet
In paradise united, as all sharing sweet
Infinite fountains of wine eternal.
AN APOLOGY TO A FAIR VIOLIST
They: “Is that a violin?’
She: “No it’s a viola”
I: “You look smarter than that”
She: “Hey!”
For Anya, in tetrameter
I’m sorry I engaged in such
Crude orchestral humor, unlike
Lawyerly ribbing, for which there’s
Never enough; I now repent
That esteem simply wanes within
Your section, that high or low stand
Still as measure. I, embarrassed,
Now know violas’ liquid grace,
A sharpened, severe chocolate,
Allowing melancholic urges,
Transcending galaxies, to pierce
And mince hearts so unused to depths
Of rich blood, maroon, in snakelike
Sequence, serious to transverse
The brooding way through wandering
Caverns, deep in their delving reach.
For as against feeble human
Distinctions, bright gleam, sober dim,
There streams such sound in personless
Forests, all mourning, vibrating,
Plunging somber; just as violas
Flourish, all the trees grieve in voice:
Fair violists draw down the sun,
Move the moon’s still breathing balance.