Note: Poem Titles Marked with a Double Asterisk (**) Have Been Published or Accepted for Publication.
DAVIS AS A PLACE
The spread of earth here gently stirs our land’s
Skin, stretched out tight, flat, on slow churning stone,
Plunging sea-bed clay miles towards slipping iron;
All then propose life back upward as soil,
As field, encompassed east-west, northward
Thrusting steel rails: it has stayed where the skim
Settled, a notion beyond the Delta,
Rushing for brick-built Chicago and far
Seattle, a split, smoothed over, a space,
A mark replete with meaning.
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 and 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.
**Entering: The Davis Poetry Anthology, 2011, (Davis: 2011), 48.
PRARIE WIFE, 1910
Her face, the color and grit of sullen sand
Along that part of the Green, still like bluffs,
Was set long before in tight wheels of loss
And pinched gain, she knew no more than taking
Care of children, some dying, all gone, then
An infant yet nursing another still,
Tight wheels of food, water, clothes strung out, burnt
Gardens, thin chickens, disease and the wind:
The gray clapboard’s now nearly folded, piece
Lost on piece, the cemetery’s short nubs,
The blurred angel is hers.
VIDEO
A partially true story, in three parts
I
“Where’s my tape?” “What tape?” “The one in the box.”
“What box?” “It had some ballet on it—you
Know: dancers.” “You don’t like ballet.” “I don’t,
But it had a war movie, ‘Western Front.’”
“Why a ballet box?” “I lost the old box,
This was there, and now it’s gone—where is it?”
“I threw it out—I didn’t know.” “God’s
Sake, Muffin, didn’t you look? The tape said,
‘All Quiet of the Western Front’ on it,
Do you just throw everything away? I
Liked that movie.”
II
‘Away’ in this case was
Thriftstore, so she in secret, ashamed, went
There and found it, paid her dollar, came home,
And rewound it for him; but it played just
A bit, to show it wasn’t ballet, war,
But smut, men standing still for just too long,
And busy women in one awkward
Pose after another, no story, no
Words but groans like grieving, though one
Girl, in Georgia rhythms claiming farm
Iowa, said she was glad she had married
Him, to which he grunted in surprise, back
Of a truck, didn’t they have a home? One
Cried, “Come dot com.” Roger wasn’t so long.
III
And she didn’t understand, nor could she
See why women asked for filth, when she
Could only imagine it would hurt, though
She caught one skinny cowboy greasing; they
Wore hats, they kept their shoes on, it made
No sense that there were people watching, filming,
Passing from one to another as if
They hadn’t been introduced. She saw them
In spurting—when she washed her husband’s shorts
After a wet dream, that was no stickiness,
No smell she wanted—the girls in their eye-
Lashes and liner couldn’t either want
It, and yet they pretended. She ejected
It, and put it in a bag for garbage.
RUSSIAN ORTHODOX FUNERAL
In Memory of Peter Janitzky
She is the priest’s wife, he circles
The coffin, chants, censing, ceasing
Censing, circling, she leads the choir,
Four notes, even before he’s done,
Setting four women’s harmonies,
God has been singing deeply
Over and over again, there
Is no motion in the tapers,
There are only intertwining
Circles intersecting, her hand
Rising in soft circles, falling,
Rising, Peter, and now falling,
As the City fell, not rising,
Constantinople, and exile
Courts in Nicea, Trebizond
Wept and were beautiful, and you
Intoning in my classes, touched,
Your voice falling in the telling,
Peter, in tears: loss has boneless
Hands. I have placed brittle, gray earth
On your coffin, there are flowers,
There are still her sacred, sonant
Ceremonies as enchanting.
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
I as a pale boy stood outside our Ford
And splashed water there where the sign had said,
“Continental Divide,” hoping to see
Rivulets part eagerly, flow 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 all masteries’ 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.
REFLECTION
Anxiety’s jackrabbit, shaggy-legged,
She rattles her eye at two long dogs
Beginning their lope, what at fifty yards,
Invisible, unlikely, she hopes brown
Earth will mother her, and at forty yards,
They wait, advance, she avalanches out.
And now the worry’s over, now useless
Death and life atremble follow, now hearts
Go plunging, yet the instant, irretrieved,
Lasts forever.
CATARACT
This is no precipice, no incessant
Rough hissing water in Scotland, lashing
A dubious Mendelssohn, closeted
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.
“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.
A BLIND, MASSIVE ALSATIAN, IN COUNTY CLARE
For Seamus 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.
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.
ORCHESTRAL WARM-UP:
SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY, 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.
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,
Being towed by Japanese, Korean,
Viet or Filipina women grown
Pudgy like them, and losing out their sex,
But just stealing bloody meat to serve them
Sacrifice.
THE PAGE-TURNER AT THE PIANO
The only piece he’s playing involves
Rising a bit too early, or too late,
Separating two stuck sheets from the score;
Note after each enchained note, he consumes
Care, but moves only when he’s nodded to.
As editors, Jack, this is what we are,
Turning another’s pages, that one who’s
Fixed in type, imprinted programs, when we
Are but thanked off-stage, in prefaces’ last
Unmarked paragraphs for aid; if we are
So ripe indispensable, why do we
Afterwards gather up loose pages,
Self-consciously, then slither from the stage?
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.
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.
PUTTING AWAY DISHES:
A KITCHEN WALTZ
No Strauss could have orchestrated the dance
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.
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 sweep, spread, in circumnavigation,
Petals flying like eyelids on triumph
Sensual saints, banner and crevices,
Proud and tender in a surge of gracious.
BRASS POSTAL WEIGHTS
The contrast can be called theatrical:
Swedish weights hammered with crowns everywhere
There might be wear, to the loss of a gram,
Stamped as well with regular, intervaled years,
When some smiling postal inspector weighted
Each against sets meticulously turned,
Nested in velvet. And, amid the gossip,
Punched in the truth for validation.
Such kind solace was only winter warmth:
The goal wasn’t the weight itself, but just
The upper boundary a letter might
Approach, but not exceed: the minimum had
no meaning. The envelope’s slight, straight womb
Mattered nothing to the brass, and so weight
Will succeed, whatever lives have been
Affected. Lunch was fish, bread, beer and cheese.
Italian weights stand dull, bored, squat, mute,
Perfunctory, registered dekagrams
A nervous, unhappy, fumbling clerk, lone, unchecked,
His native poetry lost in tearing stamps
Nervously, and counting out trembling change,
Sighing with the weight’s oppression,
Miserable their cold bearing, artless touch,
Even in the caress of soulful sun
In summer, temporizing until one
Siesta departure, for pasta, ripe
Fruit, the joy of his wife, waiting, olives
In her eyes, for softness, the smack of sweat,
The rhythms of sending and receiving
That ponders, weighs and gains and loses weight.
ANA- KAI KATABASIS: 1812
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book 3, 2; Book 4, 14
Not Tolstoy’s condemnation, but there was
The worst day on which to be born
Seekers have observed new planets
However foretold, the women knew the boys
To Incarnation, once again,
It has been so many months, years it seems
Crowds still shout at me about Allende,
Though we tangled in another life, I’ll
“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
Crossways at orders beyond imaging
VII. “Le premier dit: ‘J’ai bien dormi.’
Compactness requires no explanation, the boys
It might have been misreading an icon
For Jack, Feeling His Age
No desolation, but contrast rather
“Older Italian men, with their big families,
tip the best”
Perhaps the urging reason is a young
The crooked ambiance of middle-aged
Oh, that the Yangtze were poured in my inkpot,
A phoebe’s monotony isn’t just
Coming home to a house dark without you,
Upright mirrors facing one another
The massive towers of Los Angeles
She’ll not remember what the five was for,
Soon enough, let it not be just too
Mater dolorosa,
I need your welcome and your diamond tears,
The purest will perch over what’s most flawed,
That is no languorous moon, but rapid
His wonder: Napoleon at the brim,
Too occupied to mark Polish Ulans
Gamely plunging the Vilna, exclaiming,
“Vivat!” and some of them slipped 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?
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.
BEETHOVEN’S BIRTHDAY
DECEMBER 16th
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 light
Across rooms, impinge on random
Motes, as less-than-obvious flow
And measures impel them, as sharps,
Flats, spheres as droplets composed
On a score. You know that seasons
Have each their own glorious voice,
Their movements; that triumph is choice
Allowed the sun, seeking ether,
A glass incarnate, or obscured
In ensheeted cloud covering
To glow somber, but, above, burst
Ready for your ears to lift up
To it.
PROCEDURE
After all we are amateurs
as we have not lived our life before
Jack Weiss, October 25th, 2015
Proceeding from their belly-taut
Mother suns, innocent pure blaze,
Hopeful as bird swarms, cavalcades
Of mountains, wind-shepherded waves.
What cannot be observed can be
Assumed, beyond the wizened tyrant
That the past is, sour memories
That no longer express except
Through constructed guilt: these bodies
Aborn are emerging, begun
Cooling, participant in all
Affectionate intermeshing
Galaxies tied umbilical
With each other; the Time Before
Is, like the single self is not,
Not, but Now is burnished perhaps,
Stretched into risk, spun in fresh love.
VISITATION:
THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
In their wombs wouldn’t hold the two apart,
So close they were in loving embracing,
As connected as communion in the touch
Slight at their arms—it is by way of this
Tremendous care all of us come out, forth,
Into being, the angelic closer
Attachment that streams from wine, blood and chaste
Water.
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).
A registration must attain,
Bureaucrats, enslabbéd, judge
Him 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.
LA VEDOVA: THE WIDOW
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.
“I KNOW THEE NOT, OLD MAN. FALL TO THY PRAYERS”
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 far-off lives
So that we were proven right—I have not
Outgrown power and seduction,
In stymied fitness to be president,
I travel, stand puzzled when 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
Mourn you now, knowing that, had we both 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
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.
DISPERSED HORSES STANDING
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.
THREE YOUNG SCHOLARS
Le second dit: ‘Et moi aussi.’
A ajouté le plus petit:
‘Je me croyais au paradis !’”
A children’s Saint Nicholas song
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.
From far-off Greece, Nicholas saving three
Princes from destruction, with the grateful men
Rising from their towers, their dwarf aspect
Most like a tub, in thanks. The princes cramped,
Nicholas looms, in blessing; this is no
Ring-dance story: rather than gleaned, the sliced
Scholars are, not lessons, but miracles
Of life beyond a nightly, steep sleep
From which belief rescues them from terror,
And places them, from the smallest, in sure
Paradise.
CALIFORNIA SAVANNAS
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.
WAITRESSING
—A Former New York Waitress
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.
PERSPECTIVE
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.
LI-PO MOURNS SPILLED DROPS OF INK
And the Three Gorges full of characters,
Waiting for me to bend and kiss
My unwritten poetry, scrawled in impatient
Sheets of paper.
PHOEBES
Begging, fond females are common enough,
The choosing is, as one says, complicate;
Yet the nests appear, and so do all those
New phoebes, singers and sung-to, balance,
Though driven by gene-machines to adapt,
Evolution arrives to bless them, with most
Random-sounding, assorted merriment.
SWAMP-TREADING
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.
MIRRORS
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.
COLLAPSE
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.
THE FIVE-DOLLAR BILL: DANTE’S PURGATORIO:
THE STAGE OF AVARICE
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.
SOON ENOUGH
soon, the tumble of transforming
Let it be, just the beginning
Of it, but not too soon, the part
Chasm, and eventual abyss:
It will be in any case, it
Will be, will be, but not so soon.
COMPLICATIONS IN ROSE
I need to know the joy in your 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 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
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 appetite. 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
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, and Mike’s Mother, too, both
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
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.
CONCERTO
“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.
“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.
“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 Beaumont AAA
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.
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.
ABANDONED BANDSTAND, WINTERS
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 execute 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
Trees die slowly, but inexorably,
Not to be rescued before it begins;
If a cypress, dark leaves, dark leaving, dark
Red 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
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.
WHITE IRISES IN A MUSLIM CEMETERY
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 the just 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 one sharing sweet
Infinite fountains of wine eternal.
POISE: THE APPLEGATE BALLET STUDIO
DAVIS
Slight slips of planed poplar, rest into curl.
They absorb within, beauty of gesture,
Stature, balance, water-like potential
Vortices, cores like willow hearts, straightened
As just-planted birch, held in limbed, shallow
Solid air, to become in love with their
Bodies. As a bass-viol clutches, paused,
This instant re-sculpts their souls, their eyes tight,
Set to belong to arm and hand, still, serene,
Anticipate in curvature of grace.
ROSES AT A FUNERAL
For being beautiful, roses are tough:
I've transplanted many, and they've caught on,
Most caring when I talk to them, always
Wanting more water, but happy with what
They get, but now global warming betrays
Them, sepia, crisp, trembling leaves, many
Canes stipped naked, flaunted accusations
Against my pretense, I who murder flourish
For money, and when I like others make
Their deaths sacred, we assassins have lost,
Slain yet another, better way to live.