Here we go again.

This first poem is a continuation of my poem "losses" from the last post. the second is what happens when a recovering Catholic reflects. The third is what happens when a recovering catholic gets drunk.


15. The old man is monkeying around
Under the hood and the sun
and mom
Is reading a book aloud
About a family that adopts a whitetail fawn.
They eventually have to tie pink ribbons
To its antlers
To show the hunters why this animal is unafraid
Why it would be foolish to shoot it
And one day it does not walk into the yard
Out of the dark woods.
Mom pauses and looks out the window into the pines
We hear the wind and our breathing
And the old man’s colorful language
And the ticking of the overheated engine.
Someday we will have a car that is dependable.
That will be a sad day.

16. A loon followed the boat
Watching every cast as if the lure
Were a new animal
It could learn to love
Something
worth building a nest
on a waterlogged stump for
Something
It could greet the sun with
Something
That would not go away.


18. seventeen fell before the invading hordes
And perished in the mud of history
Choking on the blood and bone
Of its shattered existence.
This lack of voice is its power
And its legacy.
A warm blanket covering its sixteen predecessors .
This is its being and its nothingness.

19. the gravel crunches under the tires
As I pull the car into the turn-off
And I hear the gulls screaming from down the bluff.
This dune country holds white and red pines
By their spidery roots
Until the water and wind exposes enough
Of the wooden labyrinth to upend them.
This is the building of the mountains of sand.
The dead and bleached bones of trees
Catching and holding and rising.
I look out past the pines into lake Michigan
And watch the burn of the sun
On the sharp whitecaps that break the deep green horizon.
US-2 will carry me out of the state of my birth
Into the nation of my exile.

20. this snowshoe hare shrieks like a child
For a slaughtered moment.
Redskin potatoes, baby carrots, yellow onions,
Rutabaga, cracked black peppercorns,
A half-dozen large cloves of garlic,
Three-quarters cup of water,
And a single bay leaf,
Will soften the animal’s pain
As its life becomes more life
As its body becomes my body.

21. what if the iceberg were not bigger under the water?
What then would we fear out on the high seas?
The truly serious lack of ice would force
The sailors into stories of giant squid out for the blood
Of the virginal.
That is what the unseen mass of ice would become.
The blood of the pure, innocent, and ignorant.

22. the arm he held her with is no more.
It went missing on a hot june day in the back meadows.
Fields full of alfalfa and clover
And sporadic patches of milkweed
That was grown to fill the life vests
Of soldiers during world war two.
The arm he held her with was torn from him
In a field that saved ten thousand lives
Seventy-years ago.
The man he was is looked for
Everyday
By the woman she has become.

23. tonight I sleep on the floor
Next to a man from cinncinnati
And across from a loud woman
On her way to san diego.
This train stops in cleveland
Not cinncinnati.
I fear for my neighbor.
I always do.






“on being raised knowing a wealthy god”
How many earthworms
have I killed
By opening this ground
To the winter-starved robins?

How many neighborhood cats
have I fed
By starting this garden
And inviting
those orange-bellied birds ?
Everything must eat
And I will thank the dead
While I savor the tomatoes
From this holy place.

This is the suffering of guilt
And the atomic structure of truth.



“zen”
I stole tulips from under beaumont tower for my mother.
They were gifts to the university from the queen of holland.
My mother admired them on her last visit to campus
And our scholars had more than one-hundred thousand.
Fifteen would not be missed.
They were dug up on a warm april evening
And put in a backpack next to a half-empty
Half-full
Fifth of jameson.
The moon showed its full fat face
And lit my efforts.
After I had pilfered the royal goods
I sat beneath the tower
And toasted the moon
and all the queens.
My mother loves those tulips
And the story
Of their origin.
A quality sin i say.

Trains, Writers, A Moving Truck, And One Pissed Off Panda.

I have been out and about quite a bit in the last month. I took my second train escapade to Washington and Philadelphia and found the whole mode of rail travel to be built especially for me. I remember when the Detroit & Mackinac line was still running and I would see those trains come through and think, fairly seriously, about chasing one down and seeing where I would end up. It is likely for the best that I did not act on that impulse because I would have ended up in either Detroit or Mackinac and while both of those places have, relatively speaking, very redeeming qualities they would not have lived up to the romantic notions that I had nurtured.

Rail travel is an excellent catalyst for a romantic. I guessed at the lives of my fellow riders. I imagined the train falling off the tracks in the middle of the Allegheny mountains and into the Allegheny or Monogahela Rivers and floating the rest of the way. I watched trains like those I grew up with pass us by full of cattle, pigs, coal, iron ore, scrap steel, and chemicals I do not even want to guess at. I spoke to a nurse from Baltimore who hated her job and wanted to just stay home and teach her daughter. I spoke to a man who sells skyscrapers to anyone interested in buying one. He was on his way to close a billion dollar sale in Chicago. Apparently that is the general asking price for these imposing monsters of steel and concrete and glass. I watched a domestic dispute over an extremely expensive shooter made of two-parts vodka and one-part gin. This particular drink caused me quite a bit of distress for a while, not from drinking it, but from imagining anyone else drinking it.

Both Union Station in Washington and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia are wonderful pieces of historical architecture. Any of you who know me well can picture the scene: I am standing in the middle of a throng of people staring up at the ceilings of these gorgeous depots trying to figure out the designs and knocking over folks in my own special and clumsy way.

To make a long story short I helped Rachel move her stuff from Philly to DC over the weekend so the initial journey was from South Bend to Washington to Philadelphia to Lederach which is a nice solid twenty-four hours of travel. We spent a full day filling the truck and then had a surprisingly uneventful drive from Lederach back to Washington on I-95. With the help of a half-dozen fine people we were able to unload the truck in one/sixteenth the time it took to fill it. Yay for fine people!!!

Rachel's apartment is in the Mount Pleasant area and just across Rock Creek from the National Zoo which was my commute everyday to the American Writers and Publishers Conference. I saw an elephant playing with a squirrel, a gorilla demolish a pile of snow, and I made a panda angry with my constant questions and comments. Pandas are a bit uppity and do not care to converse all that much. I saw a male lion knock a cub tumbling over some rocks. I watched a tiger watch me and knew I looked delicious. There was much more but instead of telling the stories I would simply suggest that you all get yourselves to a zoo soon and keep your eyes open. Things will happen, as they do, in all kinds of spectacular ways.

Writers are an odd lot. I met some decent people and made some good contacts that I hope to keep working with for a long time. I knocked over Joyce Carol Oates. I heard some lovely poetry and had some strange discussions. I talked to more publishers than I could have even guessed existed. I drank whiskey sours, some good and some bad, in the bar where Langston Hughes used to work and where he passed a couple of his poems to Vachel Lindsay under a glass of wine while serving that cranky Russian. Interestingly I had no idea Hughes had worked there until I got back to South Bend and received a book from the lovely Rachel telling me this bit of literary history. It seems like something that might be shared with writers at a writers conference. I guess not.

I had many excellent walks in Washington with people from many different universities, publishing houses, and by myself, but the best ones were always with Rachel who knows the city well and likes to share her knowledge with me.

All of this said I have been writing, of course, about Washington quite a bit recently. I am thinking of turning it into a one-hundred poem project. Here are the first three. Be well friends.




The washington poems


"epiphanies & epochs"
A moment like that when the sun
Shines as the rain falls

heavy. Or when your mother finds
the porn under the bed

and cannot look you in the face
without laughing

and you know what she is laughing
about because she stole one

and left it on the coffee table next to
a good housekeeping.

There are moments that exist outside of themselves.
Like walking through the national zoo

And watching a one and a half-ton asian elephant
Playing games

With a black phase grey squirrel
And it is easily noticeable

That these two have been friends for
Quite some time.

Your mother would giggle and wink
At this.




“such certainty”
They whitewash the apartments to rid them of their history
But sometimes they forget to patch the holes
And we can see where the wineglass
Hit the wall
After missing the ducking head
During a discussion about healthcare policy
For theoretical people
In maine or texas.

I make up stories about the scratch on the floor
Where a drunken intern for senator so and so
Slid naked on a saddleback chair
All the while trying to not upset the two bottles of malbec
Balanced on the palm of each hand.

The outlet under the bed was broken after both occupants returned from work
With guatemalean fighting cocks under their arms
A strange but not unheard of coincidence
And the birds became indignant
And fought to a feathery death.
The winner dying later in the evening from horrific wounds
Suffered while being cleaned for dinner
The loser expiring after being thrown into the wall
And sticking a spur into
One hundred-twenty volts of pepco.

Did the others discuss cookware?
She was right about what I have said about non-stick surfaces
But I often forget what I say.
No harm done.




"the farmer's kitten and the cooper's hawk"
The police look on
But do nothing
About the man sleeping in a box
On the steps leading to the senate side
Of the capital.
I wonder at their thoughts.
Do they judge or suffer for him?

Likewise there is a cooper’s hawk
In the main reading room of the library of congress.
It is like the one I saw in the barn chasing a tawny kitten
After a third cutting of decepit hay
On a mid-august morning.
It did not seem to want to hurt the tiny thing
Just the chase was enough.

The experts believe this particular raptor
followed a rat or pigeon through an open door.
There is no sign of the vermin.
Experts are known to be wrong.

There is the chance that this hawk saw
A door with shadows
And possibilities within
Like a hopper window
With the curtains blowing into another life unknown
And it just said “fuck it, let us see what we can see.”
And it exercised its rights
Like the guy sleeping in the box.

The police should escort him to the library.
they should let him settle
next to the Gutenberg
that cost as much as a block of rowhouses
in adams-morgan.
it should be his manifest destiny.

Open the doors that I paid for
And let this man
And all the hawks
And rats and pigeons
Tawny kittens and tired farmers
and adams-morgan hipsters
in.

let us all in
and we can see
what we can see
and that should be
just enough.

Back from hiatus.

It has been a hectic, sad, and wonderful time for the last month. I am pleased to say that there are plenty of grand goings on, errr, going on. I have spent some quality time in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Northern Michigan, a train through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I have drank and danced and played and written and thought and loved and been loved quite nicely over the past bit of time. It makes for difficulties in trying to post updates on this thing. I remain very busy but have decided to pick this all back up and give it another run. I appreciate those of you, my good and kind friends, who care enough to bother me about such things. I wish you all well and will try to be more timely. Again.

Here are some poems I have been working on. They are all still in progress but they have been finished enough so that you can get the gist fairly easily.



“losses”
1. It can be as small as a key
Or a lucky coin, rabbit’s foot, phone number
On a napkin.
It can be the leaves dropping from the maples along the street
Or the opening of the ice on the bay.
Burying a dog
has sometimes brought more suffering than
Burying an angry man
who happened to share my blood.
I remember
the white ponies that burned in the barn
The black bones.
Thinking
This used to be one thing and is now another.
No certainty
as to what was removed
and what gained.

2. This café is going somewhere
And they are holding the secret close.
The view of the bad traffic pattern
will soon be gone.
It has been a comfortable and dark cave
Where many worthy projects were born
friends and lovers laughed and talked
It had done well, as cafes go, successful.
There has always been, to me, confusion
As to what success actually is.

The landlord was angered by the politics
There was no reason given but this is the one inferred
And rightly so.
This place pays for itself
By itself
In a dead sea of commerce and ambition without soul,
Without thought.
It is too real for this particular reality.
All of the good things are.

3. There is a canadian geologist living in sweden
And an american biologist in france,
A Michigan painter in iowa city
A government aid worker from philadelphia
A sad poet in south bend
And this is what travel gets you:
Movement and missing parts.

4. A weathered piece of paper on the light pole
Surrounded by the tacks of former occupants
Shows what may be a dog,
Maybe a cat,
At least something in the mode of a pet
That disappeared
On a wet and grey day a month before
When a man stood in his front doorway
Coffee in hand
looking out at the bouncing pebbles of water
a slight body brushed past his pajama clad leg
Never to be seen again.

5. This song reminds this girl of that boy
And she moves her head back and forth
Without meaning to
Forgetting that she hates him.

6. Under a crooked stack of books
Is found the one
that was read
during he death of the woman
who fed him,
Cleaned him, loved him, built him.
It was about a crazed sea captain
His crew and a terribly angry whale
Of an unnatural color.
Finding the book made the coffins
Explode to the surface
Open
And allow life
Once again.

7. The chickadee looked at the feeder
And was saddened by the fact
That the squirrels had been the earliest
Visitors to this once perfect place.

8. A mechanic of the brain
Told him a lie
About how things would go back
To what they were.
Money was exchanged for bad theories
And the only normalcy to come
Was the setting of the western sun.

9. A thousand words are shown to her
And she acts as if she remembers
But
Actually
Her history is at odds with the facts
And if
In the evening
She could remember her dreams
She would know this.
Her invented nightmares seem to overpower
Her blessed existence.
Nothing gets better.
She will not let it because there is excitement
In the fictional foundations of her pain.
Happiness is
To her
The most boring of trends.
She would even argue
with the smile in the photograph
Just to make sure it never happened again.

10. As the soul left the fox
Did it ask the question:
“have I lived my life the right way?”
Or
just let out that one last reluctant breath
And cease the worries of its hard life?
Neither question
Stops the wind and rain from bringing down the mountains.

11. That thing that made me jump out of bed
Every day and run from moment to moment
Without worry.
That thing that made me smile at the barn cats
Chasing one another through the shadows
In loft that always had the smell
of july.
That thing that made me take someone at their word
And believe that their mean ways were
Simple mistakes.
That time before my brain cracked my skull
And invaded that fine world.
Here I sit knowing exactly what I want to say
And hating it.

12. A woodcut of clean light through
White pine branches
That I disrespected enough
To put a cup on
And one drop of coffee ran slowly down
The side to create a bronze circle
In the sky
Of the setting or rising sun.
It was given away against my wishes
And now I only see this outline of thought.
I sometimes spill coffee
With the hope that I can rebuild
The beauty
That the dark liquid will grow a tree
And the light
Of the most ambiguous of times.

13. When I did not drink
I was a terrible bastard
And the most judgmental fool I knew.
We must never fear the bottle
For it is the best of friends.
It kills the bastard
And throws away the gavel
And makes us all grow up a little.
Leave the keys on the table
Empty a bottle or two
On a walk through the city
Along the river
Or into the trees.
Commune with that which is hidden
By ugly sobriety.

14. the radio was not always this painful.
It used to play merle, waylon, Johnny, willie,
Some paycheck.
Now we have the travesty of modern twang.
An evil imitation without the busted bones and bruises.
Even the steel of the guitar is tempered.









"routine"

A dusting of hoarfrost on the leaves
Of the maples and oaks
The branchs look like glass
And the cold morning wind
Rattles them without tone
In gorgeous perfection.

I am reminded of a late October morning
When I awoke to the same
Scene
In a different play.
I went to water the horses
And on the trough’s thin skin of ice
Stood a single chickadee
Moving along with the breeze.
A tiny black and grey figure skater
Not concerned by the audience
Consisting of a boy and three Belgian’s.
The horses were waiting patiently
For the bird to finish its routine
And I looked to hills ten miles north
Thinking
“I hope I never forget this”
And here
In this city
With sirens and gunshots and angry yells
Exists trees wrapped in frozen water
Making sounds
Like a small bird full of life.
there is a healthy world under the thin skin
of this place.






“two short stories: a critique”
In the Pretrushevskaya story “The Arm”
the pilot tells the colonel not to be concerned
by the appearance of his decrepit plane
the stump of flesh
that used to be his navigator
or the smell of cooked meat.
“I had a small crash on the way here.”
And the colonel accepts this with military grace.

Murakami’s “The Folklore Of Our time”
is resplendent with outward success
smothering inner turmoil.
The pain of popularity is thrown in the face of the judgmental
and ignorant.
The golden boy never gets his angelic other
although she promises herself to him after she becomes betrothed to another.
They try but they fail
look lovely in their suffering.


the end.








"there is no moderation"

On my travels of the morning
The leaves of three trees
Through some happy circumstance
Found their way to me.

The leaf of the cottonwood was large and rough as a farmer’s hand
But a muted yellow that gentled it
Making it sweet and comfortable
As if the farmer were holding his daughter
After some disappointment or heartbreak
That he knew would pass
But felt her pain all the same

The oak leaf
Fell on me like a stone thrown
By some angry youth who knows not the damage that can be done.
It was a crisp brown
The loss of life was the loss of color.
It was an atheist leaf
holding out for existence but not for death.
The end was the end.

Finally a dainty and serrated river birch leaf
That seemed made of copper and gold
Found its way onto my leg.
Of the three
it should have been the quickest to blow away from me
But it seemed anchored
As if it were a part me
It seemed to have a more serious weight than that of the other two.
It was the runt that held firm to be respected.
The small birch leaf
Was the one that made me
Truly happy.
It fought to be.
it made itself important.
It was a small leaf
But it was also a painting
And a book
And many thoughts
Flowing
From the bending tree
In the wind and the sun
Its brothers and sisters floated on the river
To other lives
To the lakes
To the cities
To the everywhere
While this one traveled with me
Telling me its powerful little philosophy
In a quiet but noble voice.

Yes, it is true. I am still doing this thing.

It must be said that a few close friends have been pushing for more content here. A wonderfully loud Canadian Geologist living in Sweden at the moment and a grand and heartsick Biologist living in France. I find it interesting that the world travelers are the ones with time enough to complain to me about posting. I love complaint so I appreciate and applaud their efforts. To all my friends, not just the lucky globetrotters, I say this: life is terribly hectic but there must, must always be time enough for art and creation. If we lose our creativity then we lose our sense of worth. We become drones and automatons without any real understanding of self. It is good to have friends that will kick you in the ass when you need it. Sorry if I Have not given you guys anything interesting recently. I will try to be better.


THE ROAD AND THE END

I SHALL foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the traveled road
Shall touch my hands and face.

Carl Sandburg




"From One Who Stays"

How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange
That other men still go accustomed ways!
I hate their interest in the things they do.
A spectre-horde repeating without change
An old routine. Alone I know the days
Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.

AMY LOWELL







“knowing the field”
this morning begins with a ceiling of cedar
panels and my eye tracing the knots
thinking
of how much is too much to drink
and coming to no conclusions.

i remember a bad rock band preceded by a much better jukebox
that played merle, willie, and hank
over and over
a girl
with what seemed to be a bandana for a shirt
she was with a biker
who looked and sounded the part
but his hands were soft.

the best guess
being he was a lawyer
when the expensive chromed motorcycle was taken into consideration.

we had spent the early morning
under the orange and pink eastern sky
cutting hay
windrowing it
into straight and fragrant lines that stretched
twenty acres.
the dogs
ran behind us
chasing the rabbits that were confused
by the change of landscape.
we drank
well-water from gallon jugs.
sweet on our dry lips under the growing sun
and the smell of the first cutting
on our darkened skins
keeping us solid and in our easy places.

at night the coyotes
leave the swamp
to play in this moon drenched field.
the rabbits would hide in the tall alfalfa
watching.

they must learn to run today
rather than hide.
pound the blood through their delicate veins
so that it may not spill.

while the rabbits educate themselves
the farmers drink too much under neon
and dance in their heavy boots
leaving a dry mud mosaic on the floor.

artists in all of the important ways
seeing patterns
in the work, the fields, the jukebox
and the knots of the cedar.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson







From HENRY FOOL:


Henry lifts up one of Simon's newly acquired classics...

HENRY
And look, if you're gunna read
Wordsworth you've gotta get a more
up-to-date edition. This odoriferous
tome you're so attached to doesn't
even have all fourteen books of the
Prelude. And you need notes.
Commentary. I'll go to the library
and find you the best edition they
have.

SIMON
Thank you, but that's OK. I'll stop
there on my way back from work. Well,
yes, maybe not today, but, you know,
tomorrow, probably.

HENRY
Quit.

SIMON
My job?

HENRY
Yeah.

SIMON
Why?

HENRY
You need time to write, Simon. To
study. To reflect.

SIMON
But I like my job.

HENRY
We all have to make sacrifices. A
vocation like ours, Simon, is not a
nine to five thing. You can't put a
fence around a man's soul. We think
and feel where and when we can think
and feel. We are the servants of our
muse and we toil where she commands.





“description is like fencing a soul”
do not talk to me of sacrifice you lazy bastard
you beautiful and interesting lazy bastard.
i know nothing of your imprisonment but judge you all the same.

that is what we are. Judges of everything different from us.
Judges without history without crucial information
with misplaced hearts like filthy coinage stuck in worn down broken sofas

strung along the streets of some third-rate college town.
you want to fix that heart? then you reach between those cushions
and we will go from there.

only the desperate do of course. those who need Schlitz
and pool funds. those who need to find something,
anything , just to continue.

every so often a homer or hesiod rears up a disturbed voice
sometimes an ovid answers with a different tone
and a discussion commences

but mostly it is more of a bly. loud and interesting for a moment
but too heavyhanded to live very long in another head.
a frightened mind born


of a little knowledge with no direction. Structured more on chaos
theory than any sense of form. enough bullets fired find
the mark. eventually.

let us for a moment, my simon, think of you and while thinking
of you let us also paint into this picture that other bane
of humanity, jesus.

absentee father. misunderstood to a dangerous fault. portrayed
as quite sexless. a solitary dead-end job. crucified
and apparently risen.

You could be brothers, my simon, but he did not have me to guide
his way through the philistines. If anything i
am the mary Magdalene

character but instead of washing your feet I will bathe your mind
and cleanse you of your impure self-doubt and
show you how to love.

Where does one go from yahweh’s child? vonnegut of course.
sacrifice, my simon, does not just mean
one thing only, alone.


it is a process and gathering of many outcomes eventually becoming
loss. Sometimes it goes unnoticed by the one giving
up the ghost, so to speak.

could you imagine walking into a slaughterhouse in beautiful Dresden
then walking out, alive, surrounded by an allied
kristalnacht?

the sacrifice then was of the soul and born of that suffering was a
fractured multi-dimensional account of the
good guys doing bad things.

growth, in other words, my simon. growth from the soil that was
tended by an enemy and a friend. These two
things are the same.

these psycho-philosophical meanderings have put me in mind of
the russians. not those of kubrick infamy but
the originators

gogol and his self-loathing mixed with dostoyevsky’s bleak
brushstroke and chekhov’s mostly
rhetorical questioning.


these men knew sacrifice and called it life. They understood this
disease well. What a grandiose
illness it is,

my simon , to be afflicted by the expansion of the lungs in unison
with a mind unfettered by the
shackles of normalcy

like a slave freed by a mere thought. this is power that no bomb nor
war nor trial of man can
tear asunder.

mark these words as true, my simon, that even as we shit,
you and i, we are beyond
the ordinary. well beyond.

we sit at the right hand of fyodor and drink from a cup offered to
us by homer himself who is closer
to our jesus .

it matters not if we are from st. petersburg or athens or south bend.
what does mean something is where we find
ourselves eventually.


we have to travel the right paths, my simon, or we become lost and
simple. the curse of the garbage man
is simplicity

and a tight schedule. It is a necessity to gather the trash but it is
not our necessity. In fact we can live
in filth and must

to understand qualification. This is good and this is bad and this is
somewhere in between like an
over-ripe orange.

our place in this world, my simon, is to witness and then describe
with crystalline clarity at times the
absolute junk

while, at other times, we must show the most gorgeous series of
events with a single word. this
is our test

to know what to sacrifice and when.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson






“A good-sized hate for the boat-tailed grackle”
I used to sleep poorly
Because I was sure the devil
Was beneath my bed.
You cured that with your simple presence.
I could hear you breath and dream
And knew then
That it was safe for me to do the same.

I awoke to chores and you helped feed the cattle
And the overbred horses would stamp out their frustration
In staccato code against the bottom rail of the corral
Until we poured the oats into the trough.
They purred like barn-cats then.
This fascinated you.

You stood at my side as the hay caught fire
The jumping flames
And the screams and the smell
Like where the devil really lived.
That night I prayed that he was back under my bed
So we could have it out
For what he did
For those he stole.


I told you to leave and you did
And I closed my eyes challenging
the black angel
But he had other appointments
Instead
I rode bareback the bay
Through a clover -field under fresh cotton and sapphire.
I had on the boots we could never afford.
I was followed by tawny mourning-doves
And cardinals dripping scarlet
And out of every lost feather grew a red-oak.
I dug my hands into the black wire mane
And felt the equine history overshadow my own
The power I used and took for granted
Was bleeding up through my arms defying
Gravity and other laws that we will name
Without ever really comprehending
Behind me a sound
Of tearing muscle
The ripping of flesh
And beyond the tragic doves
Beyond the cardinals shedding their souls
Beyond the now tall and massive oaks
A blackness condensed on the horizon
Like a harsh wool blanket pulled over
A once laughing face
The cloud screamed with a thousand voices
My head snapped forward
Because if I stared too long
I would see the things behind me
The field stretched on into small hills
And on the far side
Mountains of a color that cannot exist
A yellow purple like a bruise between
The azure sky and the fertile earth
Salvation lay in those unlikely mountains

Again the dark chorus
louder and sharper
as if it needed my attention to continue on
turning
the red oaks were ash
surrounded by bright embers
that once were cardinals and doves
there were birds still
the cloud was made of black birds
shrieking diving snapping
like miniature crows
eyes without pity or empathy
eyes devoid of anything like a soul
they looked like a thousand rags
soaked in oil
begging for a flame

the animal beneath me was powerful but tiring
and I could feel its heart
pounding on the anvil of its ribs

I looked again to the mountains
And standing on the last hill
Between myself and peace
Was a tall man outfitted like a priest
In a habit the color of a deep hole in the ground
And the air around him bent
As if not wanting to be too close

The hellish menagerie was almost upon me
And driving me into god-awful company
As the first bird touched me
with an ebony wing
the tall man looked at me and smiled
warmly
like he knew me.


“are you there?”
I asked into the night sounds
Of crickets and bullfrogs
I took a deep breath and focused on the ceiling
That my mother had painted eggshell white
“to let the light in” she had said
And it seemed to
“are you there? Please?”
And I heard you in the hall
Pitter-pattering into the room
Licking my hopeful outstretched hand
And crawling under the bed
To drive the boat-tailed grackles and the devil himself
Away from the mountains.

There is very little difference between
god and a good dog.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson

The dangers of barefoot soccer...

are many. The worst of these are toes popping out the bottom of one's foot. Actually, the worst is likely having a foot fall off but the toe thing is pretty bad too. The nice advantage to hopping about on one foot is that it slows life down and clarifies thoughts. True wisdom is knowing this trick without the blood and broken bones. It is very hard to be wise. Mainly I would say that injuries can be a lot of fun if looked at properly. It is only the truth. Read these poems slowly and soak them in.


"THERE ARE THOSE WHO LOVE TO GET DIRTY"

There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.



GARY SNYDER



"FLYING AT NIGHT"

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.


TED KOOSER






"summer sadness"

The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,
Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair,
Melting the incense on your hostile features,
Mixing an amorous liquid with the tears.

The immutable calm of this white burning,
O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly,
‘Will we ever be one mummified winding,
Under the ancient sands, and palms so happy?’

But your tresses are a tepid river,
Where the soul that haunts us drowns, without a shiver
And finds the Nothingness you cannot know!

I’ll taste the unguent of your eyelids’ shore,
To see if it can grant to the heart, at your blow,
The insensibility of stones and the azure.

Stéphane Mallarmé







"PATRIOTICS"

Yesterday a little girl got slapped to death by her daddy,
out of work, alcoholic, and estranged two towns down river.
America, it's hard to get your attention politely.
America, the beautiful night is about to blow up

and the cop who brought the man down with a shot to the chops
is shaking hands, dribbling chaw across his sweaty shirt,
and pointing cars across the courthouse grass to park.
It's the Big One one more time, July the 4th,

our country's perfect holiday, so direct a metaphor for war,
we shoot off bombs, launch rockets from Drano cans,
spray the streets and neighbors' yards with the machine-gun crack
of fireworks, with rebel yells and beer. In short, we celebrate.

It's hard to believe. But so help the soul of Thomas Paine,
the entire county must be here--the acned faces of neglect,
the halter-tops and ties, the bellies, badges, beehives,
jacked-up cowboy boots, yes, the back-up singers of democracy

all gathered to brighten in unambiguous delight
when we attack the calm and pointless sky. With terrifying vigor
the whistle-stop across the river will lob its smaller arsenal
halfway back again. Some may be moved to tears.

We'll clean up fast, drive home slow, and tomorrow
get back to work, those of us with jobs, convicting the others
in the back rooms of our courts and malls--yet what
will be left of that one poor child, veteran of no war

but her family's own? The comfort of a welfare plot,
a stalk of wilting prayers? Our fathers' dreams come true as
nightmare.
So the first bomb blasts and echoes through the streets and shrubs:
red, white, and blue sparks shower down, a plague

of patriotic bugs. Our thousand eyeballs burn aglow like punks.
America, I'd swear I don't believe in you, but here I am,
and here you are, and here we stand again, agape.

David Baker





"GREEN-STRIPED MELONS"


They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.

Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.

An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.


Jane Hirshfield

Yeah, so, I skipped a month.

It was not all vacationy, just busy. Today seems like a good day to post something, what with the cute Russion spy story and the prehistoric whale that ate other whales making this morning so interesting. It is very difficult to write artistically and academically and that is my reasoning for not having posted any new poems. Yep, that is my excuse. Here are some poems. Now the Canadians will not complain so much, trust me that makes sense.



"SHINTO"

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us--
touch us and move on.

Jorge Luis Borges



"THE RIVER OF BEES" This is our newest Poet Laureate for these United States and all that.

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calenders
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Images of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

William Stanley Merwin



"THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS"

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry




"SLOW MOVEMENT"

All those treasures that lie in the little bolted box whose tiny space is
Mightier than the room of the stars, being secret and filled with dreams:
All those treasures—I hold them in my hand—are straining continually
Against the sides and the lid and the two ends of the little box in which I guard them;
Crying that there is no sun come among them this great while and that they weary of shining;
Calling me to fold back the lid of the little box and to give them sleep finally.

But the night I am hiding from them, dear friend, is far more desperate than their night!
And so I take pity on them and pretend to have lost the key to the little house of my treasures;
For they would die of weariness were I to open it, and not be merely faint and sleepy
As they are now.

William Carlos Williams



"THE GIANT TOAD"

I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even
so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much
to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin
in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of
my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath
my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty,
like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me
through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pig-
ments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop.
Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I'm
standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front feet. Get
down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until the snail
gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just
once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic
bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once, some naughty children
picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again
somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could
not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death
of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack
mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they
let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle,
however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison,
the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great
responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware,
I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If
I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and
dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air.
Beware, you frivolous crab.

Elizabeth Bishop



"DRUNK AS DRUNK"

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

Pablo Neruda




"THE ICE CREAM PEOPLE"

the lady has me temporarily off the bottle
and now the pecker stands up
better.
however, things change overnight--
instead of listening to Shostakovich and
Mozart through a smeared haze of smoke
the nights change, new
complexities:
we drive to Baskin-Robbins,
31 flavors:
Rocky Road, Bubble Gum, Apricot Ice, Strawberry
Cheesecake, Chocolate Mint...

we park outside and look at icecream
people
a very healthy and satisfied people,
nary a potential suicide in sight
(they probably even vote)
and I tell her
"what if the boys saw me go in there? suppose they
find out I'm going in for a walnut peach sundae?"
"come on, chicken," she laughs and we go in
and stand with the icecream people.
none of them are cursing or threatening
the clerks.
there seem to be no hangovers or
grievances.
I am alarmed at the placid and calm wave
that flows about. I feel like a leper in a
beauty contest. we finally get our sundaes and
sit in the car and eat them.

I must admit they are quite good. a curious new
world. (all my friends tell me I am looking
better. "you're looking good, man, we thought you
were going to die there for a while...")
--those 4,500 dark nights, the jails, the
hospitals...

and later that night
there is use for the pecker, use for
love, and it is glorious,
long and true,
and afterwards we speak of easy things;
our heads by the open window with the moonlight
looking through, we sleep in each other's
arms.

the icecream people make me feel good,
inside and out.


Charles Bukowski

The Wrights.

"Northern Pike"


All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

James Wright




"On the Skeleton of a Hound"


Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body. Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer. Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.


James Wright






"Rorschach Test"


To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago;
there is something so 19th-century about it,

with its absurd reverse Puritanism.

Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged
by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss
ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger?

Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear
that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way
of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu-
riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in
this situation.

Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt-
ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too.

Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their
male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil-
lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious.

You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that
isn’t a pussy!”

But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying
to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.”

The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re
supposed to be crazy

(and are probably proving it).

Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes,

it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when
your only chance is to lose. Fold,

and they have got you by the balls—

just like the ones you neglected to identify.


Franz Wright