Poems - Summer 2009
9/27/2009
Sitting in 30th Street Station
without my glasses.
Columned at both ends
and fixed with dangling lights.
It looks like Berlin during
the Third Reich outside.
But in here, the warm ooze
of an American prime
glows faintly.
Emberish, it captivates and comforts,
like the sad end of a fire.
————————–
9/25/2009
I looked up from my Riverside Complete Works
to see the white sun enshrouded
by blue September clouds
setting tamely behind Philadelphia.
Writing while you’re moving
is like singing in the fields
or telling stories by firelight.
It keeps the soul’s rough edges
burning bright.
Time sits behind us, grinning
His big fat wallet doesn’t fit in his back pocket.
Hoarding greedily, never shelling out
what we’ve been giving.
He just keeps on holding
our alms for oblivion.
Let loose your songs and poems
like arrows let fly at once.
Don’t hide them at the bottom of your satchel
It’s not as deep as his.
—————————–
9/25/2009
The world is overflowing with art.
Freakish green eyes brim over,
Welling up with tears from her soul.
Like rain on a meadow
the condensation of expressive particles
into heavy droplets
become the painted words
with which we scrawl our heartful lamentations
on the side of our home.
Sometimes, like Tom Sawyer,
we get our friends to paint our fences
but all of us,
not just those who paint prolifically,
sometimes are not satisfied
by the whitewashed fence they brushed out for us,
and we push forth our own
thickly colored rain
from weighty, smoky clouds.
————————–
9/17/2009
These visitors I see in dreams
Don’t speak or show themselves to me.
They command fear in sensations
and imbue my envisioned eyes with rain.
The rain is unending in my deepest sleep
The stars come out only when I wake
and then I am afraid to look at them,
while ringing in my ears are taunting mysteries.
It is irrational to fear invisible entities,
but is it rational to write off a dream?
I find that sometimes when I wake, in sweat,
that these dreams are impossible to distinguish from reality.
During the daytime, they reoccur in the back room of my mind,
and they are the same as any other memory.
I am not insane,
but they tell me they are coming,
and I believe them.
—————————–
8/28/2009
There’s a lot of sadness coming
Time lives in everything
And the plans you make
are saddened by their outcomes.
A worried man sings a worried song
He’ll find himself knee deep in water
Before he reaches the shores tattered margents,
and he won’t be worried long.
Motion pictures play an ancient game
They keep alive the templed flame
of ritual and sacrifice
And all our martyred TV heroes
are born of this same vice.
I don’t know what these things
have to do with one another
but I wrote them anyway.
And there’s a lot of sadness coming
There’s some purging to be done
through song and ritual.
——————–
8/24/2009 - Like the Stones of Venice
We are all imperfect images
with the limbs of God. (of the eyes?)
We are all imperfect buildings
like the antique stones of Venice.
We are all crafted of
material as ancient
as any in the Rialto.
Nothing between the Po and Piave,
No ship upon the Adriatic,
No palazzo built on sinking wood
is older than our blood.
We all have our gothic windows
Asymmetrical and flawed.
No rounded edges smooth our touches
No pure white columns yield our secrets
We burn low and ugly in the sun
We become more intricate in old age
No unending youth,
No eternal golden piazza
lays white under the sun.
We gather up our assets,
live huddled near the sea,
groups of unique buildings all:
community, friends, and family
make up our city-states,
and wait
against the undertow.
Wrought with wrinkled buttresses
and marked by six pointed arches
Long fixed upon our faces
Steady against the years and weather.
We burn low and ugly
Not crafted in a line, the next as the last,
but one by one
our elders wrought us
Not grand or richly spangled
but strong and built to last.
We may not symbolize perfection
but occasionally our dreaming towers and spires
lift up some soul to heaven.
———————-
8/15/2009
Laying on our big London bed, legs crossed
And thinking that this is right.
Thinking that you are here.
This is now and England.
Around the slow curves of the Earth
is a low golden band of light
That each year emboldens with each night.
The image passes fondly.
You’re at the window, soundlessly
I bound across the room, loudly
and come up behind you.
Attacking you with me.
The windy passage
brings crisp Thames-clipped slips
underneath a bright lavender sky
It is a low city
but high enough
for our love.
——————–
12 August 2009
I sentimentalize classrooms,
but not the other students.
I sentimentalize the room.
I take in prophesy
and doctrine from
a strutting peacock
with a flapping tail.
In the windy gap
of my recipient mind
I lounge on mountain tips
and falls.
———————
31 July 2009
The magpies are sprightly snatchers
Bringing their winged bodies to rest
while they raise their speckled little hatchers.
I invent fictions for the woodpigeons too
their necks are ringed with downy gorgets
and they bring me news of you.
There’s three white cows across the Queen’s Road
that live ‘neath the shadows of the Backs
the long tails of grass they eat always shining gold.
Canadian geese appeared here one sorry year
and all the university wits said “send them back!”
but now it’s much too late I fear.
There are animals here I know not
and badgers still have babies to be got
and college chapel bells ring hot
when summer sunsets start t’rot.
————————
12 July 2009
The imprint of our dreams on the every day
always leaves lines of sadness in our faces.
And those night-glossed images are not so far away
from the daylight soul’s resting places.
The lattice shadowed leaves upon the grass
signify nothing.
Remember nothing.
Recall nothing.
I look for reflections
of myself
in the windowpanes of glassy campus buildings
and in the hoods of cars.
The apparition that I see
is not the avatar
of my slumbering reveries.
It is an image once fantasy
It is a face I’d never seen
In all my desperate attempts to glean
the locus of some truth.
It is the face that I longed to wear
since I’d seen it on display
but couldn’t seem to find anywhere
until in fate-like sympathy
I experienced the honey-feel
of your shining truth.
————————–
15 July 2009
Among the watergrasses and flowering weeds,
lies a castle on two isles, stately Leeds.
Against the siege of Longshanks you stood,
and in you now lies something virtuous and good.
Proudly, your nobility shines hardily in a time
when of monarchs we have small need.
You are the bounty of England, the sweetest grape
on her vine.
And so ends these heroic lines.
Among the gnarled grasses and clutching weeds
Looms a petty little castle, Leeds,
with itself much beguiled.
The house of six English queens,
if English we can call these.
Ladies given, or taken, or traded to be defiled
by some brute like Edward Two
or Henry Eight.
You are a reminder, ignoble house,
of frustrated men who devoured
enough of their country that now
we are still in the process
of digging from your slit-bellies
the worthy years and truths
that you have eaten.
———————–
6/27/2009
You woke in time for breakfast
but everything was burnt.
The tabletop was glass
and you were in the past.
Now, everything I’ve learnt
has broken under pressure.
In time I’ll laugh again
when clean water is a treasure.
But right now I’ll write this poem
in an amiable flurry of rain
about the moments that are gone
and all the thoughtless pain
that continues to wax and wane
amidst a life of love regained.
At dinner you were seated
next to the aunt you’ve hated
since the fires of hell were heated
but lately… it’s abated.
—————
6/21/2009
The rolling endless hum of the engine
is the constant backing rhythm
to all these satellite radios.
But the trip is at its inevitable ending.
Sitting on a blue milk basket
Slimy and slick from hundreds of scallops
My orange oilers glow with a sickly vibrancy
under the hazy lighting.
My mind is soothed back to irregularity
by the lapping of the seas on the hull.
Gone soon will be the throbbing Zen,
Gone soon will be the crystalline fog,
Gone soon will be that paradox of
clarity and murky dread.
I still see, behind closed eyes,
the knife infinitely cutting through
earth toned scallop guts
and scraping perfectly the muscled medallion.
But my consciousness will soon lose the
constancy of routine;
the structure of the watch.
————–
6/20/2009
I wish that I had written more
out on these lonely banks
but after working six-on-six-off
my eyelids slam like doors.
I look for you in every dream
so that I can find your eyes
but all that I can see right now
are things that simply die.
The light out here is a pageant
but all that fills my head
is thoughtful pent up anger
and the six more hours I dread.
——————
6/13/2009 - Handle Compass Like Eggs
Waking up on the top bunk
of a boat named after me
Nothing about it resembles me
but its desire to navigate the sea.
We’re twelve hours out of sight
of either land or tree
and the softly painted light
from horizon to horizon -
is all that we can see.
The seabirds in their flight
lazily trail above our wake
Unbound they drift awhile
in the gaining bright.
Unlike them, I hold the trailing tight
and remember with a smile
the compass in the pilot house
reads “handle me like eggs”
beneath its trusty dial.
———————–
6/4/2009 Sir Thomas Malory, on himself.
He died a long time ago
the man who wrote this book.
He wrote legends, about men who forsook
and about the places they did know.
He lived a long time ago,
the man who they mistook
for a rapist and a crook.
He wrote all one winter
in the soft English snow
held up in a dungeon
for what, I don’t know.
His life is a fact.
But not one we can see.
His life ended one night
that’s all it could be.
What he wanted to be
was something long gone
a knight of the sun
down before his bed on one knee.
—————-
6/3/2009
The skull of a dog
or a raccoon
maybe a rat,
near the ocean
jumping off the pier
into the sand
under the chilly grey skies
of my ever more abstract memory.
Grasping for magpies
They are right there
My mind thought
They are gone now
My eyes sought.
The beach is filled with
shark teeth.
It’s no wonder
the scavengers are fleeing.
These lonely shells
of once graceful organisms
I can see
have been completely picked clean
by the ever-hungered tides.
Some of us stand
on the left or right sides
of this continent
some of us live
in the now
or the then
of our memory.
————————–
5/30/2009
I used to stand at this door
and watch the headlights
come downhill
North Main Street
Trying to tell
from the shape and configuration
from their strangely human affectations
which was my mother.
I used to sit on these steps
Merlin’s Crystal Cave on the tape player,
listening silently
to the conversation
and the Mets game on TV
coming up the stairs.
Ears awash in the secrets
that come out after nine o’clock.
I used to have
an imagination
and now
all I have
are my memories.
—————–
5/29/2009
I’m shutting down now
I’m shutting down the windows and doors
I’m making the rounds, floor by floor.
I’m the one who tends
to endings,
who completes the daily cycle
with custodial grace.
I’m shutting down now,
Washing the windows and floors,
I’m shutting down now,
Moving in and out of doors,
I’m the unseen hand
that closes up the drawers.
When you find that things
do not begin again,
It will not be
on account of me
not closing up
When the sun fails to rise
Do not blame the night.
——————–
5/26/2009
What do you see in her foreshadowed eyes?
Why do you look at me
and not her, the ancient one?
She is as old as the sun
and her roots as deep as any tree.
What do you see in her penultimate teeth?
Why do you look at her
and not me, the newborn son?
I am as old as no one
and as young as the first word on this page.
——————–
5/25/2009
And let us live under the sea
And let us sleep under the waves
And let us sleep until we dream
And let us sleep until we wake
Do not harm us, thoughtless knaves
Let us sleep, let us dream, let us wake, let us be.
Do not tear us at the seams.
Do not cause our sea-foamed eyes to weep.
The turqoise, amber, and emerald
that you seek
and would take
is only the bed
we would rest upon.
Submerged here with us, your sunken treasure.
Time will not let you speak
until the rhyme is nigh complete.
————————
5/24/2009
I’m walking near dirty trout-stocked ponds
A yellow dog by my side
I’m averting my eyes from every ear that passes by
I can’t believe I even tried.
These houses all hammer my twilight moods
The memories they wield
produce quantities of bruises.
I don’t even like the people that live in them.
They are all silent now.
The people in this town
resist the winters.
They are a moderate group.
People who throw rocks, and sticks, and logs,
on newly frozen ponds
to stop them from freezing.
——————–
I’ve Noticed
I’ve noticed lately
that when I am explaining things
I use the same hand motions
that my father does.
I’ve noticed lately
that I think about endings
more than beginnings
and I think more
than I speak.
I’ve noticed lately
that things don’t appear changed
until they do.
I’ve noticed lately
that I never think
of the right metaphors.
—————–
5/17/2009
The thickness of night
compliments its promise
of lonely dreams
and endings.
The heaviness of night
is natural to its
somnolent urgings
and scattered scents.
The earth itself
pulls over us
her own
starry blanket.
———————-
5/17/2009 - Ottawa, Canada
Hoping you’ll remember what I said
and what you felt
Is all I have left; and dread.
Hoping I’ve got spades
to go with these I’ve been dealt.
The blue heron drops; and wades.
The waves are over there to the East
I can hear them at least.
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