S E L E C T E D P O E M S
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BIRTH HOUSE
Birth house, St. Albans, Queens.
To the left, The Hassells, to the right, The Artadis.
When I was a boy, the two patches of dirt on either side
of the walkway were thought to be lawns, and
stringing Christmas lights across the great expanse
of the facade with my dad, Eddie,
was a Herculean task made only for real men
and their sturdy, admiring sons.
Now, as for all of us, that early place that gave us life
and warmth and safety seems like a little cottage,
the cavernous rooms, once places where our toys were
brought to life by our insanely powerful imaginations
(now mostly beaten down by the harsher realities of life)
would seem like pantries. While I reflect on all of this
I realize (you know, because of the harsher realities)
that what was once the case for most of us at birth
is barely altered by death for many souls around the world,
and that my - our - kind of nostalgia is a luxury.
But it is what it is,
and when I drive by the old block I feel the tug of the abyss
from two ends; yet I recall the sun on my face and the squeals
of delight when Ralph the ice-cream man finally showed up
in the late afternoon, after the boyish toil of hours of bike rides
and street skully and dirt bomb fights in the alley, 35 cents
snatched from my father's hand, passed like a baton,
as I raced to the truck for my frozen fudge on a stick.
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THINGS CAN DAWN TOO LATE
I am told, again and again, "See, black folks have survived and still rise!"
Nice to the ear, as is all quickening kitsch.
I join the chorus myself.
I must; speak it and it may become true.
O, the regalia of colors at the teas, the sorority lunches, the confabs of Alphas, the fundraisers!
But I've seen the numbers, the numbed faces, heard the two-dimensional dreams –
enough to get over,
the right emblem on the car,
the right zip code,
just making it to 30 –
little more is sought, the humanity is truncated, stultified,
the death rattle even in the greeting,
the glance across the white room to catch the eye of another walking wounded.
Look up “survive,” “rise.”
Damn - Whose dictionary is this?
Visiting the Salish and Kootenai, making my way through the artifacts on display –
The noble attempt to reclaim the language, the traditions, pretty blankets for sale,
woven by citizens of the Flathead Reservation.
O, but I erred just now: “Citizens of a reservation?”
A painful, heartbreaking chuckle, almost through tears: No, “forced denizens making do.”
Power unalloyed with decency and mercy can crush language into mush,
make space enough to deny reality to oneself.
Outside the visitors’ center is poster after poster of the faces and names
of tribal women and girls gone missing, likely snatched by sex traffickers,
among the demons of the Earth – among, as there are others.
Presume most dead.
What does pride and restoration avail without autonomy?
I keep asking this question, but few listen; it’s much easier to “celebrate our culture.”
All can be expert at that, at least.
And that’s what this power wants, I thought -- to dance in the celebration of your misery
as it visits and gawks at what it has wrought,
and tell its stories about the nobility of your race once
safely back in Elysium.
"The oceans can make a comeback," the Woods Hole journal declares.
Well, that's good news!
But do the gasping corals, the sea floor which experiences a daily D & C
by a thousand bobbing abortionists so that we may have a moment of unneeded succulent flesh
from the ocean womb, the rest, unwanted – dolphins, parrot fish, you name them –
tossed dead from peaceful life into the human-fouled waters, once home, now tomb –
what do these know of comebacks?
This mighty, sick, delusional nation, ejaculated into being by the race-hand of conquest,
like Nineveh, calling down a terrible wrath upon itself, as it has from the beginning;
Like Nineveh, filled with millions not knowing their right hand from left;
Like Nineveh, forgetful of decency, truth – only smug, commercial self-certainty
soaks the citizens’ brains –
is sinking like a stone into its self-created abyss.
It could have been so much more.
It didn’t need to end this way.
What can be done at this hour?
We have been warned again and again, told that the world is not our property,
that the “sand niggers” and just plain ol’ “niggers” and the “dikes” and the “Chinks”
and the “wops” are us, the flickers and the bears and the pangolins, too,
that this is the “world house,” not a mansion of sealed-off rooms, not separate houses
but one house,
that the destruction will come back upon us.
Await a savior, a champion, an “Enkidu” for the hideous lumbering “Gilgamesh”
fucking us out of existence while we, effete, enervated, watch our own rape on cable news,
again and again?
Have we not been shown what is good?
And what is required? I hear the old prophet’s voice from my boyhood Bible studies:
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly upon Earth,
not as lords, but as fellow sufferers, fellow aspirers, future humus all,
knowers of nothing despite our boasts from laboratories to sanctuaries –
to live a life of awe, holding each other up in the brief hour given.
There comes a time when a thing is too late absent complete repentance,
a full turn – teshuvah as my Jewish friends say, metanoia, the Christians. Same thing.
“But you don’t really care for repentance, do you?” – you proud of the “Global North.”
(I hear Cohen’s voice singing this in what’s left of my mind, but not in "Hallelujah,"
but rather 'Êykhôh, Lamentations.)
And now this plague. It may be illicit, mawkish, ghoulish, but I shall fit it into this narrative anyway.
For it is not that we die, it’s that so many needn’t,
and needn’t have, now.
We kill each other by our choices, our selections, our misapplication of resources, our
wants, our endless need for shiny novelty, the pursuit of convenience, of more “goods” for
the landfill.
The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai:
“Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it,
because its wickedness has come up before me.”
Nineveh, at least, repented.
ID, POST MORTEM
After the line of grievers, nods to the blackened family,
After the director's team re-entered the rented room
To close the lid on another life, came a bang, and
Flying splinters peppering the faces and turned backs
Of the celebrants; all eyes toward the source of the
Sound and shrapnel:
Two bloodless fists through two holes held up by
Two bloodless arms, the final act of refusal,
Ready to box God in the cosmic, Jobian match
In which each bell is another Why.
My father told me, when I was a boy
trying to help him take care of the little square of grass
we had in St. Albans, never to pull a weed by the stem,
that you have to grasp it at the root if you would be rid of it or
else it will just reappear, and quickly.
Again and again I see the poor weeders of society
who have failed to take that lesson, and have left
the weeds to grow, as they, with great sophistication,
recommended new names for them, new implements
to prune their leaves, new devices to hem the plants in.
Whosoever would be a weeder must be a radical.
The tender of surfaces has his place, but not here.
Who is this "you" that is feared will replace "us?"
given lengthy answers, of course. The
sociologist has hers, the historian his, the philosophers theirs.
Dances on the surface thought sublime.
Below the surface, the surface of the lies that
tie together in bundles our superficialities,
as our eyes and ears fool,
Is a vast network of roots, untouched other than
So these angry faces on the march, who think they
are "us," have, behind their contorted faces, illuminated
by their kitschy torches, ideas the roots of which
were never killed. Too inconvenient to bend so low,
too much effort to dig into the darkness.
Every time we let white, black, and brown pass and
call for greater harmony across a surface spectrum,
every time we call for greater understanding between them,
we grasp the weed by the stem.
So over the horizon, the weeds may, at last, choke
off every rose bush and corn stalk and sapling,
and a new Reich may soon rise up, and we
become Planet of the Weeds, where flowers
once bloomed, and all had, for at least a brief moment,
the chance to be "us," birthed together
by the stars, fated, at last, to go down together
to the world of the roots we now ignore.
Wrens, July 2015
They'll be gone before next year.
But, for now, they are content
to traverse the length and breadth of the yard,
faithful to their many little errands,
and enjoy this summer's moments,
as am I.
What else should we do
in this short season?
Athens, Revisited
Truth is a boy's toy.
It does not need much tending,
takes care of itself ere long, even when
hidden under fools' baskets - pushes
up through the weaves like weeds
between hard stones.
It is over the soft, bleeding body of Love
that we must stand and worry.
It is over brittle Hope that we must fret.
It is away from Despair that our eyes must peer,
as into a vista where salvation waits.
Before long, my friend, you may discover
our Taproot was false; it was not Socrates
that was needed so much as the mystics and the bards -
the sage, the griot, big hearts not heads.
I tell you, now, Truth is a boy's toy - a shiny
lure that litters and chokes the rivers that flow
past the thrones of the gods, or, all too often,
snatches souls, like hapless carp, from the
very waters of the life they would know.
Firsts
- On the second inauguration of President Barack H. Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, January 21, 2013 -
This is, today, another first --
first time someone like him, The One,
has been twice inaugurated to be head of state,
first time such a thing has happened on this
particular day.
But -- and I hope it's alright to tell you -- I tire of firsts,
firsts that shouldn't be firsts because it is so damn silly
that they are firsts in the first place -- ready to move on to,
perhaps, fifths, and ninety-thirds, and two-hundred-and-seventeenths,
and then, well, and then we'd stop counting I suppose,
because it would be too absurd to count -- pointless.
One day, we will live our lives in higher numbers
(I'll be gone then -- maybe you too)
and then justice will roll down and righteousness
will stream -- then we will be so far past firsts that
no one will notice, because something better, in us,
will reign.
But as it is, today, as good a thing as it is,
we celebrate one more small step up from
the muck of history; and on we go, must go.
Rubber, Burning
He found my Being - set it up
Adjusted it to place. -- Emily Dickenson
Over the long months, perhaps years,
I had begun to make out its outline, far
off in the blue-grey sky - the swirling laces
disturbing the careless sail of the cumulonimbus.
The first one had already struck and made
a mess of things, but I muddled through,
soldiered on; and now its mate was in view,
and I could see the lateral, and then the tongue
flapping in the air - at times the medial, the midsole,
the insole, the outsole, and the heel, too -
the thing, forged by Fate, hurtling toward my life to
strike it squarely or, perhaps, as the first, to take out
something or someone I loved, cherished.
But as I dug the post holes for the new fence, and then
began to plant the new hydrangeas and hyacinths,
along with some lilies and daffodils - some new
grass by the pergola, it faded from consciousness
as I became lost in my dreamy, human existence,
lost in the moment of a single, fine, summer's day.
Without willing it so, or telling a therapist my fears,
it now concerned me less than whether I had used
enough mulch, or laid-out the leeching hose in the right
pattern, or whether the robins would gorge themselves,
greedily, on my newly laid seed; and at some point, in the late
afternoon, the smell of burning rubber wafted by, and
I decided, playfully, that the smell was telling me that I had
won the day by looking down instead of up, by tending
the little garden of my life, hands covered with the soil and
grit and color and wetness of the earth in my backyard
and that the harbinger from beyond the clouds had been
flung back toward the hot sun by a power greater than Fate,
and that this day all would be well, and would likely be well
the next day, too, just as the sun, setting over the trees
seemed to promise it would be, even if I would not
be here to see it.
Beyond These Things
I don’t care about the loan or
the interest on the loan;
I don’t care about the broken fence
and the green fluid that flows through
the veins of this false life.
I don’t care about the bite of taxes or
about the sting of the bee, for
there is always the river, flowing by, with
its soft “Shhh … Be Still – Listen,”
and the sunshine like gloss on its sweet lips, and
there is always the raindrops falling from the
sated leaves, and there is always the steam
rising from pavement, like the spirits of the dead
ascending to heaven.
There is always the sun upon my face and
the little boy with the Tonka truck who knows no fear of life;
and there is always the quiet wood and the pathway
through it, and the dulcet tones of snapping twigs and
robins, and blue-jays, and
the voices of the winds, in conversation, high up
in the canopy of the ancient trees, saying
“Shhh...Be Still – Listen.”
Beautiful Sadness
Beauty everywhere, every-
where, beauty – everywhere, everywhere
beauty – the pile of my sons’ old clothes (“They were
happy kids,” she said, which made me wince) – everywhere – the
old photos of christenings – the wedding vows on knees –
the promises – the promises broken, forgiven – the tears of joy and
the tears in the dark night – the smell of new Keds when I was seven
– father and mother sitting on the sofa at
Christmas watching me play with my new blocks, the fake plastic light in the
real fireplace, spinning-out its faux blue, red and green ;
Dewey, Rorty, Baldwin, St. John of the Cross, John Irving’s novels, Updike’s
American-stained gloss; Dr. King’s sweet soul, Merton’s “Fourth and Walnut” moment;
Prettyman’s place on West 98th; Jesus in the garden; the two spirits within; the trinity;
Luther before the inquisition; the first time I read If; Walden and the Gospels;
the Colorado Rockies, Crested Butte, the icy mountain lakes of summer – beauty, beauty;
Baiting Hollow, Long Island, two million miles from Queens,
walking the shore – beauty – the tidal pools, the smell of sea – beauty,
the glint of sun-splashes on the fenders of dad’s Mercury
Monarch (his joy, the first new car he ever bought) – beauty – his Miller beer in
his trucker’s hand, in my ill-fitting yellow robe as we sat in the cabin in the cool of morning
– beautiful, too, the man making sure that his family will have a summer to remember,
like the big boss and all the rest, even if just one.
The words “I forgive you” and “I love you” and “This will pass” – beauty;
watching the little dog eat part of my jelly sandwich, or a handful of Cheerios—beauty;
The Ides of March, Sergio’s Waters of March, the end of March – beauty; waiting for
Spring, the burst of the dead grass back to life again; the backyard
rimmed with tall trees – the birds that have made their home there – beauty.
And you ask me why I am so wistful?
O My God! I have come to love it so!
And I will have to let it go!
Faith (2)
Faith is "It has to be so"--
Like two plus two must be four,
like the roots grow into soil, and not sky.
Simple, essential, axiomatic,
air in the nostrils, sweet on the tongue.
God is -- not a game of chance, the
hypothesis of a mere dreamer, but
the necessary, the indespensible,
lest I lay myself down and die.
Wind
On the beach, the wind in my ears.
Yes, yes, I know the wind in my ears
is not Allah or Jesus offering me a revelation;
but neither is the wind in my ears
just the wind in my ears.
At Home in the World
Me, I have no fight left for things like this.
I am content to let you have your Jesus, your Paul,
your Eckhardt, your Darwin, while I have mine.
I understand, now.
You get wiser as you get older – if you want to;
you realize that your fatigue and nonchalance
are not age, but nature’s way of doing for you what you
would not do on your own – put away dissipation
that you may drink-in the day you are given while
there is still world enough and time – especially time.
So I will leave you to your six day world and love
you anyway, just as I ask the skeptics to leave me
to the fuzzied-up God of my fathers and of my mothers and,
perhaps to love me, too – leave me to these and I will leave
you to your myths of molecules that wish to transcend
mere valence and go to the opera, and drag race, and dine,
which is no different than what I have been saying all
along anyway, with my fuzzy vocabulary of faith – you, with
your manly experiments and equations.
You get wiser as you get older; it isn’t truth that matters so
much, but that we feel at home in the world, for how awful
when we don’t. So decorate as you please –
soft pillow of an idiosyncratic theology over here; purple
drapes of pomp and ritual there; a field experiment on quarks
over the hill; but a shared candelabra to keep the night at bay –
set that here, please, between us, so that we can at least see
each other’s needy eyes and faces and dying hands, and, together,
pray -- or whatever it is you do -- that the sun will rise for both of us,
so that we can go on disagreeing about the pointless things that
keep us apart in the arrogant hours of day.
Same time tonight, then; I’ll bring the candles, you bring the light.
Here, as This
It’s OK to be where we are; it’s OK.
It’s OK to inhabit this trouble-ridden body,
the body that breaks, that is diseased and riddled with pain
more often than we would like, or can stand.
It’s OK to think that we are but a stage on life’s way,
that we are not what the whole thing is about,
that we are still leather-knuckled brutes, mixed with a
little angel, here and there.
Whenever we claim some superlative station, we
ought to know that disappointment lurks but a moment away – it
always has, hasn’t it?
The earthworm knows better, and so does the seagull;
they, at least, get it – they will never have books or libraries or Winchesters, but only
the earth and the air.
In their own little earthworm and seagull language, I suppose them
saying, “That will do; that’s enough for us; but what’s enough for you?”
Judging the Fat Man in the Airport Café, Louisville
I saw the big, fat man in the airport café.
“Is he one of those hicks who sticks a Confederate flag on his pick-up truck?”
Or is he, possibly, instead, a poet who writes sublime lines, in six languages,
giving lectures and recitals across the land?
Or better, is he just a son, like me?
One day, O Lord, may my eyes be clean enough to see.
Rocking Chair
(Abbey of Gethsemani, Spring, 2011)
In Kentucky, at Bethany Spring, I
was asked what item outside
best expresses where I am – now.
I did not hesitate, only pointed
to the rocking chair on the porch, which
suggests both rest and restlessness.
"I am at mid-life," I said – "sitting,
thinking, rocking – waiting for
the next circle to open for me
to enter; when at once I will
be off, the rocking chair thrust backward,
and for a minute, waving
good-bye as it rocks alone –
a rocking chair, rocking without me,
rocking to stillness as I go on to the rest
of this life to create a new corner of my world,
where one day, if I am lucky, another rocking chair,
perhaps being fashioned now, awaits me."
At the Abbey with Brother Paul
(for my friends at Bethany Spring, New Haven, KY.)
“God Alone” loomed over the entry way
at the Trappist monastery like a great eyeball;
the same grave invitation that accosted
the more famous monk who entered
so many years before.
We opened the iron, brown gates;
we entered under the gaze.
By the koi pond, near the Gingko tree, Brother Paul
held forth on his recollections of the famous monk, but
also about himself; to reflect with us about his own
life, spent here since he was but a boy, really.
Brother Paul read his own works,
as the fish splashed about in their delight,
frolicking in the green water (Nina Simone's, "Feeling Good"
echoing through my head, as I let New York fade away:
"Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin' on by you know how I feel");
the birds dashing, loudly, overhead, as in an aviary; large insects
lumbering and bumbling through the gathering, without manners,
on their precise little missions, absorbed with a time that
is not our own, absorbing the sun and kissing the sweet air they rode,
high on life.
("Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don't you know;
Butterflies all havin' fun you know what I mean;
Sleep in peace when day is done,
That's what I mean")
Of course, in a certain way of looking at it, the large eyeball sign
is not really true; God is not alone here – She has many companions,
diligently at their work, serving her tea, bathing her, feeding her, and
He is quite busy returning the favor. No, God is never alone
here, not in this place, where the insects and the fish and
the people all sing the same song, and pray the same prayer.
I reach out as if to grasp a piece of this to take with me
on the plane, back to the rest of my life, where, I am
sorry to say, I leave God, sitting in my waiting room, alone,
far too often and so, far too often, sleep is not so peaceful.
What is That to Me?
I've heard that the Dutch are
irreligious -- mostly; but
what is that to me?
I can't really blame them -- mostly; and
perhaps, in their own way, they'll
come around one day.
But whether they do or no,
what is that to me?
Forced to Look for Myself
I am not like you, moon;
I am not like you, content to roll
around in the sky, a slave to the pull
of another, ever quiet - though
much to be envied, if envy you could
understand in your senseless, lovely glide.
I am not like you, lion:
I am not content to eat and kill
and live an endless cycle of the same,
though powerful you may be you know
not what you do, mute beast with the quickening,
deadly eye.
I am not l ike you, mountain;
I am not content to be heavy and dense,
or rise high into the sky or, with others,
rim the vale over which you stand as sentinals,
protectors with no lives of your own.
A man am I, shaped just below the gods,
forced by my very nature to crave and hope
and dream and strive and die, never as
complete as you, always looking for something
that is the most elusive thing of all - forced to look
for myself, not knowing what I shall do
when I find him.
The Believer, Walking
As I walked through Greenwich Village
a young man saw my lapel pin and
intruded with, "You can't really believe that!"
As though awaiting his words for a hundred years
I replied: "Believe what, and why?"
"Clever," he said. "I've tried clever. It does no good," and
then "I love you," I said, and bid him good-bye.
Tomorrows
It is odd - isn't it? - how we so
boldly make our plans when all
around us are reminders of how frail we are --
a nail has pierced the tire,
the big limb has fallen and
swayed the back of the chainlink fence.
There is no window into what follows;
no certainty that where we are headed
is a place we would want to be; we are
not pulled into it, but pushed by something
in us that knows all the risks,
but insists we go on --
as though it needs to be born.
On Men at War
And they say that It is more important that we are right,
and that your children’s blood and love mean little.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of war,
the better to feel life’s steady throb.
Men to arms, men to war, will meet to test
on some curious, distant shore – will meet
to slash each others’ baby breasts, to raze the
heathen town, the churches, the mosques
burn down, and watch each others’ faces licked
by flames’ burning glory, the steely smell of
blood in the air that blows from camp to camp,
windswept traces of futures gone, like cattle
at the bolts, like sheep at the saw –
gone, gone, all now gone.
Then come the stories, for those who remain – the
fine, fine stories, masculine refrains, of saved
fellows in the holes, pinned with nowhere
else to go, of medics who die in numbers unknown
in their mad missions to patch the human targets
as best they can, to send out again to face the missiles,
the shrapnel, the flame that’s thrown on the beautiful
cloth of skin, to make it hiss and blister and
the soul scream, in hell within the burning shell.
Then come the lies, often proffered just as well as
those told as the big men groped for casus belli, as
the pols searched for the reason that is preference –
“It is more important that we are right! It is more important
that we fight!”
If the grass does cover all, does it cover men’s lies?
Does it cover the lost dreams, a little one’s plan of life
now carried away into the realm that no one can enter,
that of what might have been? Does it cover the births
that will not be, the birthdays that will never come, the grandchild
and –mother that will never meet? Does it cover the cowardice
of statesmen who looked to gain rather than avert the evil because,
as they claim on our behalf, this is simply us, simply what we do?
Does it cover the history that will not be made, now usurped by this?
Does it heal the wounds that linger the generations, and that dash
the hopes of dreamers who see the light fade to darkness
as the years pass them by, filled with images of death?
Who is the coward, then? Is it the one who calls "To Arms!,"
or the one who shouts, “Have we not seen this before, and have we
not learned? Or are we fated to drink the putrid brew again and
again, forever more, for fear the caper berry will burst, and we not
taste at all?”
If war quickens, let those who make it take to the face of the sheerest
mount, one by one, and climb for dear life – for that will make a man
just as easily, quicken just as well, and the lives lost on the sheer adventure,
crashing on the crags and cliffs, will be the fools’ own, and not those of
innocents whose only crime is love of home, and duty to that which gave
all they’d ever known.
Much there is that’s wrong with the world, but
the first of all is men at war, not the beggars in the streets,
or the threat of conversion, not the tsunami’s flood or the rain pushed
mud, but rather the moment when we take to madness, and
riddle and maim and burn the bodies of God’s daughters and sons for
the sake of evil itself.
Let us rethink our causes, for devotion is beautiful indeed. The faster plane,
for life's transport; the faster ship, for sport; the pinned up uniform for
the love brigades, and the great, grand turrets for lore.
The Night's Song
The night's song creeps, slithers into
my head, and plays its bassy, tremulous out-of-tune;
my eyes shut, absurdly, in the dark of the room -- shut,
absurdly, in the dark of the room
as if to be sure that not a glimmer of
light would shine into the places where I hid now, hid
now from day, with all its light that is darkness,
the light of men at work, moving through
the torrid streets, street walkers, as I myself am,
moving, half asleep, through the city, forgetting,
forgetting why as we buy the slaughtered from pushcarts
to place between our buns, a dead thing to eat, to excrete;
a dead thing sates, and as satyrs we wander home,
another day done, another gone, to someplace.
From darkness to this darkness; lights out, a "Good Night,"
the lips touch "Good-Bye" just in case, just in case.
And in the darkness God pulls up a chair and stares, Her breath
falling on the idol that is myself, the idol that is myself, now
melting, metling in the cool of night, rocked in Her arms, in the
darkness of the dark, tomorrow one step closer to, somewhere,
all being, everywhere being, vain but, somehow feeling that
I'm on the way.
First, You Admit It
Walking around the lake with little Babs in my backpack
I felt something, something more than the dog moving about
for a better perch to see my son walking far behind me, something more
than the frigid air that rose up from the ice and that poured down the mountainside -
though it was all of this that made the moment, too, each its part to do.
In an instant I was transported to the same spot, a million years ago
and I realized that the snow crunching under my boots would have had the
same grit and groan, the air would have been just as cold, the trees
just as barren and ashy, and that it would be the same a million years hence,
even if we ceased to be here -- and I loved this thought
for the very first time.
The snow is the same snow, the ice the same ice, the wind, the same as
yesterday, and tomorrow, and there was no need to fret, and I reached into
the backpack to stroke the little time traveler who had shared this moment with me,
and I prayed that there would always be little dogs like her, and cold winds, and
mountains, and lakes, and crunching snow even if there were no human soles for it
to groan and sing beneath.
First, you have to admit that you would go on as you are, that you thought
the world was made just for you, even if you never put it quite that way, and then,
somewhere along the way, if you are lucky, as you walk around a frozen lake,
or dance with your baby boy, or run your fingers over the petals of a rose, you
admit that you loved more than you knew or knew you had the power to, and
that you no longer needed to be around to see it all -- that you love creation more
than yourself, and all fears, all fears melt away, melt away, like the snow
in the first warm days of Spring, and all at once the scales fall from your eyes, and
you are, finally, finally, free.
Still Here?
Thought by now you'd be gone, did you?
Thought the bombs over there and the
foreclosures over here; the swine flu and
earthquakes, the cancer and the mad cow;
the marriage rates and the sad fact that
even runners have heart attacks were all
facts pertinent to your sure and imminent
demise, did you?
Well, maybe you are right.
But here you are, reading this, now,
breathing and hoping and planning as
the rest, though with your usual trepidation.
For God's sake! Let yourself be taken, and forget it.
It really is the best you can do, other than know
deep in your own soul that it isn't all for nothing.
And, of course, it isn't. But that's up to you.
There is no star, no galaxy, no nation, no
religion, no prophet, no prophesy, no fortune,
no Peter, Paul or Lincoln more needed than you,
or more consequential, or more loved. You are as
large as all that - or, if you insist, as small as all that.
Is a universe sealed inside your breast,
or a hummock left by a brutal winter?
The freedom to decide seems, I grant, too much.
But there you are my friend.
There Are Places Like This
In the Lik gallery I marveled at
all the photographs – of caverns bathed
in reddish light, of an elephant with
head pressed, almost lovingly, against
the trunk of a lone tree, and of the rows
and rows of lavender, bursting
with purple, under the white clouds.
Too much to witness from this dark little
room, like seeing God in a cardboard box.
Being there instead of this vicariousness; a
dead eye as proxy for my own.
There are places like this in the world, and
walking along West Broadway I am not
there to witness them, as the summer of life
winds down. Yet I am grateful for at least
these images; they reassure me that beauty
abides, whether or not beheld, and my
heart bursts and swells knowing I live in
the same world, and that maybe you and
I, too, are beautiful.
Transition
No point in fighting the pull – You’ve
got to move on and there is no way back;
and even if there were, would you really go?
Who would be there waiting, a younger you?
No, you’ve got to gently lean into the
new gales, the rains, the blowing sand that
now stings your eyes and rasps your skin,
and know that there is something of you
and in you that abides, always. There is
no place to go to that is not already here –
Vestigia nulla restrorsum.
The Ploys of Philosophy
|
There it is, there’s your “answer,” right
there across the room; if you take it up
it will heal you and your brow will lose
its pleats, and you will feel your stiff muscles
relax, and the spirit inside of you will
dance, and you will meet the end of your
days with a fond reflection.
But to walk across the room is hard for you,
knowing that there are other rooms,
and other answers, and you know so long as
you care too much about that, well,
there you are, suspended between faith
and doubt.
Own this room, be a denizen of this place, and
let others be at home in theirs, and that’s all
there is to it. So clear, so simple, so impossible;
as impossible as the impossibility of your
suspension between heaven and hell.
Ripe Falls the Fruit
Ripe hangs the fruit, to be
shaken or plucked or snipped from
the branch or the vine.
Ripe falls the fruit,
swelled and filled by rain and sun,
and on the ground or grass wrinkles
and bursts and pours its sweet into
the happy maws of God's lesser denizens.
We nourish by falling, too.
Winter, 2007
The cold came late this year
and all at once the yellow-red leaves
bid their branches good-bye and
took their leave for the sweeper and
the plastic sacks that would gather them
up like a holocaust and abandon them, together,
by the side of the road, where they will not
even be free to feed the new life of all the trees
to come.
Let us leave the bodies on the ground
that they may do their work, and so
next year I shall tell the gardener to pile high
the colored bodies along the trunks
in the woods near the back gate,
for even rotting (if there is such)
we do God’s work.
Dear Brother
No, brother, it gives me no pleasure
to see you suffer so, not now, not ever;
it gives me no pleasure that I cannot
scale the walls between us, that I might
be with you on your last, long walk, but
The tragedy of life does not erase the
facts of life, or stop the planets in their glide,
or erase the scars and the wounds you
gave to me and, worse, to others unable
to anticipate one like you.
I would be merciful now, for I have
already forgiven you. But what does
mercy look like now, in this? Would it be a smile?
A ‘Get Well Soon’ card? A dinner by the lake?
Which, when I have no smiles left, no
inclination to pen your address, and nothing
to say to you at a time reserved for
the breaking of bread and banter? I cannot
smile at you, send you well wishes, eat
with you so near, and be at all sincere.
Ah, Dear Brother – you have left me in
a quandary. If God has sent you as my test,
it might be the very test I fail, and the one that
makes all the difference, and in some way
(so ingenious as to make me smile), your
darkness overshadows me even across the miles,
and makes me wonder if any virtue exists.
God is a clever God indeed;
What a perfect tribunal for thee, and me.
Cold Winds
Cold winds blow winds
blow cold;
Cold, cold, cold,
Like ice icy
death it’s time to go, go
to the Keys, Largo
I’ll go, we’ll go winding
down where our bodies
glow.
Follow Your Road
“Follow your road, and maybe
someday your road will take you far
away,” so the Seawind song goes.
But so too, it seems, will another’s.
When we would go our own way
the road we must follow is not planted
in a yellow wood, nor even cleared
of brush and trees and stones,
but rather to be etched out of the
earth of our own God-given dreams,
foot by foot by foot,
like the passing of life in days.
Indeed, whether this way or the other,
surely we will find ourselves far away,
or if so fearful of even our shadows
perhaps but an inch or two
spans cradle and grave.
There are those for whom the idea of
meeting a mass of strangers at
the end of our road makes us
faint, sick, overcome by the thought of a
life lived inside another’s dream
and by another’s light, having buried
our own under a lifetime of timid “Nos.”
Easy it is to walk the wide road, with
its geometric plain, filled with companions,
whose voices make us forget our
idolatry.
Yellow
The trees on Maniece and Otsego
were ablaze, torches of cool yellow flame
crackling and dancing at the steely sky.
How real, though, is yellow?
Why this sacred mood over pretty leaves?
Is yellow not just what rods and cones do,
as some would say, in that quite-sure way?
Or is yellow, like purple, God trying to get us
to look up from our New York Times?
Is not that crackling and dancing for you and I?
“Yes,” I’d say, in a quite-sure way.
“Yes, and these branches are the rafters
of the canopy of heaven, though I am mad
for saying so in this age of rods and cones.”
The Church by the Brook
I’ll have a church by the brook
with the round window in the mezzanine,
and the youth will come from all around
and hear how they may yet care that life
came here, and that the beauty they
hoped for is just what we humans do,
and so have faith, have faith in the
beauty and in it and through it
see God, That calls to you from the
sunset, and the table, and the patch
of dirt under your new Nike shoes.
Ravi
Break this Western spell with
whining string and magic drum,
and take us away to Shakti so that
by her power the spell of Walmart
may be broken, that we may see the
Ganges from New York, as sacred
once more, rather than survey her
for abuses called uses;
and so then maybe, maybe then,
the Mississippi, the Hudson and
the Rio Grande, too.
Sanity
I trouble myself sometimes to ascertain
just who is sane – whether the cab driver
or the bespectacled- briefcased rider,
whether the decaying mother of three
in the cleaners, or the artist starving in her
loft in ecstasy, whether the penguiny waiter
at the Atlantic Grill, or the owner who must
prepare each day a slaughter for an army
of metropolitans who already have too much,
with no sense of irony, as people in the Delta
or the hills of Rio pluck their last chickens
and ground their last roots, whether the astronaut
who would risk all to stroll a dusty ball, or the
earthy carpenter who sings while swinging
hammer against the background of the sky to
finish the child’s room addition to the
Jones’s summer home, though the Jones
have already two others like it up by the mill,
whether the man who flees
to shelter in the rain, or the one who walks
through the tempest and laughs
as the drops drench him through, whether
the believer that God cares, or the skeptic who
claims to cling to nothing but ‘ethics’ as he distracts
his mind with ‘the ten thousand things’ that
delay the inevitable stare into the aimless weather
that is, for him, all that is.
Faith
Faith is the irascible declarative,
“It is so!”
For if it is not then what is the point
of even pleasure? Or shall we stay for
at least that Epicurean bribe and
remain in the service of some funky
molecules that conspired in some occult way,
in a tiny cellular huddle,
to keep us around that they may
go on going on with their game?
As for we religious, I know of our own bad
accretions, our silly disputations, but odder
it is still that it is we who yet believe who are
called odd, when the molecule sects
install isotopes and elements as gods with
wills to pass themselves on, that use our progeny,
our bodies and minds as pawns in a tiny conspiracy,
hatched out of sight, before sight, or you or I.
Peachtree
I feel the shudder
as the peach explodes
on my wet palate;
I do - yes, I do - taste all of
the dinosaurs and
the lava, and I
receive visions of
the gods whose hot hands
shaped the world and time.
Old Friends
What are old friends if
not true friends who want
us only for us and the recollection
of the paths that have crossed on
the journey – if it is a journey – of
life, and cross and cross again.
Good jokes and laughter,
bad “jokes” and tears, mark the
memory of those who have touched
each other’s hearts and took upon
the shoulders each other’s fears,
and delighted at mutual success
down the passage of years.
Old friends may dwell so but
never do they grow apart, for so
long as the heart beats, there they
reside.
Sex
From the moment that I entered her
I knew I was doomed, for “I” had really
not entered her, so much of me being
so far away (in Key West, I think), that this
appendage, this tuber of gristle and skin
that cannot even move of its own,
but inflates only by the caprice of millions
of others, like a fantastic barn raising
“Lift, Lift, Lift, and In!”
Is it a cosmic joke that it is shaped like
an “I” and that it sounds like “eye”
when it is as blind as the cave it
enters, like a mole, searching for
something to eat, it devours more
than it can ever know.
How often are we there
when hair meets hair?
Thanksgiving Thoughts (Redux)
Please pass the turkey and giblets,
and the cornbread stuffing, too;
and, Oh, the berry sauce, and I’ll
take some rolls from the linen cloth –
hot! hot! hot! – two for me
and two for you.
And when we sit, I’ll look around
for some cider to wash down
the greens and the hen,
and we’ll partake, with the others prostrate,
in far flung huts, with sagging skins,
near shallow graves of unlucky kin.
Note to self: Next year, think these things again.
Cloud Shine
Sun shine, moon shine,
but when the sky turns
we’re loathe to say “cloud shine,” too.
Do not the clouds ride
with the sun on their backs
and diffuse to the world, in unison,
the linen light no less
than the moon?
Anticipation
I rise in the morning like a warrior
knowing he must don his wares and
face the nameless, faceless god
that is himself, a god who suffers
no dally and no ruse that he might
look to that spot of road under the
feet only, rather than the one that
winds on, and out of sight.
The god drags him to the sun
from where he would,
but for a moment, lie.
Seeing Too
I am of the sort who fill in landscapes.
I apply my own oils and dredge
our memory for scenes, as when I drive
on a newly smoothed road with
sweet taffy lines yet unblemished
by sloughed rubber, and see the spirits
rise from the loam beneath –
the spirits of those whose lovely
brown lives were rent by the balls
of Gatling guns and iron spheres.
I am of the sort who see the crushed
skulls of Africans under the picnic tables
at the family reunion, and who wonder
how much of the dust on the
bed post has traveled time and oceans
from Bergen-Belsen or Babylon,
and I conjure rivers of blood
as I fish Swift Creek and Reynold’s Channel.
I see, too, that the sun is fair
and the sky the richest blue,
and breathed over my head by God.
And so, fellow human, do you?
Do you see, too?
Song for Juliette
(November 29, 2007)
The cells, they say, were spread
like stars in the night, hot nodes
in a dark and darkening sky,
shining but fatal if too near.
“We prefer to watch from here.”
God or Nature, whatever the name,
holds the reasons for the same,
for stars and cells that run amok
and kick the pail and rend the rails
that hold the dreams of life within.
But the answer – faith only knows;
Before stars and cells we puzzle,
and strike the pensive pose.
As by and by the stars will die
specks lead on to darkened eyes
and no Beloved with leather sling
could stand that Force three cubits
high that comes to claim the stars
and you and I.
They say that we are made of stars.
Those little cells then, too.
And if they're right once pall is drawn
“Like the stuff of stars we will go on,”
and that may be all the faith we need
as we laugh and cry, naked, into our
dusky sky, inside our lovely rails,
and dream life’s dreams.
Martin
January comes and so one
thinks of King, as I do now
while reading a collection of
papers from his life’s Spring;
before the thieves came, and
took away this rarest, God-cut jewel.
And so, reading above the fold,
and below, and within, I
shake and tremble for us and
think “What now?”
Who now, if not me, now?
Thoughts turn to my deeds,
and I wonder if God approves,
though my heart bursts with love
and the Spirit floods heart and nerve
and sinew, and the pains of a billion
voices echo through my brain, like his.
Who now, if not me, now?
O, Martin, come and teach me
how to enter the Way, to lift my
Cross and hold the torch of God that
maybe, in my own small way, I may
speak truth to might, before the
Big House gates, before I fade away.
Who now, if not me, now?
Who now, if not me?
Tension and Soft, Moving Air
I’m a hard nut, for they tell me “meditate”
and I know, from my reading, that they are right,
and so I contemplate instead; and they say breathe
but it seems that I prefer to hold my journeyed air,
like Linus his little blue, dirty blanket.
There are those moments, though, when I
remember to breathe, like when I’m sitting
in traffic and notice the way that particular
tree’s leaves shimmy in the soft, moving air,
and I can feel the Sweet Breath move
from the tree – into my car, through the
open windows and, like the Holy Spirit itself,
through my knotted chest, and I relax and
permit the asshole in front of me to make his
left turn from the lane to the right, and glimpse
the rustling papers in his back window as he
passes, illegitimately, as Holy Spirit visits
there, too, like that specific tree, and me.
I melt a little into my seat, and remember
all the times when I turned left when I
should have turned right, or not at all.
Fifty
We fret or mark the half of things, and so
fifty is a metaphor as much as years passed,
and has twice the force of forty-five as
we contemplate how long we last.
But, too, we are not one hundred, so let us
go picnic in the sun, and dance and run,
and let us write another verse as we turn
that page, and think like Zeno, for we are
always only half done.
Elation
I recall being elated.
I was a boy, under the
covers with my new Hess truck,
lights on, moving through the
blizzards and valleys of
my white sheets and pillows,
the only toy that Dad would let
me take from under the tree on
Christmas Eve, and the
only toy I would need.
Rest
I have grown tired of the bills,
the mortgage and the driveway tar,
and the words “I have to” which
never seem to end, and never
knowing what I think I know,
which slips away like oil or sand
into the horizons of memory.
Why this?
Why were we made to go, and
never come to rest?
I suppose, God’s love made it so,
otherwise, how do we grow?
Yet, I have grown - tired.
Yet, I would rest.
Caring
After Nick’s cello lesson,
after his basketball game,
I was eager to drive home to
his mother’s dinner and
newly trimmed tree. But
he said he had a headache
and wanted something to
eat, so I pulled over and
gave him three bucks for
a bag of chips and a soda,
and felt my heart swell, filled
with gladness that I had three
bucks to hand him, and we both
enjoyed the ride
home, sated, and listening
to Elton John sing the Circle
of Life, and Don’t Let the Sun
Go Down on Me, as I reached
for a couple of chips.
And so, it would come as a
surprise when, in but two days,
I would slap his face
for the first time, for cursing
me as I counseled him to
take care of his own affairs
better than he had been,
and though I hated to touch
my own child’s face with any
but a caressing hand, that
smack was like the chips and
drink, only no music played
as his head lurched back
and my guts twisted deep
inside of me, and his deep
inside of him, as the circle keeps
turning to what must be.
Miami Beach, January 2008
I like to stroll the beach between the hotels
up Collins down to Ocean Drive and
meet there the noon hour where I can
take my lunch along the strip and watch
the glowing passers-by drawn from
everywhere to a place only half real and
less than half as real as the beach that
leads me here, where I can imagine
the masted sailing ships off the shore,
years and years before.
On the beach was a young brown man
facing the spray, prayer beads and cross in
his hand, facing the ocean toward which he prayed
that maybe Jesus would come to shore and
meet him, and carry him away, and I nodded
as I passed him by, and he nodded back a
plaintive “Don’t you see, brother?”
And his dangling cross, rather than bared breasts
governed my thoughts and my day, as I came to
lie down under the sky, and thank God for
ocean, and sun, and for sending me a sign.
And so I turned to the ocean, and prayed, and
saw Jesus swimming with Buddha on the horizon.
Soundings
His fellows gathr'd round the stone,
arms afold in solemn pose and
talked of light not 'fore disclosed.
And one remarked -
"I asked him, not too long before,
how we had not known. Said he:
'But none had queried me 'til this;
I have been here ever since....' "
What beauties rot in timeless holes
where fail we sound our fellows' souls
and pass by players' masks that hide
perhaps, luminescence, gold.
The Mall
I used to say I am no part of this misuse
of time on Saturday afternoons,
this abuse of hard won income – splurges
on nonsense trinkets that sit on the bureau, or
in it, or under it, or in front of it, or wherever.
I resist!
I used to say that Veblen is right, of course,
that this consumption is conspicuous
with the dysfunction of shallow souls streaming
like lemmings over the cliffs of credit thrown
over the limit that their plastic cards impose.
Stuff like that . . .
I used to think I was better than the mall,
better than any mere arcade that would steal me
from my books and ‘better’ thoughts and
my duties at home, and –
But then there are the faces.
The living faces, the smiling faces, the ice cream
from the Baskin Robbins counter faces, the
beating hearts of children faces – people like me faces, browsers
in bookstore faces, friends, lovers, colleagues, fathers and sons
and mothers and daughters and clerks behind the register faces, yes,
vexed, idle, smiling, watching the clock run out on their day faces,
Registers keeping them from joining us in the aisles,
from buying the item that is placed in the pretty velum
bag that will carry it home where it will make them feel
better to be a part of a land where there are pretty velum bags
and people who put things in them, and people who make those things,
and who move those things, and who polish those things and
who live next door or down the road or across the mountains;
Feel better to be part of a kaleidoscope of color, shapes, sounds –
yes, the business owners know the score,
they peddle tiny drops of joy, not wares as I had supposed;
they know the score just as we who browse and sniff, and touch, and wish,
and buy and lay-a-way (if we must) for two weeks hence
when the eagle lands again and
we return to claim that little item that brings a smile with its feel
– it is real, after all, and
more real than homilies and ruminations in French cafes
and the black-shirted snobs in clogs and grey soldiers of fact and thinkers
who use phrases like ‘conspicuous consumption’ as though they
have an answer better than our need to see faces,
to touch things, to hold things, to give things, to bring solace to a plagued,
beleaguered spirit when yoga and Church and Marx and Jesus won’t do.
No, let there be malls – scores and scores of malls,
places to stroll and wish and buy and meet and play and do and, yes, think –
That, too.
The keepers win, but not nearly as much as I who consume
the images, the songs, the color, the warmth of human throngs who sing
and sing the same songs by the Sam Goody's and in the window, over there,
there are clogs for sale, and black shirts, too.
Grace (No. 1)
Grace. Grace.
Another year passes and
I am right back to you.
No test, no doubt, no fear, no earthly
hope has been able to root
you out. You have poured out
your grace upon me and you have
called me to you. Through the dark
nights, the sunny days, the cold
winters and the warm winds of
Spring, my heart has kept its home
in its longing for you. To touch you,
to know that you walk with me
through this life, to feel your Spirit
like a portentous breeze that
whispers your name in my ear,
this is my longing. May you continue
to call me back, even as I look away,
walk away, from the very source
of life and sanity. These reflections
are themselves grace.
Thoughts About Bricks
Across Broadway, from my window
I see the countless bricks of buildings,
kilned and baked years before and
filled with stories that will never be told,
just as the passers-by on the street below.
Countless stories - countless, countless - too
many to tell, or hear, or bear.
God Has Run Rough With Me
Once again, God has run rough with me,
and so I may not get there with you now.
We all must heed this Captain’s call
and not too far trod toward heaven’s glade, O No!
For we must surely sigh, it seems, and wrest ourselves
back to the treacherous, edifying sea.
But why so often on bitter water
does this Captain set the sails that rip us
from sun lit shores toward stormy gale,
while we hang, scarred, in raspy ropes,
with a mere promise of blessed shores
and palms and peaceable sleep beneath
the canopy of heaven, as we bleed and bang along
the masts and gunnels and splintery deck?
For a while, let me cleave with prickly Jonah
and bid some earthly captain book me passage and even
abandon me in this abyss where I would
dare some mouthy fish come and feign my “rescue”
and deposit me on toilsome shores toward
which that other Captain’s sail had me set
to plight troth to a mission for now foregone.
And so, Dear Captain, let all Nineveh expire and the world
remain ablaze in fires started long before I came upon the stage.
Why suffer as fool to minister the fools’ parade?
Why suffer for naught but to ease a pain today
that, by our nature, will come at dawn in different dress
after this day’s sun has set?
Leave the starfish on the shore, and let them perish,
one and all.
Are we not fools to take God’s errand
when our own faces may turn to peaceful sky with
no brief to carry or orders to “heal and rectify”?
And is the voice we hear a call and not an echo
of a primal scream bounced from youth
within our souls’ caves, when first we asked
“Why?” and “Why?” again?
I am forked, though, and O would I get there with you!
But God has run rough with me, and placed my face
inside my sin and dressed me down for the dots I’ve missed,
though my arrows in first circle fell – enough for any less
than Covey, enough to spare the stripes of any, but Him,
He who dwells in me.
So for a while, let me cleave with righteous Job,
and dare a speech from whirlwinds
(I am ready now, with that precedent)
to talk back to God Almighty,
to wrestle as did Jacob of the broken limb
for that blessing that I, nay we, all deserve just
for living in this petty state from day to day.
I shall dare with a yawn his bass-toned speech on Leviathan,
and His famous question,
“Where were you when?”
I will dare them one and all.
What’s this higher light of which we dream,
and shall we have the courage to look upon it day by day,
and at what cost? Family? Friend? Sanity? Soul?
Or should we not, instead, repose?
So let me laugh a while, dear Captain –
And that is no request – as I figure out the
exits for those pains in head and chest, as I figure
out why servants, like lovers, must suffer so
and still be asked to ease alterity’s woes.
The minister deserves her rest, and push her
not too far, for ministers break too,
the ones of vision break too,
the prophets break too, and first,
who see the possibility of Your beloved dream on earth,
yet who tire of tears, torments and splits, and so are tempted
to enter that Nineveh, and live-out the time amongst them
not as servant, but as hapless friend.
But by and by, You shall not break me,
for that dream I own, and it is mine, and
my work is for those kindred souls and
not, at last, for You on high, in the seas or in the
sky.
Reward me Yes or No, that work I do is not for You
whose foggy speech and darkened clues have left me spent
and black and blue; I work for my brothers’ and sisters’ souls,
and by that toil I make my own.
And since I love them can I really rest too long
while bombs appear o’er a sweet child’s bed,
and Satan claws the hearts of youth
with bigotry and nationalist “truth” that rinses out
the sweet within, and bids they turn God’s rifle on a friend
from Palestine to old Berlin, on hapless souls, just like them?
And so in time I’ll rise, whether with vestments donned or bare flesh worn,
I’ll stand against this Satan born of “I and Other” imaginings,
and that my ministry shall be.
So I will rest, and turn my face to brother sun
and dare you, Captain, place a cloud that we may not
gaze upon each other for a while.
I have earned my time with him.
And you shall no doubt tell me hence that this was
part of plans for me, and I that much the wiser am,
one more lesson learned and lived.
And I will smile a knowing smile, and turn and take
my sister’s hand, and balm the wound on a brother’s heart, and
know that to serve is always now, one by one,
from the inside out, clad in vestments
or in my nakedness.
Sienna
Today in the food court I saw a young couple
who had a pretty little girl in tow, and
they called out to her by name, "Sienna,"
as she meandered to the kiosk selling
plastic toys and little stuffed animals, things
that dazzle little girls like Sienna.
One day, perhaps thirty-six years from now,
Sienna will mount the podium at the convention of her
party, and give an acceptance speech, and she
will help determine the fate of millions.
But, for now, she is preoccupied with the
green and yellow teddy bears and oversized
crayons made of plastic, but which look
good enough to eat.
And how like Sienna we are, each of us who
thirty-six years, or months, or days, or hours
from now, will mount some new platform in
our lives, and help determine the fate of millions,
if not of people, then perhaps of blades of grass,
or flies, or grubs, or spores that will float on a summer
breeze, that allow us to be consequential, even if today
we are content to be dazzled by the wine in our glass,
the new granite counter top, or the flatware
from the Pottery Barn that we found on sale.
The Shadow Lengthens
Having lost track of the time,
being caught up in the sunshine,
the waves crashing upon the shore,
I look down to find my answer.
The warmth of sun, the squeals of
children at play turned, for an instant,
into a dark winter's chill.
But it passes, and I bend to help
a little boy build his castle, also soon
to be washed away, but not yet.
Ecce Homo
I am the saint, feeding the poor,
I am the dark man at the door.
I will curse the Lazarus rich
and kick my brother in the ditch.
I can bite my tongue six days a week,
and slice you, on the last, before my tea.
I will rock you in my arms at night to ease you,
and snap you in two by next day’s noon.
All in all, I am good, and aspire for better;
but push or pull too hard, and burst my holy fetters.
I curse this split within my limbs,
but think again, and start to grin.
All poems: Copyright © David E. McClean, 2006-2020. All rights reserved.
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