Working Heart

Working heart, love factory,
Generations of stored excellence
Perched on a straw nest hatching tired
From the constant ache of egg laid want.

Turned and turned but not from feeling.
Star bright dreams of the distant present,
Unblinking daylight telling all the fictions we believe,
Fears with words that wake us almost speaking
From nights of almost dreaming.

Spring Dawn Haiku

Mud blacker than shade,
rippleless silver mirror,
Morning dark dawn kiss.

To my students from the University:

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Geezer

It is not my ears but my years
that wants to hear the shuffle and thump
of dance. It is not my mind but my age
that longs to puzzle out of another
passionate irresistibility that is consuming
all my faculties with the intensity
of hot, wet oblivion. Does wisdom come with age?
Obviously not! Am I a fool?
With every ounce of strength I can muster!

Spraznicum Esho

Happy International Women's Day!

Sunset in Sun City
(for mom)

I.
Wheelchair ruts in faded red carpets
Crowded lobbies, hushed corridors
Grab a seat, the matinee is about to start.

Ancient limos, giant and shinny
Pull up to the grand promenade
Before the majestic doors.

The music of large bands is
Swinging in syncopation,
Swaying in orchestrated phrases.

It will soon be flashing lights, fancy dames,
Reporters bending in to catch what’s said,
Cigarettes and whisky until the dawn.

II.
Alone in the school yard
Two miles away, the squeak
Of a metal swing fractures the silence.

She actually enjoys the sound of it,
The desperate cry of some
Tortured giant metal bird.

No mom or dad around.
Nobody to play with,
The metal shrieking in pain.

III.
The old begin to gather
In after dinner sitting rooms
Chairs roll on careful rubber treads

Across padded carpets, or glide with a lisp
Down level linoleum paths as if descending.
A walker makes soft metalic clunks

Bangs in muted hollowness
Against the table as the woman
Surrenders to the chair.

There the show begins;
Not talking, staring straight ahead
She sees what no one still alive can remember.

She cries, she sighs, she smiles,
She holds dad’s hand.

Sleepless senyru

Downward arching moon
Pale rectangle on the floor
Blank screen of moonbeams

Of Humble

The railless train of dreams ploughs through my night.
It whistles and chugs and races out of sight
And I am left in the bed before dawn,
A set of muddy ruts with no memory,
A headache and the corrupt taste of forgotten sweets,
Listening to the last cluck of laughter,
Incomprehensibly hanging in the air
Of an empty room that once was the party in my sleeper.
We are faced with the river that loses its freedom
When it becomes a drink of water and
The rare air at the mountain’s frosty summit
Which becomes a tired sigh.
Things go from what they once were
And our forgetfulness is puzzled by their halos.

The arrogance of work

He sits and struggles, wracking his brain;
He’s arrogant enough to dream of fame
and assumes that work will allow him to learn
the secrets of chocolate, stars and rain.

No matter how hard he works,
Those who have more talent will do
Whatever it is better than him.
They will not have earned a tiny parcel

Of that advantage, grace has put it there
And, no matter how hard he tries,
He can never make a miracle
Nor equal by sweat and tear

That which they found waiting for them
With wide open arms and a cheer.

Spraznicum

Happy Men's Day! Can you not cry for the millions? Are your tears dry as newsprint?

You dream headlines, I weep

I was on the road to a surprise
and the sunrise scratched at my window
long before the high above
Satchmo sang Brecht in German.
Bavaria breathed a flurry of yellow leaves.
Wine whirlpool.

The naked form of gluttony
danced before my eyes
less funny than hippos in tutus.
Wander to the bathroom
slowly, drop the seat,
no time of day,
there’s nothing better to do.
Hotel room.

Do you care this is about a person, not people;
does it matter this is about everyone, not me?
The plate is greasy in the restaurant
the food slides off and we might eat it
but do not, we were born full.
Song empty.

We are weakness strong in number -
Marx was right, he was wrong,
he knew the answer could
only be imposed or
no one would get it.
He knew I didn’t deserve to know.
Pain teacher.

Tear lake.
Swan dead.
First bird flu.
Millions.

Myths

Can you set the sky right?
Beowulf could. Can you avoid the
Temptation to take advantage of what you know?
Doc Brown could (most of the time).

Can we save humanity from panic
And keep their ignorance intact?
J and K could no matter how many
Bugs came for a killing spree.

Can Neo come to understand
And save us from our slavery?
With love enough, of course.
All you have to be is a good person.

Can I learn to be a good poet?
Can Sisyphus roll a rock?

Gulya wore her heart on a sleeve

The world was a morning that became the afternoon
in which children ran all over the meadows and
in and out of the small ravines.
Of course the banks of the river
hung precariously over dreams of an
unsupervised time that should have been
a school day but was an entertainment for
somebody, I don’t know who, as the adults
nervously got together, worrying about how
they looked and what their kids were going
to do, which they had already done and were
getting ready to do again, as playground fantasies
became real trees and streams in the mountains
with the same bees and ants making
small, soft brown flesh to have the same red bumps

Busses and classes and kids and cars
and everybody segregated so we could be watched
by each other, always not noticing what
someone was doing, everybody always
in ever changing groups except the adults
who were already overdressed for the wrong event
and anyway I brought my samovar, so strange
that the one foreigner should have an
object so common, it should have belonged to
somebody else but the strange man who
visited the English classes (after the kids had
done a forced march through two weeks
of dialog memorization – you know, the usual talk,
which nobody ever has) had agreed to be there
and wanted the impossibility of being a part of the thing,
which he was, but not the part that drooled on his pillow
or chatted with the other guests who were parents of
the kids who were sneaking off in plain sight everywhere.

Everybody was doing a different time, the afternoon
was already too long, we should be getting back, Pavel and
Slava had found a path down to the mountain stream,
not fast anymore but broken into a hand with, intermittently,
too many or too few trickling, snow cold, clear fingers, so that
Katya was telling Roza we couldn’t go back yet
because they had to get there, that place they always
go to but hadn’t time to get to yet. Wait a minute
so we can sing folk songs in Russian and the fool
can sing Strangers in the Night in English to
the absurd afternoon gathering and
they all smile and clap, no one understanding English
but the teacher of the English class who was trying
to keep me from feeling so strange
in this setting just like I might have done with my own kids
in another time in some place on the other side of the world
not feeling so different and not needing any
hot tea, cold day, parents and teachers, kids running everywhere samovar.

I kept trying to escape so naturally I was really trapped
The children kept wandering further away
And were so preoccupied with every anything
finding joy in being able to get away from each other together
that I saw my chance and looking at some dangerous branch
wandered off to save the children from their freedom
created by the society of adults I so desperately
needed to escape and they, of course, were glad,
what was I doing there anyway and there is so much
to talk about only not now because, although his
Russian is really bad, he might get the gist of it
and we are trying so hard to make him comfortable
I think the English teacher’s going to have
a nervous breakdown and what is she thinking
about anyway, oh, thank God, he’s across the ravine now,
I hope the kids are safe, how will they talk with him?

What do they need to say? As everything is obvious anyway,
even though it only looks like what we think it is,
just as we only think we know what it looks like,
and that is why the kids are all so busy looking around
and the adults are trying to avoid it at all costs as
the little corners with the rips in them and the
frayed places in the processes of fooling ourselves
where we have grabbed them too tightly for too long
and the holding on to them has worn everybody out,
especially the kids, but they are not so desperate,
you can hear it because they can still laugh and
it doesn’t sound like a policeman dragging a table
through a crowded bazaar when they do.
I’m obviously trying not to be noticed and the kids
understand that part because that is why they are also
wondering around out here in plain sight where
people can hardly notice them. I’m getting lucky at it, too,
which is a relief, as the strain of being a happy adult
was starting to fit me too tightly like too small underwear
and all the smiling and nodding was just the basest bit
of something so thin and fragile you are afraid
to hold it any longer. The kids did and didn’t understand.

They just made it so I could be there and it wouldn’t matter
(which was something impossible for the adults)
and I began to look down and up and around, finally
starting to see brown leaves and spider webs and ugly little
round pebbles everywhere and there was sparkle on the
wet, grey stones where it didn’t belong, just as it
had always been. I was so relieved to see it again
that I wasn’t prepared for the next moment when the
whole mirror cracked and the kids came and got me
to show me that he whole view had changed and
everything was back in place now, just as they
had always known it was but I had just started getting used
to fooling myself about it again. They silently brought me to
a cold and clear and fast flowing bit of stream and
stood there wordlessly waiting for me to see it where it was lodged
against a big round stone that was pressing it to the bottom.
A young woman’s arm, neatly severed at the elbow,
sat there like a dully grayish pink bit of trapped driftwood.
The fingers were relaxed and rounded as a handshake but the skin on
the tips of the fingers had been abraded in some places
as it had tumbled in the water down the steep mountain.
Her fingernails had been neatly trimmed but had no polish.
It was surprisingly light for being waterlogged. I used dead
branches like chopsticks to remove it from the water and hid
it behind some rocks on the bank where it would remain
among the fallen leaves and traveling stones like history.

surrender to making war

for Laura

funny how the days slip by
an urban surrender
to a time tsunami
filling the tide pools
of the nighttime’s passing cars
it hurts too much
this world of scars and sharp steel
I have no other way to talk to you
do not race your wheels too slowly
we have too much to do and say

I learn to oppose creation

I have asked my name of the whisper god
But will pray it loudly and with violence
For there is among people a certain deceptiveness
Which cannot be hidden and the whisper god
Is too kind with it to be tolerated
Nor can his hand be trusted to do
As would be satisfying for me.

Though there is nothing he cannot do,
He would tolerate this thing which I am
And let me make him weak and foolish
And a servant of my pleasure.
He will hear the horrible things which roll my drums
And march on trembling legs to my glory.
Thus he will be my greatness and
All shall fall in fear and death before me.

I will fight to raise myself up and
He will be the battle cry my crowd will yell.
As I have watched his faithful minions
Shame themselves with sin and pride,
I have heard my deepest longing
Gurgled with their dying breath.
The pack of little dogs that bite from fear
Inspired me to power this year.

As for his eternal glory,
We will have our day this morning.
My short heaven will only be
The hell I create now.

Darkness

The light is precisely as bright as always;
Your eyes have grown dim.
Why bother to turn the lights on
It won’t help much
So pull the unseen darkness
Around you like a blanket.
It will not warm you,
It’s more a comfort as you
Do as you have always done,
You could do it with your eyes closed,
As you now prepare to hang the wash,
Wandering the dark corridor
From the pitch black laundry room
To the dusky room with the folding clothesline.

Curtains are not important
You cannot draw them wide
To flood the room with light,
If you could, you’d gladly
Tie back the curtains in your eyes,
Or maybe not, perhaps
Now darkness is your Taj Mahal.

Sotto voce

I have this voice, it’s over there,
In that box under the dusty case of beer.
I just found it again, by accident.
It slips away and, truth be known,
I sometimes forget to look for it, although
I need it more often now.

It is the most surprising thing,
Hiding here and there.
I never know where to look for it.
Sometimes it lurks to the ruin of a comfortable chair
Or can be found in the fridge’s cold foods.
Other times it’s in a book on the shelf or a shadow under the stair.

It always takes me by surprise.
With my tousled hair and rolled up sleeves
As I sort through things looking for it,
Suddenly it is there, making me wonder
If all is not as it would seem,
If it hasn’t been looking for me.

Four Postcards

I have seen you wearing
nothing but urgency
and it was beautiful.
In the calm of dark
I have held you, felt
your tenderness and fire

and glided quietly
to the distant shore.
The answer to the
questions I’ve forgotten to ask,
I have seen burning
in the sunset that

shines behind your eyes.
Please come in my room,
look out my windows to
see yourself standing outside and
find the quiet and excitement
I feel when I see you on my step.

Vesuvius the butterfly

So now shall we go to the other side?
It is the violence of birth
And transformation

Because it takes one thing
And makes it radically different.
So shall we now go

And be with the tree as it bursts
Its bark and becomes as yet unknown?
Shall we now go

Into the madness we’ve always feared, to enter the silence within, which is
Trembling and surging like a symphony
Saying shall we now go

And find these words as they burst free?
Then they become that song your heart longs for, asking
Shall we now go free?

It is your chance and your dream
Wrapped up in the cocoon of your fearing it, that asks
Shall we now go?
Shall we now go finally free?

There is hope yet

The silence before the beginning of words,
Where you are afraid everything
Has a name but you don’t know it.
The knock at the door before
Knowing what that is, still startles,
Breaks the endless dream of
Individual being, or starts it,

Aware you are in tune with things
And Sextus, Montaigne, Hume
Rattle the bars of their hopeless doubt
For disbelief of the door that is all around them.

A room of doors that serve as walls
Where Jeddai trees battle motionlessly
With their shade sabers cutting lifeless swaths.
We are motionless as ideas
Separated from all life,
Empty as the shadow of a person.

If we realized, we would open the door
to discover a dusty brow and a glistening road.

Tribute to the startling truth

As we celebrate the superficial
In the daily drama of small change lives,
As our big city/little town without
Meaning motivates tears and endless talk,
Waves of nervousness well up within to
Make us restless as an English August,
Make us hope for a change from summer’s warm.

Will we walk rough and scarred through some kind of
Portal into a time and place with no
Illusion where ugly or shockingly
Brave, a mirror’s gaze will tell the truth and
Find that reflection is not only ours?

We so often see you there,
Photo of our dreams and fears.

Mister Rogers’ last kill

I sit quietly and alone,
World bombarding my head and ears,
The base line almost shakes the glass
From the apartment just above.

Power talking rappers posture
Greed, sex, violence, arrogance,
In a language not know to him
Who listens over and over
In the room above. I have heard
him crying when his father yelled

Less louder than his stereo.
He is grown now, his father’s gone.

He has gotten used to it but
His father’s anger still lives there.

phonecall

i hear your ring
ask who you want
you tell me
he is not here

do i know you
are you looking for me
can you stop calling
can i stop answering
do i want to

Ars Poetica

for Andrew

As the moon sat high in its
Westward ark, not clear and visible
But intimated by its ball of glow
Infused in gathering clouds in the
Opposite way from which
Dark spreads in warm water
Around a tea bag,
He stood in a dark room of a
Sleeping house staring out the
Frosted window, filled with
Thoughts which were also high in their ark.

Early next morning the snow was falling,
Large fluffy flakes, slow and erratic
In their nearby descent. No hint now
Of glowing globe, neither sun nor moon,
In the illuminated dim. In his breast
A burden blossomed into musical syllables
Of what he hoped you would know.
Sometimes a story of beauty
Which surprised him, sometimes
Questions which everybody asks but
Cannot answer. In failing words
He sought to invent that
Forgotten language that both of you
Could understand, that would save you both
From irreconcilable aloneness.

Beneath the ice we waited.

Grimlin snow suddenly starts,
Forgotten but now remembered in
That time when it just happens.
When you go outside
Ironically, at last, because
You were waiting, because
The children know it as
If it is the first time, as if
With sliding and laughing
Or with simply lying
In the snow, watching, that
The change in dullness
And staying inside is made
Into that strange situation
Of happiness.

And who could guess that state?
But we know because
Beneath the ice we waited.

It was always a box

I was the box back then.
That was before the door
Opened and the box blew up
And the present began
Running like a river without
Gentle bends past groves of
Apple trees in late summer
When the fruit bulged
In wind singing branches.
Thereafter sagging, the fruit
Grew oversweet and browning
Fell in soft plops on brittle
Dry grass above rocky banks.

Little bare feet that ran so
Harmlessly, that shot the sky
With fingered guns and
Laughed among the place between
Dung and dirt and bird filled skies,
That carried the triumphs and sorrows
Of the smallest things
Without knowing any largeness

Or the Emperor’s strange need
For bright swimming fishes or
Dark heart weaning from mother’s
Milk before the portent toothing
Of inflamed gums in moist
Motion of thunder clouds
Imminent of the richly deserved
To him who would get it
Like everything else
In much different ways
Then those thing are usually
No matter how inevitable.

Those things which fly out
From the box so fast
They can’t be caught
And spread themselves around so
That they will not be gathered,
Cannot be separated from the
Rest of everything, some which
Is normal and some which is not,
But can’t be told immediately
From the things they otherwise
Look like because everything
Looks pretty much the same
From the outside.

Do you hear me
At the certain age of a child
The child is no longer a child.
Does the time tell you lies
About the present?
And merry Christmas may
It wrap you with gaudy glint
And whisper absurdly
Get back Loretta
Glad ribbon lessons in
Delayed possession
Which is the nature of history
Which is where I am at.

Beyond the box
I am human but not
Like I wanted, I am
History but not the kind
I want to read or write.
My imagination is not
What I imagined and
I continually must redefine
What happiness is by
Looking at my own
Surprising happiness
Made up of dreams
So strange they must have
Belonged to someone else.

Where did today come from?
It is as if my tomorrow
And somebody’s else got
Mixed up and our
Lunchboxes got switched
And I was expecting a
Sandwich and I opened it up
To find what I am eating
Is not what I packed.

Do you want to know where
My father is? My mom
Can’t remember and thinks
It is because she has forgotten
The moment her box blew up
And life slipped past
Childhood dreams that
Kept us from being sleepless
Although they never allowed us
To fully be awake.
Now my dreams are like
My lunch (somebody else’s)
And I can’t guess what kind
Of me would have possibly
Wanted to dream them
Just like one day when
My father turned out to be
Somebody else.

Oh brave new world
That has such creatures in it.