[Poetry by Stephen Vincent Kobasa}
The Fox
Wide-eyed at its grace, before I noticed
the small corpse in its mouth.
As with all things living,
we no longer know holiness unmarked.
So every beauty is a reminder,
and a curse.
6 May 2017
Wide-eyed at its grace, before I noticed
the small corpse in its mouth.
As with all things living,
we no longer know holiness unmarked.
So every beauty is a reminder,
and a curse.
6 May 2017
No More Waiting
(after C.P. Cavafy)
The barbarians,
have arrived this time,
with their jackhammer solutions
and corrupt connoisseurs,
to find barbarians.
Listen to the hypocrisy of outrage
from those
who long ago erased the ruins
from their care,
and could not find Palmyra,
even in a dream.
20 May 2015
Full of Noises: A Memory
Dreams have a geography,
but not a calendar.
The monster knew this better
than the tyrant,
when the island sang to him
in his sleep.
And here is that island’s double,
its landscapes designed for pageants
and warnings;
the forests twisted one degree away from nature,
each tree in the marching woods
lit by its own sun.
On a beach of rocks,
tokens left by strangers
for other strangers,
this small heap of false pearls,
stolen to make a brief gift
before the tide steals it back
The mock drownings of a magician’s ocean,
have a long real history here,
with the stranded learning to starve,
the cabin boy dying within sight of land,
and the lovers standing on rooftops,
waiting for the horizon’s answer.
Another image in the mirror of this place,
found where the blind giant still tosses
a boulder at the sea from time to time,
out of habit or pity,
his sheep all long lost in the brambles,
and his tormentor at home in another blind man’s song.
Along the vanishing cliffs, some minor deity,
moonlighting as an artist, has left a mess.
But a god’s waste dump still speaks of splendor,
with a riot spill of red and ochre slag,
and a pyramid of failed pottery,
shattered with a shrug rather than a curse.
The single string fence
meant for a protection of plovers,
fragile as all our gestures against extinction,
here where the sun is nightly broken,
and every mist
strips the skin of the world away.
Martha’s Vineyard, MA - New Haven, CT
May, 2015
Around Rita
All of you are come to
one of those islands from
an old dream
where there is no food
but blessing.
Offshore,
compassionate whales
circle one of
their wounded.
The clutch of sorrow
is in the mail,
you know.
But now
there is other business.
The colors of her
bright house
are vanishing already,
memories flaking away.
Did we talk? she asks.
What did we say?
So you have
packed up the past
in your own satchels
to carry it for her.
That is the thread
spun too tight
for death’s scissors.
We are whom we love.
9 April 2015
All of you are come to
one of those islands from
an old dream
where there is no food
but blessing.
Offshore,
compassionate whales
circle one of
their wounded.
The clutch of sorrow
is in the mail,
you know.
But now
there is other business.
The colors of her
bright house
are vanishing already,
memories flaking away.
Did we talk? she asks.
What did we say?
So you have
packed up the past
in your own satchels
to carry it for her.
That is the thread
spun too tight
for death’s scissors.
We are whom we love.
9 April 2015
Run
And they all left him and fled. Now a young man followed him wearing nothing but a linen cloth about his body. They seized him, but he left the cloth behind and ran off naked.
– Mark 14:50-52
Twisting like a furious child out of its mother’s arms,
he trips, almost falls, one hand briefly pressing the dirt
to push his body away.
Was there laughter?
All that instruction to abandon fear
was for nothing. Worse.
Nothing but fear.
Imagining the torturers,
the grate over the stone pit.
That was the starting gun.
Or it was heaven’s dog, loosed for the first time,
rabid and silent,
tied to the runner’s shadow.
Later, in another place, a linen rag
will be left behind in a grave that someone
ran from.
But here do we have the Greek messenger
from the battlefield who finds
no finish line but death?
Or is this Adam, naked again?
Sinless.
Free.
– Palm Sunday, March 29, 2015
And they all left him and fled. Now a young man followed him wearing nothing but a linen cloth about his body. They seized him, but he left the cloth behind and ran off naked.
– Mark 14:50-52
Twisting like a furious child out of its mother’s arms,
he trips, almost falls, one hand briefly pressing the dirt
to push his body away.
Was there laughter?
All that instruction to abandon fear
was for nothing. Worse.
Nothing but fear.
Imagining the torturers,
the grate over the stone pit.
That was the starting gun.
Or it was heaven’s dog, loosed for the first time,
rabid and silent,
tied to the runner’s shadow.
Later, in another place, a linen rag
will be left behind in a grave that someone
ran from.
But here do we have the Greek messenger
from the battlefield who finds
no finish line but death?
Or is this Adam, naked again?
Sinless.
Free.
– Palm Sunday, March 29, 2015
The Price of Admission
(Bardo Museum, Tunis, 18 March 2015)
It was a bit steep,
as you discovered when
the guns began their guided tour.
(In Parliament, hearing the shots,
the legislators scurried away with their outrage).
Shell casings bounce across the mosaics.
What older assassins might have left their work
on these tiles,
some petty Caesar’s blood?
And this was Carthage, too,
until the Romans posted it with curses
that have yet to be lifted.
The story of the salted ground was a lie.
Simply unnecessary.
In other galleries, other cities,
the statues have been erased into
what they were
before there were gods.
Here, when you died,
the statues vanished.
You were the last to see them
free of the footnote
of your murders.
Everyone who comes
now
will think of you.
This is where it happened, they will say.
Here.
If they come.
It’s Happened Already
This is that whimper
end of the world
the quiet catastrophes
on the front page
drought
earthquake
prairie fire
each in biblical conformity
to the promised catalog
but a world
some worlds
conjure a blithe exemption.
Loneliness is the sin
that spares us
for burning
and we miss
the last day.
September, 2011
This is that whimper
end of the world
the quiet catastrophes
on the front page
drought
earthquake
prairie fire
each in biblical conformity
to the promised catalog
but a world
some worlds
conjure a blithe exemption.
Loneliness is the sin
that spares us
for burning
and we miss
the last day.
September, 2011
Notes for an Elegy
( for Edward, 1948-2010)
God give the yellow man
an easy breeze at blossom time.
– Arna Bontemps
The lemons on the blue and white porcelain plate
three
placed according to
the rules he knew always
what order
the world
had for
fiction.
But the world never conceded,
never signed the treaty
of his painting.
All its wars killed him,
a distraught believer
sitting in Marat’s bloody bath water,
like Gericault sketching in the morgue.
He saw more than was good for him
and remembered everything.
This was not a blessing,
and the glories that he fashioned
from the horrors
were no consolation
in the end.
Then what do we
incompetents
do for hope?
We gave him over to his own untender mercies.
In the only dream I have had of him since he died
the room was full of books,
like his house
and not,
as dreams always slightly revise the familiar,
and a brightness
his last perfect lie.
May - December, 2010
( for Edward, 1948-2010)
God give the yellow man
an easy breeze at blossom time.
– Arna Bontemps
The lemons on the blue and white porcelain plate
three
placed according to
the rules he knew always
what order
the world
had for
fiction.
But the world never conceded,
never signed the treaty
of his painting.
All its wars killed him,
a distraught believer
sitting in Marat’s bloody bath water,
like Gericault sketching in the morgue.
He saw more than was good for him
and remembered everything.
This was not a blessing,
and the glories that he fashioned
from the horrors
were no consolation
in the end.
Then what do we
incompetents
do for hope?
We gave him over to his own untender mercies.
In the only dream I have had of him since he died
the room was full of books,
like his house
and not,
as dreams always slightly revise the familiar,
and a brightness
his last perfect lie.
May - December, 2010
My Friend Icarus
In memory of Peter De Mott
That morning, the day he fell,
I was standing in a studio
looking at the painter’s most recent work –
a man’s body pressed flat to the ground,
flannel shirt,
light blazing his hand like resurrection’s preface.
So I knew,
later,
that out of this fallen world,
he had found another way.
23 February 2009
In memory of Peter De Mott
That morning, the day he fell,
I was standing in a studio
looking at the painter’s most recent work –
a man’s body pressed flat to the ground,
flannel shirt,
light blazing his hand like resurrection’s preface.
So I knew,
later,
that out of this fallen world,
he had found another way.
23 February 2009
Sorrow for Beginners
(for Laurette Laramie)
A miner with his headlamp,
this grief takes us past
the shiver and clang of the
elevator gate.
And we go down
There in the long narrow
where his bumbling fragment of light
separates one piece of our silence
from another,
the stone in tears,
we think of our own dying, ashamed.
There is a breathing out of the darkness.
Eurydice whispers,
we are not forgotten.
February, 2009
(for Laurette Laramie)
A miner with his headlamp,
this grief takes us past
the shiver and clang of the
elevator gate.
And we go down
There in the long narrow
where his bumbling fragment of light
separates one piece of our silence
from another,
the stone in tears,
we think of our own dying, ashamed.
There is a breathing out of the darkness.
Eurydice whispers,
we are not forgotten.
February, 2009
The Burning of Olympia
(for Ioanna)
Dryads aflame, the trees that were pyres in waiting,
fuel to their own ashes.
Those elderly lovers
giving their last loaf to Zeus
turned to wood in thanks,
still burned for each other
like the sister and brother who would
not leave their donkey
on the road from Artemida
where they and the animal
suffocated together in the darkened air.
Whose torch?
Perhaps it was
some hoplite amputee from today’s phalanx,
bearing kerosene and a grudge,
enraged at crawling for the smoldering laurel.
Or Achilles, in eternal obedience to a catamite ghost,
piling corpses to serve the dead.
Or Silenus walking drunk with a cigar.
September, 2007
(for Ioanna)
Dryads aflame, the trees that were pyres in waiting,
fuel to their own ashes.
Those elderly lovers
giving their last loaf to Zeus
turned to wood in thanks,
still burned for each other
like the sister and brother who would
not leave their donkey
on the road from Artemida
where they and the animal
suffocated together in the darkened air.
Whose torch?
Perhaps it was
some hoplite amputee from today’s phalanx,
bearing kerosene and a grudge,
enraged at crawling for the smoldering laurel.
Or Achilles, in eternal obedience to a catamite ghost,
piling corpses to serve the dead.
Or Silenus walking drunk with a cigar.
September, 2007
The Antikythera Mechanism
“...a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.”
A small confusion.
This is the machine itself –
not for measuring –
it operated this
brassy universe
clicking on its dismal
certain way.
Rare because there
was only one.
When it went to
the bottom
it didn’t drown
by accident,
but was thrown overboard
like Jonah
in hope of better
weather.
30 November 2006
“...a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.”
A small confusion.
This is the machine itself –
not for measuring –
it operated this
brassy universe
clicking on its dismal
certain way.
Rare because there
was only one.
When it went to
the bottom
it didn’t drown
by accident,
but was thrown overboard
like Jonah
in hope of better
weather.
30 November 2006
School
One of the English
came yesterday
dragging his box of darkness
into the bright room.
The shopping list:
Tape. Nails. Hose.
Bullets. Earplugs.
Candle.
Wood.
Tape.
Oh, the milkman and
his own lost children
making these murders for poets.
Headline cleverness of
Paradise Lost.
But it is our paradise
of fictions
vanished.
Not theirs.
4 October 2006
Another Portrait
in memory of Stanley Kunitz
A prank.
As yet, we had no lessons in betrayal, so the seminarian, seething,
walked like a vaudeville clown down the line
striking each of us with a carefully equal blow
across the face.
Not a word to either mother or father about
the usurping violence hidden in my child’s closet.
Where in the registries of humiliation
will I find that portrait? Would I know him now?
To what other astonished innocence were we the overture?
Did his history lead him to a pinwheel of granite
at the end of some wet leash?
Pain’s memory on your cheek
carried me back to mine –
Ungrateful.
Indebted.
1 October 2006
in memory of Stanley Kunitz
A prank.
As yet, we had no lessons in betrayal, so the seminarian, seething,
walked like a vaudeville clown down the line
striking each of us with a carefully equal blow
across the face.
Not a word to either mother or father about
the usurping violence hidden in my child’s closet.
Where in the registries of humiliation
will I find that portrait? Would I know him now?
To what other astonished innocence were we the overture?
Did his history lead him to a pinwheel of granite
at the end of some wet leash?
Pain’s memory on your cheek
carried me back to mine –
Ungrateful.
Indebted.
1 October 2006
Birthday
for Daniel Berrigan at the age of eighty-five
Just less my father’s age,
how young you both were, without our knowing.
Now that dying generation
leaving us to fend.
Always short of despair.
Discontented.
Recused.
Only to imagine your own griefs quiet –
the angel’s assurance at the door
of the tomb.
June, 2006
for Daniel Berrigan at the age of eighty-five
Just less my father’s age,
how young you both were, without our knowing.
Now that dying generation
leaving us to fend.
Always short of despair.
Discontented.
Recused.
Only to imagine your own griefs quiet –
the angel’s assurance at the door
of the tomb.
June, 2006
Walking with the War
Fleshy, mottled purple, chewing
its way up out of the leaf floor,
only one,
planted by spacemen
in tinfoil helmets,
twisted coathangers for ears,
and toy raygun wheels of sparks.
These days,
there are demons in the spring,
every stone wall outline
of nothing
is the ruin of a torture chamber
etched in the woods.`
I’ve seen enough –
the bullet holes in the
“No hunting” signs hung
like Christ’s royal alias
on the dead trees.
But better these bleak surprises
than the exhausting ghosts
and kid dreams
of the over and over
I travel as
my father’s keeper –
every difference between
now and then –
the blood stained dogwoods
cut to stumps.
One day
the memory will jam
in the projector
and the film bubble
away to the bright patch
of any war
but this.
March - May, 2006
Fleshy, mottled purple, chewing
its way up out of the leaf floor,
only one,
planted by spacemen
in tinfoil helmets,
twisted coathangers for ears,
and toy raygun wheels of sparks.
These days,
there are demons in the spring,
every stone wall outline
of nothing
is the ruin of a torture chamber
etched in the woods.`
I’ve seen enough –
the bullet holes in the
“No hunting” signs hung
like Christ’s royal alias
on the dead trees.
But better these bleak surprises
than the exhausting ghosts
and kid dreams
of the over and over
I travel as
my father’s keeper –
every difference between
now and then –
the blood stained dogwoods
cut to stumps.
One day
the memory will jam
in the projector
and the film bubble
away to the bright patch
of any war
but this.
March - May, 2006
Poet Ghost
(for Beth and Ay Ling)
I saw Emily Dickinson
in Amherst today
edging her walker
towards home
with no idea that the
locks have been changed.
There are oil stains
on the wooden porch,
the smell of Iraq in
the air. If she
turns toward the
cemetery she’ll find
my sheaf of daffodils –
five dollars – balanced
on her headstone’s
rim. Perhaps she
was more cruel than
I thought. Perhaps her
silences
are my fantasy.
Perhaps she babbled
endlessly, with only
the poems to shut her up.
28 March 2006
(for Beth and Ay Ling)
I saw Emily Dickinson
in Amherst today
edging her walker
towards home
with no idea that the
locks have been changed.
There are oil stains
on the wooden porch,
the smell of Iraq in
the air. If she
turns toward the
cemetery she’ll find
my sheaf of daffodils –
five dollars – balanced
on her headstone’s
rim. Perhaps she
was more cruel than
I thought. Perhaps her
silences
are my fantasy.
Perhaps she babbled
endlessly, with only
the poems to shut her up.
28 March 2006
Communion for the Birds
Sharp-edged hosts to carve the tongue
put out for those desperate flocks
tricked by Titania’s twisted seasons.
Turning to see the crows, a broken diadem
of shadows on the high branches,
attentive to corpses.
Hours later,
sunset,
the shreds of bread untouched.
What is it that waits for darkness?
But the crows were there feasting
in the morning.
First Sunday of Lent, 2006
Sharp-edged hosts to carve the tongue
put out for those desperate flocks
tricked by Titania’s twisted seasons.
Turning to see the crows, a broken diadem
of shadows on the high branches,
attentive to corpses.
Hours later,
sunset,
the shreds of bread untouched.
What is it that waits for darkness?
But the crows were there feasting
in the morning.
First Sunday of Lent, 2006
X-Ray Machines in the Botanic Garden
A refugee at the entrance
(or like a tinker, but there are no tinkers – no clatter in the streets)
I heap my bags,
electronics, damp blue poncho
inside out.
The machine demurs.
I yank my belt
attempting a joke about possible
embarrassment which the guard
misunderstands.
There is a man with a machine gun,
Venus Flytraps in a bowl
on the counter; lovely, waiting.
I sit in the mock humidity
at the door, unwilling to go
further.
Fans spin beneath the
high glass.
The iron trusses are threaded
with pompous houseplants
and name tags.
The man with the gun disappears down the path
under the palm trees.
I listen for the first shot.
I’m safe.
9 August 2005
A refugee at the entrance
(or like a tinker, but there are no tinkers – no clatter in the streets)
I heap my bags,
electronics, damp blue poncho
inside out.
The machine demurs.
I yank my belt
attempting a joke about possible
embarrassment which the guard
misunderstands.
There is a man with a machine gun,
Venus Flytraps in a bowl
on the counter; lovely, waiting.
I sit in the mock humidity
at the door, unwilling to go
further.
Fans spin beneath the
high glass.
The iron trusses are threaded
with pompous houseplants
and name tags.
The man with the gun disappears down the path
under the palm trees.
I listen for the first shot.
I’m safe.
9 August 2005
The Emperor's Violin
for Ardeth Platte, O.P.
There must have been
in that sliver of time
between the detonator's click
and the click of the world going away
a bright line of silence
then the eye of the dial
opened to blindness.
In between the before
and after –
the tintype pop
and its miniature cloud
and the voice from under the cloth
singing to the emperor's violin.
As the flames tear at
the circus tent,
our fantasies burning in
the center ring,
while the audience,
stupefied,
flings itself at
the locked exit door.
Y-12 Factory,
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
6 August 2005
for Ardeth Platte, O.P.
There must have been
in that sliver of time
between the detonator's click
and the click of the world going away
a bright line of silence
then the eye of the dial
opened to blindness.
In between the before
and after –
the tintype pop
and its miniature cloud
and the voice from under the cloth
singing to the emperor's violin.
As the flames tear at
the circus tent,
our fantasies burning in
the center ring,
while the audience,
stupefied,
flings itself at
the locked exit door.
Y-12 Factory,
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
6 August 2005
Ultrasound
I heard the whales singing
in my father’s veins
as the colors flashed across
the black and white map of his
thigh.
There are burrows here,
where the blood flows,
doors into the darkness,
footprints on the moon,
all the crannies in which his
fear is hidden.
The novice
technician makes
the lights explode
like the sky over Baghdad
on one war’s night.
This could be a tape of his own memory:
the beach with the dead
edging each other like beads.
What other wounds are out of this machine’s reach,
the old intimacies that were my making?
He is my grail king,
the Greek left screaming on an island
who would not heal,
despite the laughter –
his antique disguise.
June, 2005
I heard the whales singing
in my father’s veins
as the colors flashed across
the black and white map of his
thigh.
There are burrows here,
where the blood flows,
doors into the darkness,
footprints on the moon,
all the crannies in which his
fear is hidden.
The novice
technician makes
the lights explode
like the sky over Baghdad
on one war’s night.
This could be a tape of his own memory:
the beach with the dead
edging each other like beads.
What other wounds are out of this machine’s reach,
the old intimacies that were my making?
He is my grail king,
the Greek left screaming on an island
who would not heal,
despite the laughter –
his antique disguise.
June, 2005
Farewell Tune
(for Elmer Maas, 1935 - 2005)
Death is at his piano again.
The jingle-jangle brings on
our song and dance man
bowler-hatted, cane whirling
from his hand like a
cinematic clock in its
frenzy of mortality.
An elder cherub,
the child’s face glittering beneath
his illness, he does
a Charleston around the
warheads
tapping out the letters of compassion with
his two-toned shoes.
Then
a final kick of his heel
and the curtain trembles with his
going.
May, 2005
(for Elmer Maas, 1935 - 2005)
Death is at his piano again.
The jingle-jangle brings on
our song and dance man
bowler-hatted, cane whirling
from his hand like a
cinematic clock in its
frenzy of mortality.
An elder cherub,
the child’s face glittering beneath
his illness, he does
a Charleston around the
warheads
tapping out the letters of compassion with
his two-toned shoes.
Then
a final kick of his heel
and the curtain trembles with his
going.
May, 2005
A Dancing Darkness
“Turn, turn, turn...”
That child’s machine,
a lens for each eye, with its round card of images,
one frame at a time
of silenced screams.
Surprised to anger,
looking,
made to see
the man pitched from the south tower,
the torturers at their pulleys,
bandaged amputees bouncing inside the ambulances from Fallujah –
all that flickering world of
monotone tragedy
that hums in the living room.
In some Frenchman’s film,
there is a gunshot.
Then a woman’s body
rolls over and over
down a snow covered hill,
turning white.
Tinkerbelle’s corpse,
wings plucked,
dumped in a common grave
with the other sprites.
No pas de deux here,
or the circus play of
tumble and trapeze.
More like a collection of loss
filed in memory’s mildewed cabinets,
then auctioned to strangers
who turn the banal to mystery
as we vanish,
no one left
to shout our names
in the streets.
The artist’s fingers slit
in the making,
a new identity scratched across
her thumb’s whorls,
she is someone else now,
no longer to blame.
What’s saved in this moment
are lies,
all lies.
He falls to his death
outside the frame.
These forms will crumple and crack
in some gallery of the future
where conservators debate
the newest immortal chemical.
They are the puppet wounded –
malevolent piñatas
that one would take a stick to
with the rage of an
abandoned child.
Then,
in this delicacy of air,
infant ghosts
appear.
Imagine them
unwrapped.
Invisible.
December, 2004 - January, 2005
“Turn, turn, turn...”
That child’s machine,
a lens for each eye, with its round card of images,
one frame at a time
of silenced screams.
Surprised to anger,
looking,
made to see
the man pitched from the south tower,
the torturers at their pulleys,
bandaged amputees bouncing inside the ambulances from Fallujah –
all that flickering world of
monotone tragedy
that hums in the living room.
In some Frenchman’s film,
there is a gunshot.
Then a woman’s body
rolls over and over
down a snow covered hill,
turning white.
Tinkerbelle’s corpse,
wings plucked,
dumped in a common grave
with the other sprites.
No pas de deux here,
or the circus play of
tumble and trapeze.
More like a collection of loss
filed in memory’s mildewed cabinets,
then auctioned to strangers
who turn the banal to mystery
as we vanish,
no one left
to shout our names
in the streets.
The artist’s fingers slit
in the making,
a new identity scratched across
her thumb’s whorls,
she is someone else now,
no longer to blame.
What’s saved in this moment
are lies,
all lies.
He falls to his death
outside the frame.
These forms will crumple and crack
in some gallery of the future
where conservators debate
the newest immortal chemical.
They are the puppet wounded –
malevolent piñatas
that one would take a stick to
with the rage of an
abandoned child.
Then,
in this delicacy of air,
infant ghosts
appear.
Imagine them
unwrapped.
Invisible.
December, 2004 - January, 2005
From the train window
A crescent of turtles in the sun,
borne up on the algae carpet
just beneath the railway tracks.
Write on their shells,
bearing the world in words.
August, 2004
A crescent of turtles in the sun,
borne up on the algae carpet
just beneath the railway tracks.
Write on their shells,
bearing the world in words.
August, 2004
Wedding Rhyme
(for Kate and Steve)
Surprises of a poet’s fate
That she should know on a first date
Or second, third, the proper tone
Of living other than alone.
That solitary dream’s embrace
Before she saw her lover’s face
And learned those steps of graceful dance
Measure one, then two, romance
In that tango tangled up
With grief and rage, the bitter cup
Of seeing how the world askew
Needs her and him and what they do.
Assenting to that joyful doom
To choose the work, but how? with whom?
Old homes unmade, their newer vows
Make new that hope that heaven allows
Of lambs, kind wolves, round the wedding table
This couple’s peace finds fact that fable
Which flattens fear’s weapons, all mercy creates.
For now, they hammer at true love’s gates.
3 July 2004
(for Kate and Steve)
Surprises of a poet’s fate
That she should know on a first date
Or second, third, the proper tone
Of living other than alone.
That solitary dream’s embrace
Before she saw her lover’s face
And learned those steps of graceful dance
Measure one, then two, romance
In that tango tangled up
With grief and rage, the bitter cup
Of seeing how the world askew
Needs her and him and what they do.
Assenting to that joyful doom
To choose the work, but how? with whom?
Old homes unmade, their newer vows
Make new that hope that heaven allows
Of lambs, kind wolves, round the wedding table
This couple’s peace finds fact that fable
Which flattens fear’s weapons, all mercy creates.
For now, they hammer at true love’s gates.
3 July 2004
A Brother’s Death
(for Elizabeth)
There is a goodbye museum
where we collect last things
The temporary exhibits –
a woman glimpsed through
the window of the train
heading north
in the twilight
of the Sicilian coast.
And the permanent displays of
hospital rooms and
monitors whistling to be
switched off.
Every departure has its waiting –
the numbers on the railway
station board erased
and rewritten.
Afterwards,
standing at the bathroom sink,
the mirror darkens on your
own face.
You wave.
27 March 2004
(for Elizabeth)
There is a goodbye museum
where we collect last things
The temporary exhibits –
a woman glimpsed through
the window of the train
heading north
in the twilight
of the Sicilian coast.
And the permanent displays of
hospital rooms and
monitors whistling to be
switched off.
Every departure has its waiting –
the numbers on the railway
station board erased
and rewritten.
Afterwards,
standing at the bathroom sink,
the mirror darkens on your
own face.
You wave.
27 March 2004
Emily Hears the War
(for Clare and Rachel)
The planes curve in the sky
Over Emily Dickinson's grave,
Shadowing toward Iraq,
Their dark noise trundling
Behind them like a hunchbacked servant.
Snow fingers the headstone's
Curt explanation -
"Called Home."
Death a mother's voice
Cutting across the field
She envied the monuments
To her own day's slaughter.
Now an ashamed ghost,
Her hidden life
Distant as ours from
The sound of dying.
Without irony,
For once clear with the horror,
Her desperate questions hanging
Each mangled body on a word.
Behind the closed curtains
Of what was her room
The sound of breaking glass,
Flowers trampled underfoot.
No gingerbread basket dangles
From the scaffold of her hands
For the children
Dancing below.
January - April, 2003
(for Clare and Rachel)
The planes curve in the sky
Over Emily Dickinson's grave,
Shadowing toward Iraq,
Their dark noise trundling
Behind them like a hunchbacked servant.
Snow fingers the headstone's
Curt explanation -
"Called Home."
Death a mother's voice
Cutting across the field
She envied the monuments
To her own day's slaughter.
Now an ashamed ghost,
Her hidden life
Distant as ours from
The sound of dying.
Without irony,
For once clear with the horror,
Her desperate questions hanging
Each mangled body on a word.
Behind the closed curtains
Of what was her room
The sound of breaking glass,
Flowers trampled underfoot.
No gingerbread basket dangles
From the scaffold of her hands
For the children
Dancing below.
January - April, 2003
Haunted
(for Liz McAlister)
The reluctant hunting for this poem,
gobbled crumbs on the path,
negatives of the skin’s map across damp tile,
minor craters in the muddy snow.
His shadow pursues him
around the corner of the chain
link fence,
anxious as King Hamlet’s ghost
to quit the morning air.
Rejoicing in the eulogies,
do the murderers dance on
their factory floors?
I hear him walking,
angel hands at the electric gates
reaching for doom’s instruction sheet,
now torn, quartered,
scoured like vellum for some new
inscription,
a nimble grammar of obedience
from the seared tongue.
And the feather of grief
rises
slips
in the notches of the air.
After these funerals,
I would carry a broom
like the Jains,
all crawlers swept clear of
trampling,
a pardon at every step.
Now his decent silence
awaits the new chants.
In his last prison,
freed.
January, 2003
(for Liz McAlister)
The reluctant hunting for this poem,
gobbled crumbs on the path,
negatives of the skin’s map across damp tile,
minor craters in the muddy snow.
His shadow pursues him
around the corner of the chain
link fence,
anxious as King Hamlet’s ghost
to quit the morning air.
Rejoicing in the eulogies,
do the murderers dance on
their factory floors?
I hear him walking,
angel hands at the electric gates
reaching for doom’s instruction sheet,
now torn, quartered,
scoured like vellum for some new
inscription,
a nimble grammar of obedience
from the seared tongue.
And the feather of grief
rises
slips
in the notches of the air.
After these funerals,
I would carry a broom
like the Jains,
all crawlers swept clear of
trampling,
a pardon at every step.
Now his decent silence
awaits the new chants.
In his last prison,
freed.
January, 2003
The Going
(for Daniel Berrigan)
Our grief cracks around us like
Ice gloved straw in an empty field.
The screen of memory buzzes.
Fading at the edge of winter,
No breath left to thicken the mist
Above the tended graves,
Poets and prophets die alike,
Gasping for words in the empty air.
Professed mourners with no talent
For sorrow, we carry the
Body into the cold, door to door.
Under your oil-stained fingers
A brother’s secrets:
The burden of certainty,
The old smile.
December, 2002
(for Daniel Berrigan)
Our grief cracks around us like
Ice gloved straw in an empty field.
The screen of memory buzzes.
Fading at the edge of winter,
No breath left to thicken the mist
Above the tended graves,
Poets and prophets die alike,
Gasping for words in the empty air.
Professed mourners with no talent
For sorrow, we carry the
Body into the cold, door to door.
Under your oil-stained fingers
A brother’s secrets:
The burden of certainty,
The old smile.
December, 2002
Epithalamion
(for Colleen and Arthur)
In the darkened days, when griefs abound,
The wedding feast’s dissenting sound.
Hear hope’s music, no lonely voice,
But chords of difference, ancient choice
To annoint the future with the past
Of marriages, from first to last.
The gentle ghosts of families gather,
Their loving beds a helix ladder
Where love divided multiplies.
In the giving, yours the prize,
Of witness gracious as you go
Full of cares, but free of woe.
November 29, 2002
(for Colleen and Arthur)
In the darkened days, when griefs abound,
The wedding feast’s dissenting sound.
Hear hope’s music, no lonely voice,
But chords of difference, ancient choice
To annoint the future with the past
Of marriages, from first to last.
The gentle ghosts of families gather,
Their loving beds a helix ladder
Where love divided multiplies.
In the giving, yours the prize,
Of witness gracious as you go
Full of cares, but free of woe.
November 29, 2002
The Frozen Butterflies
Heaped up like emptied suitcases in Dachau,
battered doors to a doll’s crack house,
or costumes looted from a toy opera
and scattered on a stage of twigs,
this genocide of fairies.
These are the failed poems on
folded paper, new garbage.
Light as ash alive,
nothing left but
the broom, the torch,
a last flying.
Tears for Hecuba,
while surrounded by ordinary horrors.
Why such grief for these mortal insects
that look like the end of the world?
February, 2002
Heaped up like emptied suitcases in Dachau,
battered doors to a doll’s crack house,
or costumes looted from a toy opera
and scattered on a stage of twigs,
this genocide of fairies.
These are the failed poems on
folded paper, new garbage.
Light as ash alive,
nothing left but
the broom, the torch,
a last flying.
Tears for Hecuba,
while surrounded by ordinary horrors.
Why such grief for these mortal insects
that look like the end of the world?
February, 2002
Winter
Swans trapped in the sun
and the ice,
feathers spread to border the light,
stunned.
Beauty erases what you know is
their insolence,
their cruelty.
January, 2002
Swans trapped in the sun
and the ice,
feathers spread to border the light,
stunned.
Beauty erases what you know is
their insolence,
their cruelty.
January, 2002
John Brown’s Apples
(for Jerry B.)
The chill gray lined
over by the new woods
His landscape more clearcut
with a smallpox of stumps
What would a child remember of this?
The stone slab wall,
passion chiseled,
an omen of the armory gates.
The empty earth where the house burned
to ash a century ago
like a burial mound stripped
of the memorial armor and edged weapons
once heaped around a warrior’s skull.
No ample grave.
A tree holds fruit in the air
too high for apples
as if Tantalus waved in despair beneath
the rotting gold hung from the lynching's branches
well into winter.
Is this the inheritance of that ghost orchard,
one now unkempt survivor,
or is it our desire that the delicate lie
be true, a pluperfect myth to fit
the day’s memory
and the story we tell our own fathers,
haunting us before they die.
December, 2001 - February, 2002
(for Jerry B.)
The chill gray lined
over by the new woods
His landscape more clearcut
with a smallpox of stumps
What would a child remember of this?
The stone slab wall,
passion chiseled,
an omen of the armory gates.
The empty earth where the house burned
to ash a century ago
like a burial mound stripped
of the memorial armor and edged weapons
once heaped around a warrior’s skull.
No ample grave.
A tree holds fruit in the air
too high for apples
as if Tantalus waved in despair beneath
the rotting gold hung from the lynching's branches
well into winter.
Is this the inheritance of that ghost orchard,
one now unkempt survivor,
or is it our desire that the delicate lie
be true, a pluperfect myth to fit
the day’s memory
and the story we tell our own fathers,
haunting us before they die.
December, 2001 - February, 2002
Kissinger's Dream
(for Fred Pfeil)
This is the past I never visit.
The loop of screams
flickering behind the
blind lens in an
empty theatre.
My excellent lies.
Enough.
I am rarely angry.
December, 2001
(for Fred Pfeil)
This is the past I never visit.
The loop of screams
flickering behind the
blind lens in an
empty theatre.
My excellent lies.
Enough.
I am rarely angry.
December, 2001
Medusa’s Dust
...where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy...
– Macbeth, IV, iii
Still life in baskets
On a shelf,
The last apples from Eden
Turned to stone by the air.
Ashes are the miniature of Creation,
Beginning and end,
The mud of Treblinka’s pond, Job’s hat.
This is the dust that was waiting.
Lost in the ruins,
Some sculptor’s monster,
An incompetent Atlas
For the shiny dream’s weight.
Under the jets,
A stage door in the mountain
Where Buddha’s ghost stands
And the honey markets sell blood.
At the end of the Silk Road, antique land,
One refugee oracle said:
"Everything has turned into piles of stones."
Or to Lear’s nothing, which from nothing
Has come to stay.
The magic of terror is fear’s democracy,
Medusa in the mirror
When we deface the steam on the glass
And listen to the snakes hum.
October, 2001
...where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy...
– Macbeth, IV, iii
Still life in baskets
On a shelf,
The last apples from Eden
Turned to stone by the air.
Ashes are the miniature of Creation,
Beginning and end,
The mud of Treblinka’s pond, Job’s hat.
This is the dust that was waiting.
Lost in the ruins,
Some sculptor’s monster,
An incompetent Atlas
For the shiny dream’s weight.
Under the jets,
A stage door in the mountain
Where Buddha’s ghost stands
And the honey markets sell blood.
At the end of the Silk Road, antique land,
One refugee oracle said:
"Everything has turned into piles of stones."
Or to Lear’s nothing, which from nothing
Has come to stay.
The magic of terror is fear’s democracy,
Medusa in the mirror
When we deface the steam on the glass
And listen to the snakes hum.
October, 2001
The Small Thing
(verses in wartime)
Inside the self’s globe,
The half horizon –
That is the unknown country,
Sealed borders, communications cut,
Where the world burns on the cave wall,
And a poem is fingered in the dust
Like a messiah’s curse.
late April, 1999
(verses in wartime)
Inside the self’s globe,
The half horizon –
That is the unknown country,
Sealed borders, communications cut,
Where the world burns on the cave wall,
And a poem is fingered in the dust
Like a messiah’s curse.
late April, 1999
The Tempest Poems
Washington, D.C. – Lake Wylie, S.C. – New Haven, CT
1994 - 2006
Washington, D.C. – Lake Wylie, S.C. – New Haven, CT
1994 - 2006
Pocahontas Hears The Tempest
(for Michael Tolaydo)
Watching the circle of sky,
Eyes turned from the stage
Its mirrors of my loss,
Blinding sharp machines
Of delight to the boxed
Cavaliers leaning, agape,
As the earth curves beneath this wood.
Cast in the crowd,
Listening for my entrance,
While the words sing
Devouring grace, and me.
Caliban Waves Good-bye
Left loathing on the sand
as the sails belly their way north
this is my reward:
Alone with lessoned blasphemies
and a singing ghost who
keens endlessly for his lost
abuse.
Retreat to my buckets of drunkenness,
dream’s satire,
and stand at the witch’s grave.
My mother.
My mother.
Antonio’s Future
My brother’s keeper.
Unmarked, I’ll suck the candied
conscience to spit
and compose a treatise on overthrow
with pictorial instructions
for illiterate second sons.
Alonso’s Bones
My cringing dream:
Drowned to chalk,
the burnished eyes tumble
to the pinball bell
of mortality’s tilt.
This gasping fantasy
is an extra death –
frightened now by
a cup of water trembling
on the captain’s table.
The lie that might come true.
Stefano tells Trinculo
Servants again,
but our knives in our pockets.
Drunk,
I remember power.
With all books into the fire,
and the curses curling to ash,
we shall be assassins
yet.
Ariel
Compassionate air,
My freedom leaves me
Nothing.
Miranda
Exhausted by virginity
and my father’s
pandering tricks.
Will this new world vanish
in the alleys of Naples
with murderers amazed
before striking?
Ferdinand
Cheap sorrow –
a few logs –
and her breasts,
his throne,
are mine.
Gonzalo’s Weeping
Who is this mad man on the beach?
One other identity card mislaid.
It’s true.
I did not recognize him.
I forget everything,
my own face a stranger to me
in the silvered glass.
What do they know of my
ridiculous hopes?
Or of this lost wizard who imagines
his thoughts of death keeping schedule
while his magic paper
turns the green water
black?
Prospero’s Regrets
My commonwealth of monsters
all pageants and torture –
tyranny’s gifts in this
accidental exile.
Raising the dead
with the pull of a backstage rope
was a kind of afterthought.
Let me forgive these equivocal killers
but leave them
a vaudeville of fear –
behind the curtain
dials glow.
I take the microphone in my hand
and tap.
Cultural Literacy
(for R.W.R.)
Do you remember Athena
scorching an Arab town
from inside her cloud?
Now myth-made murderers
who cannot name the Fates
saunter in the sand.
Dear Wordsworth wanted Triton back
but I stand in a broken stone circle,
screaming the old gods away.
1991
(for R.W.R.)
Do you remember Athena
scorching an Arab town
from inside her cloud?
Now myth-made murderers
who cannot name the Fates
saunter in the sand.
Dear Wordsworth wanted Triton back
but I stand in a broken stone circle,
screaming the old gods away.
1991
The Man in the Green Blanket
(for A.L.)
The reporter says:
There is a body
bundled into a green blanket
at the side of the highway.
A white car. The desert.
(Starstruck, Paul crumples,
dust smokes his profile on the path,
another casualty marking the way).
Sniffing the air like the Greek king's double,
we tap the corpse with our cameras,
still blind on the Damascus road.
March, 1991 - November, 2001
(for A.L.)
The reporter says:
There is a body
bundled into a green blanket
at the side of the highway.
A white car. The desert.
(Starstruck, Paul crumples,
dust smokes his profile on the path,
another casualty marking the way).
Sniffing the air like the Greek king's double,
we tap the corpse with our cameras,
still blind on the Damascus road.
March, 1991 - November, 2001
Shahrazad Tells Another Story
(for E.C.)
In Ur,
tombs crater the landscape,
drying the patience of kings.
Auschwitz shower rooms below ground,
lies of safety,
reassuring the family crowds.
Like a slice of tissue on a slide,
the child’s body rides the huge stretcher
out of the pit, from grave to grave.
There is a cellar without a door
where “Ala-ed-Din’s lamp burns,
fuming ghosts.
14 February 1991
(for E.C.)
In Ur,
tombs crater the landscape,
drying the patience of kings.
Auschwitz shower rooms below ground,
lies of safety,
reassuring the family crowds.
Like a slice of tissue on a slide,
the child’s body rides the huge stretcher
out of the pit, from grave to grave.
There is a cellar without a door
where “Ala-ed-Din’s lamp burns,
fuming ghosts.
14 February 1991
The National Gallery in Wartime
(for J.B.)
Shelved in the sun,
their backs to the doors,
wary, hoping for ghosts.
Inside, the lines twist toward Titian,
the flaying, the rain of fire.
30 January 1991
(for J.B.)
Shelved in the sun,
their backs to the doors,
wary, hoping for ghosts.
Inside, the lines twist toward Titian,
the flaying, the rain of fire.
30 January 1991