Just because you can
count to seventeen does not
make you a poet.
Archive for July, 2009
Songbird
The girl who calls herself Swallow,
ensconced in deep red draped
from hips to floor, kneels
demurely like a Baltic mermaid,
red hair falling across her shoulder
to her right breast, a small pendant
hung on a thin gold chain
against her fair, translucent skin,
a serene smile that reminds you
of La Giaconda, the same lovely face,
creamy shoulders and hands
coupled in her lap like two birds
held gently in a red velvet nest,
eager to take flight. She is
a songbird on the south shore
of the Gulf of Finland, a singer
and flautist, student and teacher,
who walks the narrow cobbled streets
of Tallinn, between twisting stone walls
and medieval churches where she
hears on the fresh ocean breeze
faint echoes of the old melodies,
the tinkling of ice crystals in winter
and the rustling of small animals
through florissant fields in summer,
and she plays them in her mind
and with pursed lips and
restless fingers that form the notes
on imaginary flutes carved from
the hollow bones of birds.
There is great joy in joining
the chorus of voices
that take flight together
at the song festival like
a flock of wild birds,
and the flute in her hands
flutters like a swallow aloft
on a delicate current of song.
Swallow leaps into the sky,
spreads her wings wide
and glides above the green world
floating and banking and swooping
earthward like the swallow
she has become, and thinks
now I know why the birds sing.
Michigan Upper Peninsula
Through fog and summer rain
you’d swear you were in Canada,
eastern Ontario or New Brunswick,
when you drive across the U.P.,
lakes and bogs and more trees
than people, spruce and popple,
maple and pine, watching for
cop cars, RVs, log trucks, moose,
listening to Niko Case,
high on coffee and Big Red gum,
chewing on your little troubles
stick by stick.
With the construction
it’ll take all afternoon
to get to the Bridge
then maybe Flint by sundown.
There’s an old man
stopped on the left shoulder
looking over his car and then
ahead on the right I see the deer
struck down dragging herself
like Christina prone and twisted
in that famous Weyth painting.
It’s too late to stop
and what could I do anyway?
Last night we found
the little black chick
who hatched last week, dying,
its guts spilt out.
You need to go, I said,
I’ll take care of this.
Smooth rock heavy
in my palm, one swift
bash, twitching, peace.
Hemmingway fished these streams,
Jim Harrison and Greg Brown too.
They say still waters run deep,
but some things
you push them down
and they just stir the muck
and bob to the surface.
Now the miles roll fast
under your wheels like years,
and slip away easier than
visions of old lovers.
I wish Dad, two years gone,
could sit here beside me.
Lightening!
Count the heart beats,
brace for the crash.
Clavicle
The aging poet has a broken wing,
the metaphor so tired it cannot
take flight. By night, he glides above
dark waters on a moist and swirling
wind. By day, planes are falling
heavy from the unmindful skies.
Ritual
Ritual
Like a banner at a medieval fair,
the white chevron bisects
fields of pink, rectangular above
and two triangles below,
and at its center a dark crest,
a mythical beast with a wild black mane.
The white is the skin that lay beneath
my Speedo at the beach, the pink
the tender skin that my cycling clothes had covered.
With my abs above and thighs below
like flamingos or high clouds at sunset
or suckling pigs, but hard and strong beyond their years,
and the dark mane a thatch of wiry hair
untouched by gray, my crotch
the youngest feature on this middle aged terrain,
diminished neither by doubt nor disuse,
a proud lion on a drought wracked plain.
Away from the mirror, long swim trucks
pulled up and tied, through the showers
to the university pool, across the cool tile,
over the edge, the shock of cool water.
I adjust my goggles like an aviator on the runway
and push off, parting the smooth blue surface,
sensation of bubbles jetting past
clean shaven legs, as Neruda writes –
nothing but the pure, the sweet,
the thick part of my own life,
nothing but form and volume existing,
guarding life, nevertheless in a complete way –
in Ritual of My Legs – mis piernas –
in the delicious years before the Spanish Civil War,
and he adds – People cross the world nowadays
scarcely remembering that they possess a body
and life within it – and so it is that I am reminded,
by the sting of the sunburn, by the outlandish
pink and white bands, and by the slippery
interface of flesh and water, the strong
rhythmic stroking across the blue skin
of the world, and by the sweet smile
of the lifeguard when I retrieve my ID card
and turn for the locker room.
July 4, 1983
(A first draft, I may come back to this one)
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We woke too early in the honeymoon suite
of the Mark Plaza Hotel, compliments of Scott,
my new brother-in-law who had flipped me the key
when he and Sharon left for an early flight at O’Hare.
No time to linger in luxury and the absurdity
of three beds pushed togther for two newly conjoined,
we fled Midwest conventionality as fast as a taxi
could take us to Mitchell Field, our escape route
to the freedom of the American West, Fort Collins
our enclave of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
and independence just for independence’s sake.
It’s afternoon already outside Stapleton,
thumbing a ride north on 25, the past to our right,
the future to our left and the present
rushing to meet us at 70 miles an hour
past Longmont and Loveland, three rides
in quick succession, the last five miles on foot,
a time when people walked and all you needed
fit in a backpack. Home on the Front Range,
sun slipping behind Long’s Peak and Horestooth,
we walk to City Park to watch the fireworks
and the ducks and geese, heads tucked
under their wings, and the other young couples
under the star spangled sky.
Stripes
The way your feet fit snug
to the end of this thrift-store couch,
who would dream you didn’t belong?
That’s how the stranger comes
to rest in this strange land –
like shrapnel encapsulated in flesh,
you only feel it when it rains.
Fucking hell how it rains!
Some days you wake to sun
afflicted by the bless-ed blindness
of the new day, a thin blue field
between you and the pinpoint stars
so far away you cannot really remember.
Traveller, the purring cat is the hum
of the Universe, the stripes on the cushion
are the years of your life. Don’t bother
to count, or even think about
the small black birds on the wing.
July 2, 2009
