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Three poems Poetry |
AFTER ALL
The morning isn’t a riddle
after all, but a problem,
an unfigured sum, digits climbing,
decimals moving up the row,
zeros speaking their open-throated
songs of praise.
The afternoon isn’t, after all,
a shepherd napping on a hill,
but a Rabbi wide awake on a bench
on a boulevard of sycamores—
two or three worlds away
from where I sit, on another bench,
watching a row of blackbirds
clatter along a wire like abacus beads,
tallying with Gnostic zeal.
Even the evening
isn’t evening after all, but
something less, dusk
subtracted from dark, the moon’s
remainder pared down, carried over
to the next column,
where a few stars
languish like tarnished coins,
and snails glister over wet leaves,
where the day’s ledger lies open
on a table, all but unreadable
in this thin parchment of light.
Mid-Life Asceticism
I’ve given up the star chart
of my father’s death,
that fading constellation,
but not the moon of my mother’s,
gibbous and silver in the sky.
I’ve given up the ratcheting chorus
of tree frogs crooning the day
to a close, but not the lazy pulse of crickets
keeping the summer grass awake.
I’ve given up piling stones
on the earth to leave some sign
of my passing, though sometimes,
when no one is watching,
I toss sticks behind me as I go,
a trail to follow back, a game
to tire the hungry dogs.
I’ve given up my hands
down my pants, watching Grace Kelly
hail a cab on 7th Avenue, but not
Kate Hepburn swirling kiss-colored
Beaujolais in a long-stemmed glass
on her father’s front porch.
I’ve sworn off Rembrandt’s light,
but not Vermeer’s, and turned away from
Picasso’s scissors, though not Matisse’s.
As for the Brueghels, I’ve given up one
but kept the other, though I’d rather not say
which is the father, which the son.
I’ve abandoned phone calls and emails,
faxes and telegrams, but not
sweet gossip passed across the fence,
and not Post-its or shopping lists—
clues to remind me the way home every night.
As for sorrow and anger, I’ve booted
those old oaths halfway down
the basement steps, but I’ve held tight
to love, the anchorite’s anchor,
that deep clarifying drink, even though some days
my mouth comes away from that cup
thirsting for things that linger
at the tip of my tongue.
All this in less than a month
of sitting in a damp anteluvian cave,
a rock for a pillow, fistfuls of sand
to rub into my hair. All this as the years
come knocking, and the songs
drift away, and the dust swirls importantly
each time I go to the door.
In Lieu of an Ars Poetica
I wanted to write a poem
of magnitude and cunning,
elegance and Zen-like verve,
a bluesy, operatic
little number, part silk blouse,
part motorcycle denim—
A poem, if I, or if it
was lucky, that might startle
a hillside woozy with crows,
sending those eighty-seven
caterwauling cut-ups up
into the uncrowed ether,
smudged and lovely as ink blots.
It was a soft-shoe dazzle
I sought, one of those so-slow
inevitable turnings
that Fred Astaire, channeling
Bill Robinson, perfected—
a gem of a poem, so deft-
ly coy in its precisions
that paint-by-number artists
could phone it into being
with a few daubs of a brush,
some effortlessly rendered
bit of ekphrastic élan
that might be snazzily framed,
then offered up at Christie’s
or Sotheby’s, bidding launched
at a cool ten grand. I’d meant
to write such a poem for months,
had what the precoital, post-
lapsarian Freudians
call the best of intentions,
spent my three day vacation
sharpening pencils, whittling
my quills, alphabetizing
my small library of books
by syllable and phoneme.
Except for cleaning the fridge
it was all the essentials
needed for burning my way
into a poem, for tapping
that elemental juke-joint
of poetry, the low-down,
sweetly moaned kaleidoscope
of words, orchestrated moths
fluttering at the window,
elegantly enfolded
as a monk’s origami,
or leaves stitched into a map
of autumn, interwoven
with their own delicate stems,
not banged together the way
a palette- and tin-roofed shack
might be, all the rusty nails
crimped over, ribbons of sky
visible between the warped
boards of the master bedroom.
And don’t think I didn’t try.
I did. Tried like a mad man
tries, a shirt-rending nut job
muttering lies to himself
long into the spooling dark.
I thought math might do the trick,
so started enjambing lines
at the algebraic root
of Fibonacci’s sequence,
considered how square-rooting
each syllable’s reduction
would give the poem a certain
audacious simplicity.
But, no. There was good reason
math and I had called it quits
back in 7th grade. Something
about numbers and letters
tripping over each other
the way egrets and antelopes
would trip, if someone taught them
to skirmish for hockey pucks
on a Quebecoise ice field.
You can see how such a game,
all akimbo and flailing,
could turn ugly. I needed
Bach, not Schoenberg. Duke or Diz,
not Sun Ra and his minions.
I conjured Blake conjuring
Milton, Dylan smoke-signaling
his glint-eyed guru, Rimbaud.
Even spent one evening
reading through the old songbook
of Frank Lloyd Wright, found myself
dreaming of Falling Water,
Taliesin’s fiery gift,
how the sweep of the prairie
was made for such conflagrant
grandeur. But page after page
only fed the hungry stove,
the house alit with the noise
of burning paper, my two
daughters scratching at the door,
whimpering like beaten cats
for a bowl of lukewarm milk.
But the poem, the poem! O cruel
evasion! Delirious
tease. O rhythm-trifling,
image-quashing, sweet music-
silencing number machine.
It hummed and quizzled about
like a rag-winged hummingbird
tippling a dram too many
at a fermenting feeder.
I put a bike in the poem
when a cyclist whirled by
my window, hoping a bike
would give the old contraption
a breezed, vitalizing spin.
I reinvented the names
of birds and flowers, exclaimed
upon sunlight, how the stones,
tropiest of tropes, dwindled
under the scurrying feet
of insects. O, it was work,
alright. Don’t think it wasn’t.
I even fiddled around
with love, the finickiest
frontier, summoning the face
of my beloved, placing
breast next to death, collarbone
seven syllables before
eroticon, sexing up
the climax-calibrating
dénouement. Hell, I even
snuck in a morsel of French,
thinking the two sexy tongues
might spur and urge each other
toward some lyric sturm und drang.
But at the end of it all
I was left with little more
than an unfountaining pen
in my hand, not a jigger
of sippable whiskey, not
a quaffable glass of wine
or water, not so much as
a crow or raven chortling
like dark jesters from a branch
in a neighbor’s tree. Nothing
but a few red leaves sifting
past my window, leaves and leaves
being only what they were,
carbon flares turning to dust
as they fell, but giving me,
at least, at last, some little
something to scribble across
the top edge of the paper,
a word that fit its own sound,
a sound that could turn itself
to anything, paper moths
or dead leaves, broken up moons
or bicycles. I gathered
a handful of tiny rocks,
walked, half awake, to the pond
behind the house. I stood there
a little while, then tossed
each one of them as far out
as I could into the dark
sprawl of water. Little plinks
rang out, like miniature frogs
skim-skipped or catapulted
into Basho’s old haiku,
then the slow lapsing of rings,
the watery insistence
pushing to the very edge
of a poem I’ve been writing
all this time about the night,
and the day that would follow,
and so on, et cetera.