Talk Show
Dante was afraid of the dark.
In our time, it’s too much light
that seems frightening.
Sin scintillates: no shadows
and no shame in our game.
Unrepentant, we confess
fifteen minutes on a talk show.
What would Dante think?
Would the poet who faced Hell
turn his back on us,
disgusted by
our shrill, whiny candor?
Daibutsu of Todaiji
You will have no rival
in stone. Next to you, the Sphinx
is a soft, shabby has-been.
Who is Ozymandias?
Those masks blasted from the cliffs
of Mt. Rushmore, mere photo-ops,
have nothing to tell us.
No comment. They stare
over our heads, preoccupied,
looking for something they lost
in the tall grass of the prairies
a hundred years ago.
But you’ve found everything
ever lost, hid it all again
under the Bo tree,
and let us go on looking
while you sit there, Buddha,
innocently still, and so huge
not even the Christ of Corcovado
could get his arms around you.
Blind, now that the paint
has flaked from your eyes,
you lift one hand: to bless us
or to feel your way?
Wolves
A few wolves on the street
watch us. Only a sneer
shows us their fangs,
stained and prematurely blunt.
We’re not even worth a growl.
Obsessed with any grass
more or less green,
we bleat and rush by--
and never discern
through our dim, ruminant haze,
the sheep in wolves’ clothing
waiting for a Shepherd.
Memo to Villon
Illicit brother, black sheep
fetid with Paris muck,
scarecrow stuffed with dungeon straw,
tonsured knife fighter,
lovesick poet with a slit lip,
scarred like Al Capone,
sweet-talking con, whoremonger
and true believer,
did wine kill you? Or VD?
Did you finally hang
at Montfaucon, Orleans, or Meung,
nothing but spoiled meat
sticking to a rickety ladder of bones?
And did you climb,
by faith, saved by grace alone,
from the gibbet to heaven?
I sit fidgeting in church,
ashamed to be bored by such niceness
(but bored--and ashamed)
and think of you.
If you sidled in this morning,
any streetwise usher
worth his blazer and name badge
would keep an eye on you.
That smirk you could never wipe off
would give you away--
and how you would heft the basket
guessing the take within a few cents.
But here no one values your offering
of a poem jotted down
on the back of a pawn ticket
and given freely--like the widow’s mite.
Francois Villon
(c. 1431-1463)
Chinook
Everything is loosening,
finally. The snarls
in my shoelaces and in my life
will all come untangled
if I just do nothing.
I must learn to sag and slump,
permit the taut muscles in my neck
to go slack. Lord,
I’ve been like this far too long:
a crazed Chinook struggling
upstream in the wrong river.
I’m ready to give up.
All the way down to the sea,
unsinkable, I’ll ride
Your peace through the white water,
thoughtless as a stick.
And I promise not to complain
about losing my grip.
Sometimes letting go
is the only way to hold on.
Soon
I keep looking up, expecting
the north star to flicker
and go out. Soon
the litmus moon will turn red.
Do roots suffer from wanderlust?
Even boulders among the hills
seem poised to leap.
How high? How far?
And how soon?
I fidget through the days,
feeling for the first time
an unsuspected migratory instinct.
Song
They sing me; I jingle.
I’ve become their brimstone ditty,
top ten, throbbing on
every boom box in Hell.
They hiss; they puff their cheeks:
it’s not a night breeze
clacking the blinds.
They whistle me while they work.
But I’m still silent, tongue-tied--
a shrug in a wrinkled shirt
and not a man.
O Lord, give me back my voice!
Let me torture them with psalms
until they howl
and run scared to their pit
and stuff their ears with ashes.
Come tune my harp again
to its own oddball, unheard-of key.
You’re my strength and my song.
I will sing You!
Dog Day
Bailey Blue, good morning--
so far. The sun has not risen
for either of us
and the moon has nowhere else to go.
Sit with me, stranger,
grand-dog left here for now
(and maybe later)
by a daughter with a stray heart.
Lift your mellow, unknowing eyes
and unload on me
all your loneliness and impatience;
let me scratch you where I itch.
This back yard is enough,
California-diverse
with dry evergreens around the pool,
apples rotting beneath palm trees,
and you: purebred Dalmatian
named for Irish liqueur and a mutt
your mistress can’t remember
except for her loss.
I’m a mutt myself, not much
of a dad or grandfather;
but I’ll take you in for now,
comfort you, and let you be
all the black and white
should-have-beens I’ve shredded
pasted back together
to make something like love.
Hyakutake, Mandelstam, God
Your salt is still seasoning the night,
spilled while I sleep,
dreamless,
and let the slow comet dream for me
of distances only words can cross.
Osip, your words reach me
across much greater distances
than the flight
of that dirty snowball
tossed by God
in a playful moment
millions of years ago.
You no longer walk the tundra
with your broken heart
in a beggar’s tin cup.
You’re free, finally alive
somewhere out there
beyond Hyakutake, somewhere far,
far beyond the Gulag Hell,
somewhere close to God.
Osip Mandelstam
(1891-1938)
Joy
Joy won’t pass through gritted teeth
in which bitterness
sticks like something green.
&
nbsp; Joy is more finicky than that--
and more staid. It doesn’t need
a wisecrack to break the ice
and won’t share the podium
with a whining tongue.
Delicate joy that curdles
in an anxious stomach
willingly hugs riffraff
and picks lice from their hair.
Who can understand it?
We know how happiness makes us
look over our shoulder
like fugitives from a bad mood,
but joy seems unconcerned.
Self-sufficient. You could say aloof.
All we know for certain
is that joy won’t be coerced.
Make a fist and it vanishes
with the flick of a fin.
You must relax,
let your fingers sway like sea grass,
before joy will come
swimming into your heart
and add iridescent color
to that reef of black coral.
The Child Within
Someone tell the shrink!
Quick! The child within,
bitter and half-crazy,
has run off to sea.
And worse, he’ll come back,
loitering under the street lamps
of my small town soul
with his smirk, his angst,
and a droll Singapore tattoo
glowing like a votive lamp
beneath my skin:
Been There, Done That.
Sure I’ll envy him, but keep
my job and my church.
His faint taste of salt
is all the wildness I want.
Before Dawn
Anxiety like a dry stick
snapped by a prowler
outside the window wakes me
again. Four-thirty.
If this is the hour the thief comes,
let him come. I have
a flashlight, my Bible, fresh coffee,
a chair on the patio,
and two hours before sunrise
to be sit and hum God’s praises
under the morning moon.
What else could I ask for?
Butterflies
I’ve prayed too long, Lord,
and so wrong, for joy--
ecstatic tons like a megalith.
Overwhelming. Almost an idol.
I expected to laugh and fall
drunk in the Spirit. Instead,
something small has come,
weightless, like butterflies
that drift with the wind
from their own far country
and all settle at once
on just one tree. Me.
When
When everything breaks free
at last--seed from the pod,
sorrow from the dry cloud,
and black water from the sun--
trees will take hold of the wind
and shake it until its teeth rattle
and the birds fall out of its hair.
I want to see that!
And I want to see the dead rise--
not to come back to this life,
rummaging through coffins
for keepsakes buried with them,
but to dance hand in hand
with their own discarded,
arthritic bones, their cheeks
flushed with luminous blood!
Sheep
If I’m your sheep, Lord,
why do knives glinting in a dark look
or words whetted on a grin
make mutton of me?
I know that You carried me once,
hefted on a shoulder,
a long, long way
home from all my wanderings.
But now, safe in the fold,
I stand off to be one side and bleat--
an odd sheep out
and more briar than wool.
And yet, somehow, I hear Your voice
and know it from the wind,
from the lies of the hireling,
and the wolf whisper at night.
Somehow. And if I never
fit in with the flock--
always a Suffolk like a minstrel
among proper Merinos--
I’ll lift my head when You call,
stop chewing on words,
and like every other sheep,
I’ll follow.
Coffee
How odd that crockery outlasts us.
Every cup, broken
and tossed on a landfill,
is still there when bones are dust.
Sometimes I feel like a mug,
a cheap gift at best,
bearing my common name,
a cartoon, a joke, an ad.
Not much, if not for this:
break me and I’ll be more
than skeletal shards.
I’ll rise from myself to the Lord
with an aroma so rich
that even Death
will have to wake up
and smell the coffee!
In the Yard With Ralph
My wife tosses a ball for Ralph,
her aged, arthritic Irish setter,
who limps to fetch,
who won’t be caught and dodges her,
or so he thinks,
with his nose down and rump up,
flagging his crooked tail,
slammed in a car door years ago,
and scattering confetti snorts,
more excited than a pup.
Next Sunday, Lord, I want to sing
the old hymns with a heart like that!