David MurphyThe dancer turns elegantly:
her pivot light and feathery,
her eyes as brilliant as a wren’s,
her lithe form swanlike as she spins
in ceremonial artistry.
The dance is life, felicity,
and also deep despondency.
Away from falls, time and again,
the dancer turns.
The nimble dancer gracefully
moves to the places she should be:
past the stages where dreams end,
to the theaters that love attends
where with airy vitality
the dancer turns.
On a cold, snowy road after darkness
Come headlights that draw the eyes
Like a puppeteer’s wires. Then comes the car,
Easing over pot holes and slick places.
One cannot see within it—if its driver is young,
Old, middle-aged, man, or woman.
Perhaps it does not matter. The car is funereal,
Though not a hearse, and not black.
A house curtain is drawn taut then released.
Footsteps sound through the brightly lit home.
They stop by the door, to greet the driver, the bearer.
Nothing ever stays the same. People come and go.
Folk pass through this world
Like a stream’s water coursing over a stone.
Love is found, nourished, and grows.
But justice is blind, fate is deaf,
And we must go on living,
Long after the elegy’s last notes are played,
Even while the heart languishes in sorrow.
Spring has come and, with it, the mornings fragrant with lilacs
When light streams past freshly-leaved trees
To marble the moist earth.
We often walked this narrow path together,
From our home to the crest of the bare, blustery hill.
There we stopped to watch whitecaps and sea oats.
Nearly as often, we stayed home, nude in bed.
While the coffee percolated over a blue flame,
I kissed your ribs and breasts and touched your hair.
The dogs lazed, and dust dappled the light beams.
But nostalgia and unrequited love make for blue memories;
They are like dull, serrated knives scratching at the heart.
I moved houses long ago, shook out the old ghosts
As if snapping a mat to rid it of dust. Such phantoms
Are unwelcome companions for the jaunty spirit.
And I’ve presented myself to a future more modern:
Where artificial intelligence fights against cancer,
Where billionaires drive electric cars.
Still—when spring blossoms, and the air’s sweet perfume
Is beholden to lilacs—involuntary memory recalls you.
I am holding a new lover’s hand, so I take the reminiscence,
Put it gently back to rest, and move forward with her,
As the bright sun lights and warms our faces.
A fire burns in the hearth.
It is night, and the sky is clear.
The air is cold; the stars are bright;
The birches are leafless;
The ground is soft and rolling
Beneath a foot of new-fallen snow.
A man’s wet leather shoes,
Creased and furrowed with age,
Steam upon the stone hearth.
Near them, lying flat, are his wool socks,
Testaments to time outdoors.
By the socks are two feet,
One crossed over the other,
Soles to the flame.
Dry blue jeans and a plaid
Wool shirt cover him.
His eyes gaze into the fire.
The house is otherwise dark.
The stabled horses’ breath rises in the dark.
The old barn smells of oiled rope and hay.
Nickering, the young bay stamps her feet,
Then sidles nearer to the old palomino.
In a clearing in the middle of the yard
Stands an ancient sugar maple. Ice glazes
Its branches. When the morning
Sun comes, the tree will gleam and seem to shine.
It is an enormous tree, one estimated
To be two hundred years older than the
Hundred year old house. Like a cosmic phenomenon,
The tree draws things to it: Birds,
Squirrels, horses, dogs, and people.
Now a great-horned owl leaps
From the tree’s branches.
It flaps once, twice, thrice,
Then glides nearly a quarter mile.
The owl flies over the hoary mist
That floats above the frozen creek.
Then the owl is gone,
Disappearing into the pine forest that lies
Deep and cold and still,
Where in many minds
Mystery, horror, and romance
Still thrive in winter.
Stars are birthed in clouds.
Stellar nurseries:
Helium, hydrogen, heat; collapse.
Ka-boom. Nascent stars scatter.
Pop pop pop: little lights populate
Our skies. Ideas illumine
The human map, pinpricks of light
In shadowed minds: starlight,
Enlightenment, Orion,
Ontology, Modernism,
The Milky Way. Constellations,
Philosophies chart courses
Across galactic oceans
And dark, moral seas.
Imagination: the distant bear, Ursa;
The Chippewa folk bear—
Both connect to creation.
Humankind aligned to stars
Since times primordial,
From fairy tales to sailor’s sails,
And stars, like people, grow old.
They are born, shine awhile,
Give light, warmth, aid life,
Then die, and vanish
In the stream of Time.
I am a good man—
That’s what my employees all must say
(Or I’ll withhold their holiday bonuses
And have them working Christmas Day).
I am a good man—
For that you can take my girlfriend’s word
(And if my wife protests the sentiment,
Then, like me, pretend you never heard).
I am a good man—
I keep my word at any cost
(And all of those who say otherwise
Are just the losers and the lost).
I am a good man—
I am assured so every day
(And thus I find it very strange
That people don’t come my way).
The tea leaves are muddled; the lies are twice-told.
A lot and very little have changed.
Folk are not called slaves but still they are sold,
And some marriages can still be arranged.
Still. Still: Ignorance, as before, is poor.
It thieves, robbing both the foolish and wise.
And still, honest work makes a cherished core;
Since before the Greeks, such work has been prized.
Some metaphors remain too: Hope, the bird—
Whether caged or just a “thing with feathers”—
Has, as its strong song, the uplifting word;
Its wings fly one out of foulest weathers.
So, much is hard to parse: wild, chaotic.
But the human spirit remains so clear.
Amidst the coiling maelstrom psychotic
Are love and care: old charts by which we steer.
In the climactic anarchy of sex—
When the various passions are
Kaleidoscopic shards
Of colored glass,
scattered on a marver
For the gaffer
To roll a molten gob through—
Then disorder is at its most understandable.
Night lightning flashes,
Illuminating distant hills;
There’s a gasp of perception.
All the anarchy assembles
Into a sudden, coherent shape.
The forking, electric wires vanish.
Darkness falls again.
Groping, searching for a spark—
What lit
This planet’s immense and antres chamber,
Provided that brief, enlightening flame?
Later, when reflecting on that quick glimpse,
One already muddled,
She finds in it
Fatalism and independence,
Care, instinct, and hedonism:
The growth and transience
Of two human lives.
When the thick rolling mists of September
Billow out among trees with leaves of gold
To lounge at the roots of needled timber,
And the afternoon air’s gilded with cold,
Then comes the hallowed season of autumn.
In this time, frosts rime grasses on a hill
And ice a slow stream’s course in the bottom
Of an old, majestic, and mountainous dell.
A scarlet cardinal trills in the still air
Deep within the mixed broadleaf and pine woods,
And an old croaking crow with feathers bare
Checks the soggy stump where she hoards her goods.
Shafts of dusty light pierce the canopy
To a moist forest floor littered with leaves;
This light reflects off the cobwebs’ dew
That beads the webs that ornament the trees.
It is damp, crisp, breezy. Mushrooms abound.
Trees rot and furnish homes for worms and ants.
At dawn, the wet woodland wakes with dim sound,
And fogs seem as mournful as remembrance.
If the mist is a kind of deathly shroud,
Then drops of raw rain are like clear jewels,
Falling like crystals from high, icy clouds
To make the earth miry and fill the clear pools.
The rain and mists, the careful husbandry,
The bees’ stores of honeyed provender
Are set against the coming scarcity.
All’s precious in fall, for an end is near.
Near numerous and luminous as stars,
And a sign of things healthy and morbid
(Depending on the case and cultivar),
Is the almost ubiquitous orchid.
A flower of finely perfumed fragrance,
It is stylish in every quick season:
To be found in buttonholes in romance
And, in mourning, adorning the coffin.
Not even the well-known, august rose
Can boast such flexibility and scope
Compared with the manifold forms of those
Orchids that stand both for grief and for hope.
Passion is present in summer on lakes
Where the sun singes swimmers’ bronzed skin.
Carefree ardor may be increased with wine:
At table with olives, cheeses, and gin.
Even when unconscious there is desire,
Haunting—unwillingly, unsought—our dreams.
With lightning and loud thunder comes fervor:
The wilderness begets wildness, it seems.
But while July lakes, repasts, sleep, and storms
May each decorate a pretender’s stage,
Only love infuses into its making
That evasive spark that quickens each age,
That makes consequent the source of a boast
And raises creation to its utmost.
While marveling at the starry sky
Where silver clouds scud and milky moon beams
In a firmament swathed in navy blue—
While exhausted folk slumber and dream,
Of fear or flight or of falling through space—
While the air smells of autumn, of trees, of smoke
And sounds of crickets, cicadas, and bold toads
Who sing in their want with chirps and hoarse croaks—
While descending the hill through low grasses
That run to the feet of an oak tree stand
Whose spectral aspect shadows the foot path,
There comes a turn and vista of the land:
There lies the distant village and spired church
The quiet houses and earthy, quaint lanes
Surrounded by arable pastures of wheat,
Rolling hills topped with rippling grains—
While on a solitary night-time stroll
Through rustling grass and the brisk, biting breeze,
In view of an old, wild, gleaming river,
There comes a worn, welcome feeling of ease.
Though even love between a man and wife
Can die, still love as a quality lives.
Love surpasses all close understanding.
It outlasts the rare, few sands that time gives,
For love revives anew every moment.
As often as it’s snuffed, it’s lit again.
It cannot be decisively put out.
Love is eternal and has always been.
It is passed through countless generations,
Between all diverse aspects of mankind,
Between folk and beast and tree and bright star—
In all ages and lands, there is love, we find.
Years past, the tented field was one of war
With cloudbursts of bombs and grave, martial light.
Though those times ever, unwelcome, appear
They are not now here, and the field is bright
Beneath a northern sky flashing colors
Of electric shades in the weird gloaming.
For these tents lie beneath a grand aurora
Whose lights, like sailors, are ever roaming.
And what lights! Like nebulas brought near us,
They make a great glow of serpentine greens,
Blushing pinks, coronary golds, purples
Whose hues before appeared only in dreams.
Such wild and brawling hues that fly by dusk
Make, like dread skies of war, mankind feel slight—
But whereas war’s thunderheads bring horror,
Nature’s aurora brings awe and delight.
While merrily drunk on proud vintages,
While the dark new moon lies cloaked behind clouds,
While clean, industrious folk sleep and dream,
And the idle markets await their crowds,
Together we forget the coming dawn,
Who daily disrespects our mortal race
With her honest rays and revealing beams
That shine such hard light on each aging face.
Instead we clothe ourselves in nudity—
In the habit as that which we were born—
And sport in an echo of our lost youths
From which ease, increasingly, we are torn,
And, hiding ourselves upon each other,
Make as though night shall ever cloud the streets
Whose welcome blindness will never censure
Our maturing souls or our tumbled sheets.
When spring comes, the huddled bees clamber forth
From their cold, vulnerable colonies,
To feel the parting nip of late winter,
Savor the freshness of the vernal breeze,
And stretch their wings after the snowy cloister.
It is a time for scouts to find new hives,
A time for wild, swarming reproduction,
For rearing young bees to replace old lives.
A long-dead tree, standing in a vale’s hollow
With a deep cavity in its gnarled trunk—
A tree surrounded by rich broadleaf forest
That’s populated by boar, elk, and skunk—
Makes a worthy home for the nesting bee
Whose queen’s needs she must mindfully mark,
Whose summer combs will ooze melliferous,
And whose life is forfeit to the hive’s arc.
To make her claim, the bee must make her dance:
A robust and energetic gyration
That tells of her proud stake in the wooded chamber
And coaxes others to its location.
With zealous effort she wins the vote
Of the hive’s fascinated queen and drones,
Then, in glory, she leads a swarm of thousands,
Through pale glens to her queen’s modest throne.
There the settling bees establish their hive.
There is much to do, and no time to wait.
Waxy, hexagonal combs must be built
For the larvae and honey they’ll create.
A resinous mix of saliva and wax
(Used as a sealant and called “propolis”)
Is applied to the cracks and crevices
Of the bees’ growing metropolis.
And of course, the virgin must be mated,
For she shall be the mother of all bees:
Those to be born in the coming days,
And who’ll be the life of the colony.
Like in a dream, the queen’s mated in flight
(Best on warm, sunny days with a blue sky)
By drones who won’t gather pollen, or nurse,
Or build, or anything—save mate, and die.
From these singular males, in but one flight,
The newly mated queen keeps in her belly
Fertile stores to last the rest of her life,
Which consists of eating royal jelly
And the vital task of reproduction:
Egg-laying, fertilizing, sex control,
For it’s the queen that manages the lists
Of sexes that the working hive enrolls.
Summer comes and goes. The female workers
Build, gather, nurse, clean, and make sweet honey.
The male drones laze far from the busy hive
On days that are hot, languid, and sunny.
The world revolves. Trees start to lose leaves.
Autumn’s chill winds come with a rustling sigh.
In fall, the gluttonous, idle male drones
Are expelled from the hive and left to die.
The hive’ll be a buzzing sphere of females
When, once more, winter comes with ice and snow,
And at that sphere’s center the queen shall rest:
Heated by trembling bees in her hollow.
In fallow days the bees live on their stores
On honey that to their cells they did bring,
As they shiver throughout the cold winter
And keenly await the coming of spring.
Enlivening winter’s landscapes
Whose snow and icy mists shroud grey tombs,
Leave tables bare, and stop rushing rivers,
Comes spring with fresh designs drawn with age-old plume.
Spring’s first sketches seem earth-toned and modest:
Skeleton drawings of green and brown twigs
Among the lowing cattle’s bogged pastures
On whose fenceposts yet hang a holly sprig.
And as early spring’s watery dawns break
Over slushy ponds fringed with leafless trees—
The long-held icicles melt drop-by drop,
The soggy soils sprout mushroom colonies,
And the craftsman with claw hammer and nails,
Ruddy cheeks, long straight white beard, and clear eyes,
Sets from his home to build a grape arbor:
A springtime gift for his beloved wife—
As the sun shines on these longed-for changes
(And others: plum trees with their nascent bloom,
A promise of new fruit, elk waiting to calve
The wondrous life that grows within their wombs),
Spring avails herself of her soft pastels.
Where wild ducks lay their creamy speckled eggs
Amongst the tall reeds of moist, muddy marshes,
Spring overpaints winter’s neutral-hued dregs,
And where banks were lately glazed with thin ice—
And morning mist rose from the lake’s surface
As bewitched smoke rises from a mirror—
Spring washes the scene with lilac crocus,
Canary yellows, and magnolia pinks.
With different hues on each hair of her brush
Spring lightens and colors sky, land, and beast,
Rendering the cold, fallow land warm and lush.
Born in a cosmic, ancient time unknown—
Neither with a beginning nor with end,
Roving the globe with no destination,
Scaled from gales to zephyrs—exists the wind.
Never truly stilled. Wind wafts through tall grass,
Strokes a woodpecker’s pileated back,
Eddies, whirls like an Istanbul dervish,
Then rushes to autumn’s gold tamarack.
Along a purling stream it courses.
Unconquerable, the wind keeps her head,
Dashing over the solemn pine forest,
Toward the boreal Arctic’s stone swept shore.
Then out! Out over the cold raging sea,
Of black waves, fractured pack ice, and white spume—
Out amid lightning’s ribbonlike white wires,
Where auroras blaze in electric bloom.
On capricious currents come chance and change.
Historic, progressive, shaping wild rain—
On wind ride voyagers, eagles, and hopes:
Hopes to be fulfilled, hopes that are in vain.
The dusk was very orange tonight
A trick of the clouds and the light
And as that same light slowly failed
The gaudy orange sky quickly paled
And turned into a starry sphere
Like a face with comets ear to ear
And an eyelike moon, clear and low.
Seeing that, folk wonder, rightly, where the days go.
What is it that makes people be happy?
Is it firelight, candles, or something sappy?
Perhaps mountains, nature, or autumnal light?
Or a day seeing children flying a kite?
Some poor folk are happy, some rich ones too.
Some people stay cheerful while others stay blue.
Scientists say it’s genetics and place,
A mix of the two in our human race.
It’s a complex formula, their studies show,
To end with an answer that we already know:
That happiness comes from without and within
And sharing it is as easy as giving a grin.
There’s deceitful beauty where trees grow twisty
In a somber forest that’s shadowed and misty
Where light shines through in arrowlike shafts
And leaves stir faintly from gentle drafts.
There in a clearing stands a crystal bell jar
With a red rose inside that glows like a star.
For centuries not a single petal has fallen—
Neither in snowy seasons nor times of spring’s pollen.
Young trees around it have grown old and died,
Yet the rose has not wilted, faded, or dried.
Deathless, perpetual, unfading, enduring:
Without change, the rose has no chance of maturing.
Again, again, and again the sun rises and sets
On this place without memory that never forgets.
It is baffling how in a town so slow
How very quickly the years do go.
Sometimes after a frightful storm
We must burn our bridges to keep warm.
Here we work like a mill
Striding every day uphill.
Our hands are callused, our backs half-broke,
We chuckle at hope, that indecent joke;
We grin at love as it slips away,
Laugh at life and the hard day
Because the words to the song of gladness
Go like this: C’est la vie and to hell with sadness!
A good poem, like a good riddle,
May take a long time to unwind,
And in that time we find its pleasure.
The old nautilus shell—spiraling,
Whorled, and iridescent—shows at once
Its bright chambers to light
And hides its cavities in shadow.
Turn the thing, and find its great eye
Watching like a riddle, or a poem,
To see whether its strange bearing can be found.
They are ancient and pearly, these things,
Found in the icy depths of profound waters:
Hard without, soft within, cryptic and fascinating—
A verse in a nautilus, a nautilus in verse,
Two marvelous twists in an ocean of poetry.
It was one of those nights
Where we were laying on our backs
Looking up towards the end of the universe
And talking nonsense about stars and life
When I had this unshakeable and illogical feeling
That I was falling in love.
I wondered if I should ask her to marry.
But for heaven’s sake, I barely knew the girl.
We didn’t get along that well.
Well, we didn’t not get along either, but, I mean to say,
What the hell was my heart doing
Trying to get me to marry this girl?
She wasn’t my type; she was too young,
Still figuring things out.
You’ve met the type: college dropout,
Wanderer, finding themselves on the road.
I used to be that way once myself,
But I outgrew it. Most of us do,
And the ones that don’t, well,
They are who were meant to be.
Anyway, the stars were shining and I was
Wondering why I’d even considered
Marrying this girl, as she prattled on—
Something about Kant, and then on to Archimedes,
And then into a bit of astrophysics that,
Even in my state, one skewered through the brain
By Cupid’s arrow, I knew she did not understand—
When I came to realize why I thought of falling in love:
Here she was, beneath the blanket next to me,
Baring her soul to me: a virtual stranger.
There was something admirable about that.
Something profoundly lovable.
I could have asked her to marry me,
And it wouldn’t have been half as mad
As the mysteries of the universe.
I know there are some others
Who still prefer nature’s sweet light
To the glare of the television set
And who like mournful Tom Waits songs
And can imagine what life was like
Centuries before the Industrial Revolution,
When the Natives on the plains
Lived in teepees and the Mayans
Were still constructing pyramids.
Sometimes I see a hummingbird flying
And I remember hearing about
How quickly its swift heart beats
And I see the moon in the daytime
Behind hammerhead clouds that still,
With effort, look like floating castles.
I guess that the world’s just gotten tougher.
The facts squeeze the youth
Right out of you. Genocides, war, pollution,
Disease, global warming, you name it—
Everyone’s got an opinion and wants you to take a side.
Hell, even the people who bury their heads
In the sand and don’t harm a soul
Get outed for not helping.
But it makes it a little better somehow, to listen to old jazz
With the music turned down real low
And a hand-rolled cigarette between your fingers
With a little bit of lamplight and
A half-decent book written by a barely decent man,
And a cold bottle of beer,
To steal a few seconds from the world—
It’s a guilty pleasure, made all the worse by knowing
That outside the world is going up in flames,
And you’re nestled in to the semi-darkness
Enjoying a few moment’s peace.
Drink is a thing most odd.
Although merry-making, it is flawed
For the odd drink
Leads to a merry think
And merry drinking
Leads to flawed thinking
Which means odd drinking.
For sure, drink is a thing most odd!
Though merry-making, it is flawed:
Even rightly put down, bottle and cup,
They’re best not stood straightly, but bottom’s up!
They say that marriage is a worthy thing
And that may very well be!
But sometimes I want to take off this ring
And be on my own and free.
The able word-smithy
Ought to be pithy
And must write well
For his clientele.
He should have felt sadness,
And had spells of madness,
Yet still kept some humor
For his consumer—
Because nothing beats levity
Except, of course, brevity.
