Contents
A Cold, Snowy Road after Darkness
Arthur Rackham Illustrates the Classics
The Candle from the Cathedral
The Cigarettes Play Farmington
The Dancer
And Death Walked a Few Steps Behind
The Disappearance of a Cat
Dr. Proctor
Downtown at Dusk
Drink is a Thing Most Odd
The Gold Miner’s Industry
The Heat
The Hollow Man and the Zealot
The Housefire
The Immortal Rose
Jacob Grimm by the Fire
The Luthier Alone in His Workshop
Maps
Moths
The Mountain
My Time is Made for Wasting
Old Charts
Old Natives
One of Those Nights
Our Hope Rises
The Poet
The Prison
The Prisoner
Quotidian
Ranching
The River in Art and Myth
The Rope Fence of the Pastel Houses
Salted
Seraphs in Black
Stars
The Stars Above
Steady Winds and Blooming Flowers
Thinking on Thought
To Hell with Sadness
The Tornado
Torture
Traffic
The Wedding Ring
What Happened by the Half-Light
When Your Back is to the Wall
A Cold, Snowy Road After Darkness
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.
Arthur Rackham Illustrates the Classics
He never saw the tales, save in his mind.
There, though, they were as clear as bell jars.
He drew the scenes with the limpid precision
of a watchmaker, and filled in the colors
with a golden touch. Baba Yaga in the forest—
he knew her since she was a beautiful girl;
he drew her after the horrors of her childhood,
the deprivations of Slavic famine.
He drew trees that spoke and fairies with wings,
while seated on a hard wooden stool,
a lantern’s meager flame flickering like magic sparks.
Leafless branches clawed at windows.
Wolves howled from a distant, wooded peak.
Rackham dipped his quill into an inkpot
filled with horror, marvels, and delight.
He adjusted his glasses on his scarecrow nose,
and, like a timeworn stepmother,
gave the written characters another kind of life.
The Candle from the Cathedral
In his memory he saw the old woman sucking her hankerchief in the pew. The widow wore a funereal black bowler, a starched jib collar, oval glasses with smoky plastic frames, and her hair spun white and curly. She held a candle like all the others among the ranks of grievers, not a few, who stretched back to the entrance of the dark, arching cathedral sanctuary under whose vaulted ceilings the sputtering flames flickered like constellations of stars.
He stood out in the cold and windfilled and trashfilled street filled with cars, and he saw through unfinished iron girders and steel transoms the dreadnought sky. He saw the low, threatening clouds elbow the skyscraper bazaar. He put his hand above his eyes, and he squinted, then he spit deliberately. There was a punk nearby whom he’d once seen animaleyed with a switchblade in the alley, and the punk leaned against a building looking at him like a window to be looked through.
In his memory he saw the bell glass half full of the white willow and ethanol tincture, the color of motor oil, that the old man swallowed as medicine in his last weeks. The old man had kept the bell glass in his office in a cherry cabinet stained dark red. It had lain behind handcut glass doors on a pad of velvety fur. He turned and trotted down the subway tunnel steps into the city under the city, and he boarded the first train that came and stood and heard the car creak.
There were not many people in the car, just a seated woman with an antique face whose nose was high and pinched, and a man who expression looked like rain. He rode the car until the end of the line then stepped off and stood on the brick platform, waiting for the train to come back again. A bag lady came up on the platform near him, nodding, chanting a weird refrain. The train was a long time in coming. As he rode he felt nothing, no hurt or pleasure.
When he arrived back at his apartment he put the key in the lock and let himself in. He had brought back his candle from the cathedral, and he lit it and left it to gutter. There was only one window in the apartment, and rain began to patter against it.
“When the flame goes out,” he said to the candle, “I’ll start to stop grievin’.”
He went into the bathroom and stripped off his clothes and stood thinking under the hot shower as the bathroom filled with steam from the water, and he soaked until his fingertips looked like sundried fruit, and fog coated the mirror. Then he stepped out of the shower and dried and dressed himself and looked to see if the candle was still lit.
He scoffed when he saw the flame creeping along the drapes and towards the furniture, and he watched as the fire slowly crawled toward his Holstein violin. He debated awhile whether to let the fire burn, but chuckled and smothered it. The candle he blew out, and it let off a silver stream of smoke, snakelike and thin.
The Cigarettes Play Farmington
The Cigarettes were a hard core band full of righteous punks and rage,
The singer supported anarchy and sang it out on stage;
Lily was the drummer girl, a saucy lass in black,
She wore a fishnet pair of slacks, her thong rose out the back.
Jimmy was the trumpeter, always barefoot when he played,
Smoking reefers in the club and forever getting laid.
Molly was the bassist, she was a poet in her soul,
Writing chords and lyrics about Hell and money and control.
The city board of Farmington, a town conservative and straight
Booked The Cigarettes unwittingly for their Annual Harvest Fête,
When October came around the leaves turned orange and black,
The pumpkins ripened on their vines, the hay was heaped in stacks
Mrs. Trot put on a dress, her corset, stockings, and her hat,
And toodled out with Mr. Trot who was wearing his cravat.
On the way they met the Smiths, who ran the local mill.
They were dressed in modest best, as humble as a hill.
The evening started very fair, with meats and fruits and pie,
There was cider in the goblets and a pretty autumn sky,
And then the band began to play, you could hear them from a mile:
A pounding drum, an ominous hum, the locals lost their smiles,
Then on the stage a screaming rage, as the singer yowled and croaked,
The sun went down, the lights came on, the fires flared and smoked!
The locals of Farmington were first transformed by fear,
And then they caught the wind of it and began to lend an ear!
“This band is fuckin rockin!” shrieked Mrs. Trot and threw the horns,
“Yeah, this is how we celebrate the reaper and the corn!”
And soon enough the town of Farmington said to Hell with our respect!
And threw themselves into a night of drink and dance and sex!
And every year thereafter… the townsfolk booked The Cigarettes!
The Dancer
The 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.
And Death Walked a Few Steps Behind
Well, I walk hand-in-hand with Life,
And Death walks a few steps behind,
And wherever I go, and wherever I lead,
Death is sure to follow.
So I had a few words a few years ago,
With that reaper known as Death.
I said, “So long as you’re coming wherever I go,
I’ll go wherever I want.”
He said in reply, “That’s a very fine view,
Just keep in mind, my friend:
When your time comes,
I’ll take you away,
You cannot run too far or too fast.”
So I nodded and considered,
And I went on my way.
And Death walked a few steps behind.
The Disappearance of a Cat
Red curtains billowed open for that cat;
he waltzed onto the hardwood, so loaded,
his mouth slightly ajar, green eyes sparkling,
luring us into his act—a spider
deftly beckoning, weaving to music
of his own creation, dreamy and gold.
A costume hallucinogenic and gold,
he broke out with a well hung air, that cat
mortified the wild crowds, overloaded
as we were with his glitter and sparkling
hair. He played implications of Spider
and Cherry Wolves, lost in his own music…
*****
Is it madness? the press asked, Your music?
Tell us, how do the things you touch turn gold?
He shrugged, slunk away like a peevish cat,
but turned, It’s all in how you get loaded—
swig the right juice, you’ll be loved, sparkling;
if not, you’ll be trite, clichéd, a spider.
And there’s nothing so lethal as spiders,
save snakes, executives, and flat music-
but every new enigma is choice gold.
We all dug his edgy airs, his cool-cat
Oscar Wilde imitations, stacked and loaded
as they were in packages, all sparkling
and convenient, quickly shipped to sparkling
masses and to the corporate spiders.
And everyone bought his life, his music,
his t-shirt. His album went silver, gold,
platinum; Rolling Stone begged for that cat
to pose, provocative and well loaded.
Vulgar, he said. Not a chance. But, loaded
and stoned, his agent dragged him in, sparkling
as wine, and spread him out on a spider
divan with eight purple arms, swank music
regaling him throughout. And royal gold
sashes were draped across the kingly cat.
*****
One day he found nothing more in music-
each grain of gold vanished, nothing sparkling
left. And he disappeared with it, that cat.
Downtown at Dusk
In April when the crepe myrtles and cherry trees bloom,
city folk are reflected in the rain’s puddles,
by water that serves as mirrors for impressions.
Wind whips billowy clouds into an eastern gloom,
while on the shiny street, a wayfarer huddles
beneath the tall windows of lordly professions.
The sun leaves plum-shaded shadows beyond buildings
and beams wash walls in apricot and tangerine.
In this fine twilight, a black cat’s lime-gold eyes glint;
hazy rays catch rich institutions’ burnished gilding.
Night falls on folk fat and merry, lonely and lean.
The cat leaps. Windows glow with a lemony tint.
In the darkness, people’s reflections disappear;
edifices are shades of coal and emery.
By night, people’s luminous private lives appear,
while day’s brilliant impressions fade to memory.
Dr. Proctor
Bill “The Butcher” Proctor was the town’s local doctor
And he had had much more than a nip.
When a woman came in with a broken hand,
He took off her leg at the hip.
When the woman woke up she just looked down and sobbed.
“Why, oh why, do you cry?” asked Doctor Proctor,
“It may be true that you’re left with one thigh,
But you’ll get used to that by and by.”
“You fool, you bastard!” the woman screamed at the man,
“I came in to your clinic with a pain in my hand!”
“Hm,” said the doctor, looking down at her leg.
“Well. Yes. Hm. I see.
“In my condition I thought I saw something wrong with the knee.”
And he thought, “Left uncorrected, this could spell serious trouble for me!”
“I’ll sue your quack practice for all that it’s worth!”
Screamed his patient in fury as she wept and she cursed.
Dr. Proctor scratched at his chin, then he put her under again.
He murmured, “I’ll fix this wreck right up in a sec!”
And with the sound of a snick and the sound of a sneck
He cut off his patient’s head at the neck!
“There,” he said, holding her head up by the hair,
“There, there, there! Now, now, she can’t complain to anyone anywhere!”
Drink is a Thing Most Odd
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!
The Gold Miner’s Industry
Under the naphtha torch’s light lie tailings of ore.
Shadows flicker on a collapsed mine shaft
which fell one night like a melancholy piano score
on men whose lungs tore each time they laughed.
And here the mercury man’s shop stands on mud.
His skin’s peeling off. His ankles are deathly thin.
He washes gold in a mercury-filled pan of wood
then sets that metal in fire to burn away its silver skin.
What will become of him?
He will work for little, until he dies.
He will lie, cold and grim,
amid the gold that draws our eyes.
The Heat
In this heat,
With the cicadas buzzing
Like chainsaws
And the dogs panting
Like lovers
There is nothing to do
But sweat
And sleep
Sweat
And sleep
Sweat
And sleep
Until you wash yourself
In the warm ocean
Until the rain falls
And turns the land green
Until the moon rises
And the heat
Like a cat
Curls up for a nap.
And then, only then,
Can you breathe.
The Hollow Man and the Zealot
The hollow man and the zealot lay skylighting the vast desert on their stomachs
watching for anything mobile and columnular, squinting into the waves of heat
and the low hellfire sun which dipped crepuscular like a ball of blood.
Above the crest of the world the sun hung suspended, huge and balanced,
and the men fell in to watching it as if towed by a riptide into Andromeda and Ursula seas.
It set in a neon cataclysm, banded the faroff mesas, until all else became parentheticals and mud.
When the moon came out, it came out vanilla and strong
like the sunless flowering of night blooming jasmine
while from the distance rode a backlit man not deadtired nor horseworn before the floating circle
and the hollow man whose diction was three parts doggerel, whiskey, and graveyardsong
rasped smokily, I tell thee wait; I have the time, the time.
He slid from under his belly a heavy revolver and spinning its cylinder made ready to kill.
Can’t hardly wait whispered the zealot who like all unwise men was mercurial
and who braided with such characteristic the strains of violence, insecurity, and assumption
and so saying he ran his hand through his short black hair as was his habit
and tendered the necklace of bleached doe’s teeth he wore for motives superstitious and bestial.
At a canter the rider lifted off his hat in that lonesome waste and the zealot spat in derision.
Hush hush hush! rasped his companion Hold your nerves and spit!
The rider came along across the shale, through the dwarf scrog and a crowd of desert bats
looking like some classical and celestial organism astride his white horse.
He wore a bandolier braced with bullets, pistols in his belt, a rifle across his back,
rode with the drumming energy of a raw heart while wondrousstar-staring as if the Leonids were at that
moment showering. He rode as if nothing lay or had ever lain in his course.
He rode as if, if he chose, he could empower a man to paint his godless world black.
The hollow man lay his thumb on the hammer of the revolver, cocking till it clicked and held.
He sighted along the barrel; just after he pulled the trigger the man popped crazy off his horse
and the hollow man seeing such sight rose and fired again and the horse fell
and so seeing turned his back and walked from that deathquilt without looking to see its pattern.
The zealot rose fingering his toothy necklace giggling at such dreadnought wanton force
then followed the hollow man, vanishing deep into the cobalt lit mesas and scrub chaparral.
The zealot and the hollow man sat sitting round a fire surrounded by soaring mountains
and near them sagged a dilapidated church, a steepled shack, with three rotten wooden steps
and inside: bare rafters termite ridden floorboards and a baptismal font of rose porphyry
carried by the zealot’s jackass through the metamorphosed and steep passes of the mountains,
and the hollow man sung singing, All the wicked man’s foibles and vile contretemps
the wicked man’s sins, the wicked man’s deeds, I make for free. I make for free. I have for thee.
And without a warning, the hollow man pulled from his holster his revolver and, aiming it at the zealot,
fired the gun six times in lethargic lethal succession and when the zealot dropped dead
the hollow man emptied the cylinder, refilled it with bullets, and left the fire burning,
for at his core he was empty, not full of hate, nor vengeance, nor malice, nor rot,
but full of no emotion, neither melancholic nor apathetic, just a husk of humanity in dread
shape with only a penchant for the spoken word and any skeletal song he might be heard to sing.
The Housefire
She had skin
As smooth
As a watermelon’s
And eyes
As bright
As butterflies.
She stood,
Frozen for a moment,
With her mouth open,
So that her round white teeth
And the tip of her pretty
Pink tongue
Were just visible.
Her arm was outstretched,
Like a medusa
Under a deep sea.
I could understand her.
I suppose that’s
How
I might stand too
If I came home,
And I, like her,
Found my home
Burning.
The Immortal Rose
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.
Jacob Grimm by the Fire
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 slacks, a wool shirt,
and a thick blanket 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,
gnarled, and with an elven-kingdom
beneath its roots.
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 Grimm’s bright mind
mystery, horror, and romance
still thrive in winter.
The Luthier Alone in His Workshop
Amid vacuousness,
vagueness, silence
ear to horsehair strings
(pluck, pluck, twing)
The luthier: polar, hoary hair
rivuleted, waxen face
planes, calipers, chisels
ebony bench
Sigggggghhhhhhh…..
stands, nestles, adjusts, lifts
bow strikes strings
(saw, pling, pling)
tattoo of sound
exequy of hush
a roaring, a splendor!
a workshop suffused.
(pling, saw saw, rush, whine orble, fade, seern, seeOyurn)
(pluck, pluck) hearken (saw) hearken (pluck, pluck) tune
(saw, neeor, seeor, zhhhh)
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
J.S. Bach
Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006: VII.
Gigue.
Resonance, reverberation decamp
ultimate echo.
Maps
Cartographers formerly inked squares
with dragons near their peripheries
and precipices over which ships tumbled
to Hell, or rocks, or seas
never known before.
And quack chiropractors with pricking needles
tattoo courses: their phony kinesiology
tracking down one’s back like generations
sprouting from a family tree.
These are maps, each a colorful arras
of pictograms and symbols,
an archive of devils and seraphs,
of the cosmos and the void.
Maps, one and all.
And their significance?
What shall be their importance,
ages and eons hence?
When the streams have dried,
and the crabs have hidden
in the sand of the ocean floor?
Only that maps etch themselves
and have recorded our paths and their ends
which lie in the distance like misty Incan ruins,
faint epitaphs of their architects.
Moths
There are some of us moths flying to flame:
burning, yet unwilling to give a damn,
propelled by a force that we cannot name
to escape, to wander this wondrous land.
We set off, in any time, knowing why.
For, weighing against the fearsome unknown
is the certain, staid life that stultifies:
of birds that have lived, without having flown.
There’s risk in staying still: waiting to death,
softening, an awful suffocation.
Such active hope for new life and free breath,
brings us to the platform of a station.
And God knows we miss some things left behind:
The work unfinished, the plans unstarted—
sentimental things, a close friend so kind,
the living and heavenly departed.
But life is short. It passes with mad haste.
Life is but a blink in the universe.
It flashes by, leaving no time to waste
between birth and grave, cradle and hearse.
The Mountain
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
At the mountain’s foot are crows, black as coal;
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
The dawn of the trial holds its mystique:
a challenge to pioneers who are bold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
The trailblazer starts with certain technique,
but must break himself to make himself whole:
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
By dusk of the trial, the sun seems weak.
The long day has grown dark, starless, and cold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
But fight on, through the pain, the doubt, and shrieks.
Fight on, through the dismantling of your soul.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
Keep hope inside when you’re too tired to speak,
and pay with your spirit every steep toll.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
My Time is Made for Wasting
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.
Old Charts
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.
Old Natives
Seas of grass
night skies of pinpricked fire
dusks with low suns
that backlight bison.
Lightning in wire
milennia before guns
and modernity.
Such atrocities, such starts.
Old natives, lost tongues.
Fire, wind, earth, water,
Summer, autumn, winter, spring.
Lost ages, forgotten arts,
painted faces, muted songs
eagle feathers, pelts of otter,
Llanguid river, purling spring.
Past, past, past—
murmur it into the mirror,
three times, ten times.
Light a candle, burn incense.
Dance, smoke, scream.
Conjure the past, summon it—
it shall not come,
it is past.
The land, the earth, the wind, the sky:
none can remember
the old natives.
One of Those Nights
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.
Our Hope Rises
Our hope rises like a strong wind,
buoying us as we ascend
from gloomy fogs we’re loathe to fly
into a clear and better sky,
one where fewer troubles attend.
From lonely walks with tragic ends
to crowded tracks among cold friends
where we’ve left our own dreams to die,
our hope rises.
Even as we misapprehend,
stumble, fail at making amends,
and live a self-evident lie,
still, if we but honor and try
to be noble before life ends
our hope rises.
The Poet
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.
The Prison
It was just a little prison,
But its walls were hard as iron
And its jailers were resolute bastards.
They hung men, day and night,
Hung them even in my dreams
So that as I lay sleeping, fearful,
I watched ghostly rebels
Swinging by their necks,
Dozens of them,
Swinging through the mists,
From nightmare gallows.
It was just a little prison,
But it kept me from being free.
It stopped me from doing
The things that I wanted to do.
It was just a little prison,
But I made it bigger
With bricks of fear
And mortar made of doubt.
The bars were of ignorance,
And I paved the floor
With missed opportunity.
I roofed the ceiling
With a broad sheet of discomposure
That covered up the sky.
Because why the hell not?
I thought I might as well.
I can’t see any distance anyway,
When I lose my temper.
It was just a little prison,
But at least I was my own warden,
And my own jailer too.
I could deny those visitors,
Courage and wisdom.
It was just a little prison,
But I made it
All by myself.
The Prisoner
He sat as the only prisoner beneath the low hanging ceiling with a drip
in the humid cell with the small barred window that looked into the jungle,
and he looked in at the captain who struck a match for the cigarette between his lips
while outside the rain splashed into the ferns and the dense vines’ tangles.
The captain was leaning back in his chair, and he was playing solitaire
with a pack of dog-eared cards as a ceiling fan spun slowly overhead
like a child pushing against a mountain, for the fan could not move the heavy air,
while the rain poured down in drops as big as grapes and as heavy as lead.
The prisoner knew that in this prison there was no time or meaning to life
that the thing to do was to survive with as little pain as one could manage,
and the captain coughed after he exhaled and set the matchstick near his knife
then set his chair down and laid his elbows on the table, rickety with age.
The captain turned over his card, and the prisoner watched with interest
for there was nothing to do in the monotony except to stare,
like living in the doldrums on the sea, and it seemed killing time was best
so the prisoner watched as the captain leaned back again in his chair.
The captain studied his cards, and he took the cigarette out and exhaled.
The smoke drifted up to the ceiling fan, and the fan dispersed the smoke,
then the captain laced his fingers behind his head, for his interest had failed,
and the prisoner glanced down and fingered his shoelace, which was broke.
Then the prisoner knew the electricity went out because the fan slowed and stopped,
but there was no change in the captain, so the prisoner lay back on his bed
and listened to the dull music of water as the rain continued to drop;
there was no wind, and there were no thoughts in the prisoner’s head.
Far in the distance came the deep whoomping sound of a mortar being fired,
so the prisoner lifted his head, and he glanced at the captain
but the captain hadn’t moved; he either hadn’t heard or was just too tired,
and the prisoner glanced around gloomily at the cell he was trapped in.
It was made of stone and cement and contained a toilet, a sink, and a bed.
The bed was a mattress without box springs, sheets, or pillows,
and on that mattress the prisoner lay again, his hands beneath his head
and considered briefly, without contrition, the paths that he once chose.
Six months ago, a white woman had entered the prison, and the captain stood straight,
and the prisoner spoke in his broken English to make the woman smile,
and after the translator interviewed him, the prisoner knew she had come too late,
for the prisoner felt her presence not as a warmth but as a kind of wicked trial.
And it used to be that on Fridays, the captain would serve them both coffee.
The captain would sit next to his cell and hand the coffee through the bars,
sometimes they would play cards and even talk in a way that was almost free
and the prisoner learned that his jailer, too, was a prisoner of the long hours.
Now the captain leaned back in his chair with his eyes shut, and the prisoner slept,
and there were no sounds except the steady drumming of the rain.
Whoever fired the mortar did not fire it again, and the peace was kept,
and the electricity returned, so the fan began to turn again,
then the captain opened his eyes, he lit another cigarette with a match,
and he shook the match’s flame out with a few flicks of his wrist
and the captain considered the loneliness of his official watch
and put out of his mind those chances that he had always missed.
Quotidian
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.
Ranching
Past the plums and bushes of blueberries
then through the hollow’s fog, thick and heavy,
at dawn when the whippoorwill’s song carries,
I drive the rutted road in my old red Chevy.
I have not slept the night. I was out on the trail,
on my horse, driving cattle along the dark terrain,
the hours marked by distant whistlings of a locomotive on the rail,
the deepest night made cold and bitter by freezing rain.
The heater’s blowing ghostly hot air on my hands,
and the truck bumps slowly along the road to home.
I take a tired look at the good lands
that wear my flesh raw to work and roam.
The River in Art and Myth
The river flows through veins of art and myth.
Ancient masters used its streaming waters:
the reaper stands at its curve with a scythe;
in Lethe are forgotten sons and daughters;
Ophelia lies in the river’s reeds;
Ruskin wrote of the Golden River’s king;
philosophers allude to where it leads,
and to the watershed changes it brings.
Christ was baptized on the River Jordan;
ancient and modern folk skip stones on streams;
Thomas Cole painted rivers through gardens,
with cloud castles to stand for youthful dreams.
From cartographic mark to mystic sign,
from fiction to life, and from bank to bed,
rivers hold a place in the human mind,
and, like time, rivers always run ahead.
The Rope Fence of the Pastel Houses
I pass a seashell of no significance
as I follow the curves of a whitewashed fence
and the uneven coastline of the sea.
The fence is jagged, hardly even, somewhat ragged,
with braided rope in place of slats,
stretching further than I can see.
Above my head, squawking shrilly, are hoary seagulls on the wing—
circling, circling, flitting, snatching, snatching at a crust of bread
then aloft again to form a ring.
And in the distance, softly scratching their stemmed backs upon the posts,
are coastal grasses, likely latching their seeds upon white painted posts,
for the wind to blow and foster breeding.
To my left are pastel houses, built on stilts with reading nooks,
with cozy crannies for the child that drowses, and oriels for those with books
to put their backs to while they thumb through poems of Charles Baudelaire.
While from a cattail, singing sweetly, warbles warmly the gentle wren.
Brown and round and barred so drably (yet still considered very fair),
the pleasant wren makes moving music then takes flight upon the air.
While I continue on my road, whistling with the wandering wind,
going just as quickly as those good folk who have in mind no certain end,
and speaking with an amiable neighbor, I’m kindly told a thing or two:
that when traveling over any distance, it’s but common sense to enjoy the view.
Salted
There’s no place I’d rather be
Than here by the sea
Where the birds are singing all day.
All my worries and cares
Drift away on sea airs
And I’m left to do nothing but play.
The world may be burning
And it’s certainly turning
But here every day feels the same.
I wake and I write
From morning to night
And at times I forget my own name.
Seraphs in Black
“Then another angel came out of the temple
and called in a loud voice to him who was
sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and
reap, because the time to reap has come,
for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he
who was seated on the cloud swung his
sickle over the earth,
and the earth was harvested.”
-Revelation 14: 15 NIV Bible
Against the rising beauty of the sun,
shimmering over an owl’s watchful eyes,
the apocalyptical black dead come.
Lightless labyrinths of deathly ebon
concealing nightmare beasts, dichotomized
against the rising beauty of the sun.
From trees, then across plains, desolate, dun,
thunder sixteen hooves guided by blind eyes
the apocalyptical black dead come.
Who race from four corners, the bloodless ones
taking, by frozen touch, their living prize
against the rising beauty of the sun.
They, in yawning hoods, take every one
judged guilty of slaying, sadism, lies;
the apocalyptical black dead come.
Who, like bright artists dabbing oils upon
canvases of horizons and dawn skies
against the rising beauty of the sun,
the apocalyptical black dead come.
Stars
Stars are birthed in clouds.
Stellar nurseries:
Helium, hydrogen, heat; collapse.
After an explosion, 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 profound 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.
The Stars Above
And when I to suit my fancy lie
beneath the tree and darkened sky
and watch with wondering eyes the stars
that glimmer through the night’s short hours
and find there the constellations bright
with Grecian myths of astral light,
I wonder if in the twinkling air
there might be other life up there.
For while I lay thinking on our great world,
one not much larger than a black pearl,
I send my thoughts to a far, empyrean shore
where no manmade craft has gone before.
And stretching out my hand and mind,
I hope to greet one of like kind:
one whose curiosity about space
extends beyond the limits of their race
and lets them dream of far-off lands
with quiescent oceans and rocky sands
where sentient beings far above
hopefully can think and dream and love.
Steady Winds and Blooming Flowers
To be convinced of the strength of far-off powers—
of deities and entities and potencies—
is to stick and wallow for wasted hours.
better to trust one’s own competency,
or to steady winds and blooming flowers.
Thinking on Thought
An unhappy mind
Makes the day unkind:
It ties our thoughts
In the strictest knots
And makes the soundest plots
Come to noughts.
To Hell with Sadness
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!
The Tornado
I hear there is a book whose words
will let a man live life the way it was before.
I hear, too, there’s something to
be said for keeping a barren, empty store:
Samuel anointed David with a holy oil,
The Fisher cast away the rich and lifted high the poor.
I find a bit of poetry in most things
and have learned from the tornado
how to break the heart and make it sing.
I have learned the cruel ways of breaking down,
the simple pains and violent things
that make a man forget the man who he was before.
And if I read that book whose words
will let a man have life the same again,
I won’t wonder when the text recites
my kindnesses and wildest sins,
that it was actually the word of karma
that made me make my bed of needles and pins.
A thief touches a pocket and makes it thin;
everything is lost to a Philistine in war,
and if I say that such a light load can make you free,
I mean I can travel roads I could not walk before—
I can carry everything I own without straining my back
off the cyclone’s path and onto some new floor.
Torture
Listen! Listen. The voice was once tenor:
now, soprano.
Imagine—yes, and just consider—yesterday he was silent.
Our clips snap tightly, our pliers are handy,
our clamps are unforgiving, our machines
well greased.
Some things are working right around here.
We don’t even have to be too cautious.
As with all open secrets there is a
wink, a nudge to the vacillators, a cold
hard ethical argument to the protestors, and then
the show goes on.
The show must go on.
On the one hand we sit at a round table
and discuss the pros and morals of
torture. This, while people’s
worlds are being unraveled, a skein of
yarn held by a thread, dropped from a
tall building.
The demolition of a sturdy warm home:
tall, distinguished, memories in every cranny.
All that is left is the thread, the
foundation.
The skein, the home, the soul—deconstructed.
It is the metamorphosis of butterfly—
vividly colored, light—into caterpillar.
From caterpillar to cocoon. Cocoon to seed.
It is a human eclipse.
It is a vanishing.
Traffic
Modernity’s hurtling bus
That carries us, unwillingly or not,
To a dimly seen destination,
Struck the quaint Romantic notion
Of Autumn’s falling leaves,
Lantern-lit forest cottages,
Gently arching stone bridges,
And clear, purling waters.
That notion was left shrieking,
Roadkill not yet dead,
Writhing on the highway shoulder.
Needn’t worry about it, though;
The Amazon delivery truck,
Coming by, will soon put it out of its misery.
Gone are the days when Nostalgia
Was in vogue, when Patience was a virtue,
And pop stars had to sing.
Here are the days of broken promises,
Callous economies, and
Hot, blistering social winds.
The Wedding Ring
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.
What Happened by the Half-Light
For but a short while has she lingered in the gloaming
standing careless by the blooming hyacinths
whose delicate petals sway in the easy wind by the door.
The filtered air and haze of autumn twilight
send warm zephyrs to churn the crinkling leaves
and rustle the golden wheat in the harvest store.
Her soul rests easy in the faltering marbled light,
as men and women make their labored ways slowly home
through clusters of fragrant lilacs and fields of ocher brome.
When Your Back is to the Wall
When your back’s to the wall
And guns point at your heart
Then show them all
You won’t fall apart.
They’ll do their worst
So now you should spit,
Give them a curse,
And the hell with it.
Curse all their mothers
and die with a sneer,
For they are not brothers
And will not die here.
David Murphy 