Aleppo
A father sings to his son,
dead two days,
and the platitudes persist.
Widow of night. Lantern’s trick.
What trace, you wonder,
exists of humanity in these etched
walls? Light bleeds through a crack
like rules unheeded and scattered.
Another sheer looming of hours.
The song, continued.
“Aleppo” was first published in Vox Populi in August 2018. I am grateful to editor Michael Simms for his continuing support of my work.
Mockingbird III
Songs, returned
to their space
within the sphere of
movement, the patterns inscribed
as if to touch the face of every
wind: here one moment, then
gone. This quickness delights us.
How, then, do we so often forget
those things we share? Night
comes and goes to another’s
phrase, yet each note is so precisely
placed, so carefully rendered
that we hear only the voice, not its source.
* * *
Another piece from the 80s. This first appeared here in March 2015, and would likely be a much longer poem if I were to write it today.
Bamboo Flute
I am studying simplicity
in the way a rattlesnake
watches a field mouse,
which means of course
that I am doing it all wrong
and making this much more
difficult. Today’s lesson
is humility: I achieve no
tone from this damn bamboo
flute, no matter how I adjust
my mouth and wind. Go
watch football, the voices
say. Instead I go to the grocery,
buy my wife’s favorite
wine, and later pour her
a glass and offer Irish cheddar
with rice crackers and a few
grapes. I sip beer, pick up
the flute, and sound a
wavering D followed by a goose
fart and spitting hamsters.
Progress, at last! Now
back to the lesson. Relax.
I’m nailing this simplicity thing.
* * *
“Bamboo Flute” first appeared in The Larger Geometry: poems for peace, available at Amazon. This anthology of poems that “uplift, encourage and inspire,” features poets from five countries and three continents. Published by the interfaith peaceCENTER of San Antonio, Texas, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All proceeds from the sale of this anthology go to benefit the peaceCENTER.
I’m pleased to have had a small role in selecting the poems.
Contributing poets include Lynne Burnett, Charlotte Hamrick, Daryl Muranaka, Stephanie L. Harper, Sudhanshu Chopra, Texas Poet Laureate Carol Coffee Reposa, Michael Vecchio, Rebecca Raphael and others.
A Word Bathing in Moonlight
You understand solitude,
the function of water,
how stones breathe
and the unbearable weight
of love. Give up, the voice says.
Trust only yourself.
Wrapped in light, you
turn outward. Burst forth.
“A Word Bathing in Moonlight” first appeared in Eclectica in July 2017.
“Thinking Music” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Moonwalker
The night’s face, pocked with stars.
In the stellar wind, we soar.
From this pale light,
acknowledge insignificance, watch
the blue spinning so far away, so close.
I am that finite point
of nowhere, of nothing, wondering
when the sun will truly darken,
if I will see tomorrow, today.
* * *
“Moonwalker” first appeared in Ligeia’s Winter 2019 edition. Many thanks to poetry editor Ashley Wagner for taking this poem.
Mockingbird
Withdrawn, it unfolds
to another
voice, like that
of a child lost in the wind.
Or, lonely, it rises from its place
and sings, only
to return and start again.
The pleasure we accept derives from
the knowledge that we are not alone.
Each morning we walk out and sit
by the stones, hoping to observe some
new patterns in his life. What we
see is an answer. What we hear is no song.
* * *
“Mockingbird” made its first appearance here in January 2015. It was written
in the 1980s, probably around 1987-1989.
The Draft
All memories ignite, he says, recalling
the odor of accelerants and charred
friends. Yesterday I walked to the sea
and looking into its deep crush
sensed something unseen washing
out, between tides and a shell-cut foot,
sand and the gull’s drift, or the early names
I assign to faces. This is not sadness.
Somewhere the called numbers meet.
* * *
“The Draft” first appeared in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art.
Variations on a Theme
1. The Long Night
We envy the shadow its attributes, its willingness to subside,
but what of its flesh?
I lay in the field and wept.
Think of the fragrance, the moist leaves
enveloping the still
warm body. In retrospect, I realize that I should never have left, that air
returns to voided space despite all attempts to disavow
light, that wind and rain and soil alike filter through the chest’s
cavity, that stones may bear one’s touch in perpetuity.
At nineteen, death had gifted nothing to my world.
At twenty, little else remained.
So close, so lovely.
2. The Loneliness of Shadows
Light collapsing around a point. The two-headed flower.
In my dreams, no one speaks.
Not the thing itself, the bud bursting forth, petals ablaze with color,
but rather change: the process reinforced.
Sleep seldom shows such kindness.
Or its fruit, redolent of sun and rain, withdrawn and shriveled,
and finally, ingested.
Yesterday I woke damp but unafraid.
3. Alchemy
Stones never talk, but they rise from the earth, appearing as if by invitation.
The way silence lines an unfilled
grave, which is to say as below
so above, an infinite murmur open to the night.
And other notions: transpiration.
Waste.
Sublimation. Calcination and burning.
At times I have withdrawn
like water from the air’s
body, fearful yet reckless in the act.
That evening the moon flickered and the shadows lay at our feet,
and all the words we never framed,
the bitters our tongues could not know, the wasted
music and abandoned caresses, those words,
sighed into the ground, leaving you adrift, alone.
But how else might one transform darkness to light?
Or the reverse.
This originally appeared in Boston Poetry Magazine in April, 2014, and was first posted here in July of 2015.
Scarecrow Calls Out the Man
These things I cannot name: that finger of night
between fear and peace, in which darkness both cloaks
and hugs the wide-eyed. A snake, in the open. And that space
behind the watcher? Perhaps it is easier to call it something
else – a gasp, or the immeasurable measure. A presidential
folly. My friends, ever cautious, swoop in and away, taking
with them only those grains they need, unlike you. What use
is a hoarded larder if it rots? How does one come to want
everything and nothing at the same time? A gilded house
spotlights wealth, not right. Is this edifice your legacy,
your monument to self? The heart monitor’s blip paints one
forever, your pursed lips, another. But even the concrete
you cringe behind lacks permanency; regard your hands
and all they can’t stuff into your pockets. Loosen that
coiled tie lest it choke you. Accept what the mirror sees,
and await karma. Though you will not hear my voice,
I offer this: may the combined weight of your lies and
larcenies, your unpaid debts and power plays, rapes,
casual racism, privilege and coarse, childish taunts, merge
into one fist-size bankroll placed upon your chest, and
fueled by the gravitational forces of forty-four black holes,
slowly, with each turn of the earth’s axis, press down and
down and down in search of that shriveled organ, and finding
it, pluck out and replace it with one resembling that of a
genuine human, one honoring respect and love, empathy
and humility. I am the sum of integrated, discarded
pieces assembled to observe and warn, collecting only
diminishment and the means to become less. Wanting
little, the world welcomes me. It arrives free, honest, on
wings, bringing wealth beyond your reach, your greed.
I own nothing. I know nothing. But this: I name you
Scourge, and laugh at the smallness of you. I name you
Farce. I name you Empty. I name you Gone.
* * *
And there are those who still follow him…
“Scarecrow Calls Out the Man” first appeared on Vox Populi in August 2017.
My poem “Where Grief Falls” is featured at Great Lakes Review. I am grateful to the team at GLR for taking this piece.
O at the Edges 