The Buddha Mind

Three komodo dragons
ate a small deer:
one in the back, one in the belly,
one in the rear.

The shocked deer endured,
its black tongue taut,
half an hour: four hungry creatures
with just one thought.

I understand this really happened.
Three komodo dragons were seen slowly devouring a deer.
My wife ran from the room and left the poem unread.
Sorry.

Icaroi

The Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner

I would turn my skin, so fair and pale,
into something beautiful (not macabre
or historical) like papyrus
and write there the truth: I live in fear.
Tiring fear! that soon, or now, something near
will turn dark, with a minimum of fuss,
and no turning back or show of power.
With death so close, my skin should be a sail.

--after the movie by Werner Herzog
Steiner was a wood carver and a competitive ski "sailer".
The ski sailers of the 1970s flew far beyond the
artificially constrained limits of Olympic skiers.
He's currently a gardener in Sweden. The lucky stiff.
We've never met -- the voice in the poem is fictional.
12-21-81

The Right Stuff

Beyond a certain point, atmosphere fails --
as its own skin fails the salt burned child --
until the gasping jet chokes on nothing
but freedom pursued to a sacrificial end.

The siren sounds our hurry to descend:
a welcome home of skintight fire, distant bubbling,
and desert quiet intent on being mild.
When we are done, a single echo wails.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Chuck Yeager
crashes in the desert an experimental plane by flying higher
than a mere jet could go.
Another Icarus.

Q & A w/ Tiresias in Hades

-Which was worse? To change your sex or lose your sight?
-What’s Sex? Women have clung to dreadful men
From the start. And men only love to have their way.
As for sight, what’s worth seeing so many times?
What was worst was to know God’s crimes
Before He chose to wreak them, to wake each day
and have the long-seen future repeat again and again,
Swarming out of the sun and turning day to night.

October 11, 2011
Several months ago, I read one of those weird internet polls -- if you had to switch either your race or sex, which would you do? Nobody said they'd switch sex. Poor Tiresias did -- rather he had it changed for him -- and then had 2 kids as a woman. When the gods changed him back to a man, he screamed at the sky, "Pick a lane, you bastards!"

The Grouper and the Bat

The Bat, the grouper half-explained, could not look down.
-Look down? the other grouper asked, his mouth an O.
-For fear of falling, you see. The other didn't.
-In my dreams, he screams in terror. -Yes, I see.
-It's instinct, not desire, that makes him go Eeeee!
and open wide for the bugs. -Could you give me a hint
about the bugs? the other asked. -You ought to know
I can't shake the feeling I'm about to drown.

Love Poem

I believed you all & I still believe
& each belief begat a girl. Oh, yes!
Tonite there isn't time to lie to or seduce
the blonde upstairs, a California nurse
who smiled & listened & cued & worse:
all of it a dream, straight from Dr. Seuss,
as if she were an egg & and I was less
& there...I want to be young & never leave.

Lost in the Fun House

(prelude)

I remember when all I had to do was read
to you, pat your back as you slept, make a face,
silly noises...when my nonsense didn't need sense,
and the carnival of my love was all.

Now you're camped in your room down the hall,
and when we pass, it's like strangers across a fence,
and my sideshow of faults is empty space.
I should have known that love isn't all we'd need.

1. Storm from the Gulf

The wind flattens Nellie's fur as she herds,
her back to the land, the gulls above like kites.
She doesn't understand that birds won't pen,
and won't leave and don't complain. They sing
the storm closer -- caws and effect. Rising
tide waters bring the junk in -- sardine tin,
magazine cover, fishing line: delights
like the answered prayers of empty words.

2. Comedy and Tragedy

Rain blew up against the condo's shingles --
the storm a placid placer miner, clearing
us out for the gold of holding this place alone.
But we hunkered down and got a video:
The Thin Man, Charade, something we know
enough to love, something loved for being known,
the last summer before child rearing
became child losing, parents as lonely as singles.

3. Beauty

You dawdle like every teenager -- mirrors
and the world look back like you think you look.
One minute like a ballerina poised upon an egg,
next the egg, waiting for the crack to come.
You are, of course, beautiful, as winsome
as any woman a father ever loved, but you beg
me to say nothing, and so I don't, and write a book,
full of the words I've never said and all my fears.

4. Generation

Slugs beset the roses, leaf rot and root rot,
even the bees are dying -- a menacing aphid
undoes their wings. A social insect with no place
to go. My prayer for you, whenever I pray,
is that you'll live a little more each day.
This one day is all we get, one little race
we run, one plot in which our flowers are hid.
For you, my dear, here's one forget-me-not.

1995
Teenage years. What would we do without them? Much better now.

News Reel: Raising All the Boats

The fresh dead along the shallow Irrawaddy
From the cholera in the wells. A flash of silk
Waving from the tied-up junks, and a buffalo caught
In mud, his rope lead taut as the foam churns.
Further down, we chase smoke where the peat still burns
And fly west with the tide where the battle is fought
Against a nemesis as old as mother's milk:
We must burn the past to feed this morning's body.

The Peasant in the Woods

Li Po built a life away from Life.
Away in the deep and lonely secret places
Where his work was almost swallowed
As he passed. He stole a life and then a wife.

A dullard from a place she’d thought remote,
She soon shrugged and shared the hollowed
World he’d built, ate his food, raised new faces,
And one night, while he slept, she cut his throat.

12/20/2010 12:05:13 AM
Heavily influenced by the Robert Calasso book
"The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony."
The elemental foundation myths of Greece
are of rape and betrayal.
With AGW, we'll get a chance to check that out.

Anniversary Cruise

Both of us love the old. An arch in Oxford,
Inscribed in bas relief, bears a scowling ogre,
But, at this remove, it’s quaint and almost
Pretty. We’d walk, eagerly, through the cold
To re-see what's been seen. As long as it’s old!
We’re getting on, and though not yet a ghost,
You haunt me still, and when you’re out, I wander
In my own life. You. My destination word.

9/27/2011

On the Other Side of All These Eyes

Two tawny spiders stepped down the bathroom wall
Toward the sink. Somewhere, up there, were babies
With little fanged lips waiting to be kissed. Or fed.
Momma 1 got to the middle of the mirror.
Momma 2 - or Dad - didn't get any nearer.
Later, someone's leg still wiggled, though dead.
So, how did Buddha deal with little fatal maybes
Fumbling to the can at night from an unlit hall?

A Trick of the Light

Instead of debt that summer, we had peace,
cut ices by the pool, laughter in the street.
Friends from strange places came in a swarm,
talking of other friends, other places, without end.
There was mail to receive, postcards to send
to girls whose scented answers spoke no harm.
We saw it all, from masts and mountains, the sweet
world harden to a whole, like rock candy: one piece.

This dates from the period following the 1984 election. I think.
It's about the sea change in attitudes during the Reagan years.

A Crystal of Water

I kick at the door in rage. I'm eight and behind
the door my sister is taking a bath. Unfair!
I hadn't known I'd want to see her until she
set the lock. My heel hammers while her feet squeak
in the empty tub. We grow up in a day, a week
at most, baffled by what we cannot see.
Then, she's out, in a towel, with slicked back hair,
unconcerned, older, and so unkind.

I assume lots of little boys develop crushes on their older sisters.

A Dream of Heaven and Hell

A stone field bounded by a stone fence,
guarded by hemlock and oak, as hard as when
a crocus shoot grown flowery at the tip
betrays the time as a pause between snow.
So much depends on that first urge to grow:
my daughter wobbling as if she's on a ship,
a first step taken toward heaven,
a world in which children bury parents.

3-22-82

Flowers

Dream of Aphrodite

A hubub of bazaars with washed turbans dried
and stacked like beehives into a minaret.
There was no oil here, only seductive eyes
behind veils or thighs cinctured with indifference.
While aching to choose, I wandered through tents
as slowly as the ambering of flies,
my sight glazing...waking rigid and wet.
The choice I made was sleeping by my side. 
1-30-81 

Primrose and Blackberry

The ache of inattention springs in a wild
crisscross of nettle and thorn, while the bush hog
catches rabbits napping, snapping their small bones:
an aftermath of roots exposed and burrows cleft,
the blade damp and downy from what its hunger left.
If only walls held the field with more than stone...

Once, remember, we made love astride that log,
its hollows humming and its mosses mild.
2-19-82

A Walk Before Dinner

I walk out past the little disused graveyard,
past its football-size stones, its burrs & weeds,
to the pond we dredged when we had other plans.
Now algae blurs the shore, except where some frog,
startled as I pass, leaps from its green-skinned log
and sets the surface fraying where he lands,
while twin-winged dragonflies hunt above the reeds
and hover near the hole the frog has scarred. 

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Many of us stumble into marriage. We like
What we see. We like being liked. We’re in love.
And that’s that. Often enough, it is enough. And good.
But happily, "just enough" is often just wrong:
Why have just the words when you can have song?
A love song is key, in your key, if you would
Be happy and old and reach that hand-in-glove
state in which sap and saint – we and thee – are alike.

for Amelia and Pat 6/11/2011

For Amelia the Hun

My daughter makes a rhyme off "spirea"
adding a syllable: spi-a-ree-a.
Which is silly and constant.
I can't hear the real word.

Clouds are zooming north after an early morning storm.

I imagine Homer,
arthritic and blind,
felt this, imagining Helen
and the pain which beauty brings:
chiming words, Spring's first blossoms,and a young girl.

He pulls at his cheeks,
like my grandfather sucking through his choppers,
and all the monotonous formulae fail him.
A girl chatters beside him.
He wants to write a lyric;
there is sun on his face.
A glacial hunger robs his morning.
The girl is moving around, piling stones together for a house.

We have only two poems by Homer,
good ones,
others interupted, no doubt, by girls.

From the early 80s

Family Portraits

Aunt Jane

After the stroke, the wind blows everywhere.
Her nerves wander; blood loses purpose.
We take her from her bed in halves
while her eyes roll like marbles in a pan.
Once up, she discovers she can stand
and cries though she means to laugh.
In the whirlpool bath she plays like a porpoise;
while drying her, an aide curls ringlets in her hair.

Uncle Louie

Divorce was a truancy for Catholics
who couldn't suspend the old belief, or sin.
Then, since he was a simple man, he drank.
After a long beginning, he found his niche,
as a hotel night clerk with elegant penmanship.
His singing buoyed him, even in "the tank,"
but only Ave Maria or a hymn
in a voice once pure as John McCormack's.

A Picture of My Grandfather at the Bank

The Ugliest Man in Louisville

We're Ashkenazic, I know. Look at him: a Jew
right off the boat! "Oh, Lord no." Mother says.
So, maybe my need is something else: thirty-five
years later, who can say? My heart's like a sieve.
Do I expect this remnant love for you to give
me a home -- or more ancient than that -- a hive?
Family and honey all around and youth that stays?
Or just eyes that look back, in love, as mine do?


This came out of my efforts to establish that we were part Jewish.
DNA evidence finally established it. 1/128th.  A marriage -- or rape? -- back in the 18th century. Probably not from the Davis line, but from the Landes line. Bavarians. And maybe Landes is shortened from Landesman.

The Temple on Vacation

(a dream trip)

Brahma's thousand faces and thousand poses
In a thousand friezes of verdigris-tinted stone
Stretch to the sky, but end like a clubbed foot.
An eczema of gods. Prayer changed to rocks.
But at sunset a miracle, of sorts, unlocks
My heart: a line of light in crimson soot
and opposite, the moon as familiar as bone.
Light will follow light though the brief day closes.

Sphygmomanometer

The provinces breed dreamers;
the railroads are full:
trappers, hoboes, eccentric electricians.
They are singing lullabies.
The men are singing.

Off in the dawn we hear a whistle
and shut the window against it.
A friend must be waiting by the hayrick.
It's true: we have nothing in common with these eccentrics!
They have so many children in tow.
They assert unconvincingly
of a master plan.
It's true we fear their time consuming plans:
canals, irrigation schemes, railroad spurs.
Out there are plans like locusts.

Blackbirds are singing.
The woman next door is spraying her roses.
If our neighbor believed in dogs
I believe it might be waking.
Water stiffens the hoses.
Our house is burning down.

Addictions: The Body as a Cave

The cartoon car spins along the cartoon globe.
The faster the wheels, the faster the globe.
So we go everywhere without leaving this spot.

It’s a wonderful grid.

Over the horizon,
A tree sinks into the field.
Cartoon rain scours the cartoon geology.

What we need is an eraser: this fault line,
That imperfection, this boundary moved.

I hear my cartoon body howl. Every night,
Like a cat on a fence framed by an oversized moon.
My body lets me know, over and over and over.
It must be fed. It must be fed. It must be.

I’m out of the car. 
It seems things have slipped.
The earth spins underneath me. The bumper is always
A handbreadth out of reach. Whether I want to run
Or not, my feet move. My back arches inward.
The race is close. The race is not close. It must be fed.

The Return to Milan

From the prow, Prospero sighted the pier,
The goods in crates, a dog, and calloused men.
The dog was yapping at a bright-eyed rat --
Lurking between a post and a snake of rope --
which had once been fierce with hunger and hope.
Then, a sportive lout, a willing hound, and that was that.
And Prospero wondered, "Why did I return?" Amen.
Why do we return? Poets shouldn't outlive Shakespeare.

I quit writing poetry in the 80s.
For some reason, I resumed.
Quelle dope.

At the End of the Gaff

The boat floor is awash with smothering air.
The sudden sun and alien warmth are confusing,
But the flood of oxygen overwhelms us,
Twisting to breathe with boots and blood nearby.
The odd-hooked gaff hoists another fish high
And then higher. And pain there’s no need to discuss.
Fear everywhere and the hook’s strange whistling
And end in this the strangest where of anywhere.
10 May 2011