And what he did last just
before his personal power
rose and surged
then tweeted out
was check his e-mail.
“Heaven will be full of spam,”
he decried, “because
everyone wants to be there,
while hell will be whiteout,
an empty inbox.”
“Or the other way around,”
I replied.
“Oh, that’s pithy,” he said.
“And there’s nothing I dislike
more than an epiphany poem.”
Climbing bolt eyes tightened so tight the threads
strip, and the tongue, a dirty oiled belaying bolt,
slips and slaps, and the whole edifice collapses,
as if a plumber has grabbed the head by the ears
and sucked on the nose with his plunger.
The smith smites a bass anvil,
hammering
the hot steamed milk face
forging
the steel bridge nose,
sculpting
terrible white teeth,
drawing and cooling
the pendant tongue,
punching
eyes opaque blue,
curling
thick creamy hair
around the handle of his hammer.
This hyperbolic happy acid oozing
cold blue face bowl of plum pits,
bonbon pate of goose liver.
“Don’t look at me!” cry the eye bolts expanding,
lips stressed taut, ears hung like life rings.
Far back on the tongue, a bitter spot to nap.
The old couple lives now in a window box.
The sash opens and a hand appears.
A palm with a long curved neck
pours water clear and concise.
An electrician comes to replace the eyes.
He breaks both sockets unscrewing the cold bulbs.
Memory starts to flicker, the call of a far-off bird.
In brackish blue eyes the tiller tongue feels spaces,
loosed from its mooring, and on the sail of the nose,
beating upwind for a kiss, ripples of sound,
the soupy surf ringing in his ears,
snores an old surfer paddling about
on a dinged, wax-worn, sun bleached board,
wanting to swim with you.
Embers of a partially burned ocean
In a box in a dank basement molting notes
A weathered surfer slowly descends the creaking
Worn stairs like dark swells yawning
Fish eyed and barnacle knuckled he climbs
Finds and opens the box, peers in, smells the pages
Runs salted fingers over the raised words
Rusting paper clips, chiseled letters in Courier font
Fading like beached seagulls washing away in an incoming tide
Wires spiraling like journaled waves
Bleaching across the page like ink in water
Blistering like sun burnt tattoos on old shivered skin
He can no longer read without bottled glasses
He chuckles like the tide receding washing scouring
White out rocks across words stuck buried in red tide pools
Like breathing into a snorkel
The surfer leers over the smoldering sea
Takes up the seaweed soiled waxed manuscript
And paddles out of the basement
Walks down to the beach and what remains
Of the water and casts out the paper like fishing net
Into a set of scaling waves
Lit with a lustrous industrial moon
The waves curling like letters in blue neon.
(Click any photo to view gallery)
| facebrick | facebuilt | facebroke | faceblind | facedearth |
| faceboss | facetomb | facepop | facedough | facetious |
| facestitch | facetouch | facebotch | facebach | faceberth |
| facestill | facestone | facequiet | facepiece | facemirth |
| facebush | faceface | facephone | facespill | facer |
| facecross | facetoss | facemoss | facetaste | facemill |
| facevalve | faceback | facade | faceplay | faceout |
| facetone | facemoan | faceme | faceyou | facepull |
| faceposh | facerush | facemush | facebrush | facetilt |
| facsimile | factotum | facecap | facemask | facetome |
| facedrone | facetill | facetree | faceroad | facelift |
| facesky | facefront | faceit | facebuck | faceroam |
| facethis | faucet | facet | facetrick | faceroom |
| faceless | facemuse | faceup | facestop | faceboom |
I pitch my brother a tricky slow
curve that floats warbling past the pink
hibiscus and slides away under
the Chinese elm, but he goes with the pitch.
The yellow plastic bat darts
like a startled fish, and he sends
me back, back, to the wall –
and the white, holey ball
whiffles over the roof,
landing in the olive tree.
Happy Birthday, John!
A seeking breeze softly slips
under the sleeping cherry tree
a cursory note, “I am too busy.
Too, too, toodle-loo,”
smiles, hushes, and sounds off.
A branch snaps, and a cat recalls the night
when the owl, the nightingale,
and the toad went out walking.
The moon follows the trio into the tea garden, pulling
behind the sounds of the rollicking ocean waves.
In the garden, two women sit talking:
”I wrench or hammer or pull or push
To disassemble and repair
To build in empty air
The sound truth that is not
Sound enough.”
”I don’t believe the truth
That there is no truth
There are two truths
The one you reject
And the one you embrace.”
Drowned out by the singing waves slopped with frothing beer,
An old, lost surfer takes a hearty long piss on the briny rocks
At the water’s rough edge and mutters a half assed poem
To pass the night in song outside walking the dark beach
While the women sit talking with the cat in the cove of the garden
Under the cherry tree awakening and petals falling all
In one great breath the ocean waves belly laughing full.
Lettuce make someone happy souperfied. Greens and reds raised and cooked in summer sun. Old gourd melon face turn round and around. Squash straighten out cute little zucchinis. Carrot tops fuzzy green pointing poking. Turnip cold heart don’t be rutabaga. Radish reaction thistle never do. Wilt silly salty pinch potato eyes. Watching. Asparagus more of this stuff. Spears dollups thin slices of pink water. Peas take your jackets off and stay awhile. Ouch cucumber splinter onion oils mix. Tear drops sea salt keeping with tradition. Corn fits in hand like a hammer handle. Colorful beans leggy for you and me. Chives purple heads and slippery mushrooms. Tomato baseball radio garlic. Bread olive oil hot green jalapeno. Pepper corn and squeeze curve of lemony raspberry wild balsamic vinegar. Tossen flip thistle make summerone happy.
The cryptic cat her cautious criticism
of the green salsa garden plot proffers:
“Are you a nested poet, then?”
the hoity-toity cat simply asks.
“I have my cri cri critics,”
the Pine Jay stutters,
pouring herself another glass
of mock orange soda syrah.
“Are you going to mix
silver with orange, then?” asks the cat.
“I would rather arrange the orange
against this blue windswept evening.”
“That would encourage a paraorange
gown,” cynically suggests the cat.
“Scr scr scree!” the Pine Jay screes,
her voice trailing off like a jet’s vapor.
“Mock, mock!” the cat converses,
though alone now. “I never did like orange peel.”
On the road again,
and on the car radio,
another Country Music song:
I’m 44 now, soon 45
The way I been livin’
Lucky alive
So much has been given
And taken away
Who knows what will happen
Today
Late summer, almost fall
Red rust brushed peaches
Dark dust green grape leaves
Swelling purples under blue blouse sky:
Woke up this mornin’
Didn’t know where I was
Wrote a letter to Heaven,
Reachin' out for you
But you weren’t there
And Heaven didn’t answer either
Signs along the road,
wood weathered grey,
in the Yakima Valley:
Antiques
Fresh Cherries
Walla Walla Sweets
Later at the Grey Inn Motel
Eating maroon cherries from a bottle
Drinking brown beer
Thinking one thing is clear and sure:
Nighttime falls
Lento, Largo, Larghissimo
Yes, darkness comes
Slow like snows,
Like muted yeses,
Like mouth harp nos,
Like in Country Music songs,
Driving through the Yakima Valley.
Note (in response to one reader's question):
The Country Music song lyrics in the poem
are taken from an original song I wrote in 2004.
So, no, I didn't hear the song on the radio,
though I did often find myself
driving through the Yakima valley,
and I wrote the song on one my Yakima trips.
I've explained the age range used in the song
in a comment below.
He feared drowning. He fell asleep on the bus,
sleeping past his stop, and on down to Redondo Beach,
the waves breaking, hard on hearing.
He slept past the beach break at El Porto,
his head bouncing against the beach-side window,
his tools jiggling in his toolbox at his feet,
past the Manhattan Beach Pier,
the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel,
the Hermosa pier, on down to Redondo.
The bus driver would have to speak up.
The evening water was glassing off,
the Strand bars filling with surfers,
their cream yellow and orange and blue surfboards standing
against cars, walls, wet, dirty sand waxed.
He dreamed of fish, bottled beer, oysters.
He dreamed of broiled eel,
of yellowtail garnished with scallops,
dreams he did not understand.
A giant squid rose from a thick gelled water
and reached up for him, and he quick stroked
in his sleep on the bus to dog paddle away,
back to Shively, the house near the railroad tracks,
where he’d built out the basement room in knotty pine.
He awoke on the bus in Redondo Beach,
at the end of the line, foggy out now,
the sound of the surf muffled
in his ears. Flying fish eggs
surrounded his tired and dozed head,
his hair closely cropped,
his clothes dirty from the day’s work.
He’d returned the car, a ’56 Plymouth,
and salt filled his ears.
Selections from Phonebook for Foulings Neighborhood of SE Portland:
1: Foulings Tavern: 33 Foulings Street, Eastgate-3218.
2: Jack Foulings, 33 Foulings Street, Eastgate-3218.
3: Foulings Car Repair Shop: 20 Third Ave. No phone.
4: Foulings Music: LP Specialists. Fourth and Foulings.
5: Foulings Grocery: Corner of Foulings and Third.
6: Flowers by Joyce: Sidewalk outside Foulings Grocery.
7: Joy Number, 19 Foulings Street, Apt. F. Eastgate-3550.
8: Foulings Cafe. Breakfast Daily, 5-11. 27 Foulings St.
9: Foulings Books. Call for Appointment. Eastgate-1022.
10: Foulings Plumbing, Repair and New: 9 Foulings Street.
If the color from today's flowers
weeped with sound,
this quiet evening on the avenue
would crash like some big bang gig.
The colors condensed the winter over,
distilled and drenched and dumped
into cavernous, smelly whiskey barrels
swarming with bees.
A yellow jacket searches
for a place to pitch her tent,
for the long hot busy summer ahead.
The spring rain fills every bowl,
brews and broods.
The yellow jacket screws her mud
to a camellia branch.
The water slows to vinyl,
the beach wood logs tattooed.
Waves like empty wine bottles fall
breaking into the fitful trash truck.
“Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi”
A Country Music song
Guitar Chords: GAD
(Slow intro with a little lilt)
G A
I took my girl to the Friday night dance,
D G
But she said, “I really don’t like to dance.”
(Lively now)
(G) Then some handsome fella
with the (A) swagger of Godzilla,
(D) asked her do you wanna (G) dance,
(G) and the next thing I knew
(A) away they flew.
(D) He’s got her in a (G) trance.
Chorus
G A
Hey, Baby, don’t drive me crazy,
D G
I thought you said you didn’t like to dance.
G A
Well, bury my heart in the muddy Mississippi,
D G
I thought she said she didn’t like to dance.
So I walked on down and I put my money down
On the counter of the mausoleum,
And I asked the mortician how much it cost to die
But he said I was a buck too short.
Repeat Chorus
Late one night I was stopped at a light,
Revvin’ up my hot rod Ford.
Along comes a Chevy, at the wheel’s my Baby,
Askin’ do I wanna dance.
I took her off the line, pink slips on a dime,
And the rest I’m happy to tell.
The moral of this story,
The letter of this tale (D – G…)
Repeat Chorus
Yes yes yo yes yah yes yep yoahza youp
Yo yo yes no nope never over my
Yes no yes no yes no yes no yes noup
Not nape nip empty nix obnoxiously
You not yes no not no yes but don’t say
Buttresses yeses yeses yeses but
No nepe no nupe no nipe no no no yea
Yes yepe yes yupe yes yipe yes yes yes what
Butting do note chairs yes accidental
Dominoes goldeneyes moonglow eyes no
This will never do we are losing ball
Ants ants ants ants ants ants ants ants solo
So long stays yes and yes gives no to this
So long goes no and no takes yes amiss
Turtle butterfly rock Petunia seashell ceramic pot candle wire stand Gas meter downspout blue slate red bricks green hose Blue wall with painted white wood door with window of six small glass panes framed Electric meter "Nutone" metal stove exhaust fan duct double spotlight wall fixture no bulbs wires grub green fern blue green blue fescue grass.
Chain link cedar planks Redwood boards bamboo Flower trash cans green yellow and grey Sheets glossy green laurel hedge golden chain bench Grapevine clothesline Wire pool cues hall chalk Ivy baseball bats raspberry Green wine bottles in yellow bin. Azalea if you've read this far. Canvas sails to you gentle reader and happy Fish nets. And may your day be free of commas and other fences.
Day One: A trance of rain, ear churn momute.
Day Two: Slide high noontide, sundersthorms plate.
Day Three: Moistly scattered sneers and a few frizzles.
Day Four: Chants of wrinkles, dartly cloudy and chowdery.
Day Five: Humility Poor Boy Talls, Barometer IPA 75%.
Day Six: Moggy, very low viability.
Day Seven: Topical air mass pew point, wind clam.
Extended Forecast:
A beast abuzz amidst the clovers: A is for Always Anxiously
Bees besieged in Beelzebub’s circles: B is for Bunched Bop
Ceding the bee’s sting: C is for Cut Care
Denuded dazed drone doodle: D is for Drilled Daffodil Dust
Each easy flower glowers, going crazy: E is for Eating Earwigs
Felled flies found in forged gyre: F is for Flounder Flour
Grease hopping aground bottom: G is for Goaded Garlic Gear
Heliotrope: H is for Standing Erect at High Noon
M ss ng n Act on: I is for Idling Slowly Down the Mississippi River
Jived, joed, and jellied: J is for Jump to Comments
Kitchen kelp: K is for Krilling
Los Angeles lovers afloat: L is for Lost in Ballona Creek Lowlands
Moneyed, honeyed, and schooled: M is for Marriage
Nonesuch wiser the nuncio nun: N is for Nauseous Napkins at High Tide
Only one occupied optative mood phone booth: O is for Obnoxious Ontology
Peeing peregrine on ice plant spears: P is for Pilled Paper Piece Work
Queued quacks: Q is for Quick Quiz
Read in rows: R is for Rubric Rust
Sew seven scarves: S is for Subsumed Existential Snow
T is for Tremulous Titbirds Telling Mother Father Will Be Late
Undertow: U is for Until Unction Snore
Vexed voice: V is for Verisimilitude
Who When What Where Why: W is for Wasted Window Father Watch
X’s not and no O’s
Yellow harrow and black and yellow bumblebees: Y is for Yielded Yelp
Zonked zone: Z is for zooming in and zooming out, buzzing, zooming, walking, talking, doodling at poems, scratching names with dates in wet concrete, riding the bus to the metropolitan zoo
The Reader
and the
Paywall Poem
The Reader
and the
Wally Moon Foul Ball
The Reader
and the
Pool Hall Doggerel
The Reader
and the
K of C Third Degree
The Reader
and the
Professor Who Knew It All
The Reader
and the
Screwball PCH Big Sur Rally of 1972
The Reader
and the
Walled Out Surf Cove
The Reader
and the
Beer Hall Jukebox Sing-along
The Reader
and the
Union Hall Layoff Sign-up List
The Reader
and the
Baloney Sandwich with Mayo&Mustard on Rye and a Glass of Milk
The Reader
and the
Red Clew of Yarn Mystery
The Reader
and the
Fans with the Giant Red White and Blue Beach Ball
The Reader
and the
Short Tell It All
The Reader
and the
True Tall Tale
The Reader
and the
Tall Boy PBR
The Reader
and the
Plumber's Helper
45th Street, El Porto, mid-1970′s, looking north toward El Segundo’s Standard Oil Pier.
Behind this wall of paper lives a poem no subscription will reveal. The poem is invisible. No journal can hold this poem. There is no log-in, no fee, no access, yet the poem is free. The words spill into the paper like seawater over a levee. This poem must be imagined. Later, after the reader leaves this book-less library, a pinch of dry salt will be enough to recall this poem.
Moonishnessly
We were children then, when we settled on the moon, amid drifts of silver shadows. Our parents were still alive, down on Earth. We had no fear of flying, outside of airplanes, no fear of flying on the wings of birds, daily flights to the moon, one-way flights. We walked on the moon all night long, moonishnessly. And in the morning, covered with moondust, we climbed down to the blue ocean for a salt-water bath.
What is prayer? When I was a kid, I learned the Catholic prayers, and believed Sister Mary Annette, who liked to quote Shakespeare, when she said, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” King Claudius is trying to pray, looks like he is praying, to Hamlet, anyway, and so Hamlet decides to put off killing him, for fear that if the king is killed while praying, he’ll go to heaven, while Hamlet wants full revenge, not to send his uncle to an unjust reward. What Hamlet doesn’t realize is that while Claudius’s “words fly up, [his] thoughts remain below.” Annette waxed literary, incomparable to none.
Impossible to know with certainty if the thoughts of others are wedded to their words, so I don’t know if I alone among Annette’s 8th grade class had this problem, but my rote prayers were recited much like Malachy McCourt explains in his book “A Monk Swimming.” He had misheard “amongst women” in the prayer known as the “Hail Mary.” But if his thoughts were behind his words, applying Claudius’s rule, I suppose Malachy’s monk swimming would have made it into heaven. If I had said “a monk swimming,” my thoughts would have been about the surf down the road from our church.
Salinger’s Franny gets caught up with prayer, and one day, her brother Zooey explains the alleged benefits of the pilgrim’s prayer to his mother, who has expressed some concern for what Franny’s getting into: “And the main idea is that it’s not supposed to be just for pious bastards and breast-beaters,” Zooey says. “You can be busy robbing the goddam poor box, but you’re to say the prayer while you rob it.” The argument of the pilgrim’s prayer, in Zooey’s explanation, seems to run counter to the “words without thought” school of prayer.
Hemingway’s characters are often caught in prayer, or anti-prayer. Consider the waiter’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, in the short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name….” And, “I don’t love anybody,” Krebs tells his mother in “Soldier’s Home.” “Now you pray,” his mother tells him. “I can’t,” he says. In the short piece titled “Chapter VII” in “The First Forty-Nine Stories,” a soldier caught in battle prays, “Dear jesus please get me out.” He makes promises to Jesus, bargains for his life, and “The shelling moved further up the line,” but “The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
What happens when Jesus gets prayers at odds, opposing viewpoints? Athletes often pray. A ballplayer will make the sign of the cross at the plate just before a pitch. Does this give the batter a kind of steroid-prayer advantage? But couldn’t the pitcher simply counter with a prayer of his own, just before delivery? Do the prayers then cancel out? But something has to happen to the pitch: call strike, ball, foul ball, base hit. But is this what prayer is supposed to be about? On the other hand, given the pilgrim’s prayer premise, why not position oneself in constant prayer? Baseball is a game of inches.
I pray you, is the idea of prayer to be always asking for something? But prayers are often made for the benefit of others. Praying for peace would seem to benefit everyone. We might pray for rain, or for a dry spell, for sun or shade, for our horse to finish first. If we have everything we need or want, should we then stop praying? But we might pray we don’t lose something, or that someone else gets everything they need or want. Is there ever enough prayer?
We pray for peace, health, safety, security. We pray for stuff. We pray that there be more stuff, and less stuff. Different kinds of stuff. Not everyone prays, of course, but if prayer is a question, surely everyone has a prayer at some point. What is gambling but a prayer, a prayer to the god of luck. John Cage said “…nothing is accomplished by writing, hearing, playing a piece of music } our ears are now in excellent condition.” Probably the same might be said of poetry. Not much accomplished there, either, and the most accomplished poets seem to know this, which improves the condition of their voice. Can the same be said of prayer?
Last year, New Directions published a small book collecting selections of Thomas Merton’s writing, titled “On Christian Contemplation.” For Merton, prayer seems to be a kind of poetry, but only after acknowledging a marketplace uselessness of both; and prayer, like poetry, might also transcend doctrine: “…ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrim as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common.” Merton felt “much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West.” He characterized these men as thinking “in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy – who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist.”
This does not mean that in prayer one escapes one’s responsibilities for putting bread on the table. This is a problem for poets, of course, too: “Simply to evade modern life would be a futile attempt to abdicate from its responsibilities [while clinging to its advantages. The way of contemplation is a way of higher and more permanent responsibilities] and a renunciation of advantages – and illusions,” Merton says.
The modern world presents problems for the poet and the prayer: “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours?” Peace, and wholeness, Merton argues, are not “the most salient characteristics of modern society.” No kidding. Yet, “What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer? Perhaps we really don’t want to pray. This is the thing we have to face.” But, if we do want to consider prayer, or contemplation, or poetry, how do we go about it? “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying,” Merton says.
How does one pray? Merton says, “The best thing beginners…can do…is to acquire the agility and freedom of mind that will help them to find light and warmth and ideas and love for God everywhere they go and in all that they do. People who only know how to think about God during fixed periods of the day will never get very far in the spiritual life. In fact, they will not even think of Him in the moments they have religiously marked off for ‘mental prayer.’” And “mental prayer” is an awkward term, because we don’t pray with our minds, Merton explains.
But to return to the idea of uselessness, of prayer and of poetry, commercial uselessness, worldly uselessness: Merton says, “Christ does not control by power; further He does not control by law. This is one of the most important and neglected features of the New Testament.” Not everyone feels the need to enter into contemplation, prayer, or poetry, but that does not mean the need is not there, seeded within the individual soul. While at the same time one’s personal anguish might be so intense or one’s perspective so hurt as to call forth a dismissal of God and Christ and all the baggage one feels associated with the church and its people and prayer and what one sees to be the hypocrisy and futility of it all. So, “How does the theology of prayer approach this problem?” Merton asks. “Not by reasoning but by symbol, by poetic insight, leading directly to those depths of the heart where these matters are experienced and where such conflicts are resolved.”
On the other hand, one might want for something simple, a simple prayer, a simple poem. One shouldn’t have to google a prayer or a poem to enjoy the moment. To google literature, in a search for meaning, is to ruin a good meal. The same might be said for church prayer, church being the place where we google our souls, but any book might work, Merton says, and reading prayers out of a book, or reading a book as a prayer “is a good thing to do and very easy and simple.”
Why pray? “The real purpose of meditation is this,” Merton says: “To teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow.” Still, we might find ourselves bored with all of this, with the idea we are going to spend any time away from our busy schedules on something as trivial as prayer or poetry. We want to feel productive. We want to help others. We’ll go to church, appear to be part of some community, put some bills in the basket, sprinkle some holy water on our face, just in case there really is something to all the hocus-pocus. For the bored or busy, Merton seems to advise to not only get it while we can but where we can: “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” One can pray “with few words or none…half-hopeless.” There are poems like this, or there should be.
There’s a chapter in the little Merton book titled “Silence.” Did Merton read John Cage? Merton says, “Whether the house be empty or full of children, whether the men go off to town or work with tractors in the fields, whether the liner enters the harbor full of tourists or full of soldiers, the almond tree brings forth her fruit in silence.” Another chapter is titled “Difficulties & Distractions.” One can’t escape all of one’s difficulties or distractions, even in prayer. Hamlet said he could bound himself in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space – were it not that he has bad dreams. Of this kind of tension, Merton says, “Do not strain yourself trying to get ideas or feel fervor. Do not upset yourself with useless efforts to realize the elaborate prospects suggested by a conventional book on meditation.”
“Everything good that comes to us and happens in prayer is a grace and a gift of God,” Merton says. “Even the desire to pray at all, and the attempt to pray, is itself a great grace.” Does this mean that God has ignored many of us, who may not feel this call to pray? Ah, but what is prayer? This claim of Merton’s rings true, pray or not: “The mere fact of having an opportunity to pray is something for which we should be deeply grateful.” Grateful, too, for the opportunity to contemplate poetry, to read, or even to try to write a poem.
There’s a wonderful poem included in the Merton book, called “Song for Nobody.” It seems to embody some of Merton’s idea of prayer:
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
Merton advocated contemplation in an age of distraction, where we might become free of anxiety and anguish magnified by the reckoning and wreckage surrounding us. And John Cage said nothing is accomplished with music, thus freeing our ears to all sounds. Cage said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Maybe Shakespeare’s King Claudius should not be trusted when he says “words without thought never to heaven go.” Words without thought may indeed be the lingua franca of heaven, thoughts without words the mother tongue of heaven.
I confess I do not know how to pray, not in Merton’s view, where one prays with every breath one takes. And I have typically prayed only with reason, and with words, and this seems the wrong approach. One should pray without reason, and without words. Prayer occurs in the act of contemplation, then it disappears. Poetry occurs in the act of writing, then it disappears. “A poem should be wordless,” Archibald MacLeish said, “As the flight of birds.” Relax, Merton says. Make a poem a prayer. If no one reads it, if no one wants it, maybe God will accept it. For readers who have read to the bottom of this post, consider it a poem; for those who have ignored it, it’s a prayer, one with far too many words.
silent quicksand was a poetry and art magazine at El Camino College in the early 70s. I don’t know how many issues came out before folks moved on and it folded, but I don’t think many. I have copies of issues # 2 and # 3. I had three poems appear in the Fall 1973 issue (# 3). When I told my old high school friend Tim at the time about it, he said there was no quicker way to obscurity than appearing in a college literary magazine. That was of course before blogging came along. In any case, I thought it was cool then, and I still do, that two of my poems shared a page with Stephen Jama, one of the ECC English instructors, who became for a time a friend and mentor.
Below is an image of issue # 3 and below that an image of issue # 2:
I was reading, at the time, the Beat poets, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, and of course Ginsberg, and King of the Road Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, and I remember reading Diane Di Prima, and I read Henry Miller and Anais Nin and all along John Cage, and Whitman and William Carlos Williams, and, having started with folk music, I was now getting deeper into jazz, and I read “Blues People,” by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Still other influences included the Rexroth translations, Hugh Kenner’s “The Pound Era,” Donald Hall’s “Contemporary American Poetry,” McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, and de Beauvoir and Sartre, and Camus. In seminars we still read Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Joyce and Beckett.
One night, I went with Jama up into Santa Monica to see a live production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at a small theatre, and another time we saw Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at a small troupe theatre in Hermosa Beach. I saw the humor in Beckett. I had a sense of humor about it all, the literary quicksand. That was all before my foray into what Han Shan called the red dust. It’s not easy keeping one’s sense of humor where the quicksand is so quiet and deep, but I had my sense of humor there, too, and I hope I still do:
“jazzskin” is an old, handmade chapbook (1973, 17 pages – click on photos):
The “poetry occurs” idea is a riff off John Cage, whose book “Silence” (1961) begins with “The Future of Music: Credo”: “Wherever we are,” Cage says, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” In his essay “Experimental Music,” Cage underscores the idea that noise is everywhere and attempts to control it create other hazards, but, he says, “One need not fear about the future of music. But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend.” When I was working on “jazzskin,” I felt, as I do now, the same about poetry that Cage felt about music. But Cage was not a jazz fan. He apparently thought jazz was about having a conversation, for which he preferred words.
Related: Jazzskin, a post, and “JAZZSKIN” a poem (follow link or see “About” page).
The Myth of Syllabus
I once spent a lot of time going to a lot of meetings where I took a lot of notes but also doodled a lot. Sometimes my neighbors showed an interest in my doodles, but not often. Over time I developed a disregard for the term a lot. A lot is used a lot as support for an argument, but a lot of the time a lot is too imprecise to properly fund a decision. Nevertheless, a lot of people got away with using the term a lot a lot.
Apart from its imprecision, a lot is unpalatable. A lot lifts off the tongue but cuts itself short, unlike alas, aloof, or aloft, which all seem more complete and satisfying. A lot carries no drift.
A lot of people think a lot is one word: alot. What’s a word? Speech flows, a syllable stream, often alotadoo about nothing. Punctuation helps, but punctuation is a kind of stop animation. A lot of the time, punctuation can only approximate the real speed of speech. Writing is divorced from speech. We are taught from a young age to separate our tongues from our eyes, the quicker to read. Poems often use stop animation technique to slow readers down, to get the reader to mouth the words, to taste the words, chew them. Words become salt water taffy in the poet’s mouth. A lot of poets suffer bad teeth, yet poetry is not fast food. A lot of poets are poor.
A lot tells an amount, but how much is it? Lots and lots. Compared to what? A lot of the time a lot is used with the time: a lot of the time. There seems to be some connection between a lot and time. A lot of the time the meaning of a lot is understood from context. It rains a lot in Portland, but still, there are a lot of different kinds of rain. A lot of the time, I think it’s raining, but it’s not wet outside. Those are good days to get a lot of yard work done.
What’s the opposite of a lot? Is there an antonym for alot? Alittle. In “Silence,” John Cage’s book that I come back to a lot, there’s a little story about a couple who live in Alaska. Someone asks them if it was very cold last winter. Not too cold, they respond, only a couple of days, they explain, did they have to stay in bed all day to keep warm.
Then again, a lot of the time, memories go awry, amiss, askew. While I read a lot in “Silence,” I had not recently read the little story about how cold the winter was, so I thought I’d better look it up. I glanced through “Silence” a few times, but I couldn’t find it. I then thought it might be in John Cage’s book “A Year From Monday,” and it is, on page 138, but there’s no mention of Alaska, and there’s no couple, just “a woman who lived in the country,” and there were more than a couple of days, “three or four days,” she says, but she does say “we had to stay in bed all day to keep warm,” so maybe that’s where I got the idea there was a couple. It’s a very short story: 44 words total.
Not a lot, but sometimes (maybe that’s the antonym) a lot is allot, as in allotment. I’ve reached the number of words allotted for this post. Not a lot.
Poems are often compost piles mixed with eggshells broken by past poets, full of word scraps and shards decomposing. Themes leach toward the surface, riding on the juicy skin of earthworms, rising toward the light and warmth of now.
Speaking of now, one such theme is carpe diem, seize the day, or, as Janis Joplin sang, “Get it while you can.” Carpe diem is an argument, an attempt to persuade. Who’s the speaker? Who’s listening? What’s the occasion? What are they talking about? Or is only one talking, the other listening?
Sometimes, abandoned or unintended compost piles volunteer new versions of old, rotted plants, often now cross-fertilizing into new varieties of carrot, turnip, garlic, potato, pepper, pea, bean, tomato, melon, radish, corn; or you might get portmanteau words, or a cornpone cornpoem, or at least a cornponepost. Of course, you might want to dig it all back in and let it stew for another year.
But here is a poem-mix from the Toads poetry reading compost pile. The idea is to dig through the layers, reading as a dig, the poem an earth oven. Careful, some poems smolder for a long time – some are still smoldering, hundreds of years old:
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (1647), Robert Herrick: the poet argues a proposal – don’t go coy, for one who goes coy risks going solo. Surely there’s a rebuttal to this argument, or the argument is a rebuttal, for going solo is better than going sour?
“To His Coy Mistress” (1650), Andrew Marvell: There are some worms in this one, but embedded in a kind of taphephobic image, and what about those “amorous birds of prey”? Is the poem an appeal to love or to fear? The poet seems to be on the run from something that does not sound too fun.
“Dover Beach” (1867), Mathew Arnold. A couple of hundred years closer to the top, but the poet is still talking to his girl, but coyness doesn’t sound like the problem, but fear has gripped the moment. Lovely evening, but our poet can’t seem to embrace the now; he’s built his compost pile over a cemetery, and that low tide has really got him spooked. Is this any way to talk to a woman? Notice how quiet her response; she doesn’t make a move.
“The Dover Bitch” (1967), Anthony Hecht. Something has happened over the last 100 years, something to the poet, and to the woman, and to the tone. The Sea of Faith is now bone dry. But no one is kept waiting around anymore. The viewpoint has swiveled. Same room, same scene, same poetry garden, but someone has shoveled a lot more irony into the compost pile.
“Dover Butch” (2006), David Biespiel. Another 40 years passes by, and coyness may no longer seem much of a crime, for the rate of exchange has changed, and the viewpoint has swiveled even more. We’re still up on the cliff, but something has changed in the economy, in the exchange. Who’s talking now? Does the woman finally have something to say and says it? Is she a mother now? Perhaps we’ve misheard, but we picture the speaker’s heart sailing off the cliff like a Frisbee.
Carpe diem the light flight of the Frisbee!
New Year’s resolutions sounding redundant? Bored with the idea of giving up potato chips and dip for another year? Discouraged just looking at the stationary bike you got for Christmas?
Read the Toads post “Why Read Poetry?” at Berfrois, and make poetry a New Year’s resolution!
Much of modern poetry is unintelligible or seems incoherent. That’s not modern poetry’s problem though. The problem with modern poetry is the absence of a general interest reader of poetry. Cautious readers avoid the crafted, arched bridges called poems precariously balanced over esoteric estuaries. But was there ever a general interest reader of poetry? Well, who filled the pit of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre? Who did Walt Whitman write for? Why did Langston Hughes use the Blues? Who did Woody Guthrie sing to? Who listens to Bob Dylan?
A word about craft, to those poets who would sit down to “craft” a poem: One may write a poem, compose a poem, draw a poem, paint a poem, photograph a poem, fingerprint a poem, press a poem, memorize a poem, sing a poem, post a poem, but one crafts a toilet bowl gasket seal, crafts a kitchen cabinet, crafts a chair to sit on to scribble the poem. Let poets work for a living and craft their poems in their sleep. And let them be well rested and sober when they begin to speak.
Why would someone who does not read poetry suddenly start? Where would they begin? Any menu would look strange, even the crafted menu, maybe especially the crafted menu. Why would they taste anything on the table? It would look a strange feast: snake knuckles, chocolate covered roses. Most of the dishes the average reader wouldn’t even recognize as food. There’s little appetite for it, for poetry is strange. Yet here’s a poet craftily writing for an audience with a special hunger, Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” writing for those “Who pay no praise or wages / Nor heed my craft or art.”
I packed Rimbaud into my duffle bag a long time ago. “The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire…But the soul has to be made monstrous,” Rimbaud wrote in the preface to his Illuminations, where quickly things get “unbearable! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in the earthen pot will never tell us what she knows, and what we don’t know.” What did that mean? I didn’t know, but the “hare,” who “stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells, and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider’s web,” I wanted to talk to, and the words curled up on the cold grate of reason and warmed one another, and soon started to glow and illuminate like candles of beeswax.
Yesterday in conversation with a colleague I was asked why I read poetry.
I am thankful for poetry. In the beginning was the word, and the word was posted to a tree, and around the tree gathered listeners and readers who began to talk among one another, even as the word was forgotten and fell to the ground and was buried in the falling leaves, and in the spring a young man out walking found the word now obscured from weather and compost and thought it said wood, or wode. This was the first reader of poetry, and Rimbaud’s Witch.
Arthur Rimbaud. Illuminations and Other Prose Poems. Trans. Louise Varese. Revised Edition. A New Directions Paperbook, 1957, NDP56.
A poem is a composition, an arrangement of parts. Or a rearrangement, or a disarrangement. Poets build things, edifices, structures, often claustrophobic, and the reader must throw open the windows to breathe. But just as often the poet tears structures down. Then the poet is a demolition worker swinging a sledgehammer, pulling on a pry bar, claw hammer hanging from the tool belt.
The parts of a poem are most often words, but not only words, and sometimes no words. The spaces in between the words, the distances between lines, the s p a c e s between the letters, e v e n, are also parts, part of the composition. The reader must wear a hard hat, walking through the poem, the construction zone, and steel toe boots, and ear plugs.
Or a poem may have no words, no alphabetical features, a nonliterate composition. Concrete Poetry contains many examples of poems composed without words. Nails are periods, screws commas. Some poems are welded together, others sewn, still others hot glued. Back in the 1960s, some poets used plumber’s caulk and boiled lead and chiseled the lines together like pipes, careful to make sure the pipes fell in the run.
But a poem may not be seen, if it’s read aloud, if the poet sings. The reader may then want to wear snorkel gear. The poet is then a cotton swab. The poet wants to clean the wax from the reader’s ears. Poets are often unreasonable, and arguments break out like bar fights, the hard hat, the steel pot, now flung like a disc across the room.
Then the poet returns with flowers, a bouquet of red roses. The roses are lovely, but beneath the glossy green leaves, all up and down the long stemmed roses, hide thorns like the claws of a raptor.
At the Rose City Used Book Fair yesterday, amid a bevy of well organized and decorous book nests, I bought another book of poems by the Chinese poet Li Po. According to the version scanned into Google Books, there were only 1,500 copies printed of the 1922 first edition.
My copy contains a “Note to the Orient Edition,” signed S. O., and dated Tokyo, November 3, 1935. The note reads, in part, “I have resisted the temptation to make revisions for the purpose of forestalling the charge of inaccuracy that may be raised by the Oriental reader. I firmly believe that my methods of translation described in the preface are well-suited to a work of this kind, which is primarily intended not for scholarly exactitude but for the poetic appreciation and enjoyment” (xi).
The note explains the title page, “The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet: Done Into English Verse By Shigeyoshi Obata.” While the cover of the book reads “Translated into English Verse…” the sub-title on the title page, reading “Done into English Verse…,” suggests a purpose often at odds with scholarly or academic writing about literature. Obata wanted to produce something for reading pleasure. Yet there’s plenty here for the scholarly curious, including biographical notes and a bibliography showing where the reader will find other translations of the poems.
And what a pleasure Li Po is. I’ve been opening pages at random to the poems. Here’s one appropriate for this post, for I plan to read Li Po through our late spring and into summer, when I’ll hang my straw hat on a branch and let the afternoon breeze cool the curls of my hairy mind:
“A Summer Day
Naked I lie in the green forest of summer….
Too lazy to wave my white feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.”
The jacket flap of my copy explains that it is “…an unabridged reprint of the famous edition first published in Tokyo in 1935.” I’ve not found an image of my cover in a couple of cursory searches. It’s a hardback, no markings in the book, very good condition, the jacket cover in excellent condition all around. There is a signature in black fountain pen at the top of the map of China that lines the inside cover. The signature reads “Joseph,” but the last name I can’t make out. There are then, in the same black ink fountain pen, three vertically drawn characters in the upper right hand corner, falling between Manchuria and a unified Korea.
My left speaker falsifies me,
crackles, hisses, clichéd toad.
I turn my right speaker to you.
Surf wax fills the air,
wave tubes squeezed tight.
An unreal bird sings,
pierces my ear with a ring,
and to my radio welds me,
night’s station holding tight,
while in the surf singing toads
fill the ringing air
with songs of greyouts.
I try to explain these sounds to you:
above my left ear a toad sings,
caught in my curly bird hair,
a secret word brings to me,
from KJOB, sings this DJ Toad:
“Silence is noise for you tonight.”
My ears grow frightened,
and I look for sounds to you,
the coming of the toads,
the interventions of Sestina’s sting,
for alone she sings to me.
My ear receives whispers of air,
a clogged blogging air,
seashelled, wax watertight.
The toads begin to mew
in the alleys of my ears joyously,
a clear and concise ring,
the singing of the toads,
about nothing much to do.
No sound fills the air.
Nothing outside this radio sings,
its channel fixed tight
to sing only to you,
asymmetrically.
Only in my left ear sings this toad,
for me a secret aria,
while fades like light your voice.
See more Sestinas.
There are, some argue, two forms of life on our planet: animal and plant. It’s generally conceived that only animals have consciousness, but not all of them. When Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am,” he may have ruined possibilities for a lot of potential ams.
“The unconscious passes into the object and returns,” Robert Bly says (213), discussing Francis Ponge’s prose poem, “Trees Lose Parts of Themselves Inside a Circle of Fog” (217).
Yet Joyce (XXXIII) says:
A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree;
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves – they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.
The “rogue” is nature, nature falling, falling kicking, yet the wind “merrily” whistles, anticipating the irony of winter’s undressing summer, when the leaves can no longer feel. Bly would argue that the leaves do sigh, and that we can hear them sigh, if we learn to listen. But earlier, Joyce had already (XV) said:
From dewy dreams, my soul, arise,
From love’s deep slumber and from death,
For lo! the treees are full of sighs
Whose leaves the morn admonisheth.
The tree of the avenue, particularly at night, dressed in dappling neon or enamored moonlight, suggests another kind of consciousness for Joyce’s (II) trees:
The twilight turns from amethyst
To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
The trees of the avenue.
For in the catechism of Episode 17, “Ithaca,” in Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are apparently discussing the ability of trees, or leaves, to turn toward or away from light (paraheliotropism, or tropism):
“Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees.”
The ideal photograph captures not necessarily the object, though the object must at least be attracted, or the light, which the photo must also catch, but the perfect photo snaps Bly’s passing and returning “into the object,” the epiphanic journey. This is the trick of photography, the lure.
Bly says Ponge doesn’t “exploit things [objects], either as symbols or as beings of a lower class.” Yet the desert creeps closer and closer. “The union of the object with the psyche moves slowly, and the poem may take four of five years to write,” Bly says.
Pieter Hoff, talking to Burkhard Bilger in “The Great Oasis” (New Yorker, Dec. 19 & 26, 2011), says, “A seed can afford to wait. Encased in dung from a passing bird or other animal, it can survive for months without rain. If the soil is dry, it can put all its energy into sending a single taproot in search of groundwater…It can worm itself into the tiniest crack, then expand a few cells at a time, generating pressures of up to seven hundred and twenty-five pounds per square inch – enough to split paving stones or punch holes through brick walls” (114).
The desert of the human imagination also creeps, reasoning against its very nature that it is the only perspective that matters, that is aware of itself. Bly says: “Descartes’ ideas act so as to withdraw consciousness from the non-human area, isolating the human being in his house, until, seen from the window, rocks, sky, trees, crows seem empty of energy, but especially empty of divine energy” (4).
Bly, Robert. News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness. [Chosen and introduced by Robert Bly] San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980.
Joyce, James. Collected Poems [Chamber Music]. New York: Viking Press, Compass Book Edition, 1957 [eighth printing, July 1967].
Photos in this post were taken this week in Mt. Tabor Park, in SE Portland, with a Canon PowerShot A560, set on Auto – no tricks, but the top photo was “enhanced” using iPhoto.
Clive James argues that poets should know the rules before breaking them. “Technique’s Marginal Centrality” (Poetry, January 2012, pp. 326-335) is a very conservative argument, often repeated by those who do know the rules and have come to control the prescriptions, and we find the argument in the criticism of all the arts as well as in the professions. Few exceptions are acknowledged, and those must be geniuses. And yet what these same critics value is hiding the rules, dressing the technique in camouflage. But isn’t this what we call advertising?
Why James sees fit at the end of para 1 to dis the lovely Yoko Ono isn’t clear, but his value goes beyond technique. To prove something simple has lasting value, a simple but beautiful line of Picasso, for example, the critic must work hard at uncovering the camouflage, thus validating the artist’s “expect[ing] to charge you a fortune for it” (326). Whenever we see something simple or even “bland,” but good, James argues, we can be sure the poet has been to school and learned the trade first, before, as E. B. White prescribed, “omitting needless words.”
James uses as one of his proofs the musician, who must learn scales, for example, the rudiments of technique. One problem with the comparison of musicians to poets is that most musicians don’t learn technique to compose, but to play the work of others, who themselves might not be very good musicians, but very effective composers. And musicians need not know much theory to play pieces proficiently, for the theory is embedded in the piece and brought to life through the musician’s technique. Is technique an art? Itzhak Perlman practiced his violin technique while watching television.
James is not talking about the reading of poetry as much as the writing of poetry. He’s not talking to readers of poetry (an increasingly dwindling number), but to writers of poetry (an increasingly increasing number, and James would plainly like to see fewer poems written by fewer poets). James is trying to restore poetry’s value in linguistic skills, prescriptions that he argues are learned then disguised or ignored to create something new. But the new isn’t always pretty to James’s taste.
Consider the Coltrane example. “Ugly on Purpose,” an Open Letters Monthly review (2008), by John G. Rodwan, Jr., of Richard Palmer’s Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin, also addresses the issue of the apparent camouflage. Here, the subject is jazz, where musicians like John Coltrane blow dissonance and cacophony at their audience. They can also play otherwise, but their sound is deliberate, however unintelligible the average listener may find it. But here James doesn’t seem to approve of the disguise. Even average listeners require training, experience, or special upbringing to appreciate an art form, popular or other, lowbrow or highbrow, standard or anti-standard. Rodwan says that in his Cultural Amnesia, “Clive James complains of Coltrane ‘subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder’ and the ‘full, face-freezing, gut-churning hideosity’ of his playing, in which ‘shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals.’” But where James can read through to what’s concealed in poetry, he seems to have missed it in free-jazz. James’s conservative argument will never approve of free form improvisation.
These arguments, that the simple or incomprehensible work of art is rooted in learned, valued, talented apprenticeship, are by now classic responses to the popular criticism of “modern” art, that a monkey could have made it, or a child. Indeed, James barely disguises his acknowledgement of this argument in his opening paragraph, where he discusses the Japanese artist Hokusai, who made a painting, in part, by having chickens, their feet dipped in paint, walk across the paper. So much depends upon a critic justifying technique. I understand that James prefers Ben Webster over John Coltrane; what I don’t understand is why he thinks John Coltrane should sound like Ben Webster (another conservative argument). Should we criticize something for not being what it was not intended to be?
James has more to say, that poets often write too many poems, thus ruining whatever reputation, “name,” they might have earned with their few really good poems. There’s also an interesting discussion of technique suitable to message: “…the argument is the action”; and “…the reasoning is in command of the imagery” (332). But there have been so many successful informal poems, so many successful Duchamps and Rauschenbergs, that “…we must contemplate the possibility that there is such a thing as an informal technique,” but James rejects this notion, for to accept it would suggest that we can write poems while watching television.
James ends his short but full piece with an odd coda of sorts, about a copy of a book owned by Elizabeth Bishop (not one she wrote) in which she jotted notes for a poem, and the book recently was put up for sale, valued by virtue of its being owned and written in by Bishop. Says James, chances are this won’t happen to most poets (no kidding), “but that’s the chance that makes the whole deal more exciting than Grand Slam tennis. Unless you can get beyond yourself, you were never there.” From chickens with paint on their feet walking across an artist’s paper to Grand Slam tennis – I for one am certainly beyond myself at this point. But I don’t quite get James’s conclusion. He seems to be saying that fame is the exciting part, the chance that a poet might become so famous that readers would scrounge for her notes. But fame seems an odd place to want to hide.
Epiphany
In the straw burrow farm mice.
Get a little closer and you’ll see
Nits in baby Jesus’s hair, lice,
And a house snake in the olive tree.
There’s beer on the breath of the three
Sage men sitting under the olive tree,
Playing games of cribbage,
Ushering in a new age.
The pieces are swaddled in wool.
Mary’s breast-feeding the baby Jesus.
Joseph takes out his tools
To build a bed before the night freezes.
Mary wipes Joseph’s brow,
The wise men questioning how,
Talking to Joseph about what he did,
And what in the end might be in the crib.
From an East Side Bus
The lurching bus crowds forward,
dogs away from the curb broken under
the plum tree overarching the shelter.
The bus thrashes on, wobbling
in a fit of leaf blowing, phlegmatic coughing.
The young, motley couple
(we see them every day lately),
their rusted stroller full
of plastic blankets,
empty bottles, and crushed cans,
sleeps on the bench in the bus shelter
covered with plums and damp purple leaves.
“Epiphany” appeared in Rocinante, Spring 2009, Vol. 8
