A Poetry Chapbook
Memory
and other poems
Suitable Subjects for PoetrySo much could be written about my father
who cares little for poetry
but I can't find a word
I'd show him without our mutual discomfort
so he's off the list. So is my youth
which passed like a breeze through the country
I left behind as soon
as I outgrew it. There is marriage
and somebody always wants to know
what only a poet will tell. Not me. I'd rather
describe the night I became a vegetarian
after taking to heart
the brochure's contents
which could have been excerpted
to make poetry that is difficult to read
because of the methods that turn a cow to meat.
I used to discriminate
against nature in poetry
wanting something with more tension than a meadow
but the desert discovered me
and whispered words like water. Journals
never interested me. Honesty demands
mine would be filled with housework
and days go by with nothing
else to say. Writing what I know
was never as alluring
as writing what I don't
like the wars that circle us without ever
quite reaching our houses and yards
except for the fighter jets
whose noise disturbs the quiet afternoons
spent writing on the porch
while the hummingbird comes to the feeder
and I scribble speculations
on where they are going and why. The president
and his accomplices
are closing in
on my imagination. A word
at a time I'm learning how it must have been
for the poets sparring daily with the censor
while their sense of metaphor intensified.
They could pick any subject from a hat
and turn it into art
with a sting. Their fathers were the government
and their youth the hope
for a future that soured. Marriage was a promise
doomed to betrayal. They never needed
to describe the cruelty that fed them
even when the muse wore bright red lipstick
and promised a good time
if they'd only confess.
Marianne Faithfull
for Spiel
Sometimes an opera singer can't reach the note
that expresses how we feel.
Preoccupied with a pure delivery
and driven by the perfection
on a score, the soprano plants her feet
firmly on the stage as her aria approaches
then raises her eyes toward a higher life
as she takes in a breath
to hold for as long as the tension
demands before she spins the sound of silk
above the orchestra's accompaniment. Applause
follows. A bow. A pause in the action
until the plot picks up
its complex threads and weaves them
back together. But what if the plot
is our own
ragged collection of experiences
we'd rather forget
but try to make them into art
granting nobility to the places that hurt?
That's when we need a voice with scratches,
entwined in cigarette smoke
and matured in old whiskey; one that would be
turned away from the doors of the Met
to spend another night on the street
panhandling for love at the edge
of harmony, where even we
can sing along.
Words for an Annual Gathering
Our need for ritual brings us back
to cactus, sun and desert water
where the memory of a friend is waiting
as we speak to the hawks
and listen to the leaves newly greened
beside the creek. Each of us brings a vision
for the better world we describe
but cannot find. It could begin
as the flower on a barrel cactus
behind the mountain in its coat of spring
or in the nest a wren has woven
into undergrowth. It might be so close
we could touch it, or far away
as the planets on which
tiny machines roll and bounce
and send photographs back
for viewing on Earth between those
showing devastation wrought by bombs
or industry so heavy
the planet cannot bear its weight.
We say our names and plead not guilty,
pass a staff of wisdom hand to hand
hoping some of it rubs off
to fortify us until we circle again
beneath the eye of a raptor
admiring the grace by which
it takes only what survival demands.
Next year's wildlife calendar arrives
filled with the hope that the lynx
will crouch in February snow
with a slender calligraphy of hair
at the tips of its ears, the saw-whet owl
will occupy its branch in the March pines,
and the red fox will stare
alertly from April to October
when the gray wolf glides like smoke
through the first rusty leaves. Manatee, panther,
egret, and hawk all take their places
as moons fill and fade
and we mark our appointments
with them, in swamps and forests
and endangered dreams. The paper is sharp
at the edges, feels smooth to the touch,
and we pin it to the wall
facing away from the window
to protect it from light
so the blue behind winter's eagle
will be as bright when we reach it
as the green of a tiny frog
dripping into January's tropical flower.
Memory
Fog peels away,
grey from grey,
the sea's face breaks
where a whale
rises from the world's memory
and a pelican hauls
its prehistoric shadow
out of the water.
Brief Light
The animals with the shortest lives
spend their few hours in the universe
guided only by their appetites
and the need for water.
They peer from the bushes
where they seek a little shade
and shy away from those
who come to help.
Day and night are all they know,
one succeeding the other
without explanation.
On a narrow bridge
from the sun to the stars
they totter
to and from a dish of food
with all their inborn wildness
still intact. Back and forth they go
until they cannot keep their balance
and weigh no more
than the light and darkness passing
through their eyes.
A Short Account of Landscape Art
Early landscapes lay like afterthoughts
behind the saints. Their purpose was to bring
a holy man close to the Earth
even as he aspired to transcend it.
In time, the forests worked their way
toward the foreground
where hunters and lovers flirted with their fates
until they disappeared. Saints lost their powers,
clung to sacrificial wheels
or displayed their severed heads on plates.
All that remained to believe in
was the elemental force
behind tides, mountains, canyons and rivers;
ebb and flow; formation and erosion;
ice and fire. Until the tides rose, fire roared
through forests, and glaciers melted
away in industrial heat. Then the artists
worked from memory, and dipped
their brushes in the eye of a storm
as perspective's parallel lines
finally met on the horizon.
Mont Saint Victoire
Cezanne paints a mountain from inside
and each time he finishes
he begins again
like a blind man
determined to see.
The president gets tough
in his television voice
and snarls
The terrorists are trying to destroy
our way of life
while my wife
considering the cost of a comfortable life
to those who don't have one
says
Well someone has to do it.
Choice
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is
something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but
perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Franz Kafka
Turning away, from the face on the street
burning to a crisp after years in the sun,
from the bird unable to fly, from the lie
that launched a thousand warships,
is always the option
that allows us to go about our business
but the eyes have a way
of following, and the lie rests
like an undigested meal
that leaves us feeling heavy. The dollar bill
we might have given
is folded in a wallet fat with credit cards
like a broken wing.
Maquiladora
A metal barrier runs along the border
whose true walls are those
of the factories
built as close to the next country
as a building can stand
and still exist under rules
allowing an assembly worker
to trade her life away
even as poisons in the water
are shortening it. The work
is sold in one currency
and bought in another
with an exchange rate that grants
no returns. All day
and every day one part
fits into another until
the parts make a whole and the whole
goes into a box
which is stacked on other boxes
preparing to be loaded
onto a truck. Time spent on
assembly lines flows into streams
of refuse and can't be bought back,
even when its price
is sixty cents for every hour.
Call into the mineshaft;
let your voice go down
to the water and the wooden beams
that cannot hold the weight
much longer.
Listen for an echo
coming back through a stack
of filings. Call again. Wait
for the sound to travel deep inside
the mountain, to go
where darkness is synonymous with the damp.
The phrase you dispatched
comes back to you
changed. It is not your voice any more
but that of the mountain,
a voice coated with gold
that has outlived those of the explorers
who found what they wanted
and trekked back to the valley
with loads that broke their backs.
Seeing Deserts
To the priests within whom religion
burned, the sporadic vegetation
represented souls for the taking
and the raindrop that hung
in the air above them
was vanity's mirror.
With the whip for company
they lay down at night
when bats hovered at their feet
with bared teeth
and the flourish of air
from their wings
splashed onto bare skin.
As the priests awoke, a blossom
opened in each of their toes. They walked
gladly to embrace the light
that ran down their scars
the way it ran through
dry arroyos.
To the woman who rode in disguise
across dunes,
distance was the measure of fate
in land so fine she could sift it
through her fingers. She smoked
with men behind curtains
drawn across illusions
and felt the desert enter her.
Her heart cast
its shadow onto her lungs.
To the carriers of dreams
who ran in their sleep
toward another life
the desert was a screen of thorns
on every one of which
a patch of clothing
was a flag impaled. They moved
in circles, always arriving
at themselves.
The saints who walked beside them
kept returning,
sometimes in the robes of holiness,
sometimes in the uniforms
of police.
To those who came from far away
to wear the heat
the desert fit
exactly as the skin
fits the lizard
who sleeps beneath a stone
as if it had been painted
onto flesh. They learned to see it
from inside, and to be humble
in their every breath.
The Glass Continent
Where the Earth's light burns cold
through a thousand years of snow
a continent floats
on its bed of silence.
This is the zero land,
whose mountains are transparent
and whose winds
are the diamond breath
of the glassblower. Language here
is the o in alone,
the e in clean,
and the letter s
skating incessantly
in a polar wind.
One syllable
travels for miles
and a whisper goes on whispering.
This is the country so clear
that to cast a shadow
is a trespass. It has no history
but the bones
of a bear who lay down once to sleep
and never woke up. They shine
as a watermark
through an unprinted page.