- 1. Other Scenes
Dia de los Muertos
On Dia de los Muertos some here choose
to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,
and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill
mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.
Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt
and dares the other men to come and fight.
In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.
Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.
Their glance tells me there's nothing more to say.
This is Guatemala where Gallo is best-known as a beer (not
wine) brand. The nervous scroungy
free-running dogs of developing countries well suggest the tone of life in poor
neighborhoods. In this setting the
universal theme of mortality is colored by the traveler’s knowledge of
pre-Columbian human sacrifice, brutal colonialism, and the barbaric violence of
decades-long civil unrest.
- 2. Divagations
I hurtle through the light and dark by trees
that reach and strive indifferent to my course,
by rocks with memories back before the flood,
each facet marking some old painful break,
eruption, gash, reshuffle. Read there, see
tomorrow far more live and clear
than ever sortilege, astrology,
or hepatoscopy could claim: beat grass
and withered weeds, a sudden bird, and wind
that envies leaves of shrubs and, homeless, sighs.
I meant to suggest that the most
common sights are surely more beautiful, remarkable, and significant than
divination or magic. The scene before
the eyes is always a gaze at the morphing flow of phenomena. Sometimes even the wise wind sounds sad.
- 3. Appetites
Feast
O be for me an oyster raw,
unfathomable: inside the shell
a lopped but answering tongue,
and be for me an onion soup,
so thick and savory-sweet.
O be for me a leg of lamb,
as rich and strong as scrubby hills,
and be for me a Brussels sprout,
compact and layered like a late quartet.
O surely you’re my bread
and fit me like inhaled air.
Do be for me tonight a custard flan
so melting to the tongue
with
caramel atop
it brings an end to words.
Or as Bessie Smith sang, “Give me
lots of candy, honey, love is grand.”
- 4. Songs
Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp
through the golden filigree of printemps.
Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light
that ravish the soul at the very first sight,
confusing their victims, occluding their might.
Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.
These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune
of garnet greens and things unseen,
a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,
a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.
My goal in these songs is to turn
the focus from content to the melody of words, a quality often neglected in
contemporary poetry. I think of Keats
describing Negative Capability, “without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason.” In another letter he spoke of “the
'burden of the Mystery.'” Just listen;
no understanding needed.
- 5. Momento Mori
Dead trees in the forked arms
of their fellows that followed,
knot-eyes wide with utter unbelief
like comrades in war unable
to believe their trench-mates gone.
The forest floor has generations
layered like old Troy, but back and back
to time’s get-go and each supports
the next till in the ultimate sub-basement
the elevator operator lifts one wry eye,
the door slides, the secret’s out
and all distinctions fade.
Then everything relaxes, all lets go,
no longer any gap from one to one,
the manic dance may pause --
so brief! -- between exhale/inhale,
before time’s arrow like
some god of locomotives,
blows a lonely whistle
and speeds on down the line
as though the terminus
must hold
that counter
where one can sit
and ask
one’s heart’s desire --
so well worth racing toward!
In what I like to think is a
reinforcement of theme, several of the images here are fading from the general
imagination. The locomotive had more
powerful associations in the era of steam, and elevator operators are now rare
birds, building a muted strain of nostalgia into the story.
- 6. Lama Swine Toil
The Lama’s Parable of the Not-OK Corral
He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town
on the far frontier of metaphysics.
His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.
The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest
received ideas.
The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise
suggestions,
but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.
At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was
his
enemy,
his brother, his mirror-image.
(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street
at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,
her foot like his poised seeking the next step,
and neither could help it at all.)
The sweat dripped down his cheek.
The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,
leaning from second-story windows,
and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,
covered him from every angle.
The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons
when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes
in
1969.
Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the cosmos, deep
and unmistakable,
“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you
covered.”
And he knew the jig was finally up.
Another apocalyptic anticipation
like the last, here employing the “Old West” set that once proved hospitable to
many of this country’s myths, a redeemed Spahn Movie Ranch of the mind, maybe,
artificial, playful and beneficent.
- 7. Translations
Horace, Odes I, 11
Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know
what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.
Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough
it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years
or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea
come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;
don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time
runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.
It is almost the last shred of the
once-sizable fund of Horatian maxims that all educated European people used to
carry about – carpe diem.
Ecclesiastes said the same.
Horace is one of the greatest of poets, though I fear he loses a very
great deal in translation.
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