Filed under: poems | Tags: abandonment, Camus, death, fallenness, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Orpheus, philosophy, Portland, San José, the Columbia, The fall, the Willamette
The Columbia has abandoned us,
the Willamette, too; and the Guadalupe; and
San Jose. And Portland. We’re
abandoned into history. We’re run aground on
a little island,
but it isn’t really a little island — it’s
a sea monster.
Verily.
The sea monster doesn’t want to drink tea
with us; it doesn’t want
to play tennis. In fact the sea monster seems to have no
interest in anything about us, what we do or whatever happiness we’ve managed
to scrape together in this small insignificance we call existence.
In fact the sea monster seems to want us for
lunch. This sea
monster is life.
Heidegger said
we’ve been abandoned into the world.
We’ve fallen
into it.
Does this sound familiar?
We’re falling together.
I smell the concrete
who knows how far down.
“La chute” Camus called it. “The fall.”
I can’t even turn my head to look.
It
doesn’t matter.
You are here
and
it’s wonderful.
We were told the Northwest is a big foolish beast,
no sea monster: a Cerberus
for we sweet Orpheuses
to blanket with sound.
We’ll smile as we play
our lyres. We’ll sing in
harsh voices.
We’ll pluck the breath from each other’s chests
while there’s still breath left to draw.
We’ll live breathless.
Au bout de soufflé.
Is there concrete below?
Has the war started?
I don’t care.
I’m happiest when I’m with you.
You wrote in a little card,
“Coup dedans là. Tout sera OK.“
Hang in there. All will be OK.
Come sea monsters. Come Cerberus. Come fools.
Come fall.
Filed under: poems | Tags: death, flowers, ghosts, Kali, rebirth, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge
I’m in the habit
of killing things,
smashing small insects,
tugging at the stems of tulips
and tying flowers into my beloved’s dark hair.
If you cut off my head
I too will be a picked daisy
and Kali will wear the blossom of my face
like my beloved does
a daisy chain.
Sever my head from my neck
and I will be just as dead
as a Christmas tree
or a rose torn from the bush.
I have piled dead sentinels high
in my beloved’s vases
in this fashion,
and tucked them behind her ears
so that they could give their essences to her.
I’ve pulled them gasping from hot cars
and nicked them from neighbor’s gardens,
and studied their mortician’s poses
in florists’ shops.
I have seen them in great bundles
stacked stone-dead like Jews
and in bunches still in the dirt
in open-air nurseries
with little white plastic labels that have
exotic names on them like
helianthus annuus and
hyacinthus orientalis.
I have browsed for the right kind in catalogues,
each picture like
the posie-photos
that the Khmer Rouge took on the Killing Fields,
the posie-ghosts on paper
still alive then,
no more saying ‘pick me’ than
the lawyers, doctors and teachers
who died those years in
Cambodia;
but still I do,
when things are good or
when they go wrong;
and compare their
dying graces
to my beloved,
and present them to her
in order to brighten her day –
dozens of dead, sweet-smelling soldiers
draped in flags of cellophane.
Filed under: poems | Tags: buildings, city streets, death, Einstein, graveyards, Heidegger, Hemingway, Kierkegaard, philosophy, traffic
What are we paying for?
There is traffic that halves
a man’s life,
that puts a boy in a vise.
There is convenience,
convenience stores of
storied convenience,
inconvenient continental breakfasts
in the lobbies of multi-storied antiseptic hotels.
Expensive motels.
Are we paying for the malls?
Those castles I never enter.
Are we paying for the highways?
That speed us toward the unnecessary,
or at least the nearest
gas station.
I would forfeit them.
I would roll the freeways up
like carpets,
and bury every road sign
in an unmarked grave.
A man on a bicycle kicks
over signs
pointing
to an open house
just over there…
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Every one along the avenue.
Are we paying for the mattress stores?
Are we paying for the car dealerships?
Are we paying
principle
and interest
for these hills like white elephants?
Are we paying for fast food
at every block?
Who gave these things to us?
I can only say
I see Einstein
on the back of a green chair.
Are we paying
for the office buildings
that sit unoccupied?
Or incomplete?
A block’s worth
of gray Swiss cheese
cultured in the sun.
Are we paying for the steel beams
that hold up their heavy backs?
For the concrete that
shuts them off from the world.
Stay a while and listen.
Are we paying for these houses?
Graveyards have more life in them.
Slick city streets seek revenge
for our evils.
We who once laid down the roads
will be laid into our graves by them.
For what are the streets
but the culmination of our travels?
When we may fly a thousand miles
and yet find ourselves home?
We may scream down freeways
and busy boulevards
under overpasses
and over bridges formed like stony
interlaced and arched hands
and see nothing.
Are we living to hurtle ourselves
toward death?
We may drive to escape and to forget,
but the roads are clovers,
curves that inevitably resend us
to the center.
Are we living to die
beneath a metal door,
under the feet of trembling others
looking for a deal to validate
their day?
The cities have killed more than they’ve ever saved.
Filed under: poems | Tags: architecture, cities, Dante, death, earthquakes, genealogy, God, mythos, Nazis, puppetry, puzzles, rebirth, ruins, storms, volcanoes, Voltaire, water
[another older poem, from about a year-and-a-half ago]
I dreamt of a time when the mottled pieces of our puzzled planet
stood in fault lines
when in fact they were nobles of perfect lineage
and with each movement
made ruins of our best intentions,
scrambling centuries’ worth of work
and making jagged jigsaws of them;
buckling the knees of freeway overpasses,
shaking loose steel bolts, and
creating works of art for us to ponder
in moments of riotous pause.
We did not design, in the past, but designified,
crossed lines,
and with every blow of the hammer
knocked the mystery from our lives
and lessened its greatness;
even Albert Speer knew this, the folly of his best laid plans,
and tried to imagine what his creations might look like
two thousand years on, as the beauteous ruins they would be -
He knew that sandcastles stand the test of time
when they give themselves fully to the surf.
All ingenuity in the performance is lost to us
if we pull away to find strings
and the hands of the master,
which wring themselves, even at rest.
We must use our own fingers
to touch the face of the world
and leave what we’ve created
to phusis,
that which arises and empties
and arises again.
Outside of ourselves,
in the hands of nature,
there are the things we can’t control
and the things we think we can,
and they push against each other like the prodigal and the avaricious,
and we stand within the eye of the storm
with all we have wrung from the earth
as some great throne beneath us
and are content to believe we retain some command of things,
while le meilleur des mondes possibles
rumbles around us,
seasons in transition, and colors, in the same cycle,
and us, quaking, in fear and trembling,
while the flow of Mauna Kea touches water, slows, and turns black,
and in vapors
whispers
that progress does not always mean going forward;
that it may mean turning our back on time and letting it sweep us to parts unknown,
and that it may mean a return, and it may send us into the ocean,
but as we give ourselves fully to the surf we know we will stand the test of time;
we know that death feeds life;
we know that at death an oath is sworn
to feed the living, and be reborn.
Filed under: poems | Tags: airplanes, books, death, dust, fear, leaves, secrets
Many secrets,
many books,
many souls trapped
in loose leaves
with no spines
that fall to the floor.
Fold them up into
paper airplanes
and let them go.
They dust our eyes
while we sleep below
them.
Many souls trapped
in loose leaves
with no spines
will kill the unborn fears
growing in our stomachs.
Many secrets,
many books,
and all only the whimsy
of spies stationed at
writing desks
or in the grave.
Heroes are born
and vanquished
cover
to cover.
Filed under: poems | Tags: blood, cats, death, God, music, sex, whispers, windows
When death comes,
it snatches with quick & clumsy
kittens’ claws
in a frenzy of
untrained aptitude.
It comes with all the clumsy enthusiasm
of a teenager.
It doesn’t allow for last words
or unfinished business
or secrets whispered with final breaths…
It does not wait for you to make peace with it
before it carries you out the window.
It’s silent…
no fanfare,
no flock of angels descending from Heaven to welcome you into the
Kingdom of God
no grand requiem
or trumpet solo.
No one plays Taps.
It is
quick
and easy
and messy.
Sometimes there is blood.
Sometimes there is not.
But there is always
mess
and no one disappears
without a trace.
They are somewhere
stinking
and very dead
whether you know the place or not –
a mess,
yours,
or someone else’s.
There’d be no jobs for
search dogs
coroners
and gravediggers
if that wasn’t true.
Filed under: poems | Tags: birds, buildings, city life, city streets, Dante, death, Greek mythology, Huxley, Norse mythology, rebirth, the woods
Ours is not quite a Brave New World;
though we’ve learned to exist upside-down,
and still the blood in our veins,
ultimately we desire grass and ground to step upon,
and though we value
the perks of our city lives
we may pick up stones to throw
and be pleased to find sand beneath them;
and may still be shocked to discover our cities were built with the bones of our ancestors,
and in a panic call back the wardens we had once chased from our windowsills.
We may seek, then, as city birds to live in the wide and wild open spaces,
to carve a slice of Nature’s bounty for ourselves,
but to pack and move there
is to leave behind everything we own
because there is no room for them, there, in the great expanses,
and it allows no burdens
save for the knowledge that a tree grows, as we do,
and transforms itself into something greater,
while a building springs fully-formed from the mind of its creator
and thus cannot be trusted.
To distinguish in this is to know God.
To travel out from the heart of a city is to travel into the heart of man;
to perch upon a branch is to know the heart of man.
If we follow the rivers of man’s blood to their spring,
and find the woods they wind through,
and travel the rivers’ eastern shores,
and drink from them as we need,
and not fear the leopard and the lion,
though they may shadow us on the opposite bank,
and discourage us,
then upon finding the bitter pools of our nature
we are obliged to settle there.
If there we find the seed of man’s heart and bury it beneath a pound of flesh,
and water it with crimson,
then five thousand years on,
when the great cities have become houses of dust for the dead to lay their heads in,
Yggdrassil will grow, again,
and so shall we.
