Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: city life, God, cities, Portland, Hobbes, Art Deco, the 1920s, Merleau-Ponty, technology, inauthenticity, overcrowding, urbanization
The girls
of the 1920s were
little more than willow wisps;
all legs, arms, and torsos,
only a motion of limbs and
pale thin embodiment.
Bowlers,
and short hair,
flapper dresses,
boys at their sides,
neon, satin, sequins, and utopian
Art Deco lives.
They were all too young to realize the horrors
the technologies
they invested with messianic robes,
too old to hear their parents’ cries.
From farmsteads,
they came to the big from
the small, never understanding they only ever traded
one enclosure for another.
Anyone who has tried to live in a big city –
now or then –
knows what I mean.
My limbs move in ever-narrowing
circles,
squeezed in on all sides by an
amalgamated mass of
bodies.
This is my salvation and my
poison.
The city is my God.
His angels are a host of automobiles,
carrying the living dead
from neighborhood to neighborhood,
but anyone can see there’s no space
for anyone anymore: the cities
are filling up, the graveyards
are filling up,
Hell is filling up.
But I’m not different:
another pretender in a city of fakes,
you the flighty flapper
I followed here from parts unknown,
shuffling the same worn deck of cards and wishing for
that lucky hand to play, thinking of
the girls of the 1920s,
and the cities that will be
our graves.
Filed under: poems | Tags: Aphrodite, Bismarck, dreams, drowning, God, natural selection, osmosis, primordial soup, water
Sleep, or try, someday kids,
and I’ll trace figures
like ripples in water
onto
your sinking eyelids.
And after,
you walk out of
the foam,
Aphrodite.
And I’ll put you flat on
your back
when you do.
It’s a trick,
I know.
God taught me how to do it.
He’s
a sallow man
eternally
limping to
catch up with the world,
stopping only to destroy
those falling further behind
than He.
I’m sorry.
Bismarck was wrong.
So sleep, or try,
Aphrodite,
and I’ll trace the figure of God
like ripples in water
onto
your wet eyelids.
Filed under: poems | Tags: blind dates, Craigslist, dusk, God, India, lost poems, love, rivers
God Bless the blind dates
middle-aged couples go on
after meeting on Craigslist
and God Bless children on bicycles
and dusk
and tow trucks
she laughs and says,
“I think I should,
but I don’t.”
there is a noise of cars,
a shift of gears,
he says he’s Jewish,
Polish,
and tells her about
the Diaspora.
God Bless jet contrails,
roads that form giant horseshoes,
curving in from the horizon and back out again,
like a river in the hills,
like the Meuse,
the Missouri.
he says “Mumbai,”
he says he’s a teacher,
she has kids,
and she gestures with
surgical precision
upon every word.
God Bless
electrical poles,
workers just getting off the job,
filing out the automatic doors,
lighting up a cigarette
he went pre-med in college,
she studied biology and hopes to become a doctor.
his gray polo shirt seems warm enough for him
even as the sun goes down,
and even as the wind picks up.
God Bless elderly drivers,
and those who honk at them.
the middle-aged blind-daters get up,
and cross the parking lot
to another coffee shop
on the other side from the one I’m at
and my source of
entertainment vanishes.
I push the end of my pen,
which retracts,
click-clack,
and a crow pecks at the crumbs of a cookie on the pavement,
click-clack.
God Bless the blind-daters.
may they become blind lovers.
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.
[a poem from about a year ago dedicated to my friend Rosa.]
We were born of the same parents,
you and I,
a twinkling nicety, once, in a young uterus;
worn well now, our skin,
and different like the differing shades in a blond boy’s hair.
Fellow travelers, both,
but you with more memory of the world in you,
and I with the unsteady legs I’ve had little chance to stretch
on foreign soil.
We were so tired when we met
that on the long ride home
we ran every red light until
our fingers pushed past the obstacles
God had laid in front of us,
and the streetlamps rose up in revolt against Him.
We ran the lights with our eyes closed,
and if our sons asked us we’d tell them, well,
we stopped when we were asked
and our eyes were dry from watching for the limits to our being,
when really we’d never known the sound of slowing down,
as if our foot were glued to the gas,
and we ran every red light with our eyes closed.
You were the girlfriend of a friend, then
and the same today, though of a different friend,
but you, the bubbly girl I met sitting on a dark blue couch,
are a very different person to me now.
I know you to be of a kind emotional,
like an ex-girlfriend of mine,
and with that same sort of proud unreasonableness
that lies crouched close to your overworked heart.
I can see you’re bursting,
your arms filled with gifts that fall haphazardly out of your strong palms –
you like a pint glass placed a bit clumsily back on the table,
splashing over the rim in great sloshing globules onto a lacquered walnut bar,
and me the slow drip through a hairline fracture,
both hoping for a deeper vessel
and a better keeper.
I know one day you will find steady hands to pour yourself into.
Filed under: poems | Tags: airplanes, AJB, anachronism, books, cliffs, films, God, His pipesmoke, my mother, the ocean, the Old Testament, the stars, the sun, Thomas Pynchon, traffic, trees
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
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.
