Filed under: poems | Tags: Cinco de Mayo, clouds, long walks, rain, Spring, swine flu, time, water
Pinch,
punch,
taking a walk.
Trash in the creek,
an old foot-massager,
and trees that release
cotton snow
you run away from.
A young man sits on a stump
near the bike trail
with some luggage,
beneath a tree
to hide from pregnant clouds.
The rain makes
footsteps slippery
and outside
everything in sight
is wet to the touch.
Downtown is packed with
Mexican revelers,
celebrating the passing of
the swine flu scare
or a holiday or I don’t know what.
I wrap my arm around
your side and chest as you sleep
and think about
the passage of time
and then you draw me close.
May days make
springtime slip
into summer
and outside
everything in sight is
wet to the touch.
Pinch,
punch.
Filed under: poems | Tags: autumn, city streets, dirt roads, dust, light refraction, neglect, Paris, rain, strawberries, suffocation, summer, sunstroke, the Seine
Sometime past the solstice summer
will kick up dust, shuffling
down a dirt road in scuffed
Converse. If he asks, about to pass
you by, you’re waiting for the fall,
when sweet breezes blow in;
and if you look to the north,
you can almost see autumn, but
for now summer’s heat pervades and you catch a whiff
of him
as he walks by -
sweat, of course, slick
as first rain’s oil on city streets,
and beneath it strawberries,
over-ripe,
and red as rays
of light left after
blue has blown away,
red as lazy, lightly sunburnt skin.
You smell cheap beer on him under
it all, and dry brush and scents
so fused with tattered clothes they seem
woven in. Grass stains on knees
of jeans
and the soles of his shoes.
He wears a white tee, faded,
about the color of his chapped nostrils,
which breathe in the dust and
dirt in shallow draughts.
A flick of fingers sends
the brim of a red ball
cap to his crown,
and beneath the light,
colorless hair
covering his head,
dim, diuretic eyes
and a crooked smile.
He pulls at several days’ scruff
with blistered, damaged digits,
black strips of flaky skin and dirt and food and blood under
every fingernail.
A dry wind sweeps in, northbound, as he ambles off,
and brings with it the stale, sweet smell
of death arcing
off the young, sunsucked man to the south -
a scent of Paris,
of the Seine
in hot August heat:
of elderly French madames
in stuffy tenements,
lying still in bath water brought
near the boiling point
by his relentless assault upon the
Bastille walls.
And as he stops, and turns, and takes
one last look
at you, the high noon
sun hits him from above,
and summer’s shady face is not a cheery color
of wild strawberries, but
a deeper crimson,
blotchy and purplish, like the cheeks
of a child left in the backseat of a car
on a June afternoon with the windows
rolled
up.
And as
he touches cracked white palms to a sweaty forehead,
brushing the hair from his face, behind his hands
his eyes spark with wanderlust of a dog
when the Fourth of July has
brought him out of his cage
to run spooked and mad
with pads raw and red dripping
into the streets.
Summer drops his hand
to his side,
and his thumb leaves a thin streak of blood down
the right side of his face, red
on red on red;
and he turns, and he walks on,
and the northbound wind resumes, whipping up
dust in all directions.
Filed under: poems | Tags: Allegory of the Cave, confinement, freedom, isolation, philosophy, Plato, rain, shadows, the Dead Sea, unrestricted submarine warfare
We say
to be safe is to be kept from everything,
to lock ourselves within these walls
and listen to the rain drip in the gutters.
I know the dimensions of the cage of security well and
I know the sound of its lock.
But it isn’t
the sharp metallic noise you’d expect it to be;
it isn’t that familiar sound,
that meeting-sound, the child of fear and determination to be released
from fear;
it isn’t how we’ve been told it is;
it isn’t loud, it doesn’t echo out past the prison yard and into nothingness
and it isn’t precluded by the shouts of our jailers.
We know
it is silent,
and its clasp is silent,
its pins and tumblers are silent
and our jailers, too.
We walk in by choice,
and may hold hands with others as they enter, too,
all of us contented as cave dwellers;
we all watch as the bars slide closed,
shutter by like a Nickelodeon,
moving the world by us in frames
like the flicker of shadows.
Light haloes around
these metal bones as they draw
to a close and
we sit.
But we come and go as we please –
they have left the keys to our cells under our pillows,
as before, though
each time we are surprised to find them there.
I have spent many years this way,
as we all must,
and have marked my time in pencil and in pen,
but have not returned in some time -
there,
to know freedom,
to let its light fall on the wall of another’s cell,
to speak of how it may be obtained,
is death,
and any man who returns to his cage
with freedom’s secrets burning in his mind
will surely be set upon
by the others.
To simply sidestep our cell
when the time comes
would be our greatest accomplishment –
for if they discover
the salt of our buoyancy
they would sink us
as surely as German submarines would;
for even the boundaries and bars
of ocean, air, and earth
are preferable
to the tyranny of ourselves.
When I walk this town
I walk with tempered boots.
I walk this town
like the rain –
softly,
and never often enough.
And when I move,
I hope they’ll say,
“he walked this town
with dignity.”
San José.
With these steps you’ve taught me,
I’ll walk all over the place.
