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: 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: 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: AJB, canvas, fingers, ghosts, hands, paint, paper, water
Whose hands are these?
that cover over other
points of light standing
on white canvasses.
Who makes them green?
Who holds the brushes?
What colors doe she use?
She fills the white spaces on the floor
like water fills a pitcher.
She leaves no spot untouched
by glorious fingers dripping specters
floated from her palette
on to paper and cloth.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anachronism, Dante, Heidegger, Michelangelo, Nietzsche, philosophy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Socrates, Stoicism, the Crusades, water
In the face of great art,
I am mute.
I could not stand before the statue of David,
could not say,
“You must change your life.”
I have not transcended this Being,
the petty existence we woke with
and wake with every morning.
Though nor am I a Stoic.
I have not accepted this state,
could not accept it;
I won’t float downstream
in the face of this bloody river.
I am not the type to establish
some Kingdom in the Desert,
nor some City of Dis.
In the face of everything I’ll fly,
until I am picked from the world’s
Teeth.
A horse can’t see its own behind.
The gadfly’s best work is done while the great beast
watches only the path ahead.
If I am an arrow,
I await my bow.
Until then,
I will remain in my quiver,
and show the others
what rotten wood they’re made of.
Filed under: poems | Tags: cheap wine, city streets, dogs, grass, restaurants, shade, smoke, space, stucco giants, suburbs, the moon, trains, water
I love normal days
absent of any significance;
mediocre meals in restaurants,
small amounts of sunshine,
what little shade there is, muggy,
the air a bit smoky outside,
the food, cold.
Children inside,
dogs inside,
no shadow, no sound,
streets rounding corners into one another
and slingshotting themselves
like a shuttle rolling across the surface
of the moon’s gravitational field
off into other neighborhoods
and through stucco walls
and off the edge
of fake balconies.
Divided by rusted railroad tracks
we trace parallel lines
through ranchos and roundabouts here
in these normal days,
down normal streets
cut off from thoroughfares
and tightened around
choked suburbs
of white folks not yet flown to the hills;
of hardworking immigrant families
tired of the crooked two-bedroom apartments
of past generations;
they all live here.
Still afternoon air
refusing to slide on past homes
not worth stopping to look at –
and the for sale signs sit for months in front of them –
pink and beige giants
adorned with wrought iron,
absent of backyard,
filled up with chilled,
airconditioned winds,
broken breezes
knocking against couch-ends and chair-legs,
hanging over kittens’ heads and babies’ cribs.
We ride these waves,
gulp them down
like cheap wine
and crash onto level streets.
We taste gravel for the first time,
let little pieces roll about our tongues,
imbed themselves in our gums,
let them grow like rows of shark’s teeth
and we’ll mow every lawn down
three whole streets
with them,
chew down every fresh
and well-irrigated lawn
within a square mile,
and run through the sprinklers
and let the water soak through to our bitter hearts
while the world dies of thirst.
