Back in the Old Hometown

Back in the old hometown

You never think what is to come.
The little kid you smiled at
is a well-known author now, a thousand miles away.
The trash-filled lot you didn't want to see
is now a church—the nicest one around.
The old stockyards are gone.
Your young best friend is dead.

You think: that was the life I built,
my very own behind my third-grade eyes.
And Is the village park still there?
You'd settle for a journey back
across those 70 years—with jackknife probe,
dig up a marble, still intact,
and now three inches down. You lost it once;
it was a shooter (big one) and
you couldn't understand just how it got away.
Poorer when you went to bed that night—
You'd traded off six glassies for it...
Yes. The blue and white.
It's got to be the one.

You knew the grown-ups wouldn't care—
no miracles for them,
just irony; a kid's old rusty knife
could never be the tool
to resurrect their life.

The little park may still survive
upon a ghostly plain, you thought.
And not the marble, but a part of you
have lain there underneath the years
not quite forgotten,
yet with some bewilderment
to see the sun again
~

The Imponderable

The Imponderable

The thinker
stares into the space inside himself
with some ignoble wonder,
"Who am I...and why?

"To found some mindless form of life
and blame it on my sculptor...
ah I see the timid wraith
who runs away from my presumption;
no they say it is awareness
that I would not face head on.
I simply stare at him, and he will flee,
Now could it be it is not life I see
but farther back into the swamp
with some finality to focus on its germ
that writhes and agonizes to prevail.

"I am a stranger in this shell,
a lark without a song,
an infant arrow with a consciousness unborn;
I am an instrument that tripped,
became a God upon a grain of sand,
that tumbled in a bowl
of some primordial soup
unable to decay.


"I do not like it very well...
that I alone must roar out to the edges
of my mushy little universe, just what is fair
and what is merely salty air
to birth in, breathe, and die.

"Or just...perhaps...there is another path
that leads to the discovery of me
back down the line, for at the basic level
I do not know myself; the past I had
did not rub off—it moved me just this far—
the night is very dark as if to smother me.

"Or at the very least,
my curiosity."
~

His Bequest

His Bequest

It's back...
unsought...
that cold, wet lump within the mind,
that Frost had known so well.
It bids me close my eyes
look at my hands--
then open them, repelled;
they do not sculpt as his,
nor dare to hold the clay.
His day enlightened yet
by suns still burning down
upon the coverlet of sod
that will not seal the eloquence
of his poetic grace.

It is I
who ill affords the privilege
of suffering--the light beneath my stone,
the brightness of a legend in my youth,
the triumph of the one who found in loss
poetic deity, who flashed
the image of his mind to me
behind the rostrum
on that day with JFK.

It is the gnarled earth he leaves
upon our pedestal,
to grope and turn,
and turn away, remembering
the wall, the woods, the whiteness
of the birches—the man who loved the clay,
installed it in our consciousness
as one who used remembering
to guide his hands, his pen, and ours,
and then to close our eyes
and see.
~

Theatre of the Universe

"Perhaps," he said.
"It was like this..."
--void--
--a beam of light--
--a speck of consciousness--
--implosion--
--dark--

"Or rather, we perceive..."
--eternal God--
--explosion--
--a creeping on the earth--
--decay--
--paradise--

He shuddered, sputtered, "No..."
--I choose outrage--
--as my own creed--
--to gaze within--
--this floating cluster--
--of my body-- -
--borrowed for an instant-
--just to see--

"...that I am spirit here
within a micro, numberless eternity."
~

Reading the Obits

Reading the Obits

Hmmm.
I remember him.
Strange fellow.
Loner.
Used to see him on street corners.
Always wondered what he was thinking.

Ah, well.
He was a fixture here.
He'll be missed, although I hardly knew him.
One thing I can't get over—
I always thought he looked like me.
~

The Citizen of Heaven

The Citizen of Heaven

Patria...sacred to the one who walks upon it.
Hallowed...from the sacrifice that passed it on.
Home...from infant life that still reposes in the body.
There, it will entreat with that fair eloquence
the body politic employs--all torn from old nobility
that blood bears in its stream,
enriched from fragments that the heart
has stored away--the jagged memories,
the tears of those we loved,
the bells that sang from towers
still remembered as the years sink down.

It resurrects the dead, this fatherland
that cries for loyalty; its cunning tries the patient,
trips up the ingenue
who sees what is supposed to be and not what is.
It fosters bravery and blindness,
soars upon the winds of rhetoric,
and casts its stones with khaki kindness
at a world that interferes.

God bless the citizen
who follows on the highway where the marchers
said goodbye, took up their arms,
and faded in the far-off sky.
God bless his vision of returning...
bless the faith he musters for the heroes nigh
at that far turn ahead,
still washed in that pale emptiness
disclosed across the evening sun.

He is the watcher, still,
who hears the bells,
and hums along expectantly

...the blessed one.
~

Distilled Purity

Distilled Purity

One has to like the price,
which never fluctuates.
It floats,
like some suspended orb
imparted from another heaven, perhaps...
itself a consciousness unknown
and undefiled.
It is the good the ages seek,
still there before our eyes.

Were there a formula,
a prize to touch or taste,
it would not occupy the metaphor
of grace nor scorn its worshipers.
There's time to let the rain sweep down
the valley, time to revel
in the harvest when the fullness comes.
It's time to yield a little, come alive
to listen while the piper plays;
the air is sweet,
the song is of the eminence of day.

If there is any paradise
let us make room for it
within our precious now
though set upon with every fond device
of intellect to struggle to our feet;
the highest good not ours alone,
persists in that strange crystalline precipitate
when all is done—old Paul knew what it was
and called it love.
~

Which Way

Which Way

It is beyond closed eyes I see
that alien precipitant
of trembling in my heart,
a partner of my soul I never knew,
whose constancy is certain
as that looming space that throbs
before my consciousness, demanding
that the song be heard, impossible
the song, the song inviolate
and there upon a waiting breath.

Words make court
around the beauty I may not contain.
The goal is given not defined,
intoned, and thrown upon the board.
I take
I break
I share the body and the blood,
and there within the courtyard
is the prize millenia have dreamed to touch.

There...
within our outstretched hands
this very moment and
We shall not pass it by.

This is one you will find difficult. I do, too, but I had to write it. It is multi-layered and mystical but at the same time celebrates inevitability, a purpose to the universe not yet understood...but, nevertheless inevitability that is just beginning to dawn on me after so much reading of late. Make of the poem what you will, or nothing at all if you choose, but I hope you will take something from it. Yes, it has faults, and I think needs further polishing. But it is a fixation I am in love with.

Off Starboard

Off Starboard

Horizon is illusory.
White sails appear across the morning watch,
are lost at noon,
and sighted once again at vespers
when the antiphon is sung.

Beneath them at the rail
another sailor over there
may share the vision,
half of fantasy that I exist
and half in brotherhood of faith
in mythic splendor of mirage.

and there am I
when sails and sky
reflect the blooded sun
as I linger on the deck, yet blest,
my restive fingers touch
the talisman around my neck
while he in supplication to a headless God
beneath the little guillotine
suspended on his chest,
would be content to marvel
that a savior such as mine
could stretch his body on a yoke of wood
and die like that.
~

Perigee

Perigee

Time floods my consciousness
with pretense of reality that like a mist
is faithless, vanishing,
exchanging slavery with me.
That which I know, I am;
that which I see
is just an object over there,
apart from unity.

Yet all is one,
the one I cannot fathom--
one I surely cannot know.
As empty as it thus appears
one question looms essentially:
will it ever be
that I am not?
~

The Secret of the Void

The Secret of the Void

What is it? One may venture only
that it is the fullness of non-entity,
to call and wait for my response—
gravamen hovering, always there
and not to be content;

yet patient in its timelessness alone,
suspends infinity above my head
to render words a useless toy,
and bring about in me
a tumult that I could not do without.

For in that vortex of the undefined
is all the vast unknown, undreamed,
unfathomed truth transcending peace,
dissolving thrones, ceding eminence
to just one evening that a helpless God
let slip away.

Sic transit gloria.
~

Lacuna

Lacuna

It is another calibration of my journey,
pre-ordained but shrouded
in the belly I perceived in childhood,
distant signals, stuttering,
of flight a soul could make
beyond the apogee of earth
when home was much too lush,
the girl who spoke with velvet lips
too pretty to ignore,
the state of appetite too unrefined,
the lust within asserting its own arrogance
before the face of God.

And now in age, it smiles
in irony...it whispers,
"Do you know me?
Do you see?"

I do. And with a heart
half full, I seek
and smile at my own frailty...
and stumble
as the storehouse of the earth
still whirls beneath my feet,
albeit not so steadily.

Decay
and loss
and luscious fruit
are at my side,
and curiosity
about that former nemesis called death
may now contend together
in a strange equality I sense
but may not understand.

I have the watch.
It's midnight, and I shall not sleep.
~

Condensed Eternity

Condensed Eternity

The ripples
on the lake preserve
a history that is not yet
until the surface calms—
oh please, I see them still.
Look there, they have not broken
off upon the shore; we may not speak
of death nor in this breath
is license to forget.
~

Of Being

Of Being

A world must have its moment even as
the river and the lava flow.
The blood, an echo from the seething womb of earth—
the wind, defying origin and death,
are alien to footsteps which must cease
when wisdom speaks.

Then only humankind can hear.
Then it is that listening and stillness
find their wedding bliss...when
awareness of another plain drifts in.
Frisson within the heart arises; there
in that dimension made where time is set aside,
flesh and spirit chant the hours

and this transcendent consciousness
that you and I who walk below the stars
have dubbed humanity, must marvel
as it pushes back its intellect
and learns again
that love is all there is.
~