Poems and rumors of
poems …
From Home
Because we have named them our friends,
The stars will one day call our children away.
Just as our parents have seen us frantically trying
to catch the attention of the moon,
our children will turn a cold eye on earth
and lunge for the stars,
riding the long ships we made them,
using the science we gave them.
Seduced by their haunting, singular song,
Our children will follow their own gaze out
through the harboring sky.
Into a place that does not love them,
Toward a star that does not know them.
Swept along by solar winds,
they sail to the next charted bright spot,
and are surprised to discover
it’s nothing like they thought.
Though wondrous,
it’s not the wonder they sought.
Maybe their own children’s stars
will answer what could not be asked from here.
Maybe when you’re far enough from home
that it’s lost in the shadows
Can you truly see it in your heart.
American Harvest
She bore him five children
Always conceived in the fall
And borne in the dry sear of late summer.
Two and three years apart,
they made up a string of
cool weather reconciliations.
Each of them empowered by their surmounting of summer,
they entered the fall with dreams of recapturing the old prize.
Sara remembered the reassurance of frequent motherhood;
John the comfort of another name to bury his own.
They each sought their separate affirmations that there was, in each, life -
enough to start another.
At moments, there was even a hint of intimate abandon - absorption in the one.
Long days in the cabin, earnest mending - a year’s worth of story and attention
to catch up on, as if each had been different ways ‘round the world.
Sleeping near became sleeping with, then sleeping after.
The enticements of proximity lulled them into a false sense of intimacy.
City people imagine that the fertile cycle begins in spring, after the quiet of winter.
But they never had to get their life from the earth, relying instead on boxes at the general store.
People on the land know that the difference between reaping and sowing
could sometimes be the span between breakfast and lunch.
You start counting on the next crop before the last is in your cellar.
As the one cycle ends, you learn to crave the life of the next cycle.
The quiet of winter comes when you can no longer get things ready before spring.
Life teaches you to sow what you can when you can.
Five kids into the process, they understood they were now immune
to the kind of life a child brings.
Intimacy became part of the story-telling, the long-ago remembering.
If there was any touching, it was that of the returning tourist –
having been there once before,
they hoped to discover just what it was had excited them so.
And like so many tourists, they left disappointed.
Creation
If you want to hear God laugh,
ask him about Creation.
Astounded by his ardency,
I stepped back.
His cheeks flushed,
His eyes wet with the dew of morning.
It was incredible!
An orgiastic surge of intoxicating vigor.
The scent of fresh fruit - none newer, none fresher, ever.
Virgin grasslands , clean pelts, rich soil, firm clay.
Blood pounding in the temples.
Never again would water be so pure,
Earth so fertile,
Rock so sharp and crisp,
Sunlight so bright.
The long, slow trek toward sandstone,
Shale and fossils just beginning.
No diamonds, no deBeers.
The seductive promise of tomorrow -
The pure free gift of Creation,
The adventure and danger of the untried -
Amoeba, trilobites, dodos, and man.
Ten million million variations to settle into a world.
An epoch to ripen -
a billion billion moments of
birth and death, growth and change.
The sweet smell of sad death.
And tomorrows.
This is a good place to be born …
This is a good place to be born.
The damp of the soil breathes out a cool welcome.
The hill, seeking the river below,
at this point cleaves itself,
willed or not, to make a nest.
In the cleft, the water slows, swerves,
digs deeper, seeking only after the scent of gravity.
Slowed, the water falls prey to waiting seeds who, in growing,
slow it further, harnessing it to their leafy offspring.
The gift of earth-mother is the gift of permanence.
She waits coolly for us to come to her.
Receiving no promise of gentleness, we come
and find a place to rest.
She moves where she moves. Sometimes, in fits she awakens and throws aside her covering of people.
She brings mountains down and waters up - driven by personal fires within that even her lithic calm sometimes lets slip.
When she rests, we come back to her folds, mistaking her dormancy for sanctuary; her inattention for peace.
I wait. My waiting is not for you, but yours to use while it is here.
I love the warmth of your presence and the coolness of your absence.
My dance is the same, come or go.
You must live your unquiet. For reasons I cannot see, you were born to heat and noise.
I will hold my quiet until the need of it
fills your ears.
You will try to touch the sun.
I will wait in the shade of my own making for you to slip down again.
Upon your singed fall I await. You will have need of coolness.
I am first-mother.
I am first-lover.
Your qualities make you long for me beyond your reach. You hunger to find all, and to bring all with you.
Wisdom is in knowing what to leave behind,
what to trust to remain.
Find the stars - I will be here.
This must be a holy land (death of Y. Rabin)
This must be a holy land
to absorb the hot blood of the martyrs
without destroying all in a purifying fire.
No rituals will clean the hands of the murderer,
no ablutions rinse his soul.
He bears the mark of Herod, not Cain -
removed from the family, he makes a G-d of his hate and thirst.
No blessing is imparted to him.
None who anoint him will enter the Holy of Holies.
His victim was a man who warred when necessary,
but sought peace when possible.
Against his own fears, he sought the greatest berekah - peace and brotherhood.
Like his name-brother,
he had been on the altar
only to be brought down.
Like his name-brother,
he began the walk home - wishing never to see the altar again.
But this Isaac
with home shining from the distant hillside,
felt in his last moment
the ritual knife of his kinsmen.
So blinded by rage,
they refused YHWH's call
to step back from the altar,
preferring death to camp among them.
Again.
TreeClimber
Having failed to make him hear, she made him hurt.
Schooled in gentleness and the indirection of Southern dialogue,
she and generations of kin lacked the resources to charm him from his perch.
Afraid of slipping, he contented himself with the lower branches,
She sat higher, trying to entice him upward.
He sat lower, trying to appear well-satisfied.
It’s a known fact, he said,
that women are better at climbing certain trees.
They have a reckless spirit that drives them to the weaker branches.
There is too much price to be paid in the fall.
She called out
You can see so many more trees from here - and the sky is bluer.
From the top of his head came the reply
I see a spot of blue from here, which is very nice if you like that sort of thing.
Though it is summer now, it will be spring before you know it and I’ll need to hurry down to tend the earth.
With the sun passing behind a cloud, she heard him declaim,
I think now that it is autumn. I should have seen it better.
That’s my fault.
But things will be dying soon, and
I’ll be called to account for that.
I should stay low.
If I don’t go down soon, it will be spring, and I’ll have cleared away none of the decay. If I don’t do this, life won’t come. I must needs be ready.
From the top of his head, came her reply
Our children should see this place
if I come down, I can’t promise they will.
The wind will find me,
but the sun will too.
It would be warmer with you here
but I can make a new friend of the cold
if you are not here. And we will be fine together.
Formless
Words without form.
Form without words.
Tasting pictures to see how they smell.
The sensation of sweet pencil stroking the back of the paper.
Images most true, whose description means nothing.
I wish sometimes that I saw pictures and heard sounds.
Smelled odors and savored flavors with my tongue.
I used to wish I could tell you what I saw without it sounding peculiar.
But it does, I do, and I am.
Sweetness and sorrow follow the realization
that my son has caught it from me.
I cherish the knowledge that
someone else sees the otherness of familiar things.
Oblong sadness that it is my son.
I try to talk to him with the words I have learned.
But image comes before map.
The road before language.
I hope he will be better than me in the world.
But still bear a broad and shining memory of the old country.
I envy him the wind that will pass through him,
pulling him forward like a jet foil.
I want him to come to me late some night.
And wake me with the story of his day on the sun.
To know that, when his mind flies, it’s as real
as anything his body is doing.
No first date.
first car,
first love.
Will ever match his first trip into the looking glass.
In these days, I am no longer tempted to strip the paint covering my mirror.
And so, the taste of having seen is always in my mouth.
I envy him the tears of discontinuity.
When his puzzle pieces fit in the wrong place.
The deathly-careening-downhill thrill the first time he
perfectly describes a dog in the language of a cat.
Bring me back to the sea before I die.
And I will know I dreamt it right.
Mornings
When I look straight at you,
Not around you at what I fear,
or through you at what I hope.
I see the bearer of a hundred thousand mornings.
Anticipation of the sun,
the earthy scent of dewed grass;
A chance to be new
fresh
clean.
A chance to try again,
be naked in my soul.
Bared to you
bared to me.
My eyes shift focus and your face comes sharp.
I see the crease of the first smile we shared -
and hope its partner hasn’t been lost on me.
It has always been hard for me
to accept the second
or thousandth
day of morning.
But you are
morning.
And life.
And freshness.
And if I want to keep you,
I have to accept it all.
Lest joy be mistaken for drunken revelry,
I have cached myself.
I would give all I know to splash and play in the light
Bathe in the morning.
Let the dewed winds
soften my soul.
But I love you -
not because you are morning,
But because you are who you are -
And in your best time,
invite morning into life.
Because I am not a person of frequent mornings,
I shield my eyes when you approach.
But less so now.
I fall back to the dark that heard me
and held me
when I was a child.
I knew it was mine.
Knew it when quiet and calm was my best home.
Before I held you - it held me.
In the winter, I went to ground there.
It is still hard for me - I start to write of your morning
and I explain the night.
I don’t remember the look of your face,
but I hear, even now, your voice saying,
“Wake, son, the Pharaoh says to go.
We are going.”
What you had spoken with eager dreams for years,
What I had seen dance across your face for decades,
You now said with awed uncertainty,
when the truth of it was delivered into your hands.
My earliest memory is of
following your finger to the horizon
when you said, “Adonai will provide.
We will go and we will not want.”
As we pack, we begin to see
that if Adonai will provide
He will have to do it alongside us
on the road, keeping up as best he can.
Without a word exchanged
everyone knows –
whatever the cost
we will be out of the camps
and past the gates
before first light.
“One hundred forty-four thousand
mornings spent as a
captive people,” you said,
“Our next morning will be as the free children of the Lord.”
Fourteen thousand four hundred mornings later
You are dead;
Mother is dead;
Brother Elihu is dead.
Obed the fool is dead
(somehow as a child, I thought he would be immune.)
The grandchildren you never knew
Mourn their mother Sara
who is dead.
Last night, Moses himself
walked
into the bosom of Abraham.
And in the moonless night, our wilderness hearts died alone and despairing.
This morning, as the heat from our campfires drives the fog away.
Ten thousand people
rub sleep from their eyes
and point as one
across the valley.
Aaron nods;
Miriam’s hymn breaks from our lips
Our people are alive and on the threshold of our birthright.
Freiheit
It finally occurred to him
dark one night
with the wife out of town
and the kids bedded down for the night.
No phone ringing
only damn-basketball on the TV
Staring at the computer screen
And wondering why the question he was asking
and the answers [they] were giving
didn’t seem part of the same conversation.
The pixels of his mind excited, he saw that
not jumping is not the same as flying.
His problem was in being free, not in being trapped.
Magellan
We have never touched like this.
After twelve years and two children.
We come face to face
as new people.
Wearing our passions and concerns as whole garments
Woven around and into our bodies.
No longer do we meet without our histories,
As unburdened, untested, unfocused, unanchored children.
I see in your face the ghosts of a thousand joys and sorrows,
And know now how many of both I have put there.
Bridge Out
Eyes lose the light,
Ears lose the sound,
Feet slow, hands begin to tremble.
Instinct becomes calculations
and knowledge becomes a phantom.
Because it is in my soul
and not in my head.
I will always have the day
I first loved you.
As fresh as the present
and every day in between.
Winter sun dancing on your hair,
Laughter bubbling from your mouth,
The smell of springtime waiting to be born.
Are drawn into me by a sacred wind
Each time I look into your face.
Busman’s Holiday
All fiction is role-play,
Modeling, masking, making.
Your man at the bus stop
(don’t we all have one?)
Muttering, weaving a tale that
even he can barely hear –
Is trying to find the stage door so he can go home.
Telling stories
of other doors, other men at bus stops.
Like keys on a chain,
all his stories are pulled out and tried, in all their permutations and combinations.
One
at
a
time.
Scrolling diligently,
With no career to interfere,
He devotes body and soul to find the fit.
Retelling his story,
the story he saw on last night’s TV
The one he’s seen in your face.
Separate Checks
Joshu the elephant – his belly full of grass
and body exhausted
with
trying to extract the more precious water
from the less precious grass.
expired
alongside the mudhole
that offered neither.
After a visit from the lion family
and a day in the sun
Joshu’s body lies exposed and fragrant.
Enter Mumon the hippo.
Who strolls in from the shining east
one morning.
Stares in puzzlement:
He thinks he sees an elephant,
but knows he smells grass
ripened into sweet warm mulch by sun
and yet … something else.
Mumon passes once,
and a second time,
slowly sifting memories to see if
he has ever before eaten grass
that looked like an elephant.
Fatigue, hunger and thirst have made the lions
surrounding the kill
indifferent to moving stock and non-competitors.
They wait for their turn at the elephant,
lacking the power to bring down Mumon's thick hide.
But in their squinting eyes
they see precious fluids,
evaporate from the body with every moment.
In a different moment . . . patience may give way.
Lost: 1 inner child
I am almost old enough to return
for the boy.
I have seen parents leave their children
behind like dust,
Not noticing the tiny pieces of soul coming free.
What makes it unimaginable to me
is that I have also abandoned a child.
I know his face - watching as the now-unfamiliar “I” drives up the street -
not looking
not waving
not holding in my heart
I thought he didn’t need me -
that others did.
And I went. With blind determination.
Without him, I lacked resolve,
so I gave inertia;
I had nothing for patience;
so I gave distance;
I could give no nurturance,
so I gave liberty.
Everything I offered to others
was lifeless
because I couldn’t give the life I left
a thousand miles ago.
I sit waiting on the porch.
In Country / Longtime Stowaway
I came back looking
for him, yes,
and for much I lacked words for.
I didn’t know who I would see -
a fourteen year old boy
or a thirty-four year old man,
or someone in between.
I didn’t know who would be greater and who lesser,
Did the father go or stay?
Which of us would be the boy?
As it happened, he knew I was coming,
perhaps always knew,
better than I,
that I would return.
I tried circling into town,
spiraling inward as I gained in confidence –
and the knowledge I would need to recognize him.
Sometimes the teacher needn’t wait for the student to be ready.
Sometimes the truth of the glass will be so apparent, that there’s no need to wait to fill it.
He understood my glass, and knew how I would understand.
And in a single sentence,
Like the most deft of Zen masters,
he walked directly to my face,
and said, “I think I’m supposed to know who you are.”
Only at that moment was I part of the community
that understood
this to be an untruth.
All the me there was to see
had been with me all this time.
And now I go home with the same
yet-subtly-expanded me
there always has been.
Treppenwitz
I haven’t been happy about it.