Excursions and Diversions

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Rites of Autumn

Leaves are fallen in the garden,

gone from lean black branches.

Bright hours are gone, too;

lost amid the equinoctial shade.

You could not count the leaves,

but would recapture hours,

recall them all;

silent as you watch the leaves

run before an autumn wind.

You let the moments slip,

used them to savor yearnings,

distant hopes,

idle revery.

Yet still the pull of yearnings,

yet still, desires unmet;

no moments in your bag

to hold them now.

Now memory is lean,

would feast upon new days

were they at hand;

would gorge upon

the promise of new dreams,

yes, even on the promise,

were there moments for a dream,

were there moments for a promising.

Without leaves on high

there is silence in the wood,

save for the one song:

when winds sweep low,

falling from the mountain,

gathering its chill.

Alone in the garden,

heir to the song,

to vistas of lean black branches—

this song will not scribe a memory,

nor hold a moment rapt for you,

more than may the lean black branches

recall scattered leaves.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Borrowings

How do you write this stuff?

Just words—

Not so!

Yes!

Not so very different,

than you yourself would use

alone...or to yourself.

I don't do that so much...

Oh yes. Perhaps you just don't listen closely...

Suppose I did?
How would it sound aloud

or to some other?

You make words seem…different—

there's something lurking between syllables,

a kind of common code,

the way the words display.

Anyone can understand the heady spirit there.

I'm barely articulate—

words can't make their way across my lips

without a mangling.

Sometimes I wonder

if I know myself well enough to try...

So, how do you write these things?

Ha! I toss words in the air—

each one falling back of its own mass

into a proper place.

Then I play a game with them,

find a pleasing pattern;

they have to suit the eye as well, you know;

massage more than the one sense,

assault them 'til they crumble

powerless before the inevitable.

But first, of course, there must be an idea...

That's no answer.

The question stays,

attaches to each glib evasion here.

I still can't understand the way it fits...

none of it explains

the way the words lie perfect on a page,

envelope me with pleasure...

and then sometimes the feeling that I get,

as if you've read my mind,

or fathomed something larger—

tapped into the full being of me,

my forgotten parts,

moments echoing from dark corners

I had never seen fit to explore,

and still don't know to comprehend…

If you're unknowing, how may I explain?

You've heard...something,

felt something;

taken something from a phrase:

the essence of some accidental truth

that I have stumbled on

in my candid peregrinations;

a truth that you've kept hidden,

precious for some reason of your own;

a dark facet, yes,

unused perhaps, abandoned or ignored,

but nonetheless a truth

because you know it.

But if you're asking me

how I might know it's true for you,

well, there is yet another mystery...

But you make me ashamed,

my feelings assailed,

left naked in full light.

How do you find these tokens?

How can you lash these nerve ends undeterred

by any sense of modesty?

Is there no shadow immune from this?

No sadness?

No secret?

You give me too much credit.

I wish I could claim it,

but the burden is all yours,

and yours the prize.

I can ill afford the drain of so much feeling.

I'm only trying to get something right,

less imperfect and more beautiful.

It's work at its worst.

If I had to pause at every couplet

to take stock of deepest feelings...

I don't know how the work would ever end.

So complex, those things, and incomplete:

a feeling never finishes, you see,

it leads right to the next,

hands off its emotion

to be used again

to fuel some other dormant mood.

I must never lose myself in that,

must note only the mood

and not what underlies it all,

not while there is paper left to fill,

and some unknown waiting to read it.

I'm a performer, see; a pro;

deadlines and all that,

even if self-imposed.

No time to plumb the paradoxes

of mundane despair

and enervating ecstasies.

No, let them settle elsewhere

if they must.

I'm not sure I like you

quite so well as a moment before.

Just a trickster?

Is it all marketing and manipulation?

How do you choose your victims?

Why am I bothering to ask you?

Please, not quite like that...

Does it seem so bad?

I guess I was better off

before I tried to shed the mystery.

I would never play loose with your feelings.

I just...borrow them for the moment,

draw them down from the common pool,

mold them--just a bit--to fit my hand.

After all, you can't begrudge a tradesman

burnishing a product with his brand.

When I've come to the end of figuring

—as best I can—

I give those feelings back to you

with just a little dressing up.

Any value added is my gift,

my thanks for the motive,

for the quick use of your soul,

which, itself, has helped me see

to where I've never been before.

At least, that's the plan.

Nothing insidious there, I hope.

I need levers outside myself

to orchestrate this world

in a way that will make sense.

So you have helped with that.

In return you have a glimpse

of what it is I've seen.

Not the truest world perhaps,

but one that must suffice until the next idea...

Yes, you see...the idea…

If you’ve been tricked to the misuse of your feelings,

I have at least shown something back:

that idea that must lie at the core,

framed in a sharper focus

than you discerned before.

My vision is the prism.

Your soul provides the ready light.

The way you talk,

it’s one allusion then the next,

points hidden in obscuring metaphors;

a graveyard for common words and meanings.

Well…you’ve surprised me.

You’ve forced me to improvise,

no time or method to make clear

how I may truly mean a certain thing.

I’ve told you, poetry is work,

the worst I could devise.

I try to gather minute meanings

magnify them to infinite form,

give you all a chance to share my mirror—

There you go again!

Amen.

I’m guilty.

How may I amend?

I have still the question:

How do you write these things?

You must find your answer in my silence.

I can’t exchange this alchemy for science

the way your wish intends.

You must grant me magic, at the last,

where, I fear, both question and answer

do surely come to a dead end.

For I still marvel when you see

either charms or mystery

in any thing that I compose.

It’s there the magic lives for me…

For now, let conversation close.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Afterthoughts

When you labored your last breath,

I had long been elsewhere.

Bad news, they say, travels fast,

though it seems, not far:

I, who once knew much of you,

was then unknowing.

What are lifetimes, looking back?

Yours read well enough to me

even without note of us,

or other quondam artifacts.

No indeed--our trove lay deep,

hidden in the secret bottom

of some misplaced trunk,

while others that I never knew

gathered then to carry you.

Better to have never heard:

another year—who knows?—

might well do all for me;

or better yet a courier

less inclined to squander news.

Nothing now points much to old scenes—

though I still choose my moments

to puzzle over absence,

and the haze of ancient afternoons,

or sometimes on fabled afterlives

and happy tales of immortality,

which have always seemed to be

no more than an apology

for absences writ large,

unbreachable.

Yet will I hold these things aside.

and let the skeptic's surety be tried

upon the very thought—

that there may be

a shadow of forever clinging near,

so long as this remembrance visits me.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

To The Fair

We walked the road through twilight,

nightingales teasing from small shadows;

the emptiness ready for all bold spirits.

There were faint stars enough

to draw thoughts of a deeper night,

and of summer pleasures to be gathered at the fair.

As we rounded the last curve we passed the tree—

the grave and heavy circumference;

slowed our march,

so quiet.

The tree was a killer.

We saw, the week before,

the carcass of the ‘65 Corvette

as it was towed to town:

covered with a shroud of canvas,

hidden in the furthest corner of the salvage yard.

But we would see beneath it, and we did;

marveling with high amazement

at dark stains spilled across bucket seats

as if by some new miracle

of upholsterer’s art.

Marvel we did, but once,

joked just once,

timid laughs falling to a kind of sigh.

In our retelling to the less bold,

we spoke brazenly of gore,

as if we had become attuned

to that kind of death,

or to any kind;

spoke the way we thought

the others would best hear,

the way we thought a soldier

might have spoken of his battle ground;

or the way a cop might talk of routine carnage;

spoke of bits and pieces that were scattered in the car,

pieces not all metal or at all mechanical;

intoned at length on what the scattered pieces might have been.

The tree at dusk on a country road.

The tree had only done what a tree must do:

stood its ground,

age and dignity unshaken

by the race of passion or hubris

or even careless indifference.

And the car had only done what a car must do—

yielding to great stressors that were never meant to be.

The unknown couple, too, complied with due necessity:

shattering—not neatly, it was said,

unjoined, but not at logical places.

We counted out our steps,

knowing the roads intimately,

knowing steps and distances

from one place to the next.

Headlights marked us.

We might lose our number,

but there would always be,

away in the near distance,

hovering above the forest line,

the glow of the fair,

faint music growing stronger step by step;

and finally the great wheel,

alive with rainbow lights,

coursing a path skyward,

to yield it’s shining vessels to the night.

Talk soon overtook the nightingales,

and rapt imaginings

made bright the evening sky.

We moved in a strange kind of present

that held a dawning future in abeyance:

knowing we were doing all that we were meant to do

that summer, that night,

along that chosen road,

the summer sky a canopy

for all small charms so soon to be embraced…

I looked back.

Our road had left that tree behind,

just beyond the reach of the long curve,

lost in the tide of encroaching shadows.

The music louder now—

that eternal present soon set to pass

into the lightness

of a temporary balming dream

of many brief inviting moments

all at once just waiting…

Away from the shadows,

and the grasp of hard necessity;

away from subtle curves

that skew even much-traveled roads.

Then quick steps and laughter,

the pull of vesper gratitudes,

for what an evening might beget…

I prayed that I would one day

better care for a Corvette.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Driftwood Dreams

bright sands raked by an unyielding wind

grey sea trimmed with white breakers

gulls adrift pure of flight on their distant azure plain

and the driftwood holding at the center

still through tides and gathering dunes

unmoved

as if in rapt dreaming

of dark mother forests so long gone

and damp wooded ground

a hint in its sere core

of the taste of ripe loam

from some other distant shore

dreaming all one

bright sun and sands

‘til it becomes a hatrack

in some idling tourist’s hand

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Preposterous Analogies Drawn From Late Night Reflections On Gravity

The highest laws notwithstanding...
there are things

that accelerate to vacuum,

hurtling straight through complex time and space

across the undisplaced fabric

of infinite emptiness—

unbalanced quanta at the helm,

terminal velocity,

scanning for some fixed horizon,

tumbling to a missing point of mass—

ah…these vectors of surplus desire!

Each habit of affinity

instills a mad sense of place,

even to uncentered orbits,

even in an empty room.

It’s easy to remain relentless

on well traveled paths;

dying hard, the habits,

tracing new maps written in old scars,

so many things so well-survived,

scars so profoundly you,

there would not else-wise be a you.

So forget that silly inverse square—

just another law that begs repeal:

things at the furthest distance

always pull the most,

and absence yields the one metric

to reckon all strong forces of the heart.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Fire

Well—

this fire begot something

to trim the leavings of the night:

ancient spirits in the smoke;

rekindled hope speaks from each tongue of flame;

ember upon ember,

old inclinations leap to light,

then sift their ashes through my heart again.

I know the fire shall shortly die,

just as all regret is said to wane.

I taste these ashes one more time,

and know there is no reason to complain.

A taste of ashes may remain,

but no one ever need explain;

I would relive it all the same,

and take no moment to complain

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

All Is Well

by Steve King

All is well, I promise you.

Do not be concerned by my

sometimes detached bemusements.

These are but easy retreats

to unspoke and stubborn dreams

where the past pursues new forms

and new wants reshape old charms.

You must not think ill of me.

These diversions inform but

my own still imaginings—

sparring with my old designs,

sanctuary from keen foils,

or just finding silence there—

call it whatever you will,

it is just a tiny step

removed from your waiting world.

Yours is no thin shadow place

to leave behind. No burdens,

satisfactions unfulfilled,

no wasted unique glories

to drain the measure of me.

All is well enough, I know,

there in the outward brilliance

of common sight, where you wait

for my strange quiet to end.

I would explain everything

of this musing well within;

but there is still mystery

lying at the heart of it.

This mystery, this darkness

will not yield to my desires.

It’s a backdrop set against

somber glows from ancient pyres,

whose light never penetrates

inward from its waning fires.

And so shall the darkness grow

with accelerating years,

swallowing whole things once known,

making my dreams slip their grasp,

while old songs reprise as sighs.

I would trace each scattered spark,

and would try to harmonize

each echo, each fading note.

So far will my eyes not see,

nor ears own such reverie.

Yet all is well, believe it.

All remembrance must be so.

And so indeed, I wager,

are the unsung harmonies

a-play beneath your calling.

I will wait when it must be,

while you linger inwardly,

while you the passing choir

illumine with the flickering

of your own secret fire.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

No Man's Land

It seems I’m caught between competing instances,

the push of past and pull of future,

nearest bit of each disguised as ‘now,’

the mask of an eternal present.

And here I stand:

empty as the eye of a needle

through which the thread of all must hang,

history and destiny drawn slack,

‘til someday they shall serve to scribe a kind of ragged seam,

and unify this narrative of dreams.

Here,

a patient link

in the contingent tale,

cleaving to each instant, first and last,

listening for fanfares and echoes

of distant ends and fast receding means;

spinning a biography

to binding futures

sprung from some unknown predicate;

working through familiar inklings

though without a syllogistic claim…

The racing times clamoring to distract:

new and new and new,

whole worlds turning in the instant,

madnesses and bright imaginings—

I would be grateful even for what madness would convey.

Now, sharpening my seeing to that needle’s point,

finally to know those things my fates may soon endow,

when—

far too soon,

each dawning moment

slips to some other

now…

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Goodbyes

So much formality I should not force—

this coolness and austere reserve,

the unrelenting conversation

disguising just how little

there is now to be said.

Soon there will be silence,

and phantoms better suited

for this ceaseless shadow play;

the shrinking reservoir

of common memories

must serve to drain the leavings of each day.

Then shall I drink quickly of the lees,

and wonder freely of what might remain:

listening for echoes where once were sundry sounds;

inventing better days that should have been.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

John Brown

I sing only of a man—

the rage must find some other muse.

Of arms and readiments for war,

the patient reader must excuse.

I seek one spirit of that time,

to wonder how it so inclined.

True, Harper’s Ferry had the guns,

bristling in a phony peace.

There was fratricide enough,

and death was hard upon the land:

the time was torn, the spirit fouled:

while Kansas bled, Missouri howled.

A house divided must soon fall.

How sooner must a man decay,

no passion there to unify,

to pull and pummel and upbraid

when destiny would sound a call.

All high-born aims must come to naught

when deeds undo promises made.

And so he felt his place and time,

and raced a path his heavens laid.

How empty is the soul that goes

to any easy pathway shown,

but hesitates at the Abyss

and trembles at the great Unknown.

Like Abraham, like Joshua,

the million stars would light his way.

A black tide rising to reclaim

its covenant would seize the day.

The problem left for later minds

was how to gauge competing crimes:

did subjugation and the lash

bring on itself the fatal clash?

Did slavery itself reward

with bloody recourse to the sword?

Could any reason yet accord

the place of minion, right of lord?

He led his sons through Treason’s gate,

held them all as ready tools,

as acolytes who would delight

their father’s will and share his fate.

In the old Books, fathers are stern

but few would so expect this faith,

and, contemplating on their ends,

seek sacrifice and not amends.

No plan is safe that must depend

upon the vagaries of men,

and so the army he would raise

was lost before his rifles blazed.

This blow to challenge infamy

was short of force and long of pain;

the dreamy triumph was undone

and only martyrdom remained.

Then it was over, he was gone,

or so they thought who strung the knot:

the great uprising would abate

as only force might demonstrate.

As if his gravestone would provide

a dam against the coming tide;

as if the blot the nation held

might, without bloodshed, be expelled.

* * * * * * *

And now the bones lie peaceably

as far from rage as they might be,

forgotten in the farmstead turf,

his blood a fountain to the earth.

(Executed in 1859, John Brown remains one of the most important interlocutors in the United States’ continuing moral dialogue. Those who are interested in particulars should refer to W.E.B. Dubois’ biography, John Brown, and Thoreau’s A Plea For Captain John Brown. The John Brown Farm near Lake Placid, New York, is the final resting place of Brown and several others—including a number of his sons—either killed at the raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, or hanged soon thereafter by the State of Virginia.)

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Wars

Old wars began with the fog of incense,

screaming rams, weeping queens;

ships to sea, armors flashing to the sun,

reflecting gladness of the smiling gods

guiding armies to their onslaughts.

And then the cries attending butchery:

spent victors draped in gore, each one a deadly priest,

invoking well those mighty smiling ones

who parceled from the heights all precious days to die,

even at the hand of such another.

So Time unwinds the warriors’ thread,

Time, that even old gods learned to dread,

now wraps its glories in new gathered song.

But still the call of deadly priests invoking the stern one,

days to die awaiting yet, attending each new sun,

new rages to bring down the veil at last;

armor blackened with the smoke of shattering sacrifice,

proud ships grounded on the beaten sand,

sprawled broken-winged across the sand,

each day to die an eon of gnashing and lament,

the wars still ending as they all ever began:

one warrior at a time, all gallantry and banners and drums,

and incense curling round the weeping ones.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Summer Sudden

…then evenings

and leisured memories

of each receding day,

bright and perfect,

brilliant mirrors to our sly designs

no matter how we chose to look at them.

Slow slipping to twilight,

faces turned to painted masks,

purple in encroaching shadow,

bared limbs unweathered by the lateness.

We knew it was no longer spring

no matter what the calendar implied.

It seemed the change would never come,

sun would never leave us

to abandon and dark dreams,

whisperings and star-lit conjurings;

our silence at the last

amid the calls of crickets,

and low insect hums,

other shadowed harmonies,

gathered in dark corners

of the shrinking day.

Dense air made wet the tall iced glasses,

leaving dew on ready hands,

teasing ready lips with thoughts of quenching,

quenched lips taunting ready ears,

sighs of easy promise,

leaving for the moment

all prospect of renewal or regret.

All ready.

Rings clicked on the cold glasses,

jeweled facets in rose sunsets

glimmering like lesser stars

as hands moved through shadows

back and forth in fading light;

painted lips curled for the sipping,

tongues for languorous rolling

of all bright sensations;

heat and summer air,

all breath enfolded,

words poised for saying,

if words would even serve a purpose

in the long twilight;

if words would substitute for sensations

waiting close upon the tongue;

if words would better serve the tongue

than soft summer bites,

dark appetites there waiting to devour

the ripening fruit of lingering summer nights.

The scent of perfumed bodies

swift touching,

sudden feeling,

all unspoken accident,

that needn’t be explained,

wouldn’t be undone (how?)

by words or faint regrets

unsuited for belief

or even for remembering,

(how might it be undone?

how could they be undone?).

It was the season made us move,

could not escape the touch,

the scent

the feel;

wondering of one’s own scent

and how to touch

and what to feel

and what to say;

endless twilight fading slow

to ease all pleasure and repose.

Yes, summer indeed.

Just summer.

And the guard was down,

because by then we held nothing

not gladly surrendered.

Summer.

Just summer.

Season of long twilight

and brimming retrospect,

though briefly were the morrows

presaged in each rising moon,

light breaching that horizon,

looming ever larger,

casting our faint shades

through the blaze of magic lanterns.

I wondered of the morrow,

small dreaming of another day,

the long wait for new twilight,

new games to play.

I wondered of tomorrow…

still nothing beckoned from beyond,

save moonlight falling empty;

tired shadows fled across the vacant lawn,

while magic lanterns guttered

one

one…

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Seeing

I thought seeing you was best,

watching as the light would change,

waiting for the night to gather us.

But dreaming holds strange vision too,

that flickers through reluctant shadows,

touching on all wanting spirits there.

Those shadows, spirits, dreams, reveal anew

and serve as well as sense

to picture you.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Today

Today I will greet sunrise with a glance.

It will have to be enough, just seeing—

Empty of new words for the old things,

I’ve done the best to rid myself of them,

shaking bare the word-bins,

purging old and occult motives

with a stream of gilt verbosity.

Emptied are all ill-stocked compartments,

shuttered now, swept clean

of all compunction and desire,

leaving few the rooms that must be kept

to tend a winter season of the soul.

And I will see

what I will see.

It must be enough today

to ply the uses of proximity,

make of it a ready world,

here, where I may gather and restore.

Further words would only draw my thoughts

back to an unintelligible map

filled with strange detours and false starts,

crossroads where I’d be constrained

to choose approaches to unknown ends,

paths a fickle will might not refuse.

No loss, or not so much…

Words often either aren’t enough,

or ring of hubris.

At their simplest, just cries of the heart, I guess.

Aren’t there enough of those to go around?

And how the heart itself does change…

Who would ever trust those cries for long?

I will see…

When I’m ready, you’ll know.

I’ll pick up the phone,

bring more complication to your afternoon.

You’ll see the number flashing,

perhaps recall my voice

and what it said last time.

You may even smile as you reach,

expecting me to say—

But you would be dismayed, this day:

remembering that I was out of words,

I’d probably hang up before you spoke…

I trust there is some way you’ll be assured—

if I have given up on the old words

it’s only to divine another way.

More quickly than I might foretell from this present refuge,

within these moments of…not saying,

it’s certain some new musings will emerge

to win exemption from intemperate vows.

They will populate these shadows,

the silence and the empty space it fills;

will reach beyond old words,

beyond the weight of wearied thoughts

that lead only to this...

It remains to be seen.

I’ll relish what this solitude allows,

but just as gladly draw the curtain

on this closing day.

Old silence will beget a welcoming void,

to echo with new murmurs of its own.

All pious tribulations gone,

grim musings undone;

each ready moment

filled with whole new seasons just begun,

crowding out those tones of twilight,

calling, as a larkbird lauds the sun,

upon a waiting chorus of tomorrows,

new gathered spirits singing then as one.