RECENT POEMS

Added 11-18-06

 

 

 

 

 

Parenting

 

Sometimes I regret having never raised children.

 

Then I have lunch with a friend, or afternoon coffee,

or sit next to a stranger in a smoky bar

and suddenly I’m listening to parental confessions

about how Helen called after midnight,

a black eye, broken tooth, the bleeding just stopped,

yes, her husband got drunk and hit her again
but she already has an appointment with a lawyer.

This was the last straw, this time

she will divorce him (her third).

 

Or Stu, after three years on the straight and narrow,

a job he loves, up for promotion,

relapsed and is back in rehab.

He would have called earlier but they don’t allow

phone calls out during the first week.

 

Or it’s a cry for money before the electricity

is turned off, or the rent overdo, or the taxes.

It’s always something.

 

Or the kids barge in unannounced

with their children at heel,

everybody yapping at once.

The babysitter is sick, they are desperate,

and so you cancel your own dinner plans

to watch the grandkids for the evening.

It’s always something.

 

And all the while the friend or stranger

assumes I’m a kindred soul, a parent,

and therefore understand how they feel.

 

But what I hear is something else entirely:

the sweet voice of Helen in the school musical,

high notes glittering off a golden crown,

standing now by the coffee pot.

She has the voice of an angel.

 

And Stu’s tether is not addiction

but a taut rope up the middle in the bottom of the ninth,

zipping right through the busboy’s legs,

a walkoff hit that wins the Little League game.

 

There’s so much cheering and applause,

I no longer hear the complaints and regrets and self-doubts

for all the loud celebration—

Such wonder and awe and innocence

in this last gasp of childhood!

                                                         (Before the web of life

entangles them as it snared you

– and slowly, inevitably

begins to teach them

                                                      

the rules of parenting.)


 

 

 

 

 

 

Ecstasy

 

1

 

You said it was your first vaginal orgasm.

 

You said you were swept away

by the roar of the ocean outside the blue tent,

how suddenly your body took off in flight,

a gull riding the storm-winds—

 

and I believed you.

 

How could I not?

 

I watched you transform into someone savage,

from the usual pensive lady

balanced in pre-orgasmic fragility,

a lady who slipped into pleasure

as carefully as an overweight matron

eased onto a cushion, not wanting

the springs to squeal.

 

I saw you lose it.

 

I saw the old tension contorted into something

that looked like terror,

your mouth falling open,

the grimace, your eyes hard as marbles;

you looked like a prisoner facing the firing squad

in the moment before execution.

 

You lost it.

The gasp that finally emerged from the gaping

mouth was a horn of relief blaring

 

release, release, release!

 

I was there. I saw this. I saw you.

 

Then why, forty years later, must you pretend

this never happened?

 

 

2

 

We were camping on the Oregon coast.

 

The blue tent, picked up at a garage sale

and needing patches to reinforce fabric

rotten with mold, was cheap,

affordable to grad students like us,

young and in love,

still learning what it meant for us

to be a couple.

 

We were camping on the Oregon coast

in a dank blue tent

to recharge our batteries before finals.

 

We put up the tent in the wind-swept grass

at the edge of a stretch of sand, perhaps

fifty yards from the ocean at high tide,

a blue smudge on a vast landscape.

 

We were alone.

 

We owned the sand.

We owned the ocean.

We owned the universe.

 

 

 

 

3

 

I have no idea how many orgasms I’ve witnessed

in a life with four wives and too many girlfriends

and little that has lasted. But I most

remember yours in the blue tent.

 

I brought this up years after our divorce

and you pretended not to remember,

as if memory might compromise some kind of

freedom, or independence, or decision

you’d made about your past.

 

As if being swept away by the ocean

(if that’s what happened)

was a weakness.

 

I didn’t push the point

even though I can still, even now,

see the grimace, the marble eyes,

and hear the horn of release

like a gasp of exhaustion

after extraordinary effort.

 

I didn’t push it but I can’t forget it

and I wonder why it isn’t the same

 

for you.

 

 

4

 

I am haunted by your orgasm

not because it was a rare moment

(though it was)

but because you claim

to have forgotten it, as if

it never existed except in my mind,

which is the definition, I believe, of

 

hallucination.

 

But I was there. I was the one

into whose arms you collapsed,

exhausted, spent,  gasping for breath,

the one to whom you spoke,

trying to explain this special thing

that had happened to you

just now.

 

Just now—

this new wondrous experience that wrapped

around us like a damp fog

hiding everything farther distant than

this very moment, the same morning fog

that would greet us and push us closer

lest we lose sight of one another

at the day’s new beginning.

 

I would have thought such a  moment

would change your life.

 

I would have thought such a moment

could never be forgotten.

 

I don’t think I am wrong here.

I think you’re hiding something

 

still

 

because if I hallucinated this,

I hallucinate everything.

 

 

5

 

I don’t want to relive your orgasm.

I don’t want you in my life again.

 

What I want is a postcard

of a blue smudge on a vast landscape

in which happened a miracle of sorts,

release release release!

 

so I might open the scrapbook of my life

and remember the blue tent

and remember the ocean’s roar

and remember the marble eyes

and remember the contorted face

and remember the exhaustive gasp,

the collapse into my arms—

 

watching this dance once again,

hearing the cosmic music once again

and thereby remembering

 

I was actually,

I was truly,

I was miraculously,

in some way

 

Connected—

 

to you

to the sand

to the ocean

to the stars

 

right then, right there.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Failure

 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

 

There was supposed to be a son in Seattle who

called to say he had tickets to the Seahawks game

and would I join him?

 

There was supposed to be a daughter

in labor and a nervous son-in-law

to comfort in the waiting room

before getting the good news, a boy, a girl, a baby

to toast with raised cigars and the best brandy.

 

There was supposed to be a legacy in flesh.

 

What I have instead are books.

They  gather dust on a few library shelves,

unread, abandoned, unfleshly,

forgotten by everyone but me.

 

What kind of family is this?

 

The only family I have.  A legacy

from choices made so many years ago I can’t

remember making them.

 

No one told me there’d be so much

to miss later, no one  told me the flesh

of literature – this was the attempt! –

would grow wrinkled so soon,

as neglected as an old man

stretched out on his final bed.

 

If anyone told me about regrets,

I didn’t listen.

 

I was the last to learn that the Muse

is a seductive, manipulative whore

who swells from creative seed, delivering

the carnal corpse of

 

Failure.

 

I was the last to learn. 

                                           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the Mirror Said

 

By all the measures

of his profession

he was a failure.

 

Only when he looked

in the mirror

did he see

how much he'd accomplished

against adversity.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Proposition

 

Life is short

Time is swift

 

Adrift, whoever

Courts death

Without paradigm

For afterlife

 

No time

For breath


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weather Report

 

Rain soaked lawn

Bloated earth

Sputtering puddles

Like afterbirth

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aging With Grace

 

Youth is wasted

On the young

 

Old age is squandered

On the dead

 

Better to lust

In the mind's bed

Where sheets cling hot

And dreams get fed

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Cemetery

 

Yellow gold red brown

Fallen leaves adorn the ground

One three seven ten

Counting gravestones never ends


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Old Man

 

 

An old man

Is a young man

Whose skin doesn't fit

 

An old man

Is a young man

Who talks to himself

 

An old man

Is a young man

Who takes naps

 

An old man

Is a young man

Whose eyes get sore

 

An old man

Is a young man

Whose smiles are sad

 

An old man

Is a young man

Whose old man

 

Was right

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confession

 

I know enough

To know

How little

I know

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Regrets

 

Regrets are cancers

In the brain

That fester inward

Toward the heart

The vanguard

Against pain

Fled long ago

 

What remains

Is no match

For waves

Of self-doubt

The usual latch

Against content

 

What is meant

By regret

Is knowledge

Of Wrong

Things done

What's won

In experience

Is lost

In torment

 

It's not that

You can't change

The past

It's that

You can't change

Anything


 

 

 

Why not be a poet in old age?

It’s too late to get rich

And poets never do.

A novel takes so many words.

A poem is brooded so.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I Think I Need

 

What I think I need

Is not what I will get.

None will care or heed

Desire's old regret.

 

What I think I need

Is clear only to me,

As potent as a seed--

Profound simplicity!

 

What I think I need

Is not what I have known.

I will not succeed

To harness flesh and bone.

 

Yet I've come close as skin,

A night accompanied

By rapture in a spin--

Almost grasping what I need.

 

But that was long ago.

What I think I need

Today is moving slow--

And silence as my creed.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Marie’s Memorial

 

I stand as still as a corpse and stare at photos,

Playbills, cast lists of forgotten plays

On abandoned stages. If the wages of death is love,

Then love fills this room. But in the corner,

Lurking like a naughty child, is more sadness

Than I want to feel. All the years of the past,

Dripping memories like rank fruit, rot

And fertilize the heart of this place.

So much has changed.

So much has been forgotten.

A lesson earned is not a lesson learned:

Those times were good -- and never can return.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography

 

I have a leak in my soul

And through it my character flows

Drip by drip. The Yellow Pages

Do not list Plumbers

For the Soul. The sages

At church have much to say

On this matter but nothing

They know makes sense to me.

 

I have a crack in my heart

Through which my spirit wants

To go. The wages of sleep

Do not pay the rent. Dreams

Without spirit do not spend.

A spirit lost is a spirit gone.

I have a leak in my soul

And through it my character flows.

 

I have a rent in my mind

And everything unwinds.

I don’t know where I’ve been.

I don’t know where I go.

I have a leak in my soul

And through it my character flows

Into the vast unknown

Far, so far, from home.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Epistemological Uncle

 

He sits alone at the bar:

A beer, a shot, a smoke.

Body bent from hard work,

Face flushed from hard drink,

He’s younger than he looks.

 

He bothers no one – yet.

We watch him all the same;

We’re waiting for the change.

 

Sometimes it happens early,

Sometimes it happens late.

We wager when and how change comes—

A dollar gets you in.

 

Tonight it takes four beers, three shots.

Slouched over the bar, he straightens up,

He looks around, a sparkle in his eye.

He clears his throat. He coughs.

His chin tilts up, he glances high,

And all the bar is his.

 

No one knows why it begins.

Does he listen in to loud harangues

Up and down the bar, where

Every politician is an ass

And every crook a star?

He’s like the wolf who in deep sleep

Scents danger down the way

And rises up with snarling teeth

To find the moon – and bay.

 

What moon hangs from the ceiling now?

What does he see and serve

With all this howling he begins:

“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”

 

Who is he talking to?

“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”

Is it moon or God he sees,

“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”

 

The howling stops.

He who had the center stage

Gets up and slowly walks away

Unsteadily and out the door.

Just this – and then the moment’s gone.

 

At the juke I play a song.

Whoever won collects the bets,

It’s whiskey all around.

 

What just happened?

I don’t know.

The fact is, no one knows.

Maybe that’s the point.

 

In the bar an echo howls,

“Do you really knooooooooow?”

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter Sun

 

A cold sharp light

Cuts up the gray sky

Until it bleeds blue.

 

The birds get confused.

Their loud chattering

Sounds like panic.

 

On the wet grass

A shadow settles in

Like a dazed snake.

 

So much light

Makes me squint

Through my depression.

 

My mood craves gray,

Not this damn

Blue blood.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Body

 

When she stretches on the bed,

I can’t look elsewhere instead.

 

The subtle turning of her lip

Suggests the curve below her hip.

 

No vocabulary tells

The special way her bosom swells.

 

All the length of limb and leg

Seem designed to make me beg.

 

In her navel’s hollow lies

A secret far beyond the skies,

 

And what her mons veneris spells

Has mystery in decibels.

 

Oh, I could go on and on—

But there she lies, and now she yawns…