POLITICAL POEMS

These words...

These words are written
for Margaret Hassan, friend
of the Arab world, born in Ireland
married to Tahseen Ali Hassan, citizen
of Iraq, a woman who gave
the best years of her life
to caring for the less fortunate
in Iraq.

They seized you
they held you hostage
in dark cells for days
then they knelt you down
they hooded you
and put a bullet through your head
in the name of Allah

Allah Akhbar!
God is Great!

These words are written
for the murdered and the murderers
for the wounded insurgent who, on that same day,
elsewhere in Iraq, lay wounded, unarmed, powerless
on the bloody floor of the mosque;
and for the young United States Marine
who walked in on him, scared, deranged, yelling:
"He's fucking faking he's dead, he's faking
he's fucking dead"; and raised his weapon
and shot him point blank in the head.

Allah Akhbar!
God is Great!

These words are written
for the killers and the killed
for the women and children of Darfur,
chased from their homes, raped, their villages
razed and burned, and for the Janjaweed
who kill them. These words
are written for the men and women and children
on those Israeli buses and in the market places
and restaurants of Israel, and for the Palestinian boys
who come with explosives wrapped
around their slender waists,
and blow the innocent
to kingdom come.

Allah Akhbar!
God is Great!

These words are written
for six million Jews;
for Rwanda and Cambodia;
for all races exterminated
out of ignorance, and fear, and rage.

These words are written
for those two thousand seven hundred and twenty six
human beings who died in the attack
on the World Trade Center towers,
September 11, 2001, in the name of Allah;
they are written in sorrow
and anger for the vengeful, demented
band of brothers who destroyed them.

These words are written
for those tens of thousands of innocents in Africa
cast out from their dwellings, beaten, murdered,
tyrannized, driven from one bleak, unwelcoming
refugee camp to another,
big-bellied with malnutrition,
their children starving to death before their eyes.

These words are written
for the victims and the perpetrators;
they are written
for us all.

"Father, forgive them," Jesus said,
"for they know not what they do."

Know not.
They know not.
They know not what they do.

Rage, rage drives the world.
Savage, unconscionable, self-righteous rage,
as we go about the business of our lives
and overpopulate this earth we are given to live on;
as we crowd in, ever closer on each other,
each of us wanting, wanting, needing,
needing the wherewithal to stay alive,
each one of us the one
who deserves to live, the one
who deserves to thrive,
we rage.

We rage because we do not receive our due
while others receive theirs. We rage
out of fear. We rage
out of frustration, desperation. We rage
and kill out of self-righteousness
and righteousness, because our need
is greater than the other man's need,
because our God
is greater than the other man's God.
We rage and kill.

These words are written
for all of us who rage and kill.
These words are written
in prayer that we may yet learn
to know. To know what it is we do.

Because it will take that consciousness,
that knowing what we do, to save the world.
It will take the consciousness of, first, a few,
then a few hundred souls,
then a few hundred thousand.
It will take the consciousness of millions
to save the world from ourselves.
It will take knowing what we do.

It will take not acting out of rage,
not re-acting, not acting
out of unconsciousness. It will take
not following the orders of unconscious men
who act out of their own inner rage
and hidden impotence;
out of their own ignorance. It will take
knowing those men for who they are, men
without consciousness or conscience.

These words are written
on behalf of those who can no longer
speak them for themselves. For the dead.
For the killers and the killed.
For all of us. Let us pray.
Let us know, always,
what it is we do.



Sometimes, Bush…

… when I see you
in your photo ops
I am inspired
to feel sorry for you:
those moments when the fear
shines through from beyond
the bravado, when your eyes
ask plainly, When
will they find out
who I really am?
At such moments, Bush,
I see you little-boy naked,
all revealed before
the camera's eye, the emperor
with his once fearsome
dick and balls shrunk up
in terror. And my heart
goes out to you
at such moments--that is,
if I manage to catch it
before the cruel laugh.



Here he is…

Well, here he is, neatly
packaged in his small
box, ready for the Xmas
market, the all-new
George W. Bush talking
action figure. Really.
He has two costumes,
his grey business suit
with its bright red tie
and his fighter pilot
flight suit. When you
push his button he has
some nice patriotic
words for your children
to remember. Maybe
George could play with
Ken and Barbie. He could
send Ken off to his war,
and hump Barbie while
Ken is gone. He could
drive Barbie's pink car
and swim in her pool with
her friends. He could
take off in a fighter plane
and land it on the deck
of a US aircraft carrier.
He could climb down from
the fighter plane and say
Mission Accomplished.



Yes, Bush,

I am deeply
sickened by those images
now emanating from
your conquered Falluja:
the torture cells, the blood-
spattered walls, that black
mask like those we saw
worn by those terrible
assassins, standing indifferent
with automatic weapons
behind their victims. Yet
I confess I would be more
deeply disturbed had I not
seen those images emanating
from your Abu Ghraib:
the bleak, feces-covered
cells, the naked prisoners
subjected to sexual mockery
and piled in pyramids for
the pleasure of the guards
with their leering grins
and their victory signs.
So are there degrees
of inhumanity, I must ask
myself? I suppose perhaps
there are: still and all,
I find it hard to summon
much in the way of self-
righteous indignation, given
the crimes we have committed,
you and I, Bush, in the name
of freedom. I do not wish
to seem unduly sarcastic
or facetious, and yet I feel
compelled to ask, How do you
square this, Bush, with the one
you claim as your personal
savior Jesus, when you pray
to him? Because I remember
we tortured and killed him,
too, didn't we, gruesomely,
and with maximum cruelty?



An Eleventh Plague: At Passover

I have seen them in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
I have seen them in London, Paris, Rome.
I have seen them on the streets of New York City,

in the parks, in the subways,

in the restaurants. I have seen them on the beaches
of Southern California and Hawaii. I have seen them
in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, around the Pyramids.
I have seen them in Red Square, outside the Kremlin.
I have seen them on the gondolas in Venice.

Our daily music has become the first few bars
of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or

The Wilhelm Tell overture,

or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik reduced to tinny jingles.
We hear it in the airports, in the supermarkets, in the hospitals.
We hear it in the deserts, on the beaches, on the mountaintops.

They are everywhere. We surrender our lives to them,
dividing our hours and days into the minutes
that we purchase for them, and seek desperately to fill.
Not one moment shall ever risk being empty,
not even in the vast, grand solitude of nature. Not even
on the freeways. Even in the thick of traffic, stalled,
isolated, encapsulated, we seek solace in what we call
communication. We punch in tiny numbers,
on our tiny keypads, listening for the magic
of the ring and knowing that our time will not be wasted,
no matter that we gladly waste the time of others
in our desperation. One single moment of boredom
is one moment more than we can bear. One single moment
of silence or solitude oppresses us intolerably.

We are wired. We are wireless. We speed dial.
We connect. We talk. We speak, not in tongues,
but in a multitude of languages. We have so much
to be said, so many thoughts of such importance,
needing urgently to be passed on to others,
we have so many needs to fill…

Busy?

No problem. I'll put my other call on hold
and take yours on call waiting. Or leave a message
on my voice mail, and I'll get back to you
as soon as possible.
And by the way, remember, you can always
catch me on my cell phone. Any time.



"Bound and Gagged"
(after Ed Moses)

They stand there, gazing
out at us balefully, from behind
their enclosure of wooden struts
and chicken wire, bound and gagged
by the ties that hold them carefully
in place, two dozen of them,
more perhaps, erect and naked,
proud, aloof under stark prison lights;
all of them strangely human, some tall,
some short, some male, with long,
hard dongs, some female, with their
pendulous breasts; some decorated
here and there with fading paint,
or spare, ritual objects; spirits
of gods awaiting their release.

Ceremonial, these carved figures
from the wisdom of the still living
ancient mind (from Papua, New Guinea,
the Ivory Coast, the Congo) have been
held captive here, in what we call
our world, standing for decades
in the museum basement, unattended,
their power unexercised, their magic
mute. And now, brought out
to stand among us in their silent rows,
they are still regal in their presence,
still commanding--in that way
the gods command, unquestioned,
unquestioning of their own authority.

And in that presence, my mind
turns to those other prisoners
of ours, today, those men
and women held in Guantanamo,
in Abu Ghraib, of ancient heritage,
and fierce, and proud in their own way,
and locked away, unheard, beyond
the reach of law or justice; we fear
that ancient, ruthless power
with which we invest those different
from ourselves, and keep them
in the basement of our lives, bound
and gagged, awaiting the timeless call
of a destiny beyond our comprehension.

For this is what we do,
in our clean world of living rooms,
and televisions, and flush toilets;
it's what what we do to those
we do not understand, and those
we fear, and those who threaten us,
guardians of the dark gates between
sanity and madness, our dream
and the nightmare of that dark,
chaotic underworld whose power
we barely dare to sense. And so
we cage them in, we lock them
in our basement; and, on fit occasion,
we bring them out to gaze back
at their ritual, barbaric forms,
discomforted by who they are
and what we do to tame them.
They show us more about ourselves
than we would ever care to know.



Anniversary

Let us not pray,
since prayer offers us
the comfortable exculpation
of piety. Let us not say, once again,
Never again: we have shown ourselves
incapable of honoring such oaths.

We kill. We kill in the hundreds,
in the thousands, in the hundreds
of thousands, in the millions.
We kill each other, our own species,
the human race. We have no excuse.

Let us not resort
to words: words have already
failed us, repeatedly,
and emptied of their meaning:
Atrocity. Depravity. Barbarism.
Inhumanity. God.
We cannot atone for our actions
with empty expressions of piety or regret.

So let us not speak today. Let us be silent,
and breathe, and acknowledge
who we are, and what we have done,
and grieve.

The Liberation of Auschwitz, January 27, 1945

NEW POEMS


SILENCE

And so you chose to leave us,
"without a trace," slamming the door
in the face of friends and family.
No note. No explanation. Only
a few small, neat, accusatory piles
of personal items, in your apartment,
addressed to individuals you thought
would need to hear from you in some way;
and your new music website, closed out,
friends’ pictures gone, your recent songs
erased—all but the one about the "afterlife."
A message, there? And then your dog,
the one you doted on, the one you loved
more than any other living being,
abandoned. Oh, you did leave her food
and water, and you locked the door
behind you with the knowledge
that she would be found, an d fed,
and cared for. Still, her presence there,
alone, made your disappearance seem
an act of desperation. And we, left
with nothing but the self-evidence
of your absence from our lives,
have no choice now but to invent
our own bleak stories, each of us
in our own way: that you chose
for reasons unfathomable to us,
to end your life; that the debts
you left behind you, the three months’
rent, the unpaid credit cards, the notice
of eviction, the disconnected telephone,
all proved too much. Or that the end
of some unknown, perhaps secret
love affair had left you in despair;
or even that a current, joyful one,
had caused you to elope to Canada
or other parts unknown, in ecstasy.
Or that you decided, not to end it all,
but simply disappear, to make a new life
south of the border, in Mexico, say,
or Costa Rico. Remember, you had done
something similar before, uprooting,
and heading north to San Francisco.
So much, though, for the jaunty tone
of your recent phone calls and emails.
So much for the frequent glib assurances
that you were doing fine. So much
for the upbeat descriptions of a new life,
a new apartment, new furniture and clothes.
It was all just another fiction, intended
to persuade yourself as much as us.
Whatever. And whatever choice you made,
this was the big fuck-you of all time,
Alistair, wasn’t it? An act of rage,
I’ll show them, a kind of vengeance
on what you saw to be an unkind world
aligned against you, inhabited
by unkind people, who never failed
to disappoint you. The final irony
being how much you were truly loved.
How much, already, knowing nothing,
so many of us miss you in our lives.
And all this time, out there, while you
hatched out your plot, in the real world,
Katrina was busy snatching human lives,
Rita was bearing down, and bloody chaos
continued to hold sway in Iraq. So what
are we to learn from this strange
synchronicity, if not the insecurity
of all being, the precious and vulnerable
gift of life, the only lasting value: love.



St. Joseph

Our friend Mary, who is
of the Catholic faith, said,
ask St. Joseph. St. Joseph, she told us,
is the patron saint of real estate; well,
actually, I suppose, of homes,
since it was he, with Mary,
who gave a home to Jesus. We had decided
to put our home of more than thirty years
on the market and, guess what? In the hottest
of hot markets, no bids.

Well, not being myself
of the Christian faith, I deemed it
presumptuous of me to be asking favors
of a Christian saint. But I did recall
how my mother, when she was alive,
had this special relationship with the saints:
she would read me their stories at bedtime
from this book, "All Saints at Six O'Clock,"
(six o'clock was bedtime for little children
in those days); and when anything was lost
at our house, she would say,
ask St. Anthony: "St. Anthony, St. Anthony,
come to my aid." And soon enough
the lost thing would be found.

And for myself, I would say,
while I have problems with the Christian God,
I do recognize in Jesus, as in the Buddha,
a man of the spirit, a great teacher;
and for this reason, perhaps, as well as
my mother's abiding faith in them,
I do have a special affection
for those men and women who followed him
and practiced his teachings in their lives,
each in his or her own way. And I believe also
in the special powers granted
to such men and women of the spirit,
greater than any of the temporal powers
we know, to perform wonders.

So we took the little four-inch statue
of St. Joseph our friend Mary gave us
and, as per her instructions, buried him,
head down, face-in toward the house,
a few feet from our home.
And, judging myself unqualified to do so,
I asked my long-departed mother
to intercede for us with Joseph, the saint
with whom she now perhaps consorts
on the best of terms: "St. Joseph,
St. Joseph, come to our aid."

So far, no bids.
But I have to tell you that it does feel good
to have reconnected once more,
for at least a little while with my mother,
and her unquestioning faith.



Echoes

Sometimes I hear his voice
in mine: my father's turn
of phrase, a sudden, plaintive
note, a particular tonality,
a hint of affected modesty.
I hear it when I read a line
aloud, or start to preach
my version of the gospel.

Sometimes, more startling,
I hear my own voice in my son's:
a raising of the timbre to sound
a note of protest, indignation,
the anger carefully concealed
behind a conventional politeness
or a charming smile, the quick,
ingratiating deference of tone.

And thinking this, I wish now
I had heard my grandfather,
who died before I could recall
his voice. From his stern picture
I imagine it firm, but gentle,
the master copy of the voice
from which my father's
was imprinted, and my own.

And I hope now, too, to live
for long enough to hear in Joe,
my grandson's voice that echo
of the generations, father down
to son; and perhaps not least
for him to recognize in his,
when he is grown to manhood,
some echo of the sound of mine.




Today, Saturday

I found myself this morning standing
in meditation at the door of my own death.
It was open. I stood on the very threshold,
dazzled. Behind me, everything was darkness.
Before me, light. This was strange, I thought.
I would have expected it otherwise, but no:
everything I knew in life was darkness.
It was the unknown that was light.
To step forward, into it, I must first
say my goodbyes to everything
with which I am familiar: to the objects
that surround me, to my unfinished work,
those many poems I have not yet written,
to those I love. To those I have not known
and yet have seen their faces every day.
To those to whom I still feel animosity
or hatred in my heart. I must let them go:
for there will be no opportunity to return.
I did not choose this morning to step forward,
into that light. I chose instead to stand
in quiet contemplation of what lies before,
what lies behind. A moment of silent ecstasy,
and peace. Knowing still that, when it comes,
in reality, in my life, the moment of my death
will not be of my choosing. Still, one way
or another, it will come. I will stand there,
on that threshold, and will take that step,
despite myself. Forward. Into the light.




Tuesday

Birdsong.
Wind chime.
The scrabble
of dog's paws
on the wood
surface of the deck.
Far off,
the rough and rumble
of traffic on the freeway.
A chopper, chasing down
the latest crime
or accident.
Birdsong.
Wind chime.
Bark.

And in Rome,
black smoke
from the Sistine Chapel.
No Pope.



At the Great Temple, Abu Simbel:
My “ Ozymandias”

So there they sit, the great ones, centuries later,
still sightless, gazing out across the desert sands,
the four of them—well, three and a half of them,
if you discount the one that’s come to pieces,
head off, half his torso gone, tumbled in great,
shattered boulders strewn down below his feet.
Talk about grandeur. Talk about colossal.
Talk about beauty, serenity, mangnificence.
Talk about awe, even—but that’s a hard one,
with a thousand fellow tourists tramping
through the site. Still, words are inadequate.
And who am I to write about them anyway?
Some Johnny-come-lately tourist, protected
in the bubble of my tour group, camera dangling,
trotting along with my laptop after all the rest.
My head is way below even the lowest level
of their great stone feet. I look up, dizzy.
They look out, distant, not seeing, seeing
further than I can imagine, across centuries
of time, way past the pitiless moonscape
of the desert sands, heads in the azure sky,
toward the the stars that only they can see.



The Watchers

I see them watching over us. They stand high
on the rooftops of tall buildings, on the median strip
of highways, spaced at intervals, at the perimeter
of airport runways as we leave. Sometimes I spot them
crowded in speeding pickup trucks, submachine guns
at the ready, watching, ready to protect us from attack.
Oh, if you wave to them, you find they’re friendly:
they’ll wave back cheerfully, perhaps a little sheepish
to be watching you. But they’re still there. Our guide
explains: “We lose just one American, you can guess
what happens to the whole Egytian tourist industry.”
Poof! We have this silent watcher who goes with us
everywhere. I noticed today what I missed before:
he wears a pistol at his waist, and smiles politely,
promising that nothing terrible will happen to us
on our journey. And so we come in gaping droves,
and ride past, in our buses and our river boats,
take pictures with our digitals and videocams,
while they, our watchers, never cease to watch.



Three morning haikus

A book, a candle,
a blanket around my knees;
otherwise, nothing.

A siren shrills
at dawn: no cock crows
in the city.

The ocean
of city lights below. Up here,
silence, contemplation.



The View from Hubble

Imagine
marvelous places
we have never visited, a million
light years distant, light
and darkness such as we have
never seen, holes
in the universe, bodies
of substances unknown, the swirl
of gases as yet undiscovered,
colors unimagined, fragments
of matter exploding outward,
inward, explosions beyond
comprehension, beyond
the power of a billion billion
of your h-bombs, particles
greater than our galaxy,
shot out in space
at speed of light, imploding,
inward, towers of nebulae, spaces
expanding infinitely, collapsing
in on themselves. Imagine a sun
six hundred thousand times
more luminous than our puny Sol.

The names we give them:
Sombrero Galaxy,
Hoag's Object, Galaxy Centaurus A,
Tarantula Nebula, Little Ghost,
Monocerotis Star. Say them
aloud. Rehearse
their magic. Spell them.

Sit down. Sit still. Breathe.
Breathe with eyes closed, to see
the majesty of a thousand universes
inside ourselves: as outside
so within, reflecting, mind
of the Buddha, one, a million
worlds, all one, within. Imagine
a universe of universes
beyond comprehension, mother
of all the gods we have yet
managed to conceive, matter
and anti-matter, one, all,
everything; no space, no time,
inside, outside, breathing,
all one, what
it is.


116 Fears

Pain. Death. Dying. Dying alone,
dying in pain, sudden death, death
in a car crash, death in a place crash.
Death in fire. Burning. Injury.
Losing a n arm, losing a leg.
incapacity, disability, impotence,
incontinence. Needing people.
Needing someone to clean me up,
get me dressed, needing someone
to feed me. Not knowing. Losing
my way, losing my mind, losing
my manhood. Losing control. Losing
my wife, my daughter, my sons,
my grandchildren. Losing everything.
No money. No place to live, no job.
No means of support. No love.
No belongings. No clothes. Being seen
naked. Being seen to be foolish
or inadequate. Dancing. Being awkward,
being incompetent. Being in unknown
territory. Being unknown. Finding
myself in situations of perceived danger
or discomfort. Being ridiculed, hated,
scorned, mocked. Being exposed
for the fraud I suspect myself to be
at weak moments. Weakness. Being
seen to be weak or incompetent. Seen
to be small. Inconsequence. Cowardice.
Vulnerability. Being put on the spot.
Public speaking. Being called upon.
Falling. Falling from a great height,
being pushed. Being pushed into
something. Fear of the void. Fear
of nothingness, emptiness. Fear
of no meaning. No sense. Being hurt
by othersfor no reason. Being beaten.
Hurting myself by hurting others.
Cruelty. Torture. Being deprived
of air. Being crushed, being buried
alive, not being able to move,
being pinned down, stuck, powerless.
Earthquakes. Being taken. Being
taken for a fool. Being robbed. Being
taken advantage of, being taken
for granted. Not being loved. Being loved
too much, being suffocated, smothered.
Drowning. Watching suffering. Watching
others suffer without being able to help.
Cancer. Disease. Slow death by cancer
or disease. Lacking the courage to face
disease and dying. Living a life without
meaning, without purpose. Being useless.
Knowing nothing about whatever lies
beyond life. Not being alive. Oblivion.
The end of everything. No me.
Nothing. No more. Never.



Moon Flight

Last night we flew
to the moon together. Our landing there
was smooth, uneventful. Everything
was perfect, if you can
imagine. Outside, romping
like kids, we saw our reflections
in the glinting visor of the silent
astronaut, our guide and escort,
sent to supervise our weightless
explorations with the solicitude
of a benevolent teacher
in the school yard. Everything
was moonlit, at once bright
and silvery-shadowed. Rocks,
sharply defined, stretches of sandy
dirt, almost bone white,
untrodden, perfect…

It was on our return to earth,
though, that we were most amazed.
We gazed up at the distant moon
from a place where many people
gathered, for reasons that were not
quite clear, but yet, we knew,
necessary; people
who had never been there
as we had, who sat quietly
at outdoor tables, drinking coffee
seriously, in white cups. And we told
each other the story then, told those
others, too, who listened to us,
in astonishment: Just yesterday,
we said, we were there, on the moon's
surface, and it was beautiful beyond
the daily worries of the mind,
beyond all words. And we were
there, in moonlight, if you can
imagine, wandering
hand in hand, like kids,
across the dunes.



For Sarah

December 13^th, then. Santa Lucia.
Saint Lucy's Day. The festival of light,
or lights. The Christian Hanukah, really,
though just one single day, not the eight
the Jewish calendar celebrates. Anyway,
today's your birthday. My mother,
a good Anglican in the high church
tradition, who observed the calendar
of saints, religiously, told us your name
should rightly have been Lucy.

No, you were Sarah. You are Sarah;
even so you were given, on Lucy's Day,
the gift of light. I see it, knowing
that others see it also, when they talk
about that unique quality that's yours.
I say it's the light within, the light
that's always there, and always yours.

And yet, in the same first breath,
you received another, different gift,
more burdensome: the gift of awareness
of the dark side. It was not the one
we would have chosen for you; still,
it was perhaps the gift you needed
in order that the light, in contrast,
could shine brighter for the rest of us.

I see you sometimes struggling
to find a path through it, unaware
that even when things seem to you
their darkest, that special inner light
shines through. My wish for you,
this birthday, as on all Lucy's Days,
is that the light that is the brightest
of your gifts remain the one
that you keep giving to the world,
which needs it more than ever; that
no matter what you're called upon
to suffer in the vicissitudes of life,
you'll always find the power within
to turn it instantaneously into light!




From "Rivers & Tides"
(Andy Goldsworthy)

He lay down
spread-eagled
on a bed of dry
pebbles. Then the rain came.
When he got back up
he left behind
the light gray shadow
of his body
on the dark, wet stones.

He walked through the village
gathering dandelions
in a bucket
at the roadside,
in the hedgerows;
then took them out
to the river. Finding
a round pool in the rocks
he filled it up
with dandelion heads,
revealing at once the surprising
receptiveness of rock,
and the brilliant, golden
beauty of the dandelion.



O Buddha

O Buddha, your image
is before me. You wear
your gentle smile. Your feet rest
soles up, on your thighs,
your right arm touches
earth. In your left hand
you hold the golden bowl.
O Buddha, how you touch my heart
with your serenity.



Sam

Sam, she said,
is a slow man.
He does things
slowly. For months
now, he has been
dying. Slowly.
Meticulously. Out-
lasting all professional
predictions, and with full
attention to the detail of
that process. This week,
she says, he has been
declining, slowly. Just
yesterday he slipped
quietly into a coma;
they thought he would
not last the night.
But then this morning,
he opened his eyes
again, and smiled
at the touch of her
fingers on his face,
and nodded at her words,
content to wait yet
another day, content
to leave us
slowly.



Mind still good

Her voice on the telephone
is filled with hopelessness
and pain. The man she's loved
and lived with forty years
and more, my friend, is dying.
Slowly. Over long weeks.
Of cancer. "When mind still
good," she tells me, "body
want to keep holding on, you
see, body not ready to let go."
To this day, long an exile
from the country of her birth,
an eastern woman married
to a western man, here, in
this country, his country, hers
by adoption only, she still finds
the language foreign: still drops
those odd, unneeded verbs
and articles with abandon.
Her words come spilling out
in torrents, though, too fast
for my mind to catch all but
a few: the days and nights
spent nursing him, alone
and helpless as the disease
deprives him daily of more
body function; the guilt
of weariness and anger,
of being past ready for
this man she loves to
leave; and being past ready herself
to rest, though
she could never bring herself to tell him
so. I find myself listening
to what she does not wish
to say, and what she does:
She says, "Mind still good."
And I hear: Mind. Still. Good.



Well, Sam

Well, Sam, they had you
finally in a small wooden box
surrounded by white flower
displays. Your framed photo
gazed out at us with a half
serious smile. To your left
the Stars and Stripes, folded
in a neat triangle--reminder
of your service to the country.
A parachuter? Sam, I never
knew this, or perhaps did,
and had forgotten. Hard,
though, to imagine you,
jumping from an airplane!
To your left, your book
of Tamura Ryuichi's poems,
the work of years, a work
of true devotion to what
you thought was beautiful
and true, what you deemed
your work must be, to share
with the rest of us. White
candles flicker on either side,
reminders of the fragility
of your lost life, and ours.
The thin and twisting wisp
of smoke from an incense
stick, rising past your photo,
past the flowers, fragrant.
And, after all our words
of regret, after the words
of admiration, deep respect
and, yes, Sam, genuine love,
after everything we could
think to say in solace to
each other and ourselves,
then came the slow chant
of the Buddhist sutra, Okyo
and Oshoko, rising, sad
and reverent as we offered
incense at the altar. Sam,
my friend, I do remember
your dislike of the word
God, but now you're gone
I dare to say it to you
anyway: God speed you
on your journey, wherever
your spirit takes you from
this day.



Rent-a-Muse

"This is ridiculous," I say. There she sits,
bit of a hang-dog expression, white gown
definitely unpressed, lyre dangling down
at her side, and clearly long neglected.
"When I asked for a muse," I say, "I was
expecting someone who looked, more,
well, let's say, professional." "So," she
comes back, tartly, "you get what you
deserve, I guess. You're no great catch
yourself. Anyway, I'm here, let's just get
down to it, okay?" "Okay," I say, "I'm ready.
You can begin inspiring now." She frowns.
"I hardly know where to start," she says.
"This is supposed to be a mutual effort,
isn't it?" We sit there together in silence
for a while. "Nu?" I say finally, realizing
with amazement that I have no idea where
the word comes to me from. It's Yiddish,
isn't it? From the German, nun (they say it
"noon, not "none") meaning now. Perhaps
this muse was Jewish in a former life, I
speculate, though I'm not sure that muses
even have a former life: this is not Buddhism
we're talking here. All of which is academic
and ridiculously beside the point. "Well," I
say, petulantly, "at the very least you could
remove that tacky gown. That might get us
somewhere." She starts to mightily protest,
of course, but this is my call, I remind her:
in my minds' eye, I manage to disrobe her
with surprising ease; and under all that fancy
drapery she has this perfect, exquisite body.
I am awed by the light that radiates from it
in heavenly fashion, and no less astonished,
--this is my fantasy, no?--that I, too, like her,
have this perfect, exquisite body emanating
light. Amazing. More than I bargained for.
No matter, in less time than it takes to tell,
the outcome of our mutual imaginative
work is unmistakable and, not to make
too fine a point of it, unmistakably priapic.
Changing her tune for the first time now,
she eyes this result with barely concealed
concupiscence (oh! fantasy!) "Ah," she says,
swinging a leg across me to straddle my lap.
"Ah, now we're talking." And talk we did,
if you want to call it that. So when she left,
she left me with a smile of satisfaction, glad
that we had managed with notable success
to make the best of an initially unpromising
situation. Moral: Trust the process. It will
always take you where you need to go.



The Bowl

I am
the bowl.
I give shape
to nothing.
Within me,
silence.
Touch me,
and I sing.



No poem

I have no poem
in me today. I have
rooted around in there
like a truffle pig, snuffling out
those small dark growths
that fester secretly
in moist earth. Nothing.
No shape of anything
that might be judged
the least bit like a poem.
Thoughts, though. A million
of them, disconnected,
snapping synapses
like strung-out rubber
bands. I have no use
for them. I picture vast
spaces in between them,
a universe of barren
silences inside the head;
I navigate dark spaces
searching the pole star.
Still nothing. Lie back,
I think I hear me say:
rest for this time in what
you are given. If what
you are given is silence
then silence is enough.



Drawing

The line proceeds directly
from the heart, through the hand,
to the white surface of the paper,
with all its awkward pauses,
its hesitations, its sudden jolts
and turns, uncharted passages
through anger, fear, and pain;
or then, long, elegant moments
of inexplicable clarity. A spindly,
long-stemmed thing succeeds
in not quite being a flower;
a chunky, volumetric shape,
in not quite being a vase:
objects that never were, nor
will be, but in the mind's eye,
now here, on paper, startling
in outline, an inner darkness
translated with fierce precision
into the real world of here-I-am.



Welcome

Death is
at every corner. Once
you awaken to your body,
you find its dark
presence in every
part of you, waiting. Waiting
is your passing, is your
passion. In your passion
is your love. Welcome
to the ecstasy
of the flesh.



Flip-flops

Who is it walks in
rubber beach shoes
up the hill, flip-flopping
past my window every
day at six a.m.? For
reasons I am as yet
granted insufficient
wisdom to account for,
on this one particular
morning that daily
passage brought to
mind, from my early
years, a poem that
started: Oh fat white
lady whom nobody
loves, why do you
walk through the fields
in gloves, missing so
much and so much?
I remember being
always so greatly
puzzled by the words.
What does being fat
have to do with gloves,
and what do gloves
have to do with missing
anything, anyway?
Not to mention, why
does nobody love
a fat lady? And yet
I do still recall these
few lines as clear as
yesterday, sixty years
later. Gloves? Flip-
flops? Am I still
missing something?




Prehistory

Talk about Inner Child! I've found
I have an Inner Dinosaur. Call her
Gertie. Flesh gone, bones eons
since turned to stone, she has
a skull now empty of what was
once a tiny brain. No heart, alas.
A long ungainly neck. Organs
and guts petrified under the giant
rib cage. Stuck in the old ways
of a billion years ago, she breathes
no more. And yet I sense her
presence, bone, by bone, by bone.
She's out to ossify me, too. I know
her by the creaking of the joints,
the stiffening limbs, the grouch
who scolds and hankers after those
pathetic creature comforts I have
come to need. Old stuff, they call it.
If I work, though, first with pick
and shovel, moving the heavy dirt,
then, for the finer grit, with whisk
and broom and airbrush, I'll maybe
some day learn to sift her DNA
from all that paleolithic silt, and clone
from her the secret of eternal youth.



Wild Life

Like Disneyland. Or maybe Sea World.
There we were, tourists, twenty of us,
paid-up passengers aboard the whale boat,
headed full-throttle up the sound to where
the captain said the whales would be,
anxious for our money's worth of wild life.
Well, first we had to settle for a faraway
bald eagle, a white dot only, perched up
high on a pine tree, head turned sidewise,
watching this parade of humans with
imperious indifference. Then, a full hour
further up the sound between the islands,
there they were. Orcas! The real thing!
In the wild! At first, a single black lunge
off to starboard. Then a breach, nearby.
A collective gasp, on board, a charge
of cameras and field glasses to that side
of the boat, impatient for the perfect shot.
And soon we were up there with the pod,
whales surfacing around us everywhere,
too many, now, to count. So marvelous,
these beasts, the great roll of their gleaming
bodies, the startling, up-close snort and puff
of blowholes, the titan launch and splash
of a full-body breach. Next thing we know,
for reasons not yet clear, the pod veers
in toward the steep rocks of the tree-lined
shore, a massing of the tribe in one long,
furious parade close in along the coast.
The race accelerates toward the narrows
in between two islands up ahead--now
we see what drives the sudden spurt:
the need to beat the current up around
the point--a thrashing mass of muscle now,
as they round the outermost spit of land,
and then fan out again, away from us, fins
flying high, a dozen at a time, in line, back
into open water. And we, the uninvited
guests in this, their territory, stand awestruck
at the rail and gape, astounded by the sheer
animal power of it, the raw display of herd
intelligence, the dance of fellow earth-dwellers
whose lives seem so much closer to the origin
than ours. They speak to the echo of some
ancient gene in us that knew how to be wild,
and free, and powerful; that grieves the loss
of that unerring and instinctive skill to work
with nature, rather than against; of that strong
singleness of purpose that drives the pack
toward the greater good of all. And suddenly,
that was it. The show was over. We put away
our cameras and wait for the return to shore
in humbled silence. What's to say? Tomorrow,
we'll head back home, rewind the Kodak spools
and download digital memory cards ready
to drop off at the nearest Photomat or Sav-on
for development and printing; whilst out here,
majestic still in their shimmering sanctuary,
the orcas will continue on their own wild way.



Bodies

We are each
given a body
to go around in.
The fish is
given the body
of a fish; the
flea, the body
of a flea. The
elephant. Each
one of us, a body.
No matter how
strange or foreign
we may feel
inside it, it is
ours. I, for
example, am
given the body
of a man. Strange,
no, all these parts
of it? Legs? Arms?
Fingers? Not so
much different from
the stone, which
is given the body
of a stone, the rose,
the body of a rose.
A mystery. Each
one of us a mystery
in our selves.



Naked

There's something in me wants us
all to be naked all the time. I've come
to love the radical, sensual honesty
of it: no hiding, no secrets left, just
who I am. Or rather, of course, no,
not who I am, but that which I am given
to walk through life in, just what is
given me to manifest myself as being
in the world. Today, for example,
I stand naked by the mirror. No David,
I tell myself with no false modesty:
the limbs too skinny, love handles
and gut protruding where they should be
tight and firm. A foot-long scar where
they removed the gall-bladder, plus
a minor tumor from the duodenum.
Cock and balls, well, maybe a fraction
less than ideal proportions, I concede,
but serviceable, surely. So here I am.
Look at me, a human body, inviting
you, too, to stand naked, run a hand
across your chest and belly, shaping
them, and on down to the hairy parts;
to take pleasure in the sheer delightful
feel of it, its contour defined by nothing
but the touch of hand, the soft touch
and feel of air where it meets the skin,
the wholeness of its singular universe
exposed to nothing more than the warm
and welcoming embrace of ambient light.



Together

The day's heat lingers on,
past twilight. The fan churns
over our bed. You speak
of a great, consuming
darkness that sometimes
descends, overwhelming you

with unspeakable grief. You
speak of the terrible fear
of loneliness. I say, in all
naivete, Open that door,
go in, look about you. It is
no more than fear, I say.

But you insist I can never
understand this place, since
I have never been there. And
rightly so, perhaps. Together
we lie in darkness, hand in hand,
awaiting the approach of sleep.



Old fool

God, am ever I tired of this old self
of mine, with all his aches and gripes.
I gaze into the mirror, suddenly appalled
at what I have become: a grizzled old fool
with sparse gray hairs, unshaven, sprouting
from a jowl that has grown weak and flabby
with dispassion. Whoever you may be, God,
have I not brazenly insulted your creation
long enough? Slap me across the face,
for Christ's sake, make me new. My body
has been incubating in the warm womb
of forgetfulness a full long decade now.
In the living room, the nursery clock,
whose skinny hands have followed me
since childhood, strikes in its familiar
off-key tones. Time to be born again.
Now let those hard contractions come,
the wakening in darkness, and the fear
of suffocating death. Now let that painful
journey start that brings me back to light.



Invitation

Get through
to the place
where the pain is.

When you
reach it, rest
there a while

in the pain,
feeling it. Then
go further,

down into the dark
place where
it is safe
to be unsafe.



Practice

I practice not being
somebody. It's hard
to leave behind so much
of who I always
thought I was, and now,
in spite of everything,
still want to be.
I hold those images
of myself so dear.
It's hard not being
somebody.

 

----Peter Clothier has written numerous non-fiction and fiction publications, poetry, articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.