Cemetery Poem

For Kathleen Keane

In the sleet I could not play tin whistle to the dead,
This dusk it was the dead who accompanied me instead.
/10 January 2014

Leaf Poems

I
With my brush the leaves and I conversed
But what we agreed the wind reversed.

II
I have learned more about leaves
By sweeping them than I ever learned
By leaving them alone.

III
Today aspen falls
They tremble when they live
But on earth they lie perfectly still

IV
Japanese Maple
Holds tight to its crimson leaves.
Blood must be played last.

Nov 9th 2013

Love in a Time of Objects - A Valentine's Day Poem

Love in a Time of Objects

For Vassia

T

here will be time enough on other days

For talk of Love, and Faith,

And the Gods

And of What Now Must We Do.

Today I remember

How one summer’s evening

On the dunes

The retiring sun lit up your face.

And how you turned from it,

Closed your eyes

And let it burnish you.

And how your feet made

A soft impress upon the wet sand,

And how the birds parted as you walked

And how they closed back in behind you.

And how clay yields to you

Seasons matter to you

Sunflowers nod at you

And you, in turn, turn to them.

Like flame takes to grass

Like wind tugs the leaves

Like grass calls to fire

Like leaves wait for the wind

Like the moon plucks upon the oceans.

Like oceans spread beneath the moon.

One night on a sidewalk in New York

You pulled me to you

And put your lips on my lips

So fiercely that it made me dizzy.

Is all this between objects

Love?  Let’s not talk about that today

Let everything that can, incline towards everything else.

14^th Feb 2013

Man and Tree - (A Prose Poem)

The architecture of people and plants is similarly erect; both are dominated by vertical axes.  Of course, the human animal when immobile has denser connections with plant life than just their shared verticality. The inflorescent brain of a person: like the crown of the tree; two eyes set apart like points along stout branches subtending and supporting the crown; the base of our cranial canopy is set on top of the stout trunk of neck and spinal cord.

A man firmly planted in the soil at the level of his neck would seem to flair out belowground – his appendages flailing likes roots in the deep earth – fingers and toes like adventitious rootlets fumbling through the soil. Man and plant are symmetrical friends – from crown to root, man and tree are linked by anatomical geometry.

A longer piece on tree architecture on 3quarksdaily.com this coming Monday 5th March.

Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum)

 

The Japanese Maple is dropping its leaves

Now that the elm is spent and in its winter-nude.

Those maples leaves that linger on the branches

Are like hands outspread and chilled raw

That waited to scatter scarlet decorations

To pave the way for a sullen monarch.

Metempsychosis

“They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief”

(Ulysses, James Joyce)

And now you are the tree – the corruptible

Transformed into the certainty of wood,

Your roots, more expansive than your crown

Ploughing the hectic-stable earth,

Your leaves – sun-soaking and ground-shading –

Reflecting the jig of time

In the simplicity of the fall,

And in the lentic stillness of livid branches –

Offered up to appease a lurid sky

You buffer the grief of the world.

Impossible Obama: a note biblical, literary, and philosophical to the new president on the topic of the impossible with special illustrative emphasis on woodworm and fishes

I came across this today when I was tracking down another piece.  I had forgotten this, and perhaps with reason.  I can't call it an unpublishable poem since it is neither a poem and was in fact published in a collection of inaugural poems. On the positive side, it has the longest title of any poem in the collection.

Julian Barnes writes a story called “The Stowaway” in which a woodworm makes unseemly accusations about Noah and his family (did they make of the ark a private larder?).  For that matter, no mention in Genesis 7 of fishes.  Jacques Derrida says true hospitality cannot be compelled, cannot respond to a “one must.”  Noah in obeying an edict of God, in the calculative performance of his hospitality reveals the impossibility of true hospitality – he makes decisions about what to include, what to exclude.  So this is the test for the new president: Wake up in the morning with the impossible on your mind.

From A Writer's Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama's Inauguration. Editor Chris Green, The DePaul Poetry Institute, 2009.

Abandoned Fields

We are bound across the quaking bog

By the mauve purgatory of heathers

And the dry stone-wall weathering

Of stonechats grinding out of fog.

Bound across all knowable time

By the fidgeting of rushes

Bearding the gaping sphagnum pool, the luscious

Fruit of the neglected crime.

I too fear the land

And its unyielding womb,

Dread it like the accursed tomb

Of a god that abandoned.

I think I primarily had in mind the Ceide Fields when I wrote this (a short piece of mine on this extraordinary archeological site here).  This is one from my unpublishable poem series which includes Elm Leaves, Tritych, Compassion, and I like the Way a Hand. 

Elm leaves

This morning I swept leaves -

Jaunty lemon-buff elm leaves

Spread across the deck, like a tailor’s pattern

For tiny asymmetrical flat caps, a pattern

That will be assembled in green

And doffed skywards next spring.

Oct 2011

Triptych

For Mary C Nolan

Stooping in to light the fire

With thrilling agonies of shallow breathes,

The gas ignites and chases the

Maledictions from the grumbling house.

Mother Mary, I and

Fire dissolve in this chromatic pause –

Before: a holy land proclaimed

And Pharaoh’s whispers from the past.

The paint is seeping from the scene

The gilded canvas vaguely holds

A simple image from that life –

The smell and sound are narrative.

Compassion

Compassion: Look out for this on a Evanston pavement: a black ground-beetle inverted, its tiny rowing motions arrest attention.  It is struggling to right itself.  Examine it!  Kneel down if you have to.  You’ll see the predicament the beetle is in – it has no legs, all six have been nipped at their bases.  The stumps flail. The fraying carapace rocks gently back and forth upon the ground.  It can never be restored.  Look closer, a crew of ants is busy with it, eating their meat rare.  On Washington Street in June, I bent over and inspected a noiseless dying such as this, and compassion obligated me to destroy the creature.  The black body was surprisingly yielding – like little fruit underfoot.  When the work was done it looked as if a single mulberry had rotted there upon the sidewalk.  Dotted through the mess, like seeds, were the carcasses of ants.