The Missing Years

"Orbits" 10/11/2011 

I spent my missing years

missing my father,

falling in & out of love,

altering states & reading books.

I travelled:

walked the dirt of sacred spaces,

slept in the desert,

slept on a couch,

slept on floors, in cars, & in hotel rooms,

in old beds & in new beds.

I found & lost a thousand dreams,

made a hundred schemes and let them fall.

They still appear sometimes on my drives:

coyotes crossing a road, the way they walk

a meditation on what they’ll do,

not what they’ve done, but what comes next.

I made poems whose satisfaction next lasts,

thought stories whose ends would never come,

smiled sweetly at the births of nieces and nephews,

frowned at injustices & cried for all things lost.

It was impossible to know how long they’d last

& there were many moments of found inside the lost,

like tiny electric charges jolting me out of sleep.

Then one day, there it was:  

the life I had been waiting for had been there all along.

Yes, I still miss the things I’ve lost:

the years of people, honest prayers, & unfinished stories.

But the things I’ve found, the things we’ve made,

are sure as the stars on an October morning & do not vanish,

not completely, but mark our movement around in orbit:

the circle that is a life that is always being found.

Moving Bodies, Standing Still

a hunter’s moon, full, dips

golden below hanging giant Jupiter,

blue-green & brilliant as a lighthouse-ship,

moored & pilotless,

somehow fixed & yet always moving,

but oh the difference a half a moon’s phase makes:

as these mornings

the third quarter moon wanes slowly

still high in the black sky

over the black roof of our home,

as the speedy sky-king looms large,

still blue, but less green,

charting my course to the west

before I bear south into the cold.

hours later,

halfway down an  ill-maintained hallway,

I pause thinking:

dizzy from the recognition of perpetual motion,

I stand here still,

but we are never still;

nothing stops, speeds, slows:

all’s perspective,

a trick of the body, the bodies, the moving bodies,

standing still.

so much of the day depends upon the spin of the moon in mid-October:

the recognition of change transpired, occurring, & yet still to stir,

how much of the morning world is illuminated by things moving away?

all this in the movement of the moon, so close,& a big blue star, so far.

the eye cannot fathom distance so great as the dishonest light

from even the king of the sky,

nor nearest neighbor, orbiting constant

cutting between all other points of light,

which are not points only apparitions,

these wandering ghosts moving so quickly in their friendless fields never pausing.

let this be the lesson  of the homeward bound:

nothing is constant but spin,

even when it seems like we’re just bodies standing still

we’re careening closer & closer to some

& sliding farther & farther from others

in & out through our continuous & careless sways.

[a very rough cut, not sure about it.]

Bewilderment

It is not fear.

Fear is waiting for

children to outgrow you.

Bewilderment is

watching them grow

into themselves

all the while knowing

& not knowing what

your role is in their process.

Fear destroys, inhibits;

bewilderment creates

opportunity, awakens

ingenuity, buoys up

sinking hope.

Standing in the morning

darkness, full moon

sinking below its

slower neighbor,

blue-green Jupiter,

so far away: what

could bewilder more

than your own smallness

alone with the stars,

knowing your smaller

children sleep just inside

the walls without a clue

what wonder & wickedness

waits for them .

I swear this is not fear.

This is not the hollowness

in the chest & sinking stomach

of self-doubt, the nagging

ache of regret. These tempt

& torture. This is bewilderment:

the dizziness of recognition,

feeling the spin of gravity,

the pull of magnetism,

the tricky grace of not knowing

what world waits for you

& the ones you love.

With this as a driving force,

I will not pray for clarity.

Six Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens

(who is looking at blackbirds)

1.

a once thin man, carrying

a thing:  a parcel of uncertain

particles, though obviously

not a blackbird’s wing,

his footsteps being

much too slow.

2.

a man in a plain grey suit,

with a somber imagination

& a difficult sense of humor:

a stagnant pond that off & on

again reflects an almost silent tree

in a cold month before the muskrat

sleeps, it sneaks into the poem

her sad reflection smiling a bucky-

toothed grin changing everything,

except for the topmost branch

still trembling from its missing blackbird.

3.

a Connecticut Homer visiting Florida

to smell flowers through a broken nose

finds himself infatuated not with the sound

of a blackbird singing, but with the innuendo

and diminuendo of the foam-cloud surf,

& magically all his well-fed monsters vanish

as so many fizzling stars, smoke-ringed fireworks,

a cigarette disappearing  across a low blue bay.

4.

one man crossing twenty bridges

into one village of twenty men

all of whom hate poetry,

especially poetry about metaphor:

blackbirds, fruit trees, uncertainty.

5.

a miserable liar, who speaks of poetry

as if it were a lion asleep in the sun,

waiting to rip itself apart line by line,

phoneme by phoneme, bit, bit, bit.

a man in a lion costume sneaks into

the poem about blackbirds to scare

them away, only to prove that poetry

is a destructive force, at its best only

knowable in the traces left behind.

6.

a dead man, a handsome ghost

in a white nightshirt pretending

to fly, a blackbird in white feathers

drunk, falling into a green-gold sky

over & over, as if death were a dream,

recurring each night in the purple hour

of 10 o’clock, & life started over again:

a yellow ring in the blue-black—

as if every morning is Spring.

This Machine

      “This Machine Kills Fascists”

       Woody Guthrie’s guitar, 1941

     “Thine evermore, most dear lady, / whilst this machine is to him, / Hamlet”

       Hamlet to Ophelia, a letter, Act 2, Scene 2

    

the machine hum of thick tread on hot new blacktop

settles in with the monotony of a lazy guitar

or banjo, mandolin, harmonica, slap of the leg

though this body, sometimes estranged,

with certain sounds sends unknown shivers ,

this machine knows no exile, is no refugee

the new grooves, tires & road, make a music

that sounds so much like flight that I can almost

feel an updraft lift over the machine’s backbeat thump

who says they are not an autocrat of their own body

tells a lie that only the body refuses to believe

maybe this is the truth behind the ghost in the machine

the song an upslope wind makes shakes this machine

like the  growl of Howlin Wolf, or bang of a Bo Diddley beat

there is no storm or stress too much to keep me from home

there is nothing independent of the dictator, mind or body,

no music that shuts down the impulse to swerve  for the curb

speed through turns & push the machine to the limits of will

 arriving home through sun or squall, north by northeast,

there is nothing more musical than your voice in our home

put the machine to rest, put the worries away & let storm

 ___________________________________________

* This poem is rushed and disjointed. I posted it anyway. 

Bringing It All Back Home

“the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” [Whitman]

the places we go that mean the most leave traces

in us matching the prints we left, a little dirt here

& there that marks our being there, our respect

for the moments spent together or alone, within

the sacred spot, the gathering place, the haunt

though there is really no going home, home shifts

like a satellite disguised as planet so slowly making

a way across the vast unempty,  detected but not

known, unknowable until the orbit ends in slow

oblivion, then the many pieces sort out one by one

when happiness settles in the lines around a mouth

something changes in the brain allowing an unusual

connectivity to link ego & sound, sight, feeling, urge,

sending a slow building pulse through the body whose

consistency converts inclination into faith into certainty:

this can never go away because it is a part of me

when pain & loss settle in the tributaries of the eyes

something triggers these same memories, though

the certainty fades to doubt, denial & disillusion,

still the faithful call out in prayer & skeptics clinch

down upon the traces of what was & might still be

answers, hard to come by, float up as pond steam

on a morning that seemed too cool for fog or storm

or the look of a cloud suggests a known place, sun

hanging through an evening in such a way as to

bring back a day’s feeling thought unrecoverable:

could it be possible that you know what I mean?

are you listening to these thoughts  as footprints

of a former life, lived & shared, slowly reappear

as blue grey cloud, & jet-stream trails lead to some

reunion, homecoming, or dream-haunted home?

if we wait patiently, will you really meet us there?

Stop all the clocks.

[B.J.H.]

Everybody’s Friend

Brian at Inspiration Point, Grand Canyon N.P. 1997

[for B. J. H. ]

“But, my brother, don’t let your lantern darken…”
     [Bryan John Appleby, “The Lake”]

This morning, driving south, out of

the hazy black of a once full moon,

the east sent up a glory of amber

orange, pink, purple, & finally all blue.

I thought of you, but you were already

there in my mind as the morning’s music

suggested struggle, pain, & yet tenacity, too,

the quality most evident behind your modesty.

Just as the universe holds together its parts,

& the wheels of my car handle the swift turns

of a morning’s commute, a magnetism pulls us

for our own good towards you for strength & stability.

There you are, everybody’s friend, holding us up

without raising a finger, but painfully curving

a grimace into an unaffected smile:  the brilliance

of generosity that gives & gives, never running out.

Tonight as I drive the same road back home,

arriving before that same sun sets in similar glory,

I’ll still be thinking of you there, family gathered close

hoping, somewhere, there is a light that never goes out.

I’ll save some last thoughts, as always, before sleep

comes & removes the day’s small sufferings & joys.

I’ll say to whomever might be listening that there

is a man, a brother, who helps hold a world together.

I’ll say: his love needs some more time to give.

Summer, 78

When the heat finally gave in, it wasn't the end of it. It lingered, hanging on at the corners, tugging at the gut like a three day binge.

No use to deny it anymore, they were still afraid of what might happen next. The news was no surprise, but the pain showed on the faces of all the poor little acrobats.

As the old saying goes: in love & the circus there's just no room for aging clowns.

The Lucky One

Of all the things I doubt, they're never one.
This life we make, day on day, is all we need to be certain.
Like one step echoes, then three more, & I'm the lucky one who follows.
I'm the lucky one who follows.

"Where Our Destination Lies" - Ben Gibbard by arthur_film