Merton

November Poem a Day 2011: Day 10

             Locked in that strength we stay and stay

                 and cannot go away

                For you have given us our liberty.

Father Thomas Merton, "Freedom as Experience"

You, too, believed it lucky to die, didn’t you?

Sure enough in your zen-like cell, the earth,

as secure in your shrinking as a barn on fire,

snug as a hairshirt on sackcloth Saturday,

believing in the liberty of dead man’s row,

the sleep of monks at the bridegroom’s call.

Tell me, Brother Thomas, did the city do what the farm could not?

Was it liberation or desperation,

please don’t simply call it vocation,

that drove you to order,

divinely happy in the presence of so much disaster?

So content with what others simply cannot.

When you attempted to illuminate words with fire,

(or was it shadow the light with bird & wind)

did you have us in mind or was it simply meditation

gone down the mercantile way?  In any case,

I found myself once as if in the flames & your little book

cooled the fire, the singe marks have since disappeared.

One last thought before going separate ways,

like the farmer & his luck, remembering to lose

is nearly always worth it for the empty gain:

Did what you gave up ever knock on the midnight door?

Come haunting the slightest sleep, a lovely woman’s face?

A lone lily too early for Easter, yet too late for the sweetest snow?

These questions are worse than empty prayers, aren’t they

Father Thomas? Or is that exactly what they are?

The knock-knocking on a vacant door, or worse,

a letter sent without the requisite wait, or worse than that,

without the familiarity of shared self-regret.

Forgive me, Father, it’s just that I’m not ready to give up yet.

Hide or Seek

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 9

There are so many ways of playing:

each of the last two mornings

a mystery bird of prey in enormous

grey pinions has appeared on the

northern side of US-59 at the westerly

bend five miles north of the Kaw & Lawrence.

Once on the wing lifting its flight-feathers

up into the shedding tree line & out of sight

before I had even begun counting.

This morning she perched upon a half cut

& nearly petrified cottonwood staring

into my driver’s side window as if I were

just what she had risked the sun up for.

Tomorrow I’ll be ready to find her.

I’ll offer no sporting call but pull my little

silver car over to the side of road & walk

the hundred yards to her spot & wait

for her to give herself away.

                                           Like tonight

as two little boys learned slowly that

patience & stillness leads to that line

between excitement & fright that proves

that being temporarily lost is worth the

anxiety if only for that instant of recognition,

the elation of locking eyes from across a room,
in hiding, under a blanket or table or bed.

You hide this time, I’ll count.  Ok, pal,

you be the owl this time.  

                                           1, 2, 3,…

I’ll see you in the morning, bird,

I’ve been practicing.

8 November 2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 8

It is not abnormal for snow to fall

at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday in early

November.  Though normally I

might miss it, being asleep or

in front of a glowing screen or

the crumpled pages of a book,

but tonight I walk across a

glinting street to a car covered

in a thin sheen of the softest dust,

the very icon of ephemera.

It is not exactly ironic that I

had been thinking hours earlier

that the heat that causes ice to 

melt a glass of middling scotch

actually dissipates as it does its job,

which is the same process  that causes

my beard, now covered with snow,

to gradually haul in the particles of

atmosphere deigning to light upon it.

As there is also nothing abnormal about death,

 persistence, or  the recapitulation of lost love 

we call believing in ghosts. It doesn't take much 

to inspire memory to create a vision. To see 

what was and isn't all at once, a rainbow, 

 a halo, or the snowy angel dancing in the 

star-like drift of flakes in headlight shine.

There is no paranormal, only perspective,

 faith, & the sleight of mind that fools

when need & imagination coincide 

with the atmospheric tricks of pressure change, 

cold front, & the tilting spin of mother Earth.

What Won't Wait?

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 7


Everything learns to wait:

The soil waits long weeks,

sometimes months even in

this capricious climate for

the salubrious soak & then

there is the waiting for the

torrent to stop stealing the

once bone dry soil now aslide.

We can plan for or against it,

but eventually the drought

must come & eventually

it must end. What is between

is what every animal knows:

who learns to wait learns

the secret of patience,

of fortitude, of survival.

I wonder about the family of

raccoons that lives near us,

perhaps some spend this rainy

Fall evening under our back stoop,

the little ones have grown now

I’m sure, perhaps moved out

& on their own, waiting for

late Winter to allow them

their first chance at making new.

Tonight, whatever solitary hole

each hides in must feel  miles

away from home as the soil

soaks up every ounce of cold,

 cold rain covering the known,

familiar scent of rubbage,

& recommending something

as awkward as night-sleep.

Even the three year old boy

who wrestles every second

out of life stumbles eventually

to bed, eyes wide open if only

for a last few minutes before

sleep finally overwhelms his

tired body, well-used, bruised,

in dire need of  slumber. It must

be the quiet racket of rain against

the windows, the slow beat upon

the roof & the hum of a distant

television that does the trick,

ends the wait & draws his great

big blue eyes finally to close.

Hugo, Roethke, & Wright

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 6


"Hardly a ghost left to talk with." Richard Hugo
 "What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" Theodore Roethke
 "I have wasted my life." James Wright

The silence is impossible,
always a rush of noise:
a train, leaf-rustle, thump
of heart, or house whisper.
Nothing stops the procession:
so much memory to alleviate
some choose liquid, pen, or pills.


Then there is the giving in:
dancing with the heavy bear,
is it time or is it spirit?
What was it the Greek said
about the river, always?
Never doubt the soaring chicken-
hawk nor the blessed ground.


For me its pictures, a line of
tinted bottles, foreground,
a haze that might be ghost-
flesh dancing just behind.
What is the strange reflection
in the glass? It could not be me,
not without a hand to chin, a tug.


Is it a waste to lay the day,
to look, to wake, to see?
Isn't it madness to doubt
your own devastation, all
the while courting the edge?
What the blood begs is not
silence, is it? Merely fluctuation.


When the three drunk ghosts visit,
never together, they speak, each
in a lonely room. One of cancer
stealing the cells, seven at a time.
Another swears sobriety: I'm dancing.
I've been dancing all this time.
The last one just sings: Kapowsin,


Kapowsin, sunfish, perch, & trout.
They are nothing if not gentlemen
ready for one last night at the fights
that will never come. Of course,
ghosts don't really wear flesh,
nor scuttle their way into pictures,
& best: they have no need of shaking hands.

Don't Fix It

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 5

The ocean is the waves,
No matter which direction.
So I'll leave gravity to that.

The moon is the shine,
Even on its dark side.
So I'll leave time & season to that.

The wind is what moves,
& the sounds they make.
So I'll leave storm to that.

Nothing was broken today,
There is nothing a poem can fix.
I'll leave tomorrow for that.

Maple on Fire

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 4

"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Dylan Thomas, "The Force that though the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

Each year, when the maples catch fire,
I am tempted to stop the car & spend
the day staring, warming my eyes,
gathering the strength to survive
another November's lapse & loss.
There is a subtle rise in the blood,
a tiny blush, a push to slow down,
to crave rest & to look for what's
not all lost: an old charm still hiding,
a souvenir of youth that first came alive
one Autumn watching a maple catch fire.

Sort of Like New

"Twins" 11/3/2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 3 

Holocene: adjective, Geology: of, relating to, or denoting the present epoch

The Holocene epoch has lasted from about 10,000 years ago to the present day. It covers the period since the ice retreated after the last glaciation and is sometimes regarded as just another interglacial period.

[from the late 19th century: coined in French from HOLO 'whole' + kainos 'new']

Oxford Dictionaries Online

Sometimes old is sort of like new:
hand me down boots,  LPs,
unscratched, the humming sound
of an old song almost forgotten,
a new song conjuring a time
when every one was older
than you & everything full
of the gravity of discovery.

Then there are books whose pages
untouched in years are still crisp,
corners unbent, spine strong.
then something slides into view:
a handwritten note, or the stub
of a plane ticket, the feather of a bird
long done soaring, whatever it is
it has nested there waiting to be found:
beyond old or new.

Finally there are the trees, often ignored,
occasionally climbed, more often cursed
for the clean-up, & each winter iced,
a clue that we are merely between ice-ages,
like the sign on our road that reminds us
that these hills were once & will be glaciers.

I've never been one to get hung up on age:
old was often new to me & as I've aged
it's mattered less & less. Watching small
turn large, praying daily for health, happiness,
& growth, knowing that day stacks on to day,
that winter follows fall, and spring never comes
too soon.

What is time to a tree, to a wall of ice cutting
through a valley or charting a river's course?
What is time to me? What am I to a child
who is everything to me?






[Note: I wrote the poem while listening to the Bon Iver  album Bon Iver. I did not watch the video until afterwards. A very serendipitous find.]

Getting it Right

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 2

The saddest are those not right in their lives

who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self –
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

William Stafford, “The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune” (1977)

I couldn’t have written this last night,
not that what I learned today makes the difference,
it’s just that timing is always a part of getting it right.

This morning there was nothing wrong with waking,

even the clouds covering familiar friends did not detract

from the lucky feeling of being awake as the west was breaking.

On the side of the road, a small fox crouched under harsh headlight,

though moving too fast I swear I could see his dark eyes dilating,

when he decided running wasn’t worth the risk, I knew what I would write it.

It’s not that everything was right today, or any day,

but nothing overwhelmed the sense that the direction was clear:

sometimes wisdom is staying quiet, sometimes it’s having something to say.

St. Charles, The Machinist

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 1: I am attempting the November poem-a-day challenge again this year. 
Please feel free to comment or ignore. These will not be great poems.


All Saints' Day, 2011

“Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.” (William Carlos Williams Introduction to The Wedge, 1944)

tool and die maker, 

writer of tolerances,
martyr of a silent cause,
surrounded by endless noise,
saint in side-shields & glasses,
sideburns of shifting lengths,
shirtsleeves, buttonhole stretch.

our patron in polyester, leather,
plastic, steel, zinc, chromium,
aluminum, thyroid, tumor, trachea,
larynx, cartilage, tissue & blood.

what shall we do with the icons:
slide rule, tape measure, earplugs,
pocketprotector, pocketknife, caliper,
micrometer, lathe, mill, collet & drill?

******

I remember walking in the building,
the hum of hard work,
men in plastic hats, work gloves, tools
names on doors,
names on shirts,
names of men,
names of ghosts.

Machine sounds from below
grinding, spinning, ripping,
the pounding of metal on metal,
the thin reverb of clinking sheets,
the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid & sweat,
a coppery film on the tongue,
& the smile of a job well done.

It’s easy to see this as a type of prayer:
the precision of measurement,
hallowed be thy name
the dynamics of cast, form & mold,
thy will be done
the purity of pattern, blueprint & ASME code
on Earth as it is…

*****

Let the tabled figures stand in place of miracle,
the assembled goods, long forgotten, demand canonization.

May the patron of makers, of machinists, of poets,
pray for us, our products, & our words.