This morning the morning more rural
passed by – cows, grace, grass
and wire –
sun and all that nothing
to do, so I did it (in lieu)
Tag Archives: poetry
Blue-eyed Wayne
I guess the idea there
was that if I met a student,
a seminarian,
of the Princeton Theological Seminary,
I’d see you could be that
and whatever came after
(a minister, a priest?)
and still have sex
or get married or both
and maybe she was suggesting
one of those for us,
though I doubt it now.
Wayne was friendly enough.
I’d like to know what I asked him,
since I didn’t know why
I was meeting him.
Mostly I was just in love with a girl –
and tennis and gin,
and a quarter-cut lime mixed with
theological ideas.
There are forgotten reasons why
There are forgotten reasons why
you didn’t do what you didn’t do,
but now you’ve only what still
never existed – Technicolor scenes
and whiskey ads, gunboats in Esquire,
the Senator before his subcommittee,
the microphone, people clinging
to his every word.
From where you watch he’s far away,
mute lips on a screen as sunlight
climbs the outer wall. Soon there’ll be
nothing left to catch it. It will unravel
in cold dark corners of space.
Man on the bus
Back when I worked at Charlie’s
on Broadway,
in Seattle not in New York,
I got it for once from both sides –
the dreamy looks and jokes,
the ever-in-my-section, thumb-rubbing-
fingers like the promise of money –
and the thing itself – big tips and a
206- just for being me.
The money part’s the part that made me not
mind it overly much – though I’d hustle in and out
when it was a group of guys,
with their hush-before-arrival and
giggle-when-I-was-gone.
They could hope for their
“maybe later at the–”
where I’d never ever be. And so
it was nothing, nothing at all
until one day on the bus I
looked at a girl and she looked at me
till she looked away uncomfortably
and got off the bus.
Only then did I recall
the man who’d scared me off
with that same hunger on that same bus,
and thus became clear
what was ever clear to a girl:
Men will ever be menacing,
and I will ever be of them.
A meditation on time and suffering
We could throw away all the clocks
and move freely through time,
get ahead of our sufferings
and swerve round them,
circle back and laugh.
Impotent suffering.
Fool.
But wouldn’t we then, even then
carry inside what we’d lost
and know it
and die?
How certain loves could have gone
There was the one of castaways on the island,
how he’d have not have had her
except for that island and his being the
alternative to no one –
and of his having been dumped by her
after “love” followed by rescue.
Then, too, there was the older man of money,
once handsome but now well past his prime –
and her,
and what won’t money buy if you’ve enough of it?
Well, except for actual love.
And so now I’m wondering about that kind,
and how love has gone,
and what that has to do
with what I’ve to say here.
What flares up, though, disappears
What flares up, though, disappears,
the fire no more a fire than
the one blown by a boy’s
painted truck,
little men on ladders
now descending,
packing it in,
smiles all around
Mr. Cantankerous
They say we’re evolving into robots,
or rather,
six-million-dollar men, adjusted for inflation,
or actually deflation,
since we’ll become cheaper to make,
and we’ll be everywhere, like plastic stuff
no one wants (not now, though later they will).
“People 2.0” we’ll be, they say,
though no self-respecting robot
would use that term. We don’t
go around calling ourselves
“the chimps” now, now do we?
So yes, we’ll be off flying ourselves
through space in ships oiled to light
beams, just ahead, I suppose,
of the bombs we’ve built
and the rising sea with all the
dead fish in it (it’s a vision
of hope, as I understand it, a new
chance to get it right).
Meanwhile, though, I’m stuck on this
future trash pile on Good Friday
2017, clinging to my cross,
a chimp and chump weak in the wind
of God 2.0
Awaiting your deep warmth and endless long days
A discourse of rains, of intense blues and greens.
One is gone and fights go on,
and not a few have the shakes.
I’m ashiver myself,
though your sun would bisect
this dripping wind
and give us the hope in-between.
Is it enough? It’s never enough
for the cloth-clad accuser (April’s sore loser)
still wanting to know:
who’s the righter for being colder?
A detailed map of the road ahead
I have often thought Purgatory would not be some
hot fire of God, but, knowing me and what
would be excruciating for me, a
glimpse of every witless and witty,
witting and unwitting hurt I’d done –
all played back in the clarity of lovelight –
God at the back, wordless, with me left to
make of this story what I could –
the reputation-slicing jokes, the
cold overwhelming power to ignore –
even for years, even to this day –
boots on flowers, the girl crying
as she shuts the door, the friend who
knows I was never a friend –
and in answer to this nothing but
my own tears, the endless stream of them.
I almost welcome it. Why not
start now? Why not separate
the spirit from the salt and get the jump
on what so obviously must be done?
I thought of this yesterday, seeing a man
doing just that, though invertedly, being on
on this side of the divide, and not
regretful but grateful.
He was engaged in a kind of
love summation, going back over the old ground,
reviewing blessings –
the man who’d said, you’ll need a trade,
the doctor who’d cured tuberculosis,
the girl who hadn’t turned him in.
He, too, was in tears,
but here at the splendor of it all,
knowing you couldn’t contain it,
couldn’t hold even one of those blessings –
not in your little cup,
not in your little hand.
