Poetry is my protection against terror.
It fortifies no wall but collapses the one
behind which I find myself cowering.
I’m embarrassed to find myself there.
Poetry is every word in the question,
What are you afraid of?
It leads me outside.
Tag Archives: poetry
The wind strips seasons from the year
My love has held nothing in place –
and has itself, some of it, gone
to where love and time decompose
in a field of stars and glass.
Another of her secrets she shares
You’re not made of sugar, she says
when it’s raining.
She can see me not melting.
Parasol, or Britain leaves the E.U.
Judgments crowd the heart
where chastity would dwell in privacy.
She would be magnanimous in isolation,
making no hard choice of the spirit,
but having instead her lake,
her begonia, her tea.
Her footman will dispatch
the stranger at the door,
and shade will beget
no dark fantasy.
Of God and L’Oréal
How wonderfully wearies the Lord
the ego, filing countersuit
after countersuit
against our vanity, depleting
with blemishes and disappointment
our reserve of can-do and
will-do – Oh I’ll get this
and I’ll get her, I will and
I will – taking His time
(He’s got all the time in the world)
while we chase our crooked schemes
of self-help and maintenance.
He reminds us we’ve better things to do,
but we don’t hear because our eyes
are fixed on our face
going up in wrinkles.
Cup with chickens
I want a coffee cup with chickens,
like I used to have or gave
to a girl
to imagine
married life with me.
How good it would be.
With a long view from the window
and one or two clouds
(but no chickens,
just the idea of them).
Now, married
with children (no chickens),
in the city not the country,
I can see life with me
is a fifty-fifty
proposition –
and less than that if you want
big bucks or chickens.
(Some do.)
Or a man who’s not cranky.
(Some do.)
Still, it’s good to remember
how I hoped it would be
(and is)
so I’m going to track down that cup.
Here in this city I’m sure there’s a cup
with chickens.
The century I once read about
We have come to need
ever-littler men
with ever-littler hammers
to fix things –
to climb through the keyhole
when your car won’t start
and shine a flashlight
on the computer inside.
Sometimes a bolt is loose
or a screw,
and he has a mini-
tool for that.
I’ve met these men.
One used to work for
Lucky Charms, a
cush job, but
as luck would have it,
he got downsized.
Artist, lunatic and man of faith
They roam like cats in the night
In no need of another meal
but with eyes to see
and time on their hands.
They are restless and satisfied.
And not three, but one,
for each is inclined
to think he’s the other
vibrant, silky
cat.
To our naked landlord, seller of cuckoo clocks
You were the first Dutchman I ever knew
and now I live among your kind, your
fishers and swallowers, ripping up
what they’ve built, running water where
they drained it forty years before,
legal and illegal-
izing their drugs, and letting
the masses in, though not really.
When I was ten I’d have told you,
there treading water in our mud hole,
that I knew a better way –
USA! USA! –
which won the big one
when the chips were down
(mostly) –
but even then, clothed and correct,
I’d have had to concede,
amid blown-out lives
(neighborhoods, brains, gutters…)
that maybe the promised promise
wasn’t always delivered.
So where does that leave us
(Are you dead?)
now I’m in your country
and you’re in mine?
How bout we split the difference?
You grant me my mountain-prairie-
can-do horizon,
and I you your genius architecture
and painter sky.
Each can keep the people he’s with.
(They’re about the same.)
You’ll not find me, though,
swimming in no hole.
And those cuckoo clocks you keep for yourself.
At Mass
I make a tent with my hands
and bow before the fire within.
I put my forehead to the dust.
Smoke rises through the eye of God
and a tear forms, a lens on the eye.
Utrecht Journal 