. Spinning .

And a remembrance of my own dad, gone five years now.

Dad

Memories live within the senses.
The sight of baby bluest eyes and wrinkled smiles.
I hear the roars of every kind of engine, mowers, drills
and the chainsaw that we tried hard not to fix;
the gentle voice heard reading Golden Books to little girls.
Smells of sawdust, fresh paint
and the seasonal burning of the lawns will live forever.
Tasting still the swordfish sticks, his favorite pineapple upside-down cake,
the hard candy snuck to children in a goodnight kiss.
Reaching out to touch him when he’s gone away
is the hardest one to feel through emptiness and summer air that chills me,
till I can close my eyes and ears and breath the silence for a while.
Then warmth returns and covers me in a father’s arms again.

12/12/11 – 07/23/04

Talking into space
I watch my words like race cars on the track
negotiate the curve of coiled pavement-colored wires
to reach the finish line, an ear

or letter by letter
pop up like weeds upon a garden page
click the ’send’ or ‘publish’ hypertexted word
to reach a reader’s eye

then wait
as for an echo’s traveling time
to reach its destination, to touch the soul
or return unwanted to its sender

Just received some really positive input from a respected source on a few pieces of poetry and that has encouraged me to maybe even submit along with the short stories as the reading season comes to a close.

I’ve never gotten any good local response or encouragement to my poetic attempts so I usually write poetry just as an exercise in imagery and concise form to assist in story writing. But secretly, deep down, we all think we’re poets and that alone, to a writer, tips you off to the very real possibility that you’re not and self-doubt is one of the biggest walls to overcome.

So I’m off in yet another direction.

Orange breast, a sun
of feathered flames
black cape spread aloft
a flash, a slash across
a reflected sea
breaking waves of clouds
none as bold
none as bright
as me.

You can hear the river sing from a hundred footsteps past
and feel the sweet wind’s breath that blows it hot and cold
into a mist that halos those that sip its waters
with smiling mouths that echo trills and ripples over stones

Crystal clear and pure the surface rushes on
hiding in transparency the grains of sand it picks from time
and mosaics into patterns that can please the easy eye
without the fingers of disturbance in its bed

She tiptoes close and closer, stoops and rubs sienna
from the banks into the creases of her beliefs and truths
yet knows she is too bent, too pale, too unyielding and
in the absence of the sunglow, her tongue tastes bitter grit

And so I would have expected a more creative approach from the Academy of American Poets in their search for gold (that’s metaphor for offering membership to get funding).

Dear Friend,

Today it gives me great pleasure to invite you to become an Associate Member of the Academy of American Poets.

Wow. They must read my weblog, they must like my poems even if damn few of my friends do. I read on:

In joining us now, you will enter into a new and exciting relationship with the best American poets of today and tomorrow. You will receive public recognition for your role in nurturing the art of poetry. And you will receive a number of material benefits which will bring you closer to the center of the American poetry world.

Here, the first mention of material benefits and it’s going to possibly be me as the recipient! More blah-blah-blah, name-dropping, and then towards the bottom of the first page we get to the real reason they’re contacting me:

By joining us today, you will become an important financial patron of this great national tradition–and an art form which, without your help, cannot be self-sustaining. As a member you will give strength and life to a wide variety of Academy programs which touch the lives of literally millions of Americans each year.

So they’ve more or less dropped the b.s. to come out and praise me for what they really want from me: money. Poetry is an art form that is not self-sustaining? Since when? Do we not get pleasure from the writing and the sharing of the words that is worth more in human experience than a $45 membership commitment?

I find it rather inappropriate for the letter writer to be so damned pleased with herself for asking me for money. Or rather, “inviting” me to give it to her cause. I also find it rather pathetic that she’s singled me (and millions of others) out as a soft tap for poetry–likely because of my web presence though I guess she didn’t think much of my poems either after all.

Poetry is a nice way of saying things, a better way, a more creative way. However, I think I would have preferred a simple and straightforward request.

Watching spring rains accelerate birth
wet, green, reaching, unfurling sprout
thrives, thickens, stands strong,
though orphaned, alone;
a seed left behind by a dying parent
containing all it would need
to continue its kind with a lick,
a taste, a whiff of life.

Man, above it all,intelligent
accepts his mortality with
faith, promise, belief in green fields beyond,
unknowing it lies in the seed, the cell,
the life, he plants to grow in the rain and
he rises, relives, rejoices for a time,
a breath, a brief taste of life.

Childless, I wonder at this, my end,
and plant a fingernail, a hair, a promise,
a hope in the earth
praying for rain.

Indigo flash, like a single lit Christmas bulb on the bush
where moments ago, red and yellow shone
taking in the glory of the sun
recycling it as feathers
painting a brush of primary color across the canvas

The snicker paces, stabs its saber
of long-toothed loss of faith
at all the plastic daffodils
in an attempt to free itself,
escape and even so
there is a dumbness to it,
that poetry relives itself
hiding in a fat white tulip bulb
emerging just when man
or woman
needs it most
a shield
a farce
a final sizzle of the torch
a month to celebrate–imagine,
celebrate–
words written to uplift
rewind mankind into a tight yarn ball
just so he doesn’t know
he’s only rolling.

Spring blue sky warmed by
the sun-wash of yellow,
stretches from the rooftop
to the maplewoods out back, and wide,
punctured by the rosy pink
of peach blossoms, to the hedgerow stone

Far beyond my fingertip horizon,
I imagine edges fading to a gradient gray
of storms twisting out of smoking wars
until it softens, blackens into someone’s
peaceful night spent waiting
to color itself a blue warm day

A single day each year
smells of the heat
of young summer
of rain
and the pungent scent
of pavement steams
through the city
then fades with its presence
while May and July travel on
and forgotten in the next
fall and winter
to surprise with its
urgent intensity and
the next year’s
first rain

Without its double-u
will becomes ill;
funny how places of things
and all things in place
turn soil into sand
maples to cacti
and adding salt to a stream
makes an ocean

It’s a group nailed tightly together
in rows of wood and paper boxes
each with a single door
that opens in, opens out
like estuaries onto the main stream
of political hallways that run
downriver, carrying their barge
that drags the waters
of concepts and theory.

There is no pause at mossy banks
no inlets unvalidated
by the iceberg that flows
according to whim of the sun
and its generated heat;
no ingress without a ticket
sorted out by color or by style
or by the ticketmaster’s knowledge
of his kin.

I’ve been stuck on the Alzheimer’s series of poems that came in a rush for two days and then dwindled. I’m glad that the feelings came out, the memories of memory lost. Just sort of fell into it before I realized what was happening and now that I’d like to continue, the moments are there and yet I cannot find the words to let them ride out to freedom.

It’s like crawling back into one’s cave.

I wake up to
the ghost of her,
all that is left
stands there
in the dark above my couch–
her couch–on which,
half a dozen years ago
her independence
would never have allowed
for me to sleep there
stay there
a safeguard for my father’s
sleep; rest he needs
as temporary illness
interrupts
his normal watch.

Does she know me
does she know why I
am here?
How does she remember
how to find me?
She wants him,
and doesn’t understand
I am a wall that
talks her back to her bed.
Something leads her
to my side, again
and again,
this night, until
I bring her downstairs
to the kitchen and a cup
of hot brewed tea
with raspberry cognac
for sleep.