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Mikels Skele - 2


Mackinac Bridge

In the center lanes, your tires
whine against the taut steel grid,
five miles of heartache
standing in for gray tarmac,
which knows nothing of music,
and so, stays mute.

In the center, in the heart, you can hear
ballads of the iron workers
who laid the steel across wind-warned
waves, whitecaps straining to reach them,
to pull them down among the generations

of sailing men and women, who,
heedless of candled windows and
widow’s walks,
never came home.

“You belong to me,“ sang the lake,
“you who know no bounds
but sky and steel. I will be your bed,
your limit, your last true lover.
Come to me.”
​
And they did,
and the bridge, knowing this better
than all the histories of men,
sings with the voices of ghosts
wrung from the iron waves.
​

Days lost

​"...and the sad gypsy sang for his bottle of wine, and I sang
​along for mine."
 -Jose Feliciano

Those days, we were dangerously close to dying,
To the end of all the longing we mistook
For grand poesie, lost on the road to anywhere.
We stepped toward no paradise,
Discarded all loving touch
But for human companionship,
Asking too much of the world, unable to grasp
The small treasures.
 
If there’s something missed, something lost,
It’s only the wide-open sky we saw
Through vinegar eyes,
Our salted wounds as yet unburied.
 
Come back to me, my own true self,
Come back, and we’ll slip away
To some long, true corner
And watch the setting sun.
​

Sky and Water

Water and sky indecisive,
light flitting around corners,
thunder mumbling curses,
a low energy kind of day

I recall a day exactly
like this, so long ago,
when we walked between the drops
to the 10th Street Pool Hall

to lay our fortunes down
on the Steepleton tables,
greener than any pasture,
leather pockets yawning.

Entire lives were spent
and measured in racks of nine;
I still hear the clack
between the thunder claps.

In the end, we walked out the door
pockets empty, hearts full,
into the long shadows
of the waiting sullen universe.
​

Summer, then

Surfing the faint, tireless breeze
Music from a distant park
The last half-hearted song
Of the sparrow
Fireflies like paper lanterns
In a far-away twilight

Long before conditioned air
In the hot, moist summer
Even clocks stopped running,
Too slow to mark
The interminable hours,
The memories, the sweat

Whole eternities passed
In the too long days
Of the too short summers

So entirely gone

There is no stylus so precise
As to record the passage of a soul

From one moment to the next
​

What Love Does

Straightens teeth, flattens bellies,
Makes faces grow smooth
And symmetrical
 
Clears clouds, cools heat
And warms the chill wind,
Turns laughter into music
 
Puts a lilt to the stammer,
Shortens noses
Or lengthens them
As required
 
Hips grow wide or slender,
and feet more elegant than air,
pale skin turns to marble
and dark flesh to ebony
 
And perfection itself
Becomes imperfect
By comparison

Age

I’m old, don’t start with me
Don’t talk of deadlines
Or complain about the occasional
Twitch of middle age

There are people I know,
Dearly beloved,
Who worry that death will take them
Before their great work is done

Others who panic
Thinking their great work,
Having taken place in irascible youth,
Will fade without recognition

Or that the world, God forbid,
And all its minions,
Might come to misconstrue
Their contribution, mistaking it for exuberance.

As for me, it could happen
That I’m done before I die,
Or otherwise

Timing, they say, is everything.
​

Diptych for Autumn

I

They say time is a river
You can never step in twice
In the same place
But I know you can
If you wait long enough
Between steps

If you wait until it’s unrecognizable
Until you step on a dry patch of grass
Crunching underfoot just so
Until you taste the clay the color of dreams
Until you feel the sweat making canyons
In the soil on your forearm
Under the seeping sun
Unfiltered by knowing

I say you can, by being still and listening
To the strangely placid screaming
Of cicadas
Dying away into the night

II

Among the ghosts I saw
In a strange and fitful mirror

A young man, lean and early,
Sunlight stranded in his hair
Skin the color of baked earth
Heart like pierced leather
Eyes berserk with possibility

I saw myself, long ago



​
Picture
Picture

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Mikels Skele's Profile

How We Are Tricked by Memory

My poems come from pith,
just below the hide of me,
from the circus trance of
living the long moment,

the split between inspiration
and expiration, blue with envy
of the sky, such security!
We’re doomed, aren’t we,

to just missing it all,
to the rear view,
to always thinking,
“So that was it?”

Never mind.
It orders itself soon enough
into personal mythology.
You know the stories,

how this and that
caused something or other,
you either played a part
or didn’t. Nevertheless,
​
a certain wistfulness,
thin as a spider’s wiry grip
and as strong,
betrays us every time.
​

Occasionally, in winter

Occasionally, in winter
I take a turn into some vast space
–an empty parking lot, a parade field–
shorn of summer frippery

and I’m there again, there
where each single blade of grass vibrates,
where every grain of sand trembles
and the sun,

terrible in its wintry beauty,
fights back the clouds,
never mind their insistence
on seasonal priority.

Hard to stay home on such days,
all the triviality of existence
concentrated in a mote of dust
poised by the window,

ready to make a run for it,
unaware of the relentless
inescapability of it. 
​

Swan Song

How hangs the moon?
Its swells all aglow
contained in essences unguessed,
or unremembered.

How dies the sun?
Its fires all but claimed,
mortgaged to the teeth,
unable further to dim.

The stars still hold their own, it seems.
Orion still hunts the bear,
faithful mutt dogging his footheels,

bow at the ready, at least until
one or another of its strings
explodes across the sky,
uncontrolled, reckless.

If there’s a lesson in it for us,
mudbound, entwined, encoiled
in rumored codes, blind to the stipulations
of our own existence,

it will be told too late,
our gasps of recognition
insufficient to sustain us. 
​

Halibun: Poetry

What use is poetry? You can’t drive a nail with it. You can’t heat your house, shoe a horse, build a dam, or pave a street. It’s no good for sewing, sawing, swinging, or finding your keys in the dark. If you’re a baker, soldier, mechanic, farmer, gravedigger, or physician, poetry doesn’t get the job done. Does poetry clean, cut, weld, braise, fry, or distill? Design a plane, accumulate capital, build a stadium? Fat chance. About the only thing I can think of that poetry is good for is changing everything.

“Words,” said Sensei,
“Cannot burn your tongue,”
Spitting ashes.
​

What I Got

I got my book of riffs,
My bebop hat
Stuffed on my head
What I lack is bread
 
I got the skinny pants
I drive my Mini past
The twilight boulevard
What I lack is gas, man
 
What I lack is class, man
The mojo ain’t workin’
The jerky aint jerkin’
 
What I lack is a clue
​

Paris, 15:42

​Stuck.
A small desire
(coffee, maybe pastry)
A Herculean labor.
Such histrionics,
A drama worthy of greatness,
And I, only ordinary,
Blindly stabbing.
 
Yet, it arrives:
Mousse au chocolat
Crème brûlée
Je n’sais quoi
 
And coffee,
A small, unassuming demi-tasse,
Ordnance as yet
Unexploded.
​

The Poetry in Poetry

Oh, this must be a poem,
from the lick-backed wobble
of word-induced glimmer,


from the near-likely brood
of dimple-starred crows,
these broad gallops of


weedy wings.

Like the grand chausee
or the midge-grained wire alike.


Oh, this must be a poem,
sits like a wimple
across my greedy brow;


yet the still carcass
– a mantis dream –
occurs relentless into the
sun-darkened corner.


Oh, this must be a poem.
​

Autumn Falling

In abrupt autumn
one sees much of expectation
wither and dissipate
as if never taken seriously,

as if intentions of good will
and promises of productive labor,
— all leaving of self in favor of virtue --
gone like a good but tardy
glacier, dim and dry,
parsed to the death.

What remains is that wispy thread,
barely traceable, but more real and reliable
than all the will gathered in all the
small rooms and resolutions of change,

the thread that runs umbilical,
winding though good or ill,
tying together all the disparate selves
pasted together in the course of a life.

In this suddenly strange autumn,
in this fall, it is the unreality
that glows, beacon-like,
though, in the end, what you remember
is that carnal you,
that piece of protoplasmic geometry.

And you ask yourself, is that me?
And yet, there is memory, inconstant,
but persistently convincing.

I understand the consciousness of others,
the subjectivity of their being,
but not my own,

not my own.
​
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