Mikels Skele - 2
Mackinac BridgeIn 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 WaterWater 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, thenSurfing 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 DoesStraightens 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 AgeI’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 AutumnI
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
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How We Are Tricked by MemoryMy 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 winterOccasionally, 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 SongHow 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: PoetryWhat 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 GotI 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, 15:42Stuck.
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 PoetryOh, 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 FallingIn 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. |
