Still
It all recurs for the maimed, how they remain,
or don’t, atop the plots of the buried. Those
who could do something table the question.
They relax in the rocker of their certainty,
a war, any war, an abstraction that walls off
the bursting specifics. A twenty-something friend
found he’d deployed to sort body parts. Arrayed,
they’d survive the fever sweeping a land we
could never know. Hailed by the white-blue atrium
of a foreign sky, he’d prowl his perimeter
until his duty tapped him. Then the oven-sun
would relight his nightmare, the categories
of bone and flesh his production line. What
achievement could signal his success? What
dream in the meantime could relieve raw nerve?
The perfect tour would end when he was still
in one piece, a nation’s greed ignoring the gore
behind the games, the horror nestling into
the still-living because still in one piece.
What We Say
Late autumn. The sun’s
troubled: warm, dazzle,
or warn? I’ve yet to get
ready. All night
indifferent preparation
of frost. Elsewhere,
armies hard at work,
like the moon as we sleep,
suddenly on the move
if we looked, like it’s always
had to be. At least,
that’s what we say.
And in the morning,
the same — armies at work,
like the moon, like us,
unlocking our office doors,
tunneling through to afternoon,
with nothing else to say.
Make a Difference!
— a villanelle for commencement speakers everywhere!
Tonight, fatigue’s grim flower unfurls,
but Gandhi, gunned down, had this to say:
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Oh? Even when giving swine my pearls,
my every action seems absurd, and all day —
and tonight — fatigue’s grim flower unfurls?
Even though, in my disgust, I’d hurl
the grenades myself, I should, anyway,
be the change I wish to see in the world?
What about how resolve just sways and swirls?
What about colleagues who counter, “We’ll pray”?
Especially then fatigue’s grim flower unfurls,
work is relentless, and all effort whirls.
But I’m to believe, on these feet of clay,
Be the change you wish to see in the world?
Thanks to the Bottom Line that makes lives curl
I’m ambushed by a twist to the old cliché:
tonight, fatigue’s grim flower’s unfurled
by no change I’d wished to see in the world.
No, Really, Who’s Counting?
Ever since that dream about García Lorca
rhyming nationalistic jingles on Majorca,
I can’t depend on anything. Only cadences
coming at me on my cats’ velvet paws or
via the news: nine dim stories followed
by the ten it would take to make an even
hundred, the odd thousand, the 100K Russian
dead in Ukraine and uncountable Yemeni
innocents. But who’s counting? Bark
curls then sheds off the sycamore, its even-
or-odd-year ritual, birch-bark-like scrolls
I shape and stitch into a solo canoe, codes
stuffed into brittle crystal bottles to bob
toward the hinterlands. I’m warning
other worlds of this world’s lost nostalgia,
found neuralgia. I’m wondering out loud
about cures for the triple-digit indignities,
the 400,000 dead in Darfur, from disease,
the XXXK in Ethiopia, from each other,
forever curious about wandering beyond
the out-of-bounds bounty I’ve always
been thankful for. Turns out bombing,
from above, that tried-&-false approach
to peace in our time, like landmines, from
underneath, leaves a little to be desired:
very little, since the current count equals
the last two and the new plan resembles
all the rubber-stamped chapters jammed
into The Big Book of Battles, this Merry
Christmas’s coffee-table best-seller. Luckily,
the Dow Jones just closed up for once, though
by only .1 of 1%, so perhaps after breakfast
and my grimy handful of pastel pills I’ll tack
some bark back on its camo branches, glue up
a few shards, leave less to write on, more time
to kill, fewer views of the put-on-pious
tittle-tattle, then paddle my ass in search
of all that pain they’re spinning isn’t there.
On the Death of Marvin Bell, Poet
— Live as if you were already dead. (Zen admonition)
He has crossed his ocean, popped up in his new land.
The dead man/not dead man mocks commemoration.
Angels sling his praises through creation’s keyhole.
But he is already vibrating exponentially.
He is already transmitting arpeggios.
His mother’s sigh and his father’s ladder had diminished.
On a roll, he’d proffer poetic emanations.
Poems’ emanations indicate he’s on a roll.
Learned and broken rules made of him a monument.
Undermining monuments is his only rule.
Beyond Compliance, Beyond Resistance
When asked once who his greatest spiritual teacher
had been the Dalai Lama responded, “China.”
The cat’s reactions to my fingers’
scratching, remind me I’m often
automatic: twitching skin of each
thank-you-very-much, arched back
of jockeying for a slender compliment,
submissive flop-and-grovel of every
please, please, please. But then
that prance of defiance across
the invisible piano wire spanning
table to out-of-bounds countertop
to stove controls, my dainty paws,
claws approximately withdrawn,
picking out the touch-pad tune of
bake, broil, clean, clock, and cancel.
Lately I’ve been working on my
up-and-walk-away, my saunter
and dusty-sandal forefoot flick,
my vertical tail-like-a-flag of
nonchalance—which I plan to plant
somewhere pacifistic, somewhere
beyond this rage against my own Beijing.