Poems
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Poems |
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
|
These These Are the Days We Shovel
Under These are the days of famine and thunder when bones show through the evening screen. These are the days we shovel under as fires burn and winds blow mean. These are the days of vehemence born; cretinous minds as thick as tar. These are the days we’ll always
mourn when we are dust and blown afar. Yet who’s to know what bliss we’ll
find, how quiet the calm of the Morphean tide, how cool the waters we’ll ferry blind? Who’s to know what stars we’ll ride, after these days of famine and thunder become the days we’ve shoveled under? Requiem for My Father’s
Tools Heifetz with a handsaw. Krupa on boards. When my father brought out his tools, I was the music’s fool. For every sound he made there was always another that rhymed. If he drove a spike, its hum and twang would Doppler down as he buried its head in some worried wood. For a lid on a crate, he’d tap out a beat -- with 4-penny nails -- using only his wrist and the hammer’s weight. The screech of a screw, muscled through oak, the chink of a chisel, when he made a mortise, the aria of his router, when he beveled a board. Click of ratchet. Rasp of file. Hush of plane. Whisper of shavings, hitting the floor. I remember the songs because I’m building a box, to bury my father’s tools; a coffin, where they might rest, until some maestro takes them out, and makes them sing again. Night Fishing with Ludwig He had a pole and I had a paddle, and -- just like that -- there we were, pushing off in our little boat: part dinghy, part canoe; like something Charon might use on a slow night. As we headed for the middle of the lake, I was mesmerized by the two tiny fires that flickered in the grottoes below his stern brow. He pointed at me with his bony finger. “Any Moonlight Sonata jokes, and it’s over!
Understand?” “Deal,” I said. Soon, we were in deep
water and he was humming and mumbling in the back of the boat, muttering to himself. Fortunately, he talked while I listened. My head bobbed as I commiserated and agreed with everything he said. He reached down through the glossy varnish of dark water and cooled his hand there; exercised his old fingers against the boards of the boat. When he pulled his hand out, and held it up, diamonds dripped from his fingertips and mingled with the stars in the mirror of the lake. He stared into the water for a long
time, so I stared, too. Brightly-colored fish, like pieces of broken chalk, moved slowly over ultramarine and goldleaf rocks. Iridescent sea grass shimmered like Egyptian silk. When we threw our lines out, we watched screeching bats dive at the bobbers, and we listened to the mournful Kyries of distant loons. But, mostly, I watched him stare at the stars. He studied them as though they were quarter notes on a black page. He pointed up, and showed me Canis, the Little Dog, and Corvus, the Crow; Cassiopeia, in her chair, and the Flying Fish; the Southern Cross and the Northern Crown; the Little Horse and the Hare. When he pointed, I watched the hairs on his broad hand turn into filaments of light. While he talked, I stared at his large head, transfixed by the craters on his moonlit face. He told me how Haydn had stabbed him in the back after hearing his C-Minor Trio. He said Mozart was a perfect music machine, as well as a scurrilous little brat. He told me how much he admired Goethe’s drawings of all over after The Sufferings of Young Werther came out. But, he said, when he finally met Goethe at Toplitz, he was dissappointed at the haughtiness of the man. On the way back to shore, we hummed Ode to Joy,
exaggerating the descending bars, like two drunken sailors. As our laughter echoed across the water, I drummed on the side of the boat and he played air piano. When he stepped out of the boat, he wrapped his black cape around him, put on his top hat, and said, “Wanna do this again, some time?” “You bet!” I said. Old Soul In a house of bone, on a belly of shell, you wander, alone, through tussock sedge and fetid leaves; over hummocks, and into swales; through mud and muck and matted reeds. With seismic sense, and skeleton reversed, you trudge through fields of bluestem, and wallow through hollows of bracken, as you head for the sand pits and the scent of sweetfern, near thickets of alder and willow. When you meet your reflection at the edge of the marsh, you see a stranger in your own home. Resigned to your fate, and a legacy of 200-million years, you search for an isle of log, or a warm stone, as you paddle and glide through aqueous green. Had you been a Buddhist, at Wat Po -- where turtles are revered as human souls, making their way through one of many lives -- you might have known the slow road to Nirvana could ditch you here, where you drag the bottom of a watery world, and make do in the mud, with your mutable soul. Van Gogh’s Ear It could hear money, coming from Theo, on a starry night; hear a horsehair brush gone-bad-in-the-paint, and the frantic rush for blue when a green
was “too-much-yellow.” The ridicule, the roar, those camphored sheets; thalos on the lobe, cadmiums within; blistered by the sun, and crazed by the din ringing from its sidekick, on every street. That damned ear: once deaf to its future fame; now, a legend, all its own; listens – still – for wind in the wheat, and some crows above; still bleeds in a hand, holding out for love; like a bad wing clipped from one odd angel, and forever attached to one man’s name. What a racket they made as they clinked and clanked in our wagon to the wump tha-wump of a funky wheel. We’d comb
the ditches and drag the creek, pan the fields and scour dumps, and wherever we looked we’d stop on a dime for another nickel. By the end of summer diminishing returns had us waiting for workmen to finish their lunch. We’d trade-in their bottles for Mars bars and Fire Balls, Once, down at the widest part of the Nimishillen, Jimmy Cook and his gang pushed my brother and me in the creek and ran off with our wagon full of bottles. We were already soaked and the sun was setting so we slogged through the creek until dark and found more bottles than we had before. By then, we were catching lightning bugs, and putting a few in every bottle. When we set them afloat, out on the water, we stood in the creek, and watched our blinking armada float away like money down the drain, and money well-spent. And when they docked in the harbor of a fallen tree – a hundred yards downstream -- we laughed all the way
to that Nimishillen bank.
|
|
|
||
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
