floors

 

floors

we stand on

saw you

my love

on your ice floe

passing

waved but

you were gone

blades skimming

through desolate

heavens

ah lover

it was the flight

we fell for

passing

is what we are

Dad smoking by the kitchen window

 

Smoke from his pipe

were spirits rising

from the dead;

they coiled into the air,

graceful tresses,

defused and dissipated.

He needed sunlight

for this sorcery;

his ghosts, silvery white

hung momentarily,

umbilical, heavenward;

he was at peace then.

Alone

To turn, on eyes opening,

find again that blank space beside you;

come downstairs,

witness to the still-birth of another day;

a receptacle of words, restless

to be heard but no ear to hear them;

to move, room to room,

through the obdurate indifference of objects;

remembering warmth in memories

that leave you to its shivering absence.

A Town Called.....

 

Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,

less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,

far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,

in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.

You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;

time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same

till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:

a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,

smoked for a day or two, then went out;

that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.

There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,

the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;

there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;

turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.

When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;

the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,

but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.

People are old; they grew old while they were still young;

it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces

are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.

Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,

there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.

Decision

 

You stood at the side of the road,

snow-covered and, as yet, unmarked.

I watched you from the window:

at first, filling your eyes with its perfection,

then weighing printing your footsteps

against being the first to leave a blemish.

And before you had even turned,

I knew your decision.

Questions on the Continuing War in Gaza

 

What difference: the oblivion of a newly born child

and it dead beneath a city’s rubble?

And the child born on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the grief of parents of fighters

and the grief of parents of children?

And the love of parents on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the child who is voluble

and the child whose words are dead in the wreckage of its lungs?

And the longing to live on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the bones that support a child

and those bones smashed to uselessness?

And the care needed on one side

of a fence and the other?

Incarcerated

Concrete walls,

steel door.

Daylight is twilight,

though

way up, light

through a window

makes a play of leaves

on the wall opposite:

 

by this means,

we know that we are 

underground,

buried.

Our living lives

are those leaves;

how we fear

the arrival of autumn

and autumn

is almost here.

Damien

 

He’s got a gimp;

it throws his suit

like the buttons are one button-hole out,

and the shirt falls

below his jacket

on that side.

He walks faster to blur it;

speeds through the city throngs;

that adeptness pleases him;

the gimp’s

in his talk

too.

He tells you straight;

tells you

he’s telling you straight,

to remember what he says

or get used to 

being kicked around.

And always checking behind

or glancing into doorways

like he’s in debt

all down the street,

then turns a corner like he’s

trying to lose someone.

He keeps his right hand

in his jacket pocket;

the fingers are walking too;

I think it's because some woman told him

that constant movement

is freaky.

He won’t mind my

telling you;

he’ll enjoy been written about,

and feels he’d be good on tv;

he knows they wouldn’t have him;

their loss.

Betty

Betty,

the world is a marble;

getting smaller daily;

its mildews and viruses

have spread,

and they are at your feet.

I wanted to say something

reassuring,

for, at the very least, a child

should have hope

and till corrupted,

the child is beautiful;

but, what is there to say:

this has been destroyed.

Betty, 

the world is a marble;

there is no stopping it;

its mildews and viruses

are  spreading always

and they are at your feet.

.

September Swallows

 Some poems refuse to be written, over and over. This is a rewrite of a poem that seems to have a hold on me

September Swallows

September swallows

Knots on wires unbinding,

as though their true selves,

too long furled,

must hone their aeronautics.

They lift from the wires

into giddy flight,

like crochets escaping staves

for the grander arias of global skies.

Career, dip and wheel;

a restlessness in their DNA

compels them; tomorrow,

they’ll be arrows, Morocco-bound.

Care and Love

 

Behind those children playing,

I see a grandmother smiling;

she remembers

the blur of children’s play

but it’s not that memory,

it’s their place in her heart.

These moments of happiness:

she has seen them before,

knows the thin bone china

they’re made of;

her smiles are carefree

as the children

but are of this moment;

she has lived through many years.

 

These books are steps;

climb,

climb,

climb for a better view.

The ladder

 

How impressive the ladder looks from the bottom,

disappearing, as it does, into the clouds.

How those rungs invite;

how everyone encourages you to climb,

so you do.

And all the way up: yes, up, up, up

and, at the top, no more rungs:

space, just space;

they invited you to climb to a space.

Perhaps, I think, this may be Heaven;

maybe, set my molecules free 

to wander through Heaven.

Perhaps, the thought is Heaven;

perhaps such a moment is eternity.

Legacy

 

Like earthworms,

like the carcasses of all animals,

we darken the soil,

enrich it.

In their turn,

our children will rise,

live in the sun

till they, too, revert to humus.

Our gift to them,

to those coming ‒ grandchildren,

great grandchildren:

a poisoned, decaying earth

and, as a tree nourishes its fruit,

this earth must feed its children

all that has collected around roots,

all that is unseen in water.

Internal strife

 

You see it in his eyes.

He drowns it in incessant yap,

conceals it behind constant activity;

answers nothing,

but is forever asking questions,

filling his life with places and people;

always on vacation from himself.

His travels are to distraction.