Month: October 2020

October 31, 2020

詩

The Japanese invented
haiku certain that a painting
of great beauty could
be completed with only
a few strokes of the brush.

The Japanese have no word
for what we claim is higher
order poetry, academic and
pedantic are two other English
words which easily apply.
And the Japanese are hard put
to comprehend so much of what
we deem experimental, the result,
a friend named Yoshi said,
of what seems the odd scraps
of a dictionary torn apart
by an unexpected tornado.

In Tokyo every tree knows
that at least four
poems lie within it, each
awaiting the appropriate
season.

October 30, 2020

PERCUSSION

After years of going to live jazz
I’ve honed my skills to a fine level.
I still know next to nothing
about the intricacies of the music,
five years of classical piano and
I barely understand Bach and Mozart.

But I know where to look, who
bears watching in the combo,
and it isn’t the trumpeter, he
with his ballooning cheeks, some
clownish bellows, or the bassist
always striving hard to develop
scoliosis, the sax player with
the rubber spine swaying.

I watch the percussionists, piano
and drums, careening from
sadness to joy and hitting
a glissando of emotions, the pianist
staring at the keys, lecturing them
on expectations for us well met,
for her falling short, and the music
slides into the background of life
in the process of being lived.

October 29, 2020

INSIDE THE PAGE

She asks innocently,
listening to the wind whispering
through the bare branches of the oak,
“How long have you lived
in this poem,” pointing
to the page of marked
and remarked typescript.
He looks at her as if discovering
she’d grown another head,
peeking out from between
her well-polished teeth.
“I have no idea what you mean,”
he says, “I write the poems—
it is up to you to furnish them.”
She grimaces, “That’s so wrong,”
a third head appeared, grinning,
“if you build poems on spec
they are sterile little boxes
that you foist off on the unwary.
Plant all the flowers you want
around it, it will still
have the antiseptic smell
should we dare step into it.
That’s just the difference
between us,” she adds, “I can see
the song of the wind
played by the trees, but you,
you see only the blankness
of the unadorned walls.”

Published in These Lines, Fall 2020
https://theselines.org/these-lines-1.1-fall-2020.pdf

October 28, 2020

AN AFTERNOON STROLL

There are three of them
and they walk slowly along the side
of the road, proud yes, but are they
old men who see no need to hurry,
or self-assumed royalty who dare not.

Nor is it clear if they are the same
group who gathered outside
the ornate gateway into PGA Village
two weeks ago, perhaps tired of
the endless greens fees to walk around.

We pause to watch them, wondering
if they are merely out for a stroll
on a pleasant spring day, or if
they are en route to Bed, Bath
and Beyond for the clearance sale.

They ignore us, as they are wont
to do, lost in their own world, we
simply part of the landscape,
for that is how things are in
the land of the Sandhill Cranes.

October 27, 2020

ROADS

The problem with roads
is that they all must lead
somewhere, and if lucky, with
other theres along the way.

I prefer roads that have
no beginnings or ends,
that go where they will
and change direction on a whim.

On my roads you never
arrive late because there
is no point at which to arrive,
so you are always timely.

Friends laugh when I say this,
say such roads cannot exist
at least until I point out
that life is just such a road.

October 25, 2020

FOR NOW

Tomorrow this poem will
most assuredly no longer be here,
though when during the night
it will slip away, never again
to be seen, I don’t know or perhaps it
will return in a form I would not recognize,
recrafted by the hand of an unseen editor.

It may take on a meaning unfamiliar,
or translate itself into a tongue
that I can neither speak nor read,
or perhaps, most dreadedly, assume
the shape of prose, accreting words
until the embedded thought is bloated
and wholly unrecognizable.

Even if I tried to stop it, watched
carefully, it would no doubt
remind me that poems have a life
of their own once cast to paper
or pixels, and I am at best only
another editor or reader, and it
takes kindly on most days to neither.

October 24, 2020

ETD

As a child, I could never
understand why, when I knew
that it ws time to go, my parents
were never ready, always needed
one or two more things; and why
en route, we were never quite there
even though I had waited the ten
minutes more they said it would take.

But I had nothing on my beloved
dog Mindy, who would stand
by the back door, leash in moth
and growl, wondering, no doubt
why I always need more time,
it wasn’t, she was certain,
because shoes were necessary,
or a rain jacket, she got by
just fine without them, and
why my last bathroom stop had
to take precedence over hers would
always be beyond comprehension.

October 23, 2020

WINTER MEMORY

As a child I know the winters
must have been milder, as it
was never too cold to have my parents
take is to Sheridan Park where
my father would drag the old
wooden toboggan up the chute
adjacent to the stairs as we ran ahead,
and smile as we hurtled down
seeing how far we could go
across the snow packed runway.

After an hour, when our hands
were blue, the mitten clips
long since defeated, he would
once again smile as we drove
to Louie’s for a foot long and
a couple of orders of curly fries.

I’m thinking the weather changed
right about the time my parents
packed off to Florida, as if God
had given them some Noah-like
warning that winters would soon
get ugly, or maybe He was just
trying to help Detroit, since my step-
siblings had to have certain cars,
while I struggled through winter
in the north in my leaky, rusting Opel.

October 22, 2020

I SPEND THE EMPTY HOURS

I spend considerable time thinking
about what it is that I am, what is I,
whether Descartes’ God or Spinoza’s
could possibly exist, or must if I can have
meaning beyond self-reflection, needing
a godly mirror, and image reflected.
Cogito, on what basis can I draw that conclusion
what logical proof, carefully constructed will
not fall under the weight of the axiom, cogito cogito
but of what? Keys that spit words that fade
under a misplaced finger, she caught in the web
twisting, unable to pull free, staring at
an approaching holiday of praying forgiveness
Vidui, as though to posit God is to validate
emotions, control impulses which leap synapses
and flit and fade, I have sinned and transgressed
I have violated laws and statutes and I beg
forgiveness that I might live, this I, this cogito
who has no external reference save God
which makes all things real, all illusion.
It is comforting knowing in death the soul is
carried on, thought lingers, or does it cease
such that I am not for I think not, yet why should
I fear, for when it is done, I will not have been
save as a reference point, a linchpin from which
may hang ornaments of a life, a tidy sum.

Publsihed in These Lines, Fall 2020
https://theselines.org/these-lines-1.1-fall-2020.pdf