| Contents The Narrow Path
Advent Service
Plato's Laundry List
Gothic
Pevsner Park
A Green Valley with Frogs
Dancing the Words Away
Sacred Scrolls
A Foreigner Once Removed
A Field Near Tiberias
Hyenas
Lyric Contingencies
Cats of Haifa
Pyrrho and Teresa
The Polite Silence of the Preacher
Gambier George
George's Religion
Baffled by My Monuments
Moments Molasses
After Heresy
An Exercise in Puzzlement
Numbskull Pudding
Ten Minutes Will Do It
Approaching Minnesota
THE NARROW PATH
Some call it a rose. I don't know.
I think of it as an evasive light.
When I turned I thought
for a moment I saw it.
They say it is closer
than your life's vein.
They say it is ethereal air
breathed in your breath.
Let's make a list:
a puff of brown autumn grass
moving in low light, a motion of
leaves high in the locust trees,
the rocks, the water, the moss,
my daughter's face calm in sleep,
the music in the high temple of golden air,
the infinite regress of reasons.
When I saw that the ladder
was higher than I could climb
in endless days of climbing,
I thrashed around in confusion.
I built tiny shelters each night
and left them behind each morning.
I raged and raged against a silence
that could not be caught in words.
That silence while I dig the beds,
that silence while instructing the machines,
that silence in the laughter and the crying,
that silence in silence looking east.
One night I heard the buzzing silence.
I followed it out into the cold,
the sky black with stars,
down the path into the woods,
water black, moon on snow,
I followed it, and found fluttering
in the raspberry thickets
an old book with yellow pages.
It occurs to me that
I should be more direct
and tell you exactly what I mean.
It is only this.
ADVENT SERVICE
My little day.
The sound panels, gold, high
in the old chapel.
"I am afraid of directness.
It is so plain.
This trivial directness
can't hold my pain."
They are so sure.
The march of diverse certitudes.
My little day.
"I am afraid of directness.
It is so plain.
This trivial directness
can't hold my pain."
Let me say.
The liturgy, ah, that brings me back.
PLATO'S LAUNDRY LIST
It seems to me, my buzzing bee,
that you hide your faith in irony.
Do you doubt or do you believe?
It's either/or, so don't deceive.
My dear dogmatist, naive apologist,
life's more complex than Plato's laundry list.
I think you'll find a thinking mind
must leave these simple pairs behind.
GOTHIC
Look down the stone walk and stairs,
strawberries spreading in the cracks.
All those years we never saw
the crumbling, sandy, dusty facts.
The cats creeping by stone urns
pause to stretch and scratch a word
or two into the feline text
and yawn a silent yarn they've heard.
The mist at night quick settles in,
cool and thick and gathering damp
so that at last some drops run off
where moss and lichen wheeze and stamp.
And trembling by the dripping walls
a tiny human moves and calls.
PEVSNER PARK
In the dirty city the park has stones
that stop the parachute games and dogs,
but old men sit there and sweat
in their beards, dripping liquid air.
I want to ask them, but by definition
they cannot know, can only read
and dance the book around the tents
by the harbor where the answers swelter.
And on the mountain like smoke
the golden dome puzzles me and shines
and the Greek columns shine white
and baffle the deep blue Mediterranean.
I wish I were in a German village,
but that is too old, two hundred years.
Then I wish I planted my corn in Virginia,
but they have long since moved to Kentucky.
A GREEN VALLEY WITH FROGS
I was still in a cool, green valley,
no eyes but mine, and I stretched
and laid down in the stream like a log
and the water was sweet and clean.
The water was sweet and clean
and I could make books of leaves
and the frogs laughed at my questions
but I merely included them in the text.
Measure for measure I measured
and cut the legs from the ladder
but the angels still descended and
were just breaths or winds or fingers.
I counted them for days and nights
but soon did the proof of natural numbers.
It all seemed like a briar bush
and my skin like thorns and filaments.
DANCING THE WORDS AWAY
She dances the words away,
with light, ironic touch
along their pinions of gray.
A few suffice her lonely brief.
She holds them like a mantra
against the nothingness of belief.
Nothing much, nothing much.
She loves the play and extra
comical combs of sodden halls
or coral filaments of reef
and blue or nothing at all.
She dances the words away
and holds them tight when
like black coated brethren
they most rough her day.
She needs them like rostas
and curls and fragrant fruit
that in their murmurs suit
a feeling of cool white pietas.
She loves them and needs them
and dances them tenderly
like a program or an anthem.
SACRED SCROLLS
They are close to the grave
these old mystics in the park,
and if at times they seem to rave,
I still nod, respecting the dark.
A FOREIGNER ONCE REMOVED
There was a gray battle ship
in the blue bay,
but all was peaceful,
no worries.
The sailors walked around
in twos and threes,
loud and friendly,
shuffling their American dollars
like cards.
I met two going down the stairs.
They gave me a tract in Arabic.
I told them in English
it should be in Hebrew,
but they just moved on down the mountain
to convert the Jews.
Of course, I didn't speak Hebrew either.
I walked around in my English bubble
in a buzz of incomprehension
until these jabbering Americans
came by and made me
a foreigner once removed.
A FIELD NEAR TIBERIAS
Red anemones, yellow groundsels
dot the new green field
spotted with stones.
It is a rough place for a profusion.
An old man sits in a tin shed.
It is an old spot.
Many others have sat here.
Olive trees grow here and there
and goats roam,
speaking some language
I don't know.
It will be brown again soon,
for a long time,
but the sky will still be
brilliant blue.
HYENAS
I thought I heard hyenas
laughing in the night.
They tell me it is
impossible in the city.
But maybe they sweep up through
the wadis and foot paths at night
thinking to claim what was theirs
for ten thousand years.
LYRIC CONTINGENCIES
She didn't start free from
the desire for belief.
She still liked a story.
She still defined a self.
But pebbles floated in
contrary, changing winds
and so her hands lifted
up to touch it depends.
And so the monks chanted
and their breathing was winds
and she bent to the ground
to pick up it depends.
CATS OF HAIFA
Theirs is a parallel city,
brutal motion despite scraps,
hard jointed mean with cynical
eyes and ecology of rats.
But the kittens still purr
and you want to pet them
as they totter and look
and spin and totter again.
You want to pet them or
to set them free, but where?
You know they will scar soon and
yowl at night like cats of Haifa.
PYRRHO AND TERESA
He wanted to ask her.
Why is faith a problem?
Aren't we beyond all that?
It died long ago like sin.
He wanted to ask her.
But he was a buzz to her
and she was a wind to him.
Their meeting was just summer.
The trees hushed up the ground like
a breathing gnome, like a quarry
long since overgrown, stone benches
and mosquitoes, she was sorry.
A different discourse alas
was needed and at last came.
Irony and awe joined just
finger tips on winds and mountain.
THE POLITE SILENCE OF
THE PREACHER
In the old country church
one bright Sunday morning
the Preacher's certainties
dissolved like laces of light.
He still preached each Sunday,
but of daily mysticisms
and justice and common kindness,
of holding the people together.
He visited the sick,
comforted the grieving,
joined the young lovers,
sent the dead on their way.
After a few years he quietly
retired to a carpentry shop
where he wrote delicate
verses of wood and words.
GAMBIER GEORGE
Time was when George would come by
and we would play chess or cards
on a log in the garden
and talk of inference and yards.
He held that it was all a game
and that turf grass was a crime
somewhere close to patricide.
But I never took him too seriously,
until he started quoting Rorty
in his rutabaga patch.
GEORGE'S RELIGION
Ol' George never seemed to quite
fit in with the Baptists in town,
but he went to church at least
twice a year and he sent his kids.
Once I asked him about it.
He said he liked them having
no creed except the Bible and
"The Bible is one hell of a book!"
Now his wife was something else.
She taught Sunday School each Sunday,
went visiting and witnessed up a storm.
When I asked him about it, he just winked.
BAFFLED BY MY MONUMENTS
I change. I am changeable, yes.
There is no other way to say
it. I am not steady or firm.
I flow and go every which way.
I could say it is the world,
that I merely imitate, fit
myself to its contours but no.
It's just me. I roam. I flit.
It might be right to say I am
too open to cadences and
the fine voices of the other,
stuttering shifting winds in sand.
I don't know. I guess I just seek
and don't find or find for moments,
even weeks, sometimes years but then
stilt, baffled by my monuments.
MOMENTS MOLASSES
He is very tired today
and wants to run away
and hide in the drifts like
river bandits with frog eyes.
He is a time bomb today
and ticks away like fumes
as his stiff time ebbs and
runs through gray rooms.
He is joined to old chances
and can't form a coherent
line or draw a picture
or get one letter sent.
AFTER HERESY
Old friendly source, old home,
I remember the silence
we talked the days from.
Many varied houses we built
around that quiet fire
and when each evaporated
like dew in misty desire
the fire would still warm me
long nights after heresy.
AN EXERCISE IN PUZZLEMENT
The filing of papers in the rough day
was all I had that time.
I wondered where the mongoose was.
Once I had grabbed his brown tale,
that was the end.
Speaking by the Carmelit stairs,
the stones comforted me somewhat,
and the stone dust.
My breathing was labored and nothing came.
The little princess and the tide warmers
blossomed in the side garden.
The clouds painted a different color of
blue on the washed out blue I was used to.
And the river bed had been dry for centuries,
they tell me. I have nothing else to say.
No, what I have said is nothing.
Perhaps a dance, perhaps sand blasting,
perhaps a shimmer of marble dust.
The saw startles the will to focus
and contain seed beds or rock gardens
until I look on all that came before
as an exercise in puzzlement.
NUMBSKULL PUDDING
Once the moorings came loose,
I started to spew again.
I had tried to contain things,
but the results were not good,
did not flow, were stilted,
forced, and all of that.
Now I see it as a starting place
from which to mumble out ten
new volumes after I delete these.
I don't know what I was doing.
It was nothing perhaps.
Now I feel freer and will dance
when the moon stones are ready,
complete with local references.
TEN MINUTES WILL DO IT
Fifteen to ten and still no sound.
I have bucked the time warp and tried
the refugee river captain and run past
the fountain with lights and jars.
I have been a little timid perhaps and
thought of something beyond ten minutes
of running fools with helmets in the
dim passage, a fulcrum of runners.
Now I think that I will project out
and pull in my mummy wrapped in
cactus paper and pollen ink bottles.
Yes, ten more minutes will do it.
APPROACHING MINNESOTA
The heavy feeling of water.
His toes just won't point.
Laps and laps. Duck walk feet.
Cleaning the pool, by accident
breathing the chlorine,
such an emptiness of air.
It was a long walk to the pool at night,
at night a girl in the park,
a trekkie girl with a large
nose who used to sing,
all I want is a room somewhere
far away from the cold night air
with one enormous chair.
His rejections came back later
on the fringes, even the fringes
of the fringes, oranges on a
starvation day, it was rare.
Down to the banyan trees and up
to a sloping platform.
He read there all summer,
once mapped for boy scouts,
once a strange encounter by
the sewage stream,
once a dream that those woods
opened into circle upon circle of worlds,
but the library prevented that.
Later with a pad by concrete buildings,
biking to Coconut Grove,
sitting in a Burger King in the mall,
a bookstore in South Miami,
Jesus Christ Superstar.
The church didn't like his
pentacostals, free singing.
To be outcast, a kind of
habit, a mild youth group poet.
Some girls liked the idea,
but he did not press any advantages,
afraid of crossing the line,
never crossing the line,
running up to the line and back,
singing Cecilia to the Christian girls.
In Colorado his calculus teacher
was happy, waving.
No, the teacher had said
he hated his kind,
turning his paper in blank.
From Ruth to Ecclesiastes,
she left him first, wholesome girl.
He tried to make yellow rice and breath,
to learn good magic by the sweet streams,
three days from Key West.
To be nude in the ashram
was for the others,
but Lake Como was an ache.
A deep tanned man
carried his lover and
swept her into the lake
like bells. He paddled
in paddle boats and
sang pine tree songs.
To work to be allowed
in the ashram, then the
rules let loose.
Ten premies meditating,
inner bells and night,
blissful celibate hippie girls,
brown rice with cheese.
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