Division returns
us to ourselves.
One cannot praise
oppression, but it
at least makes us
take a stand and say
“this is who we are
and as we are this
let us celebrate and mourn
what we alone understand:
that there is a tree
in a cleft
in stone
in a desert
and while the tree
would have been stronger
had it sprouted
elsewhere with more soil
and water, it still
stands and everyone
wants to touch the tree.”
Don’t shade your eyes against
the hawk above you
or the animal, unnamed but present,
that is slipping through the brush on the roadside.
Invite them
to your day — include them
as if they were family,
for they are, a branch
you have never known well,
but who nonetheless
carry news of kinship
from unknown regions.
You will not understand them.
That’s all right. It will be their world
and yours touching, not blending
or overlapping — you are too far along
this path for that to happen,
at least right now. For a moment, though,
you’ll feel them breathing, see flight
in a different way, try to name
what is in the underbrush simply by sound.
Skunk, possum, raccoon…or something else?
You’ll invent, perhaps, a new word
for what is unseen there. It may call out
that swift creature
to stand before you unafraid. Maybe
you’ll stare back into its amber eyes
while the hawk observes you two,
gathers your images in, tells itself: yes,
I recall this, there was a time when all of us
took each other on as simple travelers,
and did not scare so easily.
Imagine his delight and surprise
at reading news of black widow spiders
in supermarket grapes
and lightning that burned down
Jesus.
His first thought:
Some things are too improbable
to be feared
or understood.
He looked at the stories
with a practiced eye
for discerning meaning
and finding connections;
was at a loss
until he saw a third story
of a miracle cure for blindness
in a remote land: a child
touched by an electric eel
awoke from a three day coma
with sight.
Then in an instant he recognized
how to spin it all
into a narrative he could believe:
the sky’s fire stroking down;
the poison in the seemingly safe fruit;
the girl opening her eyes to see
incredulous doctors straining to understand
what was happening —
pride stumbling against nature,
and nature just laughed.
He congratulated himself on figuring it out.
That all the links were only in his head
was something he never stopped to consider.
Walking
among the hard and careless
without mentioning what I see
makes me soft. There are
buddies, friends, and acquaintances
who do not see how things connect.
Can’t read between lines, can’t see
or hear the trembling in voices
afraid to be anything but soft.
Soft —
I long to remain in bed
all day, melt into the covers
and only think and speak
in cotton and down. To be
legitimately soft and caring,
to slide into the pillows
comfortably with no desire
to rise; how can I remain so
when the world is hard
on the soft?
Morning is the time
for the diamond tongue
that scratches truth into
the bathroom mirror.
I want to see those words
across my face. Always
a reminder that hard
is necessary if soft
is to follow, and that soft
cannot be enjoyed
without knowing hard.
The older I get
the more gunshots sound like music,
the more a baby crying makes me want to say
“Ahhh…the kid’s learning something.”
And also,
the more often I am compelled to weep
at some song as it perfects
the air it rides on.
The older I get
the less I believe
that what everybody says
is true, the more I want to look for
and proclaim
exceptions to rules.
And also,
how simple my understanding of God becomes
when I take concern for humanity
out of the definition of “God.”
The older I get
the more amazed I become
that I am older, that I have survived,
and also
that it has not become easier
with experience…
such arrogance.
Such selfishness!
That this exists, all of it,
ought to humble me out of any desire
for more than this,
but I behave as if I am central
and my needs are central,
as if salvation
was ever any part of the Plan.
The older I get,
the more at ease I become
with the idea that I will pass
sooner than later, and also,
that I will be
forgotten sooner,
replaced, regrown,
and God won’t even notice.
What’s up, you ask?
All the shades are down
and I’m afraid of the street
rising like a wave to crest
through the windows.
I almost struck a man
in the store today
for cutting me off with his
cart.
Came home
with white knuckles
and a fiery imagination
full of apocalypse, hoping
the cat could calm me
and now he’s taken shelter
somewhere.
I’m going
to kick something —
are you coming over? Please
say yes, I’ll let you in.
I need someone here
who can see me
even when I have become
invisible.
Well, aren’t you
remarkably flexible —
being so nice to her
when you secretly despise her
for being so nice to you?
What a dumbass she is,
what a sterling specimen
you are
to not show the contempt
you feel for her
in her smock and name tag,
waiting on you so pleasantly
as if she actually enjoyed
contact with others, almost as if
she didn’t know that she’s a wheel
in the Cosmic Rejection Engine
of The Great Corporation
and her willing wage slavery merely reinforces
the efficiency of the Grand Scam?
You, on the other hand,
are so magnanimous you’d even
stoop to doing her
if you ran into her somewhere
and made a connection
because you both were wearing
ironic Pantera T-shirts. Such a blessing,
you and your urge to admit
a certain attraction as she rings up
your stuff that she smilingly
puts in a Big Red Bullseye bag
you’ll discard as soon as you can
in a gas station trash barrel
because you don’t want that showing up
in your trash — what would the housemates say
if they knew you’d shopped there,
even ironically, buying
the first thing that caught your eye
and not even seeking country of origin
on the screen printed label in the neck.
You’re hoping she’ll be there next time.
Maybe you can chat a bit. Try to sympathize
over her plight. Check out her ass
again. Suggest you attend a party
at the local co-op on Friday, pray
she doesn’t have a kid. Maybe you’ll
get some. Maybe she’ll remember you
and think you’re a hero, a Prince Charming
in Converse and Mossimo,
skulls and bands blossoming like heraldry
on your knightly vegan arm. How sweet
you’ll be to her. How flexible
you’ll hope she is.
Six thirteen PM,
ten PM, midnight
or just before dawn,
the rhythm of what I am
pulls me to the desk,
drums me
into the seat,
and there I stay
until a poem has come.
If you pluck two guitar strings
that are close to unison tuning
and watch, you will see the waves
of one splitting the waves of the other.
Sock them into tune and you’ll see
the waves become the same.
The math of music is reliable,
and so is this arithmetical
process of mine that brings me
back to the work and tenses me
until I sing in tune.
If everything is math,
it follows that if every word has its purpose
and every purpose must have its word.
I’m solving for purpose in words.
Apogee, perihelion, parabola,
terms of art; heart, love, passion,
common denominators; walnut,
cheese, mold, cheekbones, leaf,
veins, all the possible numerals
for use.
No logic here worth following,
no rules but the bare need
to follow what seems to be
a path, a proof of hypothesis.
An elegance in the solution
is worth the loss
of breath
and sleep
and time.
And in the end, after
the ciphering is done?
It should sing. It should sound a note
or two or more in harmony,
or dissonance that opens irrational
music for thought; what I hear
may be different than I thought I would
but it will be music and if you see me
in the poem
I should swing and thrum
in time to what you hear.
So rhythm will pull me
again and again to the desk,
to the equations and the harmony,
back to the axis through my spine
and the one through my groin
around which I plot the curves
of how I will sing when the tension
at last is equalized
at six AM, ten AM,
dawn or noon or just before,
whenever I am pulled toward song.
It will be full, no room for air.
It will call out every offense I’ve suffered
as if all were equal. It will offer
no image not in the public domain.
It will taste bitter until I spit it out
and then it will taste like triumph.
It will be loud as a windstorm
on an already-scoured plain.
It will connect invisible dots
wherever I can find them. It will have
moments that make you swallow
other moments that are inedible.
It will be musical and disjointed
with leaps across ages and countries.
It will focus a floodlight on a broad area.
It will call up recognizable names.
It will follow sense with nonsense
and mix the two. It will insist
and cajole and exhort and define
and coax and seduce and by the time
it’s complete it will deconstruct
and exhaust and reject
and stick with you for minutes and
you are going to love it in the moment
and never think about it again
but it will be printed on a T-shirt you can buy
and the letters will flake off early
so it ends up as a shadow in your wash
and you’ll give the shirt to Goodwill
and that’s my distribution network.
It is going to be something,
I promise you that. It’ll be done soon
and you’ll see. You’ll see.
Walk into a store full of junk
and start looking
for your fortune.
Rub the wrong lamp
and get
the deeply messed-up genie.
He grants one wish with the stipulation
that you can only ask for a secret blessing.
No one can ever know you have it or you’ll die.
The request for the large penis
is right out the window, along the ones for good looks
and wealth and health and everlasting youth.
You think for a moment and choose the ability
to put into words exactly what you’re feeling
so you can understand it yourself.
You walk out the door of the store
not changed, except that people start calling you
“Nick Drake.” Confused as to who that is,
you start writing and singing about the confusion —
again, mostly for yourself, but one day
people hear it and start to talk, and then you die
for a moment, and you come back
when they start calling you “Ian Curtis,”
and it happens again and they call you
“Kurt” something, and then “Elliott”
something, and another name
and another name
until you barely know what to think,
but you’re going to keep writing about it,
cursing that genie the whole time.
Mourning
the Gulf —
what do we mourn?
The sea turtles,
the moon jellies,
the phytoplankton we cannot see?
The tarballs cutting our vacations
short, or ending them
before they begin?
The fishermen
staring
at loaded guns?
Sunsets that hover and dip
into rainbow sheens
and brown slicks over our memories?
Do we fear the oily hurricanes
and greasy storms
yet to come?
Are we grieving
the Gulf, or how our own
experience with it
has now forever changed?
Do we even know what grief is
when it comes to such a thing as this —
for I do not believe the Gulf is grieving
as past extinctions
surge into view.
I do not believe a pelican
mourns as it dies, or that a shrimp
faces death with stoic resignation.
The earth feels nothing today
as it bleeds. What we feel
is unimportant to the earth
as it turns, as it adapts
to this. In five hundred years
it will be as if nothing happened here,
except to us if we are still here.
We mourn for that, not for the Gulf,
but for ourselves. For what we learn
about how small we are, understanding
for the first time again
that when we break the Earth we break only ourselves,
how the planet always heals, cleans itself up,
but never fast enough to save us from what we believe
of our own omnipotence.
Tiferet, a journal of spiritual literature, has an online presence that includes a Poetry Corner. June’s featured poets include G. Drew Hunter and his guest Tsultrim Serri, Tony Brown (that’s me, of course) and Melinda Lee, my guest.
Click on “Poetry Corner” on the left hand side of the page to read the work.
I’m thrilled to be in here, and especially thrilled for Melinda — her first publication!
It’s the kind of art
that makes you
contemplate its meaning
for hours
before taking a hammer to it
The kind of art
that boils water
and that’s all it’s good for
The kind of art
that flies avoid landing upon
The artist is a rube
who has stumbled into genius
once
and sparked
slapdash rebellion
It’s the kind of art
that prompts us to say
“everyone must be good at something
once”
Duration is beside the point
Talk of legacy is laughable
The kind of art
that shines when the right light hits it
and come closing time
doesn’t show up at all
but it’s working right now
and when that light gets itself lined up
just right on the piece
it’ll be like a drunk hobo is all over your lapels
spitting unintentionally foul aphorisms
and you’ll tell everyone about it the next day
and keep the story in your party repertoire
for a long time
Once he dared to think
he could be delivered from this,
but it has always pulled him back.
The neighbors stare at his car
all the way to the parking space out front.
One gives a perfunctory wave.
In his childhood home
the air is thick and sugary. Old songs
cling to his new shoes.
His mother is still waving food
at him and Dad’s still
outside
waiting for the obligatory
visit to discuss the tractor and
the shed.
A quick sandwich to keep the peace,
then back to the car. He waits
until the turn off from Main Street,
into the back roads leading back to the highway,
to roll down the window,
turn up the radio, and scream.
A woman sees a dragonfly.
She creates a dragonfly oracle
from it as it rises, hovers
where she can point at it.
Says, “It’s a sign.”
A child, bandaged
and slightly broken,
takes his crutch to be a sword
and slays the dragonfly,
acting as its name recommends he act.
A man sees the dead dragonfly
on the sand. Sees the beach as
a long gravel road heading south
and knows he will reach the end of it
one day, alone, no one by his side.
These three
will carry what they saw with them
for as long as they live,
dragonfly oracle, adversary,
and talisman each moving, flying,
carrying them forward.
The dragonflies see it differently.
In the Dragonflies’ Great Vision,
everything is broken out, held in a facet
and each facet shares its truth with the others.
A dead brother
is just scrap. Its brothers brush
its existence to one side
as just another moment that has ended.
And the woman, child,
and man are just moments who have ended.
What they mean is irrelevant
to the dragonflies. Their wings
are always spread. They already
know how to fly.
Dark Matter 