*
Contents:
Learning to Walk Again
This Addiction
Traveling Beyond the Personal
*
Learning to Walk Again
The floors are waves
and all the hallways seas and fast-
forward eons of birth and rebirth, like ice
that comes back or shrinks
disappears. The surgery, some
frankenstein of wellness, split your balance
stem to stern, saved your heart but now
the ship’s prow aims at the sky
and then plunges again and again. This
is no thrill. The terror erupts
like bothered bees in summer heat.
Learning to walk again the little store
down the block is therapy,
school, an obstacle course
as if narrow aisles or freezer doors
could dive, trip you, your feet and knees
give way. What have the doctors
made you? What have they made
all of us? The fear of falling spins
and whines even in our kitchen
you find new ways to hang on
and move through the mayhem when
familiar rooms turn opaque, chill, wet,
frayed as April mornings
once were when great banks
would hover in off the wider waters
and fill the basin of the bay.
From up here
that world floats under a heaven
of clouds, steeples poke through
but when you try to move
through your fog of fear
and the last medicine
of a courage that used to come
as natural as a clearing breeze
seems a dream:
will you stumble, will
your neuropathy tangle
your most confident stride?
You go on. The little store
your basic training camp
in a war we all could face
but now, you are the only one
at its terrible front line
and you are winning
sometimes sometimes
you even remember fearlessness
and ease, an involuntary
entry: Come in! Welcome! Though
the world you remember has become
a perpetual tremor. Will it
ever return, stability
I mean, I mean
confidence? People say
you are strong and brave but you know
there are no other choices.
This Addiction
It is lethal
this addiction
to financing hate
and massacre
how we purchase
our personal version of peace
via the profitable
means of war
always
on someone else’s turf
as if the little
miracles all around
can no longer
be made to pay
we are weaned
on the pornography
of shootouts car chases explosions
while sons and daughters
of the wealthy
bound
from high bridges
or dangle themselves
from mighty
rock faces
once unassailable
even holy because a saunter
through the mountain
lupine
can no longer suffice.
Addiction:
a craving for blood
televised ruins of some far
away wedding
our lust secret
even to us
what we pay for
with soul
and any claim
to righteousness
while they gather
at our borders
starve
in the wreckage
of the long planned
but forever denied
and inestimably
lucrative
executions.
Traveling Beyond the Personal We poets often speak of roads, easy enough to carve them out of this miasma the infernal noise of the mind and its charges, its leaps and innumerable connections. Our tragedies too flame out in dreams, the highway stumbles down our cliffs by the sea. We all have stories. This isn’t a contest, nor is it therapy… and advice in poems: who follows it, really? I wandered once in the gardens of gruesome mass graves, caged children stolen for unspeakable acts, and considered my own travails entirely extracurricular even if linked to the real lesson: The world is a freak show in spite, or because, of its astounding clefts, its heights and those crowns of coral islands disappearing into the drink that may rise again when I am far beyond dreams. Still— whatever our crimes, whatever our losses it is our job, especially for anyone lucky enough to have the time and means to read and know poems, to make necessary connections beyond our own tragedies, however large or small or impassable they may be and often enough they are. What links us is not so much what wounds us inexorably, each from its own ordeal, but how we elope into our nights of freedom, dreams; even as we die in the dirt, singing something singing one thing, anything. Apparently, we can’t really avoid going on, whatever it is we sing as the roads we envision pass beneath us and those islands rise again and we are given a drink of water and everyone on all the other roads greets us as they trundle by.
Damn, that second to last stanza from beyond personal, straight to the heart! And I love your photographs. What is it about poets and taking good pics?
I read these the other day and needed to go back a second time. Very strong and powerful, though the one that most touched and disturbed me was the first, because it is lovely, shows as much of you as it does the person who inspired the poem, and because I know who the subject is and am saddened that this has happened.