Dying Mantis

The bright green armor of the thorax
Is mottled now and autumnal,
The eyes, like pools of ink,
grow dim.
That quick inquisitive look about
is hardly present,
Your head dips and exhausted body splays.
Only the once strong front legs,
Lined with tibial spines like a gladiator’s,
Still grope tentatively and reach out to the branch.

Gone now are the days when you devoured your mates,
When you hunted the spider with impunity and
All lesser creatures cowered before your majesty.
Head cocked, eyes bright, your raptorial legs cocked in prayer,
Ready to snatch your prey and draw it to your waiting mandibles,
Unrelenting devourer of the still living.

The arc of life is short and painted in a season.
I look in your eyes and see my own demise,
See time take power and purpose from us both.
Gone now into the ground of the lost past,
Sweet dreams of passion at the edge of the field,
Surfeit of pleasures now dusty with memory,
Youth behind and the abyss before.

There is no tenderness in this season for either of us,
Little solace in the children we have borne, or
The food we have consumed or bonds we made.
The arc closes and dusk comes in
When the air clicks with the promise of frost
And the end of Summer days.

September 24, 2016

Image Source 

Nature, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

As a fond mother, when the day is o’er,

Leads by the hand her little child to bed,

Half willing, half reluctant to be led,

And leave his broken playthings on the floor,

Still gazing at them through the open door,

Nor wholly reassured and comforted

By promises of others in their stead,

Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;

So nature deals with us, and takes away

Our playthings one by one, and by the hand

Leads us to rest so gently, that we go

Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,

Being too full of sleep to understand

How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

                               

Image Source

The Donkey’s Foot Is Sure Along the Path

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" 
No prayer - yet. 

There will be many days and nights to offer prayer.  

No, no prayer.  A shout of anger and frustration 

Barked up to an indifferent world.

Shame and fear, a calmer voice,

“Is there a chance they could have made a misdiagnosis?” 

None and now, 

Blood, 

Chaotic and lost, turns on itself 

And consumes the host.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Jesus Sweet Christ.  

Where is that muscular savior, 

That laughing God son?  

He has gone to the field with his disciples and 

I can see him at the crest of the hill, 

Boldly swinging his scythe.  

Bless this harvest.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  

Where is that rustling warmth?

Where are the delicate hands
Running through my hair, 

Drawing my throbbing head to rest

On the breasts that fed a child God?  

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  

There she sits in high crowned glory,

Robed in the sky, 

Her eyes glittering and indifferent.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  

So here we are 

Left with little Joseph.  

Patient as bees, 

Slowly he  draws the blade 

Along the beam edge 

To erase the last imperfection.  

He hears the crowd outside 

Swept along its way to Jerusalem and
He returns to his tools. 

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Joseph leads the donkey along the path, 

Unburdened now – no mother, no king.  

And I follow.

The donkey’s foot is sure along the path 

But so close to the cliff edge 

I can hear breezes lift

With the heat to move my hair.  

They whisper how easily the sparrows rise 

On their wings, how easy is the flight 

Across the river.  But if I gaze over the edge 

The rocky bed is very far below 

And the water is black with the dead. 

Image Source

Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

There is a very good article on Kunitz at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/06/a-visionary-poet-at-ninety/304941/2/.  There are also several videos on YouTube of the author reading his work.  I took the photo the accompanies this post.

WHEN MAN ENTERS WOMAN by Anne Sexton

Any man quoting a poem by Anne Sexton is probably on shaky ground.  You think you know what she is talking about, but there is an uneasy feeling that you are missing the point entirely and it only remains for some woman to point that out to you.  That being said, I still feel that Sexton speaks to me from time to time.  She once wrote "This loneliness is just an exile from God."  My entire personal theology could be summed up in that one line (the key? 'only').  So I am going to give this a go.  I think I have her point in this poem.   If not, there is a legion ready to correct me.  This poem is from The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), a book that was a gift and a curse and has haunted me for decades.

When man
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman 
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashes their rivers.

This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
though God
in His perversity
unties the knot.


Image Source

Still Joy To Be Found

There is still joy to be found.
Pleasure in the optimism of birdsong,
Relentless waves against the beach,
The absurdity of flying beetles.

Those obnoxious, brilliant orbs,
Their color a distillation of every green,
Seem better suited for clinging
To the edge of delicate blossoms
Or moving tank-like through the grass.
But then those iridescent shells
Burst forth wings. What joy!
They take flight across the lawn,
Mad to find the next flower.

When I go, as I one day will,
Do not lay me out on white satin.
Don't paint my face to give it life.
Do not fill the coffin's edges with
bottles of liquor or pens or books;
Talismans of a life.

Burn me down and put my ashes
In a box of iridescent green,
the color of a beetle's shell.

I'll spread my own absurd wings.

This is not for you, now

I watch her check her mail 

while she waits for her salad in the pub. 

She'll pack it up and take it back to her room. 

She can relax then and let go a bit, 

kick off her espadrilles, 

the ones she had hand made in Spain 

by Lika Mamika.

Maybe she'll wait until later to open her laptop.

The afternoon light glints off the Neponset 

and reflects in her half rims. 

The thick page boy colored to match 

her russet blouse and matching capri's.

Not bad for her age, as they say. 

My age. 

Good hands, thick gold rings. 

Married well with a good job besides? 

Somebody in charge, a decision maker.

I am sure her garden is bright with flowers. 

Well ordered, controled , always in balance.

She is ruthless with the plants 

that do not bend to her command. 

Beneath her wide-brimmed sea grass hat,

her eyes search the ground for the errant plant. 

The trowel plunges into the earth again and again. 

At dusk she comes into the kitchen, 

lays her gloves on the black marble counter,

turns on the faucet and runs her hands under the stream, 

her rings glinting in the sunlight. 

" A good day's work" she says to her husband.

He struggles to remember the curve 

where flower meets 

curve of inner thigh. 

He says nothing, 

but silently roots for the weeds.  

Quincy Ma, 

June 19, 2012

Deer Bones

I wrote this poem this week after listening to Gary Snyder reading from his poems at the Library of Congress in 1966.  The 'facts' of the poem are true, but not contiguous in time.  I wanted to write a concrete poem about an incident that happened a few years ago when I had literally stumbled on a deer skeleton after stepping into the bushes to pee.  When I got home and began to write, the older story of being left on the side of the road just snuck into the poem and the theme began to emerge. It is true that I have always been teased about my small bladder, but as I have gotten older it just seems to be more acute.  Hence the theme of growing old and ending up, ultimately like the deer.

Deer Bones


I drive home in the rain from the train station, a point along the way 
Car to train to subway to office building and back again.
The beer I had in the club car cries for release and 
I finally can put it off no longer.
I pull over at wide spot beside a stone wall and slip into the woods.
I step in a bit and piss into the wet leaves, steaming in the drizzle.
God, I hate growing old, with a bladder 
The exact capacity of a twelve ounce beer.
Curse my age. . . . but only a little.  
There is relief in standing amid the dripping trees
Beside the empty road beyond the undergrowth – a bit naked and free at least.


And it is not as though my need to pee is really
All that new . . . night on a lonely road in Connecticut
Three of us standing in the tail light’s red glow,
Piss splashing off the warm asphalt.
We were young or drunk or possibly both.
They drove away without me because I was too slow or the butt of some joke.
I watched the tail lights round the curve into the black forest and was left
Standing on the empty road.
The sound of frogs in ditch water and a breeze crossing the grassy fields,
Undulating in the darkness,   I am sure I laughed with joy.
They came back, of course and we all laughed
And probably drank some more.


Now I finish up with the wet air cold on my face and turn to go.
That’s when I see the bones heaped under the pine.
I first see the cage of ribs and then long thigh bones;
Coming closer, the skull and antlers, the bare grin of teeth.
I am no huntsman so I can’t tell if this deer staggered
off the road  with a shattered pelvis to die panting under this tree.
Or was he blinded in his majesty by a flashlight and a sharp report?
One shot echoing in the night, then another for good measure.
Was he hastily butchered  - the hindquarters and shoulders
Skinned and sliced away, the rest left to throw wardens off the trail?
I can’t tell.  For all I know this deer died a natural death;
Died of starvation;
Died of old age;
Died of love.
How the hell should I know?


I run my hands lightly along the smooth antlers, 
As yet unchewed by porcupine, squirrel, rabbit, mouse.
I am tempted to take some souvenir  but think the better of it.
I chose to honor this open grave, this white memorial to change;
To coming and going, to life and death, to wide eyes and
Twitching nose and strong legs and flashing tail;
Honor this white monument of pure smooth bones.
Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway, as I zip up and
Make my way through the waning light
Back to the car,
And the drive home. 


05/22/2012

Ok, so this site has nothing to do with my poem, but I was looking for images and found this one

You have to check out this very cool site of images of the Goddess .  http://www.pbase.com/stephen_collector/the_goddess&page=4

Time Does Not Bring Relief by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go - so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say "There is no memory of him there!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him! 

image source

Passengers by Billy Collins

Traveling to Chicago this week, this poem concerning flying struck me.  I am sure Breanne knows what I mean, although I am sure she doesn't feel like jubilizing . . . . .

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

with the possible company of my death,

this sprawling miscellany of people---

carry-on bags and paperbacks---

that could be gathered in a flash

into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

Not that I think

if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,

holding hands like a ring of sky divers,

into a sudden gasp of brightness,

or that there would be some common spot

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

some spaceless, pillarless Greece

where we could, at the count of three,

toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It's just that the way that man has his briefcase

so carefully arranged,

the way that girl is cooling her tea,

and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter's hair . . . 

and when you consider the altitude,

the secret parts of the engines,

and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . . .

well, I think it would be good if one of us

maybe stood up and said a few words,

or, so as not to involve the police,

at least quietly wrote something down.

Roots: Epigrams

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These epigrams are pretty good pointers to the influences and reading I did in the past that led me to write and be a thinking person.  Sorry I don't have more specific references, other than the book titles.

"To write poetry means to exist in that joy which preserves in words the mystery of proximity to the Most Joyous.  Joy is the joy of the poet."

"Remembrances of the Poet", Martin Heidegger 

"The Chinese poet relates that men did not want to hear the song that he was playing on his flute of jade; then he played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since, men, too have listened to the song . . . "  And thus he went from the gods to those whom the image cannot dispense.

I and Thou , Martin Buber

" . . . a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment.  In a word, it is a representation, and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days'."

Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade

"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

T.S. Eliot

 "Ignorant people use the most idiotic words sometimes with a dignity, a force of feeling that makes them glow and flare.  I listen in profound silence . . . later I try to imitate. I almost always fail."

William Carlos Williams

I am soft sift
In the hourglass - at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
  And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
  Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", Gerard Manley Hopkins

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
-- A day of dappled seaborne clouds --
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord.  Words.  Was it their colours?  He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue; sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds.  No, it was not their colours; it was the poise and balance of the period itself.  Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour?  Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure form the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

" . . .On the other hand there is Flossie, my wife, who is the rock on which I have built.  But as far as my wish is concerned, I could not be satisfied by five hundred women.  As I said at the beginning, I was always an innocent child . . . Men have given direction to my life and women have always supplied the energy."

William Carlos Williams

Talking with Lover

These poems were written after meeting Dawn's grandmother who the family called Lover.  She was colorful, to say the least.  She lived to attend our marriage, but these poems were written after that , probably in the early 1980' and , based on a night of conversation with her at her apartment in Southhampton.  I distinctly remember coming into her apartment in the middle afternoon and her first suggestion was that I 'make myself a highball', totally baffling to a recent college grad in the '80s.  I found her charming and hilarious, as I did my own grandmother, but I heard that she was a force of nature in her day.  As a child, she was bilingual in German and had visited her family in Northern German with her mother.  Her father worked at the Arion Club in New York and they lived in apartment there for a time. I tried to capture her voice and cadence in these poems.

i
I remember very clearly,
very clearly,
the kitchen, lace curtains and
the little garden
outside the door and the long window

like this, you see.

They had a bowl of cherries on the table
- always adults around me then - and
they told me not to eat anymore.
But when they left,
I did,
pits and all.

Yes, that must have been in
nineteen and four

or five.

ii
This is my father.
(The proud
moustachoed
German,
stout as a puppy,
on his horse in Central Park.)

He died of heart failure
at the age of thirty.
Mother believed it was
because of the five flights he had to walk up
to where we lived above the Arion Club.
When Mother told me - I was six -, I said
"Aber Mutter, musst du wieder trauen."

I accepted it.

iii
(She glows like sixty years ago,
dusky hair in a thick braid next to
her dark eyes and girlish smile.)

We walked arm in arm along the beach
but the next day her brother came and told us
that she had died.  Of polio, the night before.
Her mother never recovered from her grief.

We had walked arm in arm - that day!

So you see, there have been sorrows
like your own

great sorrows.

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

This sonnet is dedicated to  my long suffering and supportive wife, Dawn. She continues to support me as I struggle to find any sort of enjoyment or satisfaction with my job.  I know it must be hard to hear me in such despair about how my work is going, but she always has words of wisdom and love and helps me carry on.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
   For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings,
   That then I scorn to change my state with kings.


Image Credit

On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

I have been reading Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins, the Poet Laureate.  I am not taking a lot away from the book so far.  He certainly can write, but I don't feel moved by most of his poems.  Sometimes, however, I need to re-read them a couple of times.  One however, struck me immediately.  I was reminded of some conversations I have had recently with Emica about her childhood and  in thinking about my own. It is the fourth stanza that resonated with me in this poem.



On Turning Ten


The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something, 
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light - 
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of  the soul.


You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.


But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.


This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.


It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees, I bleed.

Look, Stranger at this Island Now by W.H. Auden

Reading this poem last night in bed, I was on the verge of tears.  Why, I wonder?  Is the clue in the poem or in the reader's mind?  I must have read it a dozen times.  I still wonder.

Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.


Here at the small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
and the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf, and the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.


Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
that pass the harbour mirror
and all the summer through the water saunter.
                                                                        November 1935

A Refusal to Mourn

It is October and traditionally as the days grow crisper,  I exchange my gin for scotch (or Canadian whiskey).  It is the time when I dig out my broken-backed copy of the Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems.  The two are inter-related, of course.  Thomas is meant to be read out loud with the book in one hand and a drink in the other.  The birthday poems, "Poem in October" or "poem on his birthday' are my favorites and I have quoted them before in this blog. To be shouted to the heavens in defiance! Yes!

But today's poem is a good closure in my mind to the last few posts on Morgan.  You can read a poem over and over again and then, one day, it finally clicks and you understand exactly what the poet meant.  Why?  Is it that the puzzle of the words is solved? Or is because of the experiences you bring to a poem unlock its secrets?  Is the poem an empty vessel for our emotional experiences, or a source and repository of images and ciphers that explain and illuminate?

A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Father and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Image Source

Last Day of Indian Summer

Monday October 22, 1979

Dearest Child,

It is 12:50 now and we know that you have died in the womb.  Why or how, we cannot say.

Where was God?
dancing in your heart
my little unborn babe,
my little wave.

Now Dawn and I must birth your dead body out.  This is a testing time for us, and would have been for you as well, but you are dead.

Such a simple thing - death.  For one like yourself, warm and hidden in Dawn's womb I am sure it was an easy death, a happy death.  But Dead you are, and we . . . we must bear the pain.

1/3/80

Morgan

Tonight I found your picture

neatly folded, hidden in my wallet.

I remember that light filled Summer day

alive with the sound of crickets in the new-mown hay.

In the cool darkness of the hospital room they 

attached the equipment to Dawn's belly and 

opened a window on your place.

We watched you wriggle your toes with 

the careless abandon of a child.

Tiny elfling in your mama's belly

floating, gurgling in an amniotic world.

(The picture shows you smiling, I swear,

through your fluid playground.)

Strange isn't it? In a single moment I

saw your birth, your first steps, splashing baths,

fearful first days of school, dates, love, education,

beauty, work - in your wiggling toes I witnessed

the entirety of your existence.

II

The night before you died

Dawn and I lay like spoons

and I felt your nudging insistence

against my arm as I enfolded you both.

You still strove toward the light

toward freedom from your fluid world.

(Hadn't you listened to your mother

weeping in the darkness, whispering for you

to stay inside . . . where love was as real

as the blood that passed between you?)

III

As you crouched dying , slipping away

in silence, aware only of your mother's heartbeat

quietly booming in your ears,

What did you recall?

Did you hear again my muffled voice

call to you through Dawn's belly?

Purring cats kneading their paws against you?

Car rides with the sound of laughing friends?

The pull of the tide on your fluid world

when Dawn and I walked beside the sea?

In the brief span of your life

what treasures lay in the halls of your mind?

What primal impulses quicken your breast?

What did you dream as you crouched, dying?

IV

In the warm fluid darkness of the womb

what is death like?

How differs the fetal sleep from that of the dead?

Did you die in your sleep as we lay sleeping?

Death knows only questions - never answers, never answers.

When you were born you were as warm as life.

You lacked nothing save a little breath,

save God's anointing spirit.

Was death easy for you?  Letting go so painless?

I wondered how long your spirit lingered.

Did you stay by to ease our pain?

V

I recall when I was very young my

grandmother bathing me, choosing clothes

for me to wear, laying me on the kitchen

table of the farm house which haunts my dreams 

even now.

My Grandmother, my Nana, 

who herself once bore a girlchild with dark hair 

and round cheeks like your own.

Into her hands I commend your infant spirit

for safe keeping until I myself can come 

to you and hold you 

again

to my heart.

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