Three
Small Lies in Spring
In the park, a father leads his daughter
into a garden. Her name is Alice.
By the path, a shy man plays an accordion
under a tree.
In a arbour, a girl laughs as she tap dances
for her grandparents.
Later, a coyote pads across
the old golf-course lane
like a hole-in-one.
Lenses
At the edge of a frame, a flash
from some antique event is captured
on a photographic plate:
A blur, a passing, a
ghostly presence.
Then with chemical alchemy
photons are transformed
into light and dark,
and ghosts walk past a wedding tent.
They appear to be waving.
Later, light through the iris
of an unhuman lens
reveals a blur on the surface
of another plate:
A starry pyre
passing through the galaxy long ago,
made from another alchemy
when light and matter
became one in an instant.
It, too, appears to be waving.
Red
Sky
I know this feeling,
I know it well.
I feel it often
this side of hell.
I know this feeling.
It’s there when I lie.
It’s at the beginning
and under red sky.
I know what I’m feeling,
so
never you mind!
It’s the kind of feeling
no one should find.
I know when it started
and where it will end.
It’s somewhere between
a foe and a friend
I know this thing,
awake or asleep.
It’s mine alone—
and mine to keep!
I’ll tell you clearly,
once and for all,
between a rock and a hard place,
you surely will fall,
if, when judging what’s best,
feeling born or bred,
the first you ignore
while the other you dread.
Lament
In these former lands,
strange farmers till the soil.
With sharp sticks they scratch earth
too ancient to recall.
In the orchards and gardens
harsh fruit falls untaken from the trees,
and seeds ripen mostly wayward grasses.
In the marketplace, traders curse and spit
as they bargain dirt for coin.
Their teeth grind like pestles.
O me
woes th’ day! O me woes th’ night!
O me
woes, my dally dame sal!
O me woes, me woes!
This is a sunset land,
dry and forgiven now by time’s passing,
and changed beyond recognizing.
Weariness hangs in the air
like desperate crows,
and I fear there is but one season left
to conjure in.
In this nameless land,
sorrow roosts on scoured limbs.
It lines the faces of red-cheeked lovers:
Young men dowse dusty vaults
searching for yesterday’s treasures.
Young women, their once bright eyes
now red-rimmed and clouded,
look to distant skies for memories
unremembered.
Wet
were the hillsides. Wet was the land.
Wet was
the graveyard
where
the weeping willow stands.
I remember how it began—well enough,
and on fair plains. Wise children grew
like sweet grass between the dogwood.
Their laughter camped along river banks,
and fires burned without sacrifice.
All was as it could be—was all it could be.
Until that terrible day when the gates opened
and I was forced to ride.
After me came the winds and time.
They blew over the newly-trod paths
choking the air with footprints
that stamped a different seal upon the land.
And so, in this graveyard land,
with kings and queens long gone or passing,
priests busy themselves in dusty fields,
and all the signposts have been torn away.
Wet
were the hillsides. Wet was the land.
Wet was
the graveyard
where
the weeping willow stands.
Jeopardy
Drinking blood
with a Latin tag,
this antique creature
is decidedly modern.
For
me, poems are like guideposts or markers of thoughts, feelings, sensations or
unexpected discoveries I run across in my comings and goings. I note them as I’m
experiencing them, then generally face-plant trying to find words to express
them so that the reader might have a similar reaction. These words, that are mere
marks on paper—signifiers, communications, placements, recordings of
life-events, are often vague and the devil to pin down; they are like dreams
fading from your conscious mind as you wake.
I
re-read poems I’ve written years ago, and at least with some of them, I still
take pleasure in their composition and imbedded questions and (maybe?) answers.
They’re kind of like cogs in a machine I’m building; they have a place in my
life is what I’m trying to say, and I hope some of them will have a place in
the life of anyone reading them as they go about building their own machines.
My
digression through Christie (and this was the final book she wrote,
incidentally) suggests to me that “truth” isn’t simple or straightforward,
black or white. It requires digging and soul-searching, and it may not always
please us, or benefit us, when it is revealed.
And
while not everything may come up into the light of day, we all know where we may
need to dig someday.
LENSES—I
was watching a show on TV about a family of nineteenth century photographers and it was kind of
fun. They took pictures of dead people—“post-mortem photography”—that strange
(by our standards), Victorian custom in which the recently
departed were photographed, posed and dressed as if they were still alive. (Presumably
those who’d had a peaceful passing, and not mangled or disfigured in some
giant, steam-belching infernal contraption of the Industrial Age.) They took
singles, as well as group portraits and the dead relative, poor Uncle Fairfax
or whoever, is propped up, stiff as a board and rapidly cooling, surrounded by his
family and friends.
At
one point one of the photographers starts a discussion on how they could
capture pictures of souls or spirits
of the recently dead, and was this not something that practitioners of the new art
of photography might achieve? We’ve all seen old photographs with those ghostly
figures that are inexplicably found on the developed print with no rational
explanation for their appearance.
Maybe
the new technology of photography, back then, working as it did to capture
moments of Time and freeze them, somehow acted as a bridge or doorway to another
dimension? They say there are other dimensions all around us. Who’s to say that
nineteenth century photography, then a new, almost magical technology, didn’t
somehow brush against a barrier between our dimension and another, and that sometimes,
something would come across.
The
magical, almost mystical discipline of photography, with its not-yet fully
explored range of possibilities, lasted until our modern times (when even a
Polaroid Instamatic gave us that moment of anticipation and drama while the film
we held in our hands slowly developed an image). Today, everyone and their dead
Uncle Fairfax captures Time with their “smart” phone cameras, catching one moment
after another, on and on at an insane pace. If you pull an elastic-band too
far, it either snaps, or snaps back. Perhaps Time does not like being captured so much and is starting to fight back—who
knows? Could it be there is a reckoning ‘a comin' from the Space-Time Continuum?
So,
in the poem there are two sets of lenses and eyes, and two brains (presumably),
and great swaths of Time and Space between them. Maybe they are connected by
more than the processes their machines allow them to see?
RED SKY—is pretty bleak and angry. The speaker
seems ready to pounce on the reader and assumes the worst in them. But it’s a
truism that hectoring and preaching are not the best ways to bring anyone
around to your way of thinking. Of course the speaker may be venting all this
bile because they are angry at themselves. There is the sense that the speaker
is burdened by the choice they made—perhaps not the specific choice but rather how they arrived at it. They also say
ignoring one and dreading the other has consequences. Why?
LAMENT—is
a fun romp through a land that is currently under a red sun, but the sun is
also an angry one. It’s a time of endurance and pain. What comes after is
unclear. What’s come before is soon lost in the blowing sands.
JEOPARDY—for
Jeopardy fans: No matter how we label
things, no matter how far back those labels go, there will always be demons
among our angels.
Cheers,
Jake.
*
Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, HarperCollins Publishers, New
York, 1973. [Title taken from a poem “Gates of Damascus”, by
James Elroy Flecker.]
