A GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM

It could have been a little room like this—
four walls, a window, table, chair—tales
tell us he was stabbed and cursing when he died
a much regretted master of blank verse…

but that was long ago and this is now
in this little room, at this window
looking out upon the ruddy repetitions
of a blank brick wall across the way…

I count poetic feet by heart, bemoan
the calling of them, just as that Touchstone
who held a plumb line for The Bard:
“When a man’s verses cannot be read
nor a man’s good wit seconded…
it strikes a man more dead than
a great reckoning in a little room,” he said.

Even the graffitist, wily, undercover,
come by night to paint his colors on the wall
might lurk in shadowy corners come the dawn
to overhear effects of his calligraphies

or the forest with the falling tree and no one
there to hear—does it find the earthy thump
insisted by an inner ear dwelling in thought?

It all comes down to one small room
and looking out the window wondering why
why embark upon an expedition or ambition
surely doomed to disappointment or despair?

Wisdom has said: because it’s there.
Then, too, there is that falling tree…anything
to get out from under it, sound or no sound,
purely by dead reckoning, no guarantee.
.
.
A GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM

THE PALPABLE OBSCURE

All souls own this evening, love,
blurring borders between quick and dead.
And even if the fearsome moans of man
did not appoint this time as hallowed,
our backyard trees announce it, as they
lose their glory and become their bones.

The veil is at its thinnest now, that
suddenly obscured you and left me
bereft, dumbfounded in the desolately clear.
Once a day, at least, I stop to wonder
where you are.  I do not think of
you as being here.  Except, tonight

a heightening of powers in the darkness
wants to break november from october
with a cold slap and a small wail in the wind.
Something more than me, something much
more sure that you abide, this night, brings
you, in ways that I can almost touch.
.
.
THE PALPABLE OBSCURE

Originally posted October 31, 2013

EPISTEMOLOGY

They never should have shown me
those pictures: the man who
wore a long white robe, sandals,
his moist brown eyes always looking up,
his long silk hair surrounded by a mist of gold.

They told me it was he who changed the world.
He spoke wise words but never wrote them down.
With time I learned he was the one
who saved me. From what, I did not know.
He had to be killed in order to do it.

After that, no robe, no sandals.
Nearly naked, limp hair matted,
head hung low, he was nailed
to a hideous wooden cross. I was
too young to not look, to not listen.

I put the pictures, the story, the cross
away in a deep place where
things never let go. Even though
all of it happened when I wasn’t there.
Nor was anyone who told me so.

.
.
EPISTEMOLOGY
.
Originally posted October 2013

ODE TO A CONDIMENT

From the trusty crock you teach
how cold a winter’s morning
or how warm a summer’s day might be.
Oh not in thermometric numbers by degree
but by your suave substantial answer
to the knife tip’s touch,
by your complexion and your spreadability.

At your most noble, taken new
from finest milk and churned
to a consistency all of your own,
epitome of softness and a cache
of flavor—you’re unsalted, sweet,
delicately of the pasture: dandelion,
clover or alfalfa, onion grass…

I love yourself
by any means conveyed—
a raft of toast, a lobster tail,
an artichoke sautéed—even my cat
demands a tiny pat of you each day.
But best of all, pièce de resistance,
those days when I bake bread

I break a hunk
warm, before the loaf is sliced,
and slather you all over it.
Then you are paradise.
.
.
ODE TO A CODIMENT
.
Originally posted August, 2013

EARTH LAUGHS IN FLOWERS

“…Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys
Who steer the plough but cannot steer their feet clear of the grave….”
—-Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hamatreya”.

.
.
Just outside my door, a little to the left,
beside the bottom step, I thought I heard
a crocus chuckle from a frost-heaved cleft.

A week or somewhat after that occurred
there was a laugh of daffodils along the pebbly walk.
Later, toting garden tools in my red wagon

how could I ignore those titterings of tulips,
giggling gladioli, snickering snapdragons and
a high-toned tee-hee from a blooming hollyhock?

Was this the earth laughing in flowers to remind
the maker of a private plotting once again
what ultimately is in charge, and what is not?

I shrugged and went indoors, only to find
not peace, not silence, but
the kalanchoe cachinnating in its pot.

Cognac and Emerson, before I went to bed,
made me this dream, from what Ralph Waldo said.
.
.
EARTH LAUGHS IN FLOWERS

A GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM

It could have been a little room like this—
four walls, a window, table, chair—tales
tell us he was stabbed and cursing when he died
a much regretted master of blank verse…

but that was long ago and this is now
in this little room, at this window
looking out upon the ruddy repetitions
of a blank brick wall across the way…

I count poetic feet by heart, bemoan
the calling of them, just as that Touchstone
who held a plumb line for The Bard:
“When a man’s verses cannot be read
nor a man’s good wit seconded…
it strikes a man more dead than
a great reckoning in a little room,” he said.

Even the graffitist, wily, undercover,
come by night to paint his colors on the wall
might lurk in shadowy corners come the dawn
to overhear effects of his calligraphies

or the forest with the falling tree and no one
there to hear—does it find the earthy thump
insisted by an inner ear dwelling in thought?

It all comes down to one small room
and looking out the window wondering why
why embark upon an expedition or ambition
surely doomed to disappointment or despair?

Wisdom has said: because it’s there.
Then, too, there is that falling tree…anything
to get out from under it, sound or no sound,
purely by dead reckoning, no guarantee.
.
.

THE PALPABLE OBSCURE

(originally posted October 31, 2013)

All souls own this evening, love,
blurring borders between quick and dead.
And even if the fearsome moans of man
did not appoint this time as hallowed,
our backyard trees announce it, as they
lose their glory and become their bones.

The veil is at its thinnest now, that
suddenly obscured you and left me
bereft, dumbfounded in the desolately clear.
Once a day, at least, I stop to wonder
where you are.  I do not think of
you as being here.  Except, tonight

a heightening of powers in the darkness
wants to break november from october
with a cold slap and a small wail in the wind.
Something more than me, something much
more sure that you abide, this night, brings
you, in ways that I can almost touch.
.
.

WEEKEND IN JUNE

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---

The smell of spring through open windows,
lilac, lily of the valley, fresh-cut lawns—
especially at sunset, if it’s warm, with a light wind;

especially on Friday, tired from a work-hard week—
it loosens clothing, talk and inhibition,
maybe with a clink of drink-to-drink.

But nothing lasts, especially to think of
beautiful deliverance from the past week, month
or year. Soon Saturday is here, with tasks

or obligations saved-up for the day,
for catching-up with housework or with friends.
Time spends itself so suddenly away

toward Sunday, when the rituals set in,
and panic petrifies the fun, the very thought of
the next unavoidable, ascending sun.

LONGFELLOW MOUNTAINS

---

---

Maine’s mountains seem like lonely islands
rising from the peneplain, assuming maybe
grandeur just because they’re not
surrounded by competing neighbor peaks.
A few are clustered—Mt. Desért, Mahoosucs–
but none range so auspiciously collective as
The White Mountains of New Hampshire,
The Green Mountains of Vermont…

…”monadnocks” they are called, American
for the Abnaki meaning “solitary height.”
For centuries they’ve held their ground
providing wary outlooks to the land and sea,
being the initial, or the final, weary challenge of
the Appalachian Trail, the highest point of
the Atlantic seaboard until Rio de Janeiro,
and the first to greet the sunrise in the USA.

These mountains each acquired a moniker–
Abnaki, French or English–dubbed by those
who walked and worked the “maine-iac” terrain.
How else explain Picked Chicken Hill, Misery Knob,
Pocomoonshine, St. Sauveur, or Toenail Ridge?
Yet, in 1959, Maine’s legislature deemed
there was a need for a collective name, so
“The Longfellow Mountains,” they en masse became.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Maine.
Now all its mountains claim the cachet of
his poetry and fame.  What would he say
today–in grateful tetrametric trochees–
being honored so?  It’s just as well, perhaps,
he does not know.  It seems his name,
collectivizing mountains, never did catch on,
though it appears, sometimes, on mountain maps.

THAT MEMORY

I do not need to summon that one—
it returns to me as regularly as the valleys
in between the hills.  There’s Mum again
sorting laundry, one eye to whatever’s
boiling over on the stove.  The latest baby
has awakened, cries like toothache. Probably
needs changing.  Is that someone at the door?

And where am I?  Slouched on the couch
reading yet another story of some other life.
Suddenly she’s there, Mum looming over me
and a hard whack smacks across my face:
“Who do you think you are?  Get your nose
out of that book!  Make yourself useful!”  Why,
I wonder, is her voice so crazy, full of hate?

As suddenly, she’s gone.  I am ten years old.
Big red drops fall to the open page upon my lap.
Swallowing blood, I raise my arm and dab my
nose upon my sleeve, lean my head back to
stop the flow.  What will I tell the old librarian
about these stains that happened to her book?
I stand, a little wobbly.  Go and help.  Only later

do I see how certain words like Love and True
began to grow unmeaningful that day.  Poetry
slipped quietly away.  Usefulness ate the better
part of time until, after half a dozen decades of
the kind of sweet obedience that kills, in age I find
poetry again, sufferance, compassion to forgive—
though Mum is dead, and that old memory still lives.