The Winter Garden

In another season of expanding darkness
I returned to the garden where it all began.

So much had changed. Everything was unfamiliar.
The air was damp and cold. The trees were grey and bare.

But I saw in one -- about chest high -- a bright red cardinal
Just the size of a human heart waiting for the spring to start.

Poetry

"He said that poetry is no more a vocation than good health. What he needed was a job."

Horae Canonicae: Sext

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,


you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon


making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,


wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.


How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.


To ignore the appetitive goddesses,
to desert the formidable shrines


of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,
to pray instead to St. Phocas,


St Barbara, San Saturnino,
or whoever one's patron is,


that one may be worthy of their mystery,
what a prodigious step to have taken.


There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who took it first,


to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,


the first collector of sea-shells
to remain celibate.


Where should we be but for them?
Feral still, un-housetrained, still


wandering through forests without
a consonant to our names,


slaves of Dame Kind, lacking
all notion of a city


and, at this noon, for this death,
there would be no agents.

When Just a Boy

When just a boy, I loved two things
Two things appealed to me
One was heaven filled with stars
The other was the sea.

I could find the stars each night
Each night they came to me
And if they were obscured by clouds
I'd just wait patiently.

But the sea was hours away
And hours I could not give.
So I imagined more than I saw
So that my love could live.

Berryman

"he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write"

Berryman by W. S. Merwin | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Theodore Meets the Milky Way

Theodore, beloved of God and a contented man,
Was reading his slender volume of visible light

When, like a dreamer startled from his dream,
He was struck by some unsettling thoughts

"There is more here, much more than I can understand
Things that I cannot even imagine perhaps

More than the storms of distant atmospheres
The bits of failed planets that circle the sun
The dormant seeds of heaven
The spectral lights of ancient gods
Things within and beyond my little bag of metaphors.

Even my equations that reveal so much without words
They confirm my suspicions:
The opposite of ignorance is not knowledge, but humility.
Awake, the empty spaces of creation arrange themselves."

Boat Slips

Across the transoms
The quiet voices of men
At work on things they love.

High Treason of the Full Moon

(contra Richard Dawkins in a variation on a popular tune)

How can I tell you how I feel when I don't know?
Words have no meaning in a language from so long ago.

Are you the uncreated guide
Or songs of children who have died?
Is it love or is it pride
That needs an art it knows has lied?

Tonight, I dare define
Your face as one divine
The moon is something more than just its glow.

Save us both some time
Just give me a sign
Give me something more than just a show.

Now that an age draws to an end you cannot leave me.
I was not made to believe in something I can’t see.

You must have a face
We cannot embrace
A cosmic plan of transcendental grace.

Thus we apprehend
The universal trend
The larger purpose in what we intend.

Just as the moon directs the tide
There is a light that is our guide
And what the stars cannot provide
Is left for mortals to decide.

Here is the proof that I propose:
Before the moon from earth arose
It held a secret to disclose
Stranger than we can suppose.

Truth Fades Like Beauty

No timeless treasure wrought bright and cold
Truth fades like beauty, more leaf than gold.

You Belong on Bull Street

One man has many beginnings
One of mine is here
My parents married at the manse of Centennial ARP.

They were not doctrinaire
They were in love.

Love does not worry about the institutes of the Christian religion
Love reconciles all contradictions
At least until the lovers learn
That love is the greatest contradiction of them all.

Reasonable people aren’t supposed to contradict themselves.
Good luck with that.

At one end of Bull Street
There stands a public university
At the other, a lunatic asylum
And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference
Or know which way love comes from
Or know which way it might go.

A Comet is an Ancient Fear

This long-haired star ruined men and nations;
Drove women mad; deformed children;
Filled all the world with perturbations.

It was the thick smoke of human sin
Burnt before the face of God;
Or the flash of the Devil's grin.

When Halley said this dirty clod
Of ice would always reappear
On its astral promenade,

The comet's nature wasn't clear.
Even science, blessed with observation,
Found poison in the comet's rear.

A comet is an ancient fear,
A remnant of creation,
Trapped by the presence of a star
In eccentric isolation.

Second Place in the Financial Times "Sky Paths" literary competition, 1986

Sandhills

The wind that makes a dune

will take the dune away.

A mountain range of sand

can't will the sand to stay.

The Labor Theory of Value

Parking on Main Street: $1.
Admission to the Columbia Museum of Art: $10.
Seeing the Nativity by Sandro Botticelli: Priceless.

Botticelli died in 1510.
He stopped painting that same year.

Die Lösung /The Solution

Die Lösung

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer's Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Couplet

Like fire upon the polar shelf

Creation must consume itself. 

Madame le Professeur

Sing oh goddess, of misery and pain,
In windowless rooms of no forgiveness
Bunkers of the lost in a losing war,
Bring forth her stories lost with urgent need
Power denied the able in the world
With words that are not and can never be
Her words, the maternal voice unconstrained
Abandoned hymns to her name undefiled
Behind the slave-name made by her father
Whose nature had to own the things he saw,
How she had to make a world of her own
Of feminine light and masculine shade,
She who would rather be a witch than wife
Who traded uncanny knowledge for gold
Who rose up to challenge facts and phrases
The brutal instruments of her abuse
A contest to control her mind and will
To trade her body and cripple her with
Fear, until there was nothing left to trade,
How she would prefer things be different
But can’t let heal the bloody scabs of wrongs
The injustice of her place outside time
An actor in another’s play, a plot
Concealed but drawn deliberately vast
Appearing, deceptively, as kindness
As respect, as worship, even as love
A trick to make her think she is happy;
Courtesy is a wall to keep her out,
The trap of romance designed to get her
To ignore a long list of cruelties
A horror penetrating her long dream
The irrefutable proof of her worst fears
Her womb bruised by crimes of the wombless.

Arrival and Ground Transportation

1.

I entered San Francisco between two ages

A young woman who overplayed the bitch

A nearsighted old man who read the news

Like he had to smell the meaning of each word.

In the awkward intimacy of strangers

Closer than friends

We tried to think of something else.

It takes a day and nearly $900 to get here

Five hours in coach, $2 headphones, two movies

Three beverage carts, four cookies, two bags of peanuts

Three new time zones, two trips to the lavatory, no meal

And always the recirculated, desiccated, and odorous air.

An arm’s length away

Outside our little metal cloud

Life was impossible.

2.

On the edge of the continent

Alone in a dark seat on the dark side of earth

I rode away in a balm of luxurious darkness

Under storm clouds the weight of one atmosphere

A black sea containing all the names of creation

Past rooms with open windows and shaded lamps

Like aids to navigation, the lights of homes

Where people hammer out of darkness

Chains of meaning released into the world
A grammar made from darkness and surrendered to it.

The Middle-Aged Married Man's Lament

for P.J. O’Rourke

The IRS wants more from me
Back taxes and a penalty.

My kids think I'm an ATM
And my account belongs to them.

They tell me that I’m old and square
They laugh because I’ve lost my hair.

Tuition bills are coming soon
I’ll pay them with a five year balloon.

The van needs oil, brakes and tires
I wonder when that tag expires?

My ex-wife wants a bigger check
My new wife wants a bigger deck.

Sometime this year I’ll cut the grass
And get that woman off my ass.

She tells me I must lose some weight
No booze, no bars, and no debate.

That’s typical of all her sex
What’s good today is bad the next.

Fat cheeks are cute in L&D
A diaper’s great for poop and pee.

A woman just can’t help her heart
She thinks it’s cute when babies fart.

But when you’re old, she’s not so sweet.
She’ll push your wheelchair in the street.

Fart once at dinner with a guest
She'll squash you like a little pest.

Assessing your resolve and mass

She'll sent you to aerobics class.

And she will not appreciate
That pin-up of your first prom date.

She'll hate the smell and steady glow
Of every brand of Maduro.

So if my flight should crash and burn
Don’t waste your tears on me
Just tell my quack I won’t return
For that endoscopy.

I'll check off what I unachieved
And have a jubilee
Smiling like a man reprieved
A prisoner set free.

I’ll laugh throughout that final dive
Relieved of all my fear
And if you should find me alive
Don’t tell them I’m still here.

Light Sweet Crude

In Texas nothing sets the mood
Like the price of light sweet crude.

Arabia is such a prude
But it goes mad for light sweet crude.

On cable news it’s almost lewd
When Liz says “Light sweet crude.”

It sounds like something done while nude
Probing holes for light sweet crude.

A beauty loves gifts, gold, and food,
But bathes each night in light sweet crude.

People simply come unscrewed
Once consumed by light sweet crude.

This Day in History

Everything you know

And what is vastly greater, everything you don’t

Fits into little vessels of time, just twenty four hours

Containing everything that has ever happened

Like debris tossed into bottomless wells.

You know the day you were born and the day you were married

Christmas, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving are easy to remember

Easter is more difficult, depending on certain lunar calculations

But Easter comes as no surprise.

Yet one of these days will be your last

Study the calendar all you want, you can’t find it

Until you stumble on something incomprehensible

The limits of your awareness, no more abstractions

Only life in a suddenly particular case

You cannot feel the motion of the earth

Nor regret the speed of each degree of orbit

But you study each pain like a magi studies the sky

Each sign in the heavens, each tremor of earth.

After death, there will be the usual business

Your obituary will appear on one of those dates

Someone will read it and comment on your age

But no one comprehends the perpetual calendar

The very small, the very large, or the very old

The distance between stars and the flicker of prices

The way nature and markets use whatever is lying about

The designs of work, of love, and suffering

The hope that the next day will be better

The source code of the human heart.