Driving

There was a time when

I knew if I made this light

I’d have the next five.

I would take 11^th or 14^th street

to avoid the speed bumps.

Now on my way to elsewhere

I take my driving slow,

enjoy the canopy of trees

(My friend said if it weren’t for speed bumps

he’d have no sex life at all.) 

I have no road-rage in me.

I'm making good time at any speed.

When a poem comes to me 

I write a few words

in the dust on my dashboard.

I can almost smell the cloverleaf,

the curvaceous on-ramps.

I forgive everyone their folly.

Maybe their wives are about to deliver

one of new persons in this world.

I can move over and make room.

We are in this together. We stop

and we go obeying the lights.  

It is called civilization. It gives me hope.

I am steering, asserting and yielding

into the flow, this river of chrome,

now a white water rapid with changing rhythm,

now a symphony, an adagio of traffic

and I in my psychic space with four empty seats,

my mind meandering with great thoughts,

so great I am allowed only a glimpse

in this vehicle, this vessel, this life.

Buoyant April

April is a happening month: Exodus, Easter, eager wildflowers, beginning baseball season and tax-time. However, we shouldn’t forget the most notable holiday: National Poetry Month.

T.S. Eliot proclaimed April as the cruelest month in his Wasteland poem. It was the month that began WWI which punctured the notion of progress, while reminding us of evanescent beauty, loss of faith and ultimate mortality.

A voice of gloom, he was. Not the guy I want to split a pizza with. My impulse is to celebrate life even with all its lethal folly.

Now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins, bullets and bullshit. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words. well-chosen, can fill the page like impressionist brushstrokes. Even between the words there can be found a vitality to buoy us and open a shuttered heart or lift us like a resurrection. It is not a bus to paradise but transport to authenticity. A successful poem has a ring of truth and a music of its own.

One doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to engage life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I recently came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Hauling peat bog in Connemara light at eleven at night / iridescent dragonfly.

Moments, unsummoned, ease their way in / blood, oil and petals.

 ___________________________

Grandpa Harry

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester Street.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their barouches and curses on the cobblestone.

                   

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.     

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in our backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.                   

Cosmic Vibe Over Lunch

More than a foursome over lunch

we were a quartet. Adele and I fed lines

to Gayle and Tommy in a singing conversation

over the menu as the American songbook.

Every dish, a cue. Avocado on the side led to

Frim-fram sauce and chafafa on the side,

an oldie but goodie from Nat Cole. 

Don’t bother morphed into 

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

We were aligned but not to be eclipsed.

(We looked at each other in the same way then.)

We found a cosmic music of the spheres in falafel,

the harmonic hum in the salad bowl. 

You say tomayto, I say tomahto.  

Tell the waiter, Anything Goes.

We sang our way through the dread.

At the drop of, Is that all there is,

Gayle became Peggy Lee.

Then let’s keep dancing, Tommy chimed in

over the omelet and salmon wrap

We were bewitched; we were beguiled.

A Bird in The Tree Is Worth Two On The Page

We came to a screeching halt. About a dozen people were looking up at the sky. I thought maybe Superman had spotted a phone booth or Icarus was being grounded for offending the gods with wax melting on his chutzpah.

But no, their eyes were fixed on the branches of a tree. We were driving in a desert area of Moreno Valley outside of Palm Springs. These were a group of bird-watchers in ecstasy over an oriole. They were in the middle of a heated dispute over whether it was orange-yellow or yellowish orange and was it a bobolink or a Baltimore oriole with no sense of direction. Birders have quick eyes and acute ears listening for the trills or see-yew song. 

And what kind of tree was it, I hear you ask. It was medium height with lots of leaves where birds might come and go in anonymity. It could have been a Joshua or an overgrown pinyon or maybe a common elm. I’m a big city guy and, as a kid, trees were 1^st base or the goal line. Maple and elm were bus stops. Yes, it’s true, as a poet I should be able to honor them with a caption. But my unknowing helped define me by who I'm not.

I’m throwing names around like I know what I’m talking about. In fact, I don’t know a sparrow from a swallow. Thank God for Google where one can get to impersonate a birder on paper at least. Lo these many years I have managed to live in the bliss of ignorance in terms of Nature. I can identify a willow only if it is weeping.

Am I allowed to love trees without a glossary of I.Ds? I enjoy watching their greenery swaying to capricious gusts of wind. I’m transfixed by the reptilian roots of fig trees and how branches reach for the sun with contorted elbows.

As for birds I know a hummingbird from a crow and a sandpiper from a gull but not much else. My head hangs in shame. I wonder if a rufous-sided towhee flew in my window, would it recognize itself in the Audubon book on my coffee table. If names confer mastery, I’m content living in an aviary without dominion. I would be in constant awe of their plumage even as they remained nameless.

 

 

Artifacts

Millennia from now when paleontologists sift through the rubble of what was once the fabled city of Los Angeles, they might stumble upon five million black rectangles, some baffling golden arches, museum-quality hard drives, and empty sidewalks with blue tents. Suppose they discovered a couple of bowling balls and a basketball court. What could they possibly make of this? From all that, they will be tasked to reconstruct a civilization.

Legend had it that we were a city of frozen yogurt shops and something called nutmeg-dusted frappuccinos but those relics could not be found. 

Residue from the stomachs of us ancient humans offers sufficient evidence of a lifestyle and bone structure so that a face can be re-imagined. The alimentary canal of a devout vegan can easily be distinguished from a meatatarian’s mastications with the DNA of ketchup.

How could they reconcile hunger and obesity? What would they think having found particles of threads from red caps on the skeletal remains of a species of humanoids with altered brains, alongside issues of Scientific American and shards of Enlightenment texts? Did these people in the early 21st century live in the Dark Ages or a rather advanced culture? Very vexing.

How will we be seen in the natural history museum of the distant future? Dead fish alongside plastic baggies and Styrofoam cups, advanced electronics gone to weaponry, architectural wonders and oil slicks. What strange people we must have been.

Yet there are uncut forests, land mass still untouched by rising seas and high deserts with a havoc of wildflowers and remnants of violins. The diggers sifting through our remains are descendants of those who somehow survived the 21st century cataclysm in sufficient numbers to have started over again, stuck as they are with our double helix.

One Man's Garbage

A trip to the trash bin got me in conversation with our landlord. He lords over the land, in the best sense, taking on a stewardship of the grounds. His name is Leigh (pronounced Lee) as in the 18th century poet, Leigh Hunt or as in Vivian Leigh. Leigh is one of those gender-neutral names. Even though most of the letters are silent, our Leigh has a booming voice that can rattle the dishes and probably registers on the Richter scale. The old English meaning of Leigh is meadow which is entirely appropriate.

His thumb is exceptionally green. He is happy planting and pruning in the garden which borders the building on three sides. We chatted alongside a flowering tree he identified as apricot. He said that a tenant, George D., back in the mid 80s, had a habit of throwing his pits and seeds in the earth, and this fruit tree is the result. Old George is now memorialized with white flowers in February, darling buds in May and orangey fruit in July. The branches angle sharply for the sun, obeying their own logic; the kind of tree-ness I most admire.

The garbage I was disposing of was a bag of shredding, rind, celery leaves, egg shells, fruit pits and melon seeds. An all-organic mulch if I had buried it, decomposing to nitrogen, sulfur and other plant nutrients. An entire Farmer’s Market could push its way through the earth. Maybe rice paddies or a sugar plantation would sprout by next year.

The truth is I’ve not planted much in my lifetime except three blossoming daughters and a bushel of words. But I can picture George furtively scattering his refuse in the flower bed 25 years ago ensuring his immortality.

George was a retired mail carrier back then. I wonder if he scattered junk mail in the same way. No, not George. I remember him as my go-to guy when I needed some fix-it work. I’m glad to have him back, still bearing fruit.

Since George’s apricot pit now graces us I would think that groves of bucolic greenery must be rising out of landfills. Yet my image of such dumps is of vultures wheeling overhead and impoverished families scavenging. On the other hand who knows what ancient garbage lies beneath the great farms and parks of our planet?

Leigh is still out there tending his garden to the ovation of hummingbirds who regularly sip at his buffet of assorted nectar from azaleas to zinnias. Red lanterns will soon emerge on the coral tree and I can almost hear daffodils bursting their bulbs to trumpet the Spring. I leave the rest to George.

At Home In The Muddle

Yes, yes, make order out of chaos,

that eleventh commandment.

Then why do I remember the fuzzy part,

that white horse in Nova Scotia that was a llama

or the anarchy of wild bulbs

overthrowing the desert,

how we spent an afternoon spotting a whale

that turned out to be a huge black rock?

Then there was the slow-moving train out of Delft

that wasn’t moving at all; only the illusion

owing to the adjacent one.

What did she mean when she said that or

didn’t say anything? Hard to read moods

with gusts of wind shifting the conifers

and the red canvas a commotion

of projections.

While I’m at it, who stole my camera

by the Strasbourg Cathedral? Maybe God,

that all-mischievous puppeteer. The long hand

of subtraction reminding me of the auberge

at the bend in the river by that village in Brittany

where there is no river

except for the waterway winding  

around my head in the MRI?

It is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

about which I am certain. To live in the muddle,

that familiar chaos we call order

as in a song I forgot the words to

or the movie of my life where I came in

toward the end with eyes still wide with the sun.