Impermanence

A dead man’s photo peers over my bed
The silent witness who lives in my blood.
Absence is the soul’s starvation diet.
I have been hungry since before I was born.

Plan for madness to heal you.
Plan for sadness to fly.
Plan for hope estranging your happiness.
It surely will.

The finite hours and days,
The years,
Dissolve with relentless measure
And apathy.

This will grieve your heart but release it.
You must not pull back: too late too late to stop.
You carelessly left your spirit alone,
Now seconds plunder its secrets

And take all.
Life perpetuates a feeble trick
on the frail mind:
A creation of memes
Moved by predestination

To obscurity.
The clock lightly ticks and then cocks its gun.
Aims between your eyes.
Are you ready?

—
I found this poem a nasty wrenching process. I was using James Galvin’s Post-Modernism as the scaffold. It was an abstract poem, slippery. I seem to be focused on mortality of late. I don’t set out to write it. It’s just what comes out. But this one felt like harder than most. Words tested, words discarded. I tried to follow the syllable and word structure of each line. I succeeded except for the first stanza and the last two lines.

Only The Emptiness

With civilized tones we said good-bye,
as his face drained white
his still fingers chilled.
It was a hard labor
his leave-taking, punctuated
by lung fluid gurgling,
eyes rolled upward,
breath stopping, pausing long.

We sat vigil and held his hand all night.

Still the stomach growls, eyes grow heavy,
the crematorium must be paid.
I whisper his name,
feel no answer, sense no presence
of spirit, as some people do.
Only the emptiness.

Another poem written using this exercise, and built with Jane Kenyon’s The Blue Bowl as scaffold.

Saturday wakes to the scent
of burnt toast wafting through
rattling Venetian-blind palms as

the gonging mission bell cuts
my sleep-hazed mind, and
I cross Mercy Street watching

blacktop roses bowing to the
gentle breeze. I walk with
lopsided longing toward the kazoo

hum of the Farmer’s Market,
where a blind troubadour sporting
tattoos on her arms courts

seekers and idlers with her
church-bell voice, and a
farmer hawks Yukon gold potatoes

as if they were truly
treasure. Beyond these nuggets, past
the fruit waiting patiently as

people nibble nuts, savor honey,
bargain with vendors, the spicy
orange day beckons to me.

There’s Always Looking After

A tree is a guardian angel.

Trees talk to us, they
whisper stories and secrets,
slip us clues to universal mysteries.

Do you see the forest, or the trees?
Sap murmurs up the trunk in spring. Listen.
The apple falls (not far from the tree), its
crisp honey tang for the taking. Notice
how the air changes when you approach
a woods; the fresh, spicy scent of leaves
and needles performing their gift of tonglen.
Handle limbs gently. Despite their
coarseness, trees are benign as babies.

Autumn. My favorite elegy. Red orange yellow
each color a note, a symphony of glorious
death. Gaia’s last hurrah before hibernation.

Glorious death. The nativity of Jesus in
Bethlehem was honored by his parents, wise
shepherds, angels — even animals. But not
one tree except for the remnant serving
as his crib. Look what happened to him.
Whereas Buddha, under a Bodhi tree,
received the gift of enlightenment.

Beware. Trees are destroyers. When touched
by lightning (not an angel), in a rhumba
with the wind, trees release limbs as
geckos lose their tails. They surrender
responsibility, abandon stability,
crush what lies beneath. A shard
of wood thrown by a tornado can kill you.

How many angels are there? They number
more than all the leaves on all the trees
since Big Time began. Earth — head
of a pin on which all trees dance.
Those trees, they krunk in a hot minute.
We just don’t see them. They move so fast.

A baby is born. A sapling takes root.
As roots grow, her neurons multiply.
They amputated the tree in our yard
the other day. Am I going to die now?

A tree is a livin’ thin’, wif it’s own
varmintality, expressed by it’s shape,
texture, locashun, seasonal variashuns,
shade/sun alterashun, th’ emoshuns it
invokes in th’ obsarver, th’ memo’ies
it stimulates in th’ obsarver. A tree
lives as long as a hoomin, o’ longer,
an’ faces th’ elements day-in an’
day-out. To sacrifice a tree is a kind
of euthanasia. A tree thet yo’ plant
today will outlive yo’, an’ affeck other
hoomins in th’ future junerashuns… but
will only be thar IF yo’ an’ yer projuny
own th’ lan’ on which th’ tree thrives.
Own SOME lan’, somewhar, an’ put trees
on it, an’ viset an’ watch them grow.

The ancient forests of knowledge
hidden in dusky, musty library stacks
have become my land. My mind, my tree
of knowledge, thrives. It is all I have.

On this moonless night everything
telescopes, clarifies. Brightness erupts
from inky black. The dark night of the soul
is really a form of enlightenment.

I fall on my knees, praying to No God.
The god of no. I sway in the wind, yearning
to be struck, to plummet, to become the abyss
that annihilates, that looks into me. Oh,
the ecstasy of descent! I cry for it.

Mindful One, she thinks too much. She dwells
inside her head, sips the ink of books too
often. For all her lofty talk about meaning
and nature, she lives indoors, estranged.
Reconciliation is possible. The priest
intones, you are dust and to dust you shall
return. So it shall be. A reunion.

Yes! A gorgeous reunion. A gorgeous death.
It shall be as it is, unless it is as it shall
be. Remember, nascentes morimur. The voice is
relentless, paralyzing. Death, inevitable from
the beginning of my existence. My destiny, our
destiny, is to become nothing.

Not so, whisper the trees. Willow weeps over my
rigid despair. A pine tree caresses my hair.
You do not become nothing. You become everything.

The body becomes a corpse. The corpse rots, feeds
maggots and beetles, enriches the soil. A squirrel
foraging embeds a nut, forgets it. The nut germinates.
A sapling grows, slowly. Outside of time. Watching over.
Witnessing the Mystery. There’s always looking after.

Kali In An Onion

I heft the white onion in my right hand;
the sunlight slanting through the window
caresses it, brings a glow to this smooth moon.
In my left hand I grasp a knife, blade glinting;
as homage to mother Kali, I split the globe.
Peeling off the outer layer, a husk of secrets;
vulnerable, the cloven orb rests.
Again I lift the knife, slicing, chopping,
breaking integrity of form into mosaic
pieces, a small supernova of pungency.
My eyes weep, observing the demise of
unity, while my heart trills with joy.