With A Heart Like That, Page 2

  Your salt is still seasoning the night,

  spilled while I sleep,

  dreamless,

  and let the slow comet dream for me

  of distances only words can cross.

  Osip, your words reach me

  across much greater distances

  than the flight

  of that dirty snowball

  tossed by God

  in a playful moment

  millions of years ago.

  You no longer walk the tundra

  with your broken heart

  in a beggar’s tin cup.

  You’re free, finally alive

  somewhere out there

  beyond Hyakutake, somewhere far,

  far beyond the Gulag Hell,

  somewhere close to God.

  Osip Mandelstam

  (1891-1938)

  Joy

  Joy won’t pass through gritted teeth

  in which bitterness

  sticks like something green.

  Joy is more finicky than that--

  and more staid. It doesn’t need

  a wisecrack to break the ice

  and won’t share the podium

  with a whining tongue.

  Delicate joy that curdles

  in an anxious stomach

  willingly hugs riffraff

  and picks lice from their hair.

  Who can understand it?

  We know how happiness makes us

  look over our shoulder

  like fugitives from a bad mood,

  but joy seems unconcerned.

  Self-sufficient. You could say aloof.

  All we know for certain

  is that joy won’t be coerced.

  Make a fist and it vanishes

  with the flick of a fin.

  You must relax,

  let your fingers sway like sea grass,

  before joy will come

  swimming into your heart

  and add iridescent color

  to that reef of black coral.

  The Child Within

  Someone tell the shrink!

  Quick! The child within,

  bitter and half-crazy,

  has run off to sea.

  And worse, he’ll come back,

  loitering under the street lamps

  of my small town soul

  with his smirk, his angst,

  and a droll Singapore tattoo

  glowing like a votive lamp

  beneath my skin:

  Been There, Done That.

  Sure I’ll envy him, but keep

  my job and my church.

  His faint taste of salt

  is all the wildness I want.

  Before Dawn

  Anxiety like a dry stick

  snapped by a prowler

  outside the window wakes me

  again. Four-thirty.

  If this is the hour the thief comes,

  let him come. I have

  a flashlight, my Bible, fresh coffee,

  a chair on the patio,

  and two hours before sunrise

  to be still and hum God’s praises

  under the morning moon.

  What else could I ask for?

  Butterflies

  I’ve prayed too long, Lord,

  and so wrong, for joy--

  ecstatic tons like a megalith.

  Overwhelming. Almost an idol.

  I expected to laugh and fall

  drunk in the Spirit. Instead,

  something small has come,

  weightless, like butterflies

  that drift with the wind

  from their own far country

  and all settle at once

  on just one tree. Me.

  When

  When everything breaks free

  at last--seed from the pod,

  sorrow from the dry cloud,

  and black water from the sun--

  trees will take hold of the wind

  and shake it until its teeth rattle

  and the birds fall out of its hair.

  I want to see that!

  And I want to see the dead rise--

  not to come back to this life,

  rummaging through coffins

  for keepsakes buried with them,

  but to dance hand in hand

  with their own discarded,

  arthritic bones, their cheeks

  flushed with luminous blood!

  Sheep

  If I’m your sheep, Lord,

  why do knives glinting in a dark look

  or words whetted on a grin

  make mutton of me?

  I know that You carried me once,

  hefted on a shoulder,

  a long, long way

  home from all my wanderings.

  But now, safe in the fold,

  I stand off to be one side and bleat--

  an odd sheep out

  and more briar than wool.

  And yet, somehow, I hear Your voice

  and know it from the wind,

  from the lies of the hireling,

  and the wolf whisper at night.

  Somehow. And if I never

  fit in with the flock--

  always a Suffolk like a minstrel

  among proper Merinos--

  I’ll lift my head when You call,

  stop chewing on words,

  and like every other sheep,

  I’ll follow.

  Coffee

  How odd that crockery outlasts us.

  Every cup, broken

  and tossed on a landfill,

  is still there when bones are dust.

  Sometimes I feel like a mug,

  a cheap gift at best,

  bearing my common name,

  a cartoon, a joke, an ad.

  Not much, if not for this:

  break me and I’ll be more

  than skeletal shards.

  I’ll rise from myself to the Lord

  with an aroma so rich

  that even Death

  will have to wake up

  and smell the coffee!

  In the Yard With Ralph

  My wife tosses a ball for Ralph,

  her aged, arthritic Irish setter,

  who limps to fetch,

  who won’t be caught and dodges her,

  or so he thinks,

  with his nose down and rump up,

  flagging his crooked tail,

  slammed in a car door years ago,

  and scattering confetti snorts,

  more excited than a pup.

  Next Sunday, Lord, I want to sing

  the old hymns with a heart like that!

  (Ralph, d. 1992)

 

 

 

  Don Thompson

  5632A Brite Rd

  Buttonwillow, CA 93206

  With a Heart Like That

  for Chris

 

  You care for people and animals, O Lord.

  How precious in your unfailing love, O God.

  -Psalms 36:6-7

  After the Fall

  Camel: I envy the owl, who is all in one place and not scattered to the far corners of himself like I am, not hung together so loosely; who grasps a thing without plodding to an infinite distance and arriving nowhere particular; who can turn his head and see behind as far as he sees before. How I envy you, Owl.

  Owl: I envy the butterfly, whose flight is not like a scream, nor like a smooth stone flung from a sling to kill a mouse rather than Goliath; who has no necessity, who goes where he will and knows the secret of a touch that does not draw blood. How I envy you, Butterfly.

  Butterfly: I envy the pineapple, who is not made of dust held together by mere joy, who does not depend on shimmering hues that fade so soon; who above all has substance, who is solid and sits upon a rump; who is hard enough
to hold off the love that tears a wing, the fascination that pins flight to black velvet; who knows what it’s like to have hand grenades name their children after him. How I envy you, Pineapple.

  Pineapple: I envy the camel, who has the nerve to ignore green, who can go without water and not shrivel; who can chew and spit, who can put his foot down on nothing but the sand of all things and be sustained; who is above all a soft lankiness and a good rich stink upon the earth, never squeezed dry for the sake of someone’s breakfast. How I envy you, Camel.

 

  Chipper

  We have buried our bird Chipper

  who served God so well,

  so briefly, with a chirrup

  and one bright obsidian eye

  to greet us:

  needle point of insight,

  sinless, which pricked

  obtuse human balloons;

  who tapped with his beak

  sending telegrams to angels,

  for birds know

  all the heavenly ciphers;

  who was precious stone--

  sapphire translated into

  the sibilant dialect of feathers

  and writ small;

  who would rest in a hand,

  harmless and patient;

  who slept easily, perched

  high above the dreams that hurt us

  until he fell--his life

  shattering silently,

  no more than a knick-knack

  in this world, but to us

  a meteor among sparrows,

  or a blue tear

  we will trust our God to keep

  forever in His bottle.

  Grace

  Codicil and subclause, addendum,

  precept upon precept,

  the law makes its case against us.

  There’s nowhere to hide--

  not in a foxhole, under a yarmulke,

  or deep in Freud’s beard--

  and no mercy,

  for the law is the law is the law.

  Our vows waffle; offerings

  smolder and stink among old tires,

  worse than Gehenna.

  We have nothing the law wants.

  But sin is no easier.

  We expect honey and get ants

  that leave us like dead bees--

  hollow, thin as cellophane.

  What can we do? Caught

  between bloodless sin

  and hard, dry righteousness,

  let’s give up. Plead guilty.

  Then grace can come to us,

  rising like water from a rock.

  But where the law rules,

  even the rain is carved in stone.

  Crow

  Stand small. Always insist on

  the short end of the stick.

  Take one; put two back.

  And get used to the taste of crow.

 

 

  Plums

  The dull boy behind the lawnmower

  splattering the plums

  that have fallen from branches

  dragged down by their own burden

  is me. Every summer

  I eat a few and complain:

  too soft, too tart--too something.

  I let most of them rot.

  A humdrum husband, I bore my wife,

  ignore my children, and yawn

  banking my paycheck.

  Worse, I despise my old dreams.

  Someone at work left a bag

  of ripe plums in the break room.

  They were all gone by five o'clock.

  Forgive me, Lord.

 

  Rilke

  When untamed angels came to you

  bearing baskets of words

  for the winepress,

  they promised you a vintage

  more intoxicating than mere life--

  than wife, daughter, lovers

  who poured themselves out

  hoping to sip from your cup.

  You had friends, facilitators

  who’d pick up the tab

  after an Orphic binge

  had left you with a hangover,

  reeling across Europe

  frantic for solitude among roses

  and old furniture. How long

  did you think you could live like that?

  There’s no free lunch, no secret

  ecstasy, no elegy without loss.

  Every death kills someone.

  You should have known

  those angels would be back,

  empty-handed and hungry

  for your marrow,

  thirsty for your thin, white blood.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  (1875-1926)

  Tiger

  Consider the tiger, zoo-bred,

  that knows nothing else

  and yet paces her cage, crazy

  for the pungent green freedom

  she can’t even imagine.

  It’s easy to think we’re like that,

  spirit locked tight in flesh--

  except with us

  it’s the cage that can’t keep still

  and grinds, twists, pops rivets,

  while the tiger inside purrs,

  curled up in God’s lap.

 

  Prayer

  Nutrasweet hour of prayer,

  my peace--my chemical peace

  with a bad aftertaste,

  I want more,

  more than bitesize meditations

  or leftovers

  of cold, greasy need.

  Give me something to chew on:

  meat sizzling on a spit

  and black bread thick as a brick;

  give me wine and tears, Lord,

  and wild honey from the comb!

  Sitting With Clifford

  Because I’ve come without limping

  to this gray season,

  much too late to impress anyone,

  I’m not embarrassed to baby-talk

  an overweight golden retriever

  as we sit here together,

  both of us warm and well-fed,

  my book open on his back.

  While the night slips down

  toward freezing, and fog

  sets its ambush

  against my next morning commute,

  and elsewhere in the house

  domesticity churns and clatters,

  I tell him he’s a good boy,

  which is true. He is.

  And for a few moments,

  so much peace infuses me

  that I might be scratching the flop ear

  of an angel unaware.