With A Heart Like That, Page 3

  Talk Show

  Dante was afraid of the dark.

  In our time, it’s too much light

  that seems frightening.

  Sin scintillates: no shadows

  and no shame in our game.

  Unrepentant, we confess

  fifteen minutes on a talk show.

  What would Dante think?

  Would the poet who faced Hell

  turn his back on us,

  disgusted by

  our shrill, whiny candor?

  Daibutsu of Todaiji

  You will have no rival

  in stone. Next to you, the Sphinx

  is a soft, shabby has-been.

  Who is Ozymandias?

  Those masks blasted from the cliffs

  of Mt. Rushmore, mere photo-ops,

  have nothing to tell us.

  No comment. They stare

  over our heads, preoccupied,

  looking for something they lost

  in the tall grass of the prairies

  a hundred years ago.

  But you’ve found everything

  ever lost, hid it all again

  under the Bo tree,

  and let us go on looking

  while you sit there, Buddha,

  innocently still, and so huge

  not even the Christ of Corcovado

  could get his arms around you.

  Blind, now that the paint

  has flaked from your eyes,

  you lift one hand: to bless us

  or to feel your way?

 

  Wolves

  A few wolves on the street

  watch us. Only a sneer

  shows us their fangs,

  stained and prematurely blunt.

  We’re not even worth a growl.

  Obsessed with any grass

  more or less green,

  we bleat and rush by--

  and never discern

  through our dim, ruminant haze,

  the sheep in wolves’ clothing

  waiting for a Shepherd.

 

  Memo to Villon

  Illicit brother, black sheep

  fetid with Paris muck,

  scarecrow stuffed with dungeon straw,

  tonsured knife fighter,

  lovesick poet with a slit lip,

  scarred like Al Capone,

  sweet-talking con, whoremonger

  and true believer,

  did wine kill you? Or VD?

  Did you finally hang

  at Montfaucon, Orleans, or Meung,

  nothing but spoiled meat

  sticking to a rickety ladder of bones?

  And did you climb,

  by faith, saved by grace alone,

  from the gibbet to heaven?

  I sit fidgeting in church,

  ashamed to be bored by such niceness

  (but bored--and ashamed)

  and think of you.

  If you sidled in this morning,

  any streetwise usher

  worth his blazer and name badge

  would keep an eye on you.

  That smirk you could never wipe off

  would give you away--

  and how you would heft the basket

  guessing the take within a few cents.

  But here no one values your offering

  of a poem jotted down

  on the back of a pawn ticket

  and given freely--like the widow’s mite.

  Francois Villon

  (c. 1431-1463)

  Chinook

  Everything is loosening,

  finally. The snarls

  in my shoelaces and in my life

  will all come untangled

  if I just do nothing.

  I must learn to sag and slump,

  permit the taut muscles in my neck

  to go slack. Lord,

  I’ve been like this far too long:

  a crazed Chinook struggling

  upstream in the wrong river.

  I’m ready to give up.

  All the way down to the sea,

  unsinkable, I’ll ride

  Your peace through the white water,

  thoughtless as a stick.

  And I promise not to complain

  about losing my grip.

  Sometimes letting go

  is the only way to hold on.

  Soon

  I keep looking up, expecting

  the north star to flicker

  and go out. Soon

  the litmus moon will turn red.

  Do roots suffer from wanderlust?

  Even boulders among the hills

  seem poised to leap.

  How high? How far?

  And how soon?

  I fidget through the days,

  feeling for the first time

  an unsuspected migratory instinct.

  Song

  They sing me; I jingle.

  I’ve become their brimstone ditty,

  top ten, throbbing on

  every boom box in Hell.

  They hiss; they puff their cheeks:

  it’s not a night breeze

  clacking the blinds.

  They whistle me while they work.

  But I’m still silent, tongue-tied--

  a shrug in a wrinkled shirt

  and not a man.

  O Lord, give me back my voice!

  Let me torture them with psalms

  until they howl

  and run scared to their pit

  and stuff their ears with ashes.

  Come tune my harp again

  to its own oddball, unheard-of key.

  You’re my strength and my song.

  I will sing You!

  Dog Day

  Bailey Blue, good morning--

  so far. The sun has not risen

  for either of us

  and the moon has nowhere else to go.

  Sit with me, stranger,

  grand-dog left here for now

  (and maybe later)

  by a daughter with a stray heart.

  Lift your mellow, unknowing eyes

  and unload on me

  all your loneliness and impatience;

  let me scratch you where I itch.

  This back yard is enough,

  California-diverse

  with dry evergreens around the pool,

  apples rotting beneath palm trees,

  and you: purebred Dalmatian

  named for Irish liqueur and a mutt

  your mistress can’t remember

  except for her loss.

  I’m a mutt myself, not much

  of a dad or grandfather;

  but I’ll take you in for now,

  comfort you, and let you be

  all the black and white

  should-have-beens I’ve shredded

  pasted back together

  to make something like love.

  Hyakutake, Mandelstam, God

  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.

&
nbsp; 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 sit 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!