ALL RESPONSES |
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to tell you that leaves fall deeper into green, that stems stir lemon &
yellow when the sky shifts back to blue. I am nothing compared to this
day, barely a whisper, less than one tick of a clock as afternoon
folds itself into tiny squares of light. Today I’d give everything
to be one diamond on this honey wood floor, one small and beautiful
thing, fleeting, luminous, born of a bright sun, pure & destined to shine.
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We appear in pairs
with lust to leave
something of ourselves,
swimming against the current
over hard round stones.
Hurry, before cold comes.
It's our last chance to see the sun
and bare our skin to air,
to feel each other's flesh
on the river's bed.
When spawn is done,
we return to the lake
to live beneath ice,
where we will dream winter away.
Will I see you again in spring? |
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so, the beginning of death is not so clear
as our infant birth--minutes the length
of light’s age, flaking skin, and veins
bursting to find
a lasting gasp in the advent of other’s lives--
we push upstream into exhaustion, not
even feeling our bones already sitting
on the river bed;
I will not give you away
even though you are dead--
and linking words into poetry, in the short bursts
of an explanation or a tail, is now the
only way in which I can think--the
only way in which I can think
right now;
it is pitiful, this gloaming of life,
but even grey is a fury of lesser colours when
its marbled surface sits wasting
among sisters and brothers...
tentative flesh--
tentative flesh is being used to reach out
(damn this is so depressing)--I have also been
a fool, a captain, a tabula,
and finally I learn
how valuable this last gasp is/can be:
sew my arteries into a book, as words, so
that I can see forever,
through the eyes of the young
as I settle into a grave of stones (what
did you expect--the fish is dying)--and
I cannot even weep as I am smoothed over
by the currents--I forgot
that I knew all this already, learned it
with my first gasping breath, which sounded so much
like the beginning of my death. |
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I wander from room to room
from tan tile
to beige carpet,
the umbrella of understanding
held over my head,
relating, connecting, interpreting.
Lifelong learning, accustomed reactions—
the memento mori I used to be able
to spew on demand.
There is a way in this,
A return to ancient spawning grounds.
What if—when I
step outside to October—
a sudden small wind
gusting from far places
or fourth street three blocks down
turns what I stand under
inside out,
blowing it away?
What stand I under then?
Is there a middle english word for that too,
circumventing latinate complexity,
driving to the heart?
Some norman invasion long ago
made devious the word tasks of my life.
Blow, small wind—
turn my brain cells upside down,
allow November and December.
There is a way in this.
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By this time next week
his black eye will have turned yellow, faint enough
& in the right light, not even there. He will have told
Everyone he knows about how his wife saved him, jumped
on the little mugger and held him down just long enough
so he could grab his pepper spray, leave the jerk crying
like a baby girl, curled up on the sidewalk. Don’t mess
with my wife he says and we both smile as she looks me up
and down calculates just how little effort she’d need
to knock me out completely.
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You never say anything about
the words you sometimes put
into my mouth, even after mending
all the torn letters that speak of love.
You just stand there in orange leaves
up to your ankles, all the summer
birds lost in your hair,
while the metal fence post rusts
in my hand and the near-by ditches
slowly turn to ice.
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I did not expect to ever leave,
but one day came a sibilant voice
lush with pathos, tendrils of sorrow,
a song so full of the Old World charm,
of crystalline shimmer, petals of light,
the blowsy way I used to feel when rising
unencumbered from the darkness below,
I had to follow.
Gone was my fear
of the noisy painted surface, the quaking,
the vertiginous charge of light.
And I transformed without knowing why,
no longer craving salt rushes, the grit
of sand, pellucid waters. Instead dreamed
of again cruising runnels, sludge-bottoms,
bed-rock and stone. I cannot explain my joy
in finding the place where I’d begun.
I only knew the voice called and I risked
even death to swim against the stream
and lay down my wild-love up here in this world.
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We cleave to the rocks
backs exposed
lamprey-weighted
mouths growing curved
against the pull
losing the colors
we know ourselves by
drawn into the death
love requires.
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All you need is one good white shirt—
she says as presses the button for steam
nuzzles the nose of the iron into the small corner
between placket and collar. I am listening, supposed to
be learning, but the curled wire at the end, the one
the cord is snaked through dances and shines in the sunlight
that pours itself into her kitchen.
It is all I’ve ever needed, shifting patterns of light, long angles
fingering their way into every corner, teasing each stray thought
out, grounded in the smell of steam, the sound of its release.
Meanwhile, her body strong, fighting each wrinkle, each fold.
If pressed, I wonder if my life would ever hang as crisp
as proper, as smooth, or if I’ll always spill
from table to floor, broken, bright.
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Here, the magic begins.
Scale, fluid flow, bone, stone
Climb and become many.
Your true odyssey can never be
Caught on camera, by pen,
Not even a bear's jaw, a clean hook
Or even within a net of strangers
In a floating world of colorful waves. |
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The sudden appearance of a fish
in a stream isn’t frightening,
not like a snake, though like a snake,
the way it darts or remains quiet,
as in wavering, as in contemplation,
two different things, one neither here
nor there; one, purposeful as in ‘to
discover.’
That sudden appearance
of an other in a world which is other than
my so-called larger world of air, the fish world
of river water, of ripples, currents, rapids,--nothing
cold or difficult for a fish. A full
life in that small, gilled body, there, seen, hovering,
a speckled thing at rest above a bed of stones,
hourly-washed . A life of transparency,
we’d say today, though a fish can easily
plummet to a darker, bottom level, out
of range of a human eye.
Its thought
unknown, though this fish’s
camouflage, which is the sudden
appearance, is a trick that doesn’t work
on me today. Which is part of the delight, to be
almost fooled. (I have stumbled across this
truth as I’d fall into an untouched scene;
it’s optional, pure luck.)
Such an appearance,
beyond most pleasing, as in finding
what you’ve been searching for, like
a plan or all things humans keep
about themselves, answers why
the brain insists on every kind of
cupboard or hidden compartment--merely
open to stash away delight.
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How a young Marine driving
a tank through solid heat suddenly
thinks of mittens on a string
That the lake
of the mind must be quiet,
with delightfully pink salmon
nibbling near the surface
before spawning
Almost dancing with that young blonde
in 1981, seeing her later in a car
driving past slowly, pausing,
motor whirring—
It was midnight then and September,
the same as it is right now,
as above, so below
Be honest—
you’re still not certain
what’s expected of you
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You on shore cry
for these apocolyptic times.
Economies wobble on a cliff ledge,
hands reach for hands
of sudden brothers while
the cliff fails landward,
or searches for the sea. Below,
I feel my first mercy, a servant
in the shallows
of the Baptism river.
These may be the last days
of the world above water.
Animals that once were are not
and the coho are listing. Your stars
are falling, your favorites leave
the dance. Beauties coupled for wild love
change heart, divide children
speed toward new love, hoping.
Below, I leave my young behind in the Poplar,
Cascade, Baptism.
I want to tell you this
while you are whimpering
mourning shortages left by weather
crying violence and disease. Listen,
there is a tune to losing:
a surge and swish,
a rising scale of speed. You think
the damaged world is clear
as river, the sea is dark. You worry
you will wander
or simply disappear.
These things happen. Look down
at the one-eyed pearls
I leave on vacant stones.
Know my flesh is changing
as I turn from Baptism to the sea. |
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In the chill of my room I gasp for air,
fishy legs churning, dappled waters
darken and freeze. I am hungry for forest and
song of wind-whistled trees,
the sandbank hiding me from
the ache of tomorrow’s rush
to ice. Sink back in mud
hole and pebble lane,
flitter like the dragonfly
whose flight we imitate no matter
the hoof or paw, because it is Life-
light, it is only one breathe more,
it is the slender silk thread,
the web, the tumble down leaf.
The winter has come to
grab me by both arms and
up-end me on the pond where
skaters have left a signature
of lace, fragile motion,
the shadows of grace.
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To have one pebbled path,
to know – without brooding
or the cruel questioning
of the heart – that there is
one direction only; to slip
easy into a freshwater groove,
a vein of singular purpose,
and struggle thick against currents,
fling that great, tired body
up waterfalls; to glide
quiet to the open waters of life
and death, the inescapable junction,
and to shimmer iridescent
in the afternoon sun, become, at last,
the very end of your own rainbow.
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As the river swallows sunlight
I turn to face the hills,
and see a red aura crowns them
where at the end of a far climb
one can stand in energy
connecting earth and sky.
Stones lit to ginger, claret, red amber
depend upon the changing light
that blesses the fishermen who stand
in the estuary dangling their patient lines,
that blesses pink salmon suspended
in clear water against rhyolite.
They rejoice in coming through
to spawning ground, coming through
one more brush with extinction.
Under clear water, stones become
pink and granite colors of sunrise
and the salmon float above them,
at ease in their release.
In town two libertarians
stopped me on the sidewalk
to ask what I thought was most wrong
with our country and filmed my rant.
“Stupidity” I answered them, but now
standing by the river pool
feeling sliced open by the blessing
of woods, water, light on fish
I see that I was wrong.
Now I say it is blindness to the fire
at the heart of things,
to the heat that rises from each of us,
outlines us the way light etches
hills in space, salmon against stones,
fire that encircles us even
as stars begin to reel in the dark.
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…to be
like the salmon
able to
blend in
with the habitat
perhaps avoid
the angler’s jealous hook
maybe
to mingle
with one's kind
write another poem
but
there is that one
unavoidable danger
one must die
when done spawning.
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(sort of on-topic)
As handsome as a brown, mottled log,
slow swimming catfish
trolls languidly
through the freshwater tank,
Long, old man whiskers
trail behind gills.
Catfish faces me,
presses his wide mouth,
walnut brown face
close
to the water side
of the window,
watching me
with dusky button beads.
We press our smooth
bald foreheads against
the thick crystal pane,
gulping air and water
at one another in wonder.
Pickerel and walleye float by,
waiting for bait
oblivious to our baiting.
Granddaddy catfish
glares
as I float down the
granite exhibit path
to catch up with
my wayward school
near the porthole.
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We harden to stippled rods
in a bed of iron reds.
We have something urgent—
and it is too soon cold.
We are in a race we do not understand,
but which we sense we are losing.
With scarcely the energy to surge,
we burn our guts out, running
against these weird currents,
fluctuating freeze and thaw—
and we have no idea
what will become of us.
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have you truly figured Verse?
even my chorus
Verse?
We, the chorus,
is not a name--
it is similitude; semblance; resemblance;
silence--and can we only hope for yours?
your beaten wings, even, always even,
concerning water,
are just
that--
wings--
(just: fair?;
simple.; only...;
am I like you?
regrettably ignorable?)--
a salmon’s
colors
do not show
shame in
dying...
colors that were
forgotten
until
unearthed...but
methinks
thatyou
arelost,
exhum-
ingthe
Deep Great Knowledge
that I guess only
you must have, seen,
read, chewed on, fiber added
to your gastrointestinality,
at least I can be thankful for your
Montezuma’s Revenge of verbs...
nounns...(yes I spelld’t that way)...
why are you working so hard
to maintain a volume of water
that has already passed? your
form is rotting away, feeding algae--
; why start evolution from its front, when
there has so much been
been angone?
here in this tiny rivulet
where rhythm tells you things--
where your muscles contract
before your neurons fire--
is it such a great thing?
your fire?--
appropriate at least in choosing a picture
and myth for itself--
“a bit too hot.” waxing rotten from the sun.
I once had a prodder that told me,
“show the love;” And I learned a lesson>.
But also, in his love there were
things I did not understand, you
see, I was raised to spout “the hate”--
and good at it were it was so--
(that is your verse, Verse.)
I have tried love; pressed it
into my arm until I bruised;
fed it my blood. harsh. but it lives;
and you have some of that--
at least we have your tauted
briliant scales (notice,
the misspelling is intentional--meant
to show what I think
of you and your
incessant idiotic blabbering.
Simple scales. Simplified
to Geometry. Numbers? really???(3--yes,
the rest of us can count too.))
and
do do, you, realize how many flavo0rs
of stars are out there among the chorus?
or do you sit in a closet, like an
old Catholic mystic, and find
how amazing life is without even breathing?
and there’s the truth?--no. please me.
please me by ignoring every word and
ignoring my poetry. never commenting Verse.
do not breath on me.
do not flutter unless it is
your heart giving out
in death. crumble away, novice, not noticed
any more than the dust of the floor
that I sweep daily, the floor
of my own death.
because you are
inherently ignominious;
so presumptuous as
to think
you are actually divine?
divinity is dead.
I will find it with my bones.
as you will with yours. |
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Marry me
marry me
marry me
shoot me into outer space
of in-laws
sitting quietly
on wooden pews
hoping for things
that should have been
all the things
they read in books
and saw on TV
wet American dreams
suffering from drought
waiting for torrents
of fresh
rain
water
gushing over rocks
towards our brilliant future. |
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the beach grass, low and green
carves delicate patterns into the sand with the tip of its blade
I study the results--much like a seismograph's etching
see the trail of a snail, the curve of a wrist, an arch
that bridges the living to the dead.
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And what is a willow tree
but a weeping hut
in a forest?
And what is a forest
but where every willow
tree is lost?
Who cries the night to sleep?
And what of the salmon? who
tells it to swim upstream--
head to one side, tilted
as though listening
to its body’s repertoire
of song in clear water:
shimmershimmer
shimmershimmer
before dying; a man
stands hands held out--
he too weeps and is lost
before dying; who will listen
to him and tell him what to do?
Who cries the night asleep? |
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Who cries the night asleep?
Tim J Brennan
_Rabbit punch_
Louis Murphy
maybe my hands will be
solemn for some frozen hours
until they cart my corpse away
to burn it. to burn it. the way
I wanted to burn when I was alive.
no different than
a woman
another man
or an ampersand
to burn. to burn. the way
they burned when they were alive.
•
I do not ask for
my bones to be ground
the dust of my once rooted teeth
to be held
you need not wrap me
just place me on a cardboard sheet
and push me into the oven
to burn. to burn. the way
I burned when I was alive.
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I did hold out my hands
to catch the last gut drop
of humanity before this most recent war
started
and instead of thistles prick
I caught the pour
of human flesh greasing M16s
and legs flayed quickly from bodies
by warheads and by bouncing bettys
I wished nothing. there was nothing to wish.
it had been done before
by better...(because they were unheard;
because they were unheard, and disappeared)
burned. burned. because they were alive. |
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Cumbersome clouds pass through an orange
tunneled sky. A subway that brings us
to all of our stops, and never really brings us home.
The passersby laughs transform your
grieving words into a series of beeps;
the Morse code of loss.
Once born into a promise we return to
find a past ridden with the disease of
guilt, broken lines that fail to draw a picture.
All that is ultimately left is the feeling of trepidation
at the thought of where we are now.
If looking back means our eyes don’t meet
where the light had taught us to be patient,
then I will never know you; all the lot of you
who drank the poison of life to meet
Jesus, Elvis and Buddha for coffee,
earlier than expected.
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“I wished nothing”
Louis Murphy
Father’s Advancing Illness
Of Oldness
It is like many nights
And days mostly being nights.
It is like many flames dancing
Next to each other as one big fire.
It is like a thousand black flies
Covering a slice of Edem cheese.
It is like the sun and the moon
And all the stars collapsing
Into a black hole in the sky.
It is like a man wishing for nothing
Because there is nothing more to wish for.
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A Crazy Day:
Dropped anger
Lost fear
A Crazy Night:
Waiting alone
Hope you come
A Crazy Boy:
Nice legs
Bad cough
A Crazy Girl:
Covered hurt
And hurting
Crazy:
The End
Well Now |
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It's a lot easier
meeting the force head on
My willingness to fight
currents
against progress to my goal
Let it hit my face
toughened by scars
His will drives me on
Spawn
Create
And there is no doubt that I will get there
I have His will to guide me
Past falls
Jumping up
Through bear-crossed shallows
Primal instincts recognizing landmarks
To that place of birth
My ancestors left me to carry on
I will
His will
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Struggling to swim upstream,
the salmon flashes its underside,
a piece of submerged cutlery
suspended in the magic hour.
I want this jeweled relic
to be unamazing,
to not hold my attention
as it now holds itself
in determined lateral sheen.
I tell myself
to think of other things:
coins, mirrors, galaxies...
but the salmon flicks
its tail westward
and snaps me back
into worshipping reflection,
back into standing still,
back into believing
we have the same face. |
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Learning a new face seemed my only next move. Doubt being cold. So I threw on skirts and cruised the greenways and lakes on my red, white and black Dyno-glide. In art deco, a silver lettered DYNO logo ran down its stem. Came from dyna, means power. Extra wide handlebars and a custom seat post afforded a tall and straight ride. In car traffic I looked SUV drivers in the eye.
I saw new faces gliding past on everyday hand-me-down bikes, or whizzing past on hollow, high tech numbers. Most smiled and some gave a fleeting “Hi”. I learned the positive linear relationship between strangers’ greetings and their bike's weight. The more the bike weighed, the more likely the greeting. Technology and means aside, all bike riders can feel wind on their faces and many show it like dogs, nostrils up, poised for a full-face slurp of wind. These are the bikers who smiled at me.
I locked my bike at our front stoop, still breathing hard from taking hills directly into my body. Glad to see you at your desk, I kissed you hello. You were still here, living in this house with me. Our books. Music. Carvings. Still, this need returned, again and again. Lovely hollow ache in my torso dropped like mercury falling, pulling me away.
We are too familiar and not young. I know you and your illness. Heavy and hard, the way I know that eating and paying bills will never guarantee survival. Or love, poems. The “we” hangs with your survival, suspended in a similar doubt, knowing well the meaning of each symptom. Familiarity fudging answers from hope.
An unfamous painter accepted my chaos in this strange twilight, took a chance – liquid red want crystalled in my throat before it dropped again, seeped past swollen lips, throbbing thighs became inside out drums for urge. Urging you. Finite twilight. Became the night that waxed darkness, pulled me forever away. |
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water is a tongue
we no longer
understand
we are no longer
fluent in lakes
and rivers and
rain is just
music to me |
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