Relations

I am related to the crescent moon;

Scimitar like, at both ends a sharp point,

Birth and death in my case but for the clever moon metamorphosis.

Similarly the round, bulbous moon is my second cousin,

Once removed;

Not that she is aware of this lumbering her enormous white belly across the sky;

More relatives I am thinking;

Soon it will be the whole human race.

Certain men in coastal China look just like me;

Missioneries maybe or traders or even a Jesuit;

If we met we would throw arms around one another

And hug like lost brothers;

But this is unlikely as we lack bus fare to the next village.

My mother claims the old Highland Scots treacherous,

Alternately indolent and violent,

Fighters, lovers of death, planters of oats and semen;

Raiders, builders of stone huts,

Women with shoulders that shine in the dark, tiger eyes.

Some of me belongs to them although I don’t know which;

Punking off the nobs, coveting my neighbour’s wife maybe.

Fishermen’s children in Africa

Seesawing on the outriggers of their father’s canoe;

A man and his daughter in Malaysia,

Cracking jokes together, rising in a great crescendo of snorts and guffaws

And belly bendings. They are my cousins

As is the woman selling tamales in a market in provincial Mexico,

Part Indio, part Castile,

And the women, men, children who surround her,

Bustling, arguing;

They are my relatives too.

There are farmers in Chile who bend their elbows

Just like I do;

Shopkeepers in Cairo who share the line of my eyebrows exactly;

Miners in the Urals sniffing tea the way I sniff tea;

Carpenters in Poland stretching in the morning the way I stretch;

An Israeli wine merchant scratching his lower belly in exactly the place I scratch;

And so on.

Five billion human beings; All relatives for goodness sakes; It’s ridiculous.

And then there are the animals and rocks and the vegetable world

And the great astronomical world of nuclear explosions and spun out galaxies,

The Great Immensity,

And somehow I am related to all that too.

Morning Coffee

Clear as water,

Dying, being born, always.

What was it you asked me this morning?

Coffee, toast, teetering on our knees.

Yellow headed blackbird singing

Somewhere in the marsh beyond the trees.

The nonhuman informs the human,

Replenishes.

Filled as we are with the reality of the other,

Why not rest an elbow on the moon,

Or bathe our many eyed bodies

In the wild yellow firepots of the sun?

What was it you asked me this morning?

Something about death,

Something about dried leaves?

Pale blue of the spring sky exquisite;

Slow unfurling of the new, green leaves.

Bright grass shooting up through dead yellow.

Run off water dank and fertile beneath the trees.

The reality of Death comes in its own time;

Its thought has no substance, no body.

Coffee, on the other hand, is delicious,

Filling the mouth with the taste of earth,

The taste of flowers.

And that wren singing in the poplars,

Tiny. Fierce. Wild.

Who knows what she’s up to?

Puffing herself up, throwing out trill notes,

As if she were the original, the primal being,

And you and I shadow figures

In the roaring of her throaty dream.

Alfred

Alfred Salutin has no friends;

Drinks alone every night, a bottle of vodka on the sofa watching television.

He hates everyone; even the specters flickering across the screen he curses,

Lays at their feet his wretchedness, his despair.

In his cups he screams at his old mother;

She had no right to bear him,

No right to bring him into such a world.

Saturday afternoons Alfred buys the scandal sheets,

Spreads the colorful pages across the kitchen table,

Gazes at the cleavages of the movie stars,

Takes sides in their squabbles and personal affairs.

But what he’s really looking for are stories of spontaneous combustion.

These he reads over and over until he knows them word for word.

O that he too might receive such a cleansing,

Such a fiery deliverance!

But in the end there is no burnt hole in the sofa,

No pile of smoking carrion,

Rather only Alfred, possessed of the familiar flesh and bone,

Tethered in the same tight corral of misery.

Mornings Alfred shaves in the mirror,

Face a fiery Martian red, eyes a fabric of bleeding rivers,

And he longs to be freed,

Longs to be delivered from this downward spiral

Of dead and ever deader hearts,

And then extinction.

The Poor

Plans for social ascension are announced now and then

By men in tailored suits,

Whisked away afterwards in limousines.

But the poor are not whisked away.

They remain, whistling through dark alleys, same as before.

Kind Hearts long to raise them to respectability.

Poor Kind Hearts!

What good’s respectability,

Naked, all by itself, without a foil?

Starving, racked with frenzy,

They can rise like a single beast, striking a blow unbelievably savage.

In bare sufficiency they build structures so elegant, so subtle,

They escape the attention of those who purport to study them.

Some fear them for their irreverence, sudden spikes of passion;

But these, to a lively mind, are the very reasons to love them.

Late Winter Letter To An Old Friend

The days are much the same now.

Deep cold. Howling wind.

Dark trees. White fields of snow.

The fire must be fed, kindling split.

What were you like when you were young?

What kind of face did you have then?

A lonely one perhaps,

Or a split face,

One side for God, the other for the human beings.

The dog’s face is drawn now.

Sometimes his eyes fill with pain.

He’s deaf; his corneas shiny with cataracts.

Yesterday I shoveled snow.

Tomorrow I’ll have to shovel again.

This morning I tried to write a poem. Useless.

My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.

My head stuffed with straw.

I thought of you then,

And wondered how you were doing.

Perhaps you could drop me a line.

Send me a note full of your usual nonsense,

And I will be in your debt forever.

Meeting With The Social Work Administrators

Soft gestured; Light falling on the faces just so.

All blood rinsed out and sailing off to the sea sand shore.

Words cleaned with silica,

Each turned in upon itself, a polished snail.

They chant polices.

Who made policies?

God made policies.

Their eyes are glazed in a familiar dream.

Many are the offices.

Many are the beehives humming.

Never are there enough parking spaces.

Holy are the many forms of many forms.

Blessed the flow charts. Sacred the silos.

Faces buffed. Fingers manicured.

There is enough honey to preserve the bodies forevermore.

They arrive in six separate cars

And leave in six separate cars.

Two speak. The other four utter not a word.

On The Birth of My Grandson

Vacuums noodling the spiral arms;

Small hole in the egg;

Sweeping movement of the inaccessible,

Its pendulum tock.

Destruction’s no mistake; rather a necessity.

No jamming the conveyor with the detritus of a fixed creation, please.

Some are born; others die.

Presidents and generals.

Even the cruelest tyrant becomes in the end

A pile of dust and leather paraphenalia.

My dear child welcome to the world.

Welcome to the beginning and welcome to the end.

Silver fish glide over the surface of the blue sea.

White birds alight in a green field.

And you, moving your liquid eye across the surprise of creation,

Have your first birthday,

Above you the happy moons of floating faces,

The hospital ceiling, painted blue.