tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23933634692831307652024-02-08T06:55:42.806-08:00wolfpoemsDavid Wolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765104863314154429noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2393363469283130765.post-3779977240584197402008-10-19T19:38:00.000-07:002015-02-21T16:05:09.421-08:00Poems<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Follow my work-in-progress "To Wit, T' Tweet, To Whom It May Concern" on Twitter @ wolf_whiskers.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size: large;">Also, check out <i>Sablier II</i>, my latest collection from<i> </i>Corn Publishing, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or through your favorite bookstore.</span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">These links will take you to a selection of work from <i>Sablier II</i>:</span><br />
<br />
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</xml><![endif]-->“Vernal” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anemone
Sidecar</i> (pp. 26-27):</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: times new roman;"> <a href="http://www.ravennapress.com/anemonesidecar/pdf/chapter_18.pdf">http://www.ravennapress.com/anemonesidecar/pdf/chapter_18.pdf</a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">“Gist” and “Descents”
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mad Hatter’s Review</i>:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><a href="http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue15/poetry_wolf.shtml">http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue15/poetry_wolf.shtml</a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<i>Amaina</i>” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Doctor
T.J. Eckleburg Review</i>:
</div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><a href="http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/product/amaina-david-wolf/">http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/product/amaina-david-wolf/</a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Below you will find a selection of poems from <i>Open Season</i> (Center Press Books, 1999; IA Books, 2006), <i>The Moment Forever</i> (IA Books, 2006) and <i>Sablier</i> (IA Books, 2006).<br /><br />From <i>Open Season</i>:<br /><br /><b>The Exchange </b><br /><br />Opening the window to test the cold<br />with a breath,<br />I see a small boy at the day care across the road<br />who sees me and waves.<br />I wave back<br />and he waves again.<br />I wave back,<br />he waves,<br />I wave—<br />We could do this all morning, I figure,<br />and as I close the window<br />the boy continues<br />to wave,<br />trying to squint past<br />the low-blowing clouds, the swaying trees<br />that now fill the glass,<br />past the day's reflection<br />to what surely must still be there:<br />the smile, the waving hand,<br />the stranger’s face.<br /><br /><br />*<br /><br /><br /><b>Maneuvers</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><b> </b><br />I grew up in a house with seven TVs.<br />I liked it when the heroes got it in the end.<br /><br />When my grandmother came to sit<br />she'd line up three sets in a row<br />and watch three different channels at once.<br />I'd kneel beside her<br />and slap the fat on her arms for fun.<br /><br />Summers when the reruns couldn't hold us,<br />my brother and I would hunt each other down<br />in the woods behind our house,<br />armed with the latest toy weapons<br />or Dad's .45 without the clip.<br /><br />If you got hit you were dead for 60 seconds.<br /><br />One night I didn't get up.<br />My brother never returned to finish me off.<br />I lay there watching the darkness close down the view,<br />thinking of the release that always fell<br />over the unshaven faces of heroes<br />dying in the arms of some full-figured woman.<br />I lay there letting the mosquitoes fill with blood,<br />trying to slow my heart to starve them off.<br />I lay there in the swell of the locusts,<br />trying to make it real.<br /><br /><br />*<br /><br /><b>Love Letter from Michigan </b><br /><br />Snow flies<br />mid-April<br />and so what<br />it's pretty yes<br />but so's San Gimignano<br />this time of year<br />unlike the strip to Ypsi<br />or Fox Lake<br />which looks promising on the map<br />until the territory reveals<br />the auto plant on the shore<br />pinching off waste in the tax-deductible<br />sunset of fiscal irresponsibility<br />and me I'm just here<br />craving another hit of sense<br />lost in this evening's holding pattern<br />of love me don't leave me thinking<br />how lovely it would be<br />to feel your orificial blessings<br />and the fresh produce con brio of your utterances<br />in this cluttered and pathologically diverted<br />world of trumped-up loveless surfaces<br />hopeless as the knot of my necktie<br />uncertain as Little Jimmy Dickens' career—<br />O tale of two thousand sequins—<br />and just now a momentary dusting<br />of Florentine twilight<br />leaves me only the residue of this<br />my sleeveless errand<br /><br /><br />*<br /><br /><br /><b>Thunderheads Thirty Miles East</b> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">anvils of discontent<br />(or is that giving too much away?)<br /><br />Willfully obscure yourself<br />you envision beneath them<br />a ceaseless line of interstate traffic passing<br />the escaped convict who thumbs a ride<br />a mile past the sign that reads:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><br />
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Prison Area</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers</span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Face it<br /><br />Those birches<br /><br />dry and leaning tall into the August wind<br />and the blue torn half-sponge<br />upright and hardening on the window sill<br />veil nothing<br />save the trace of last summer's Bergamasques<br />hovering to the east of Como<br />far from this glazed fugue of remembrance<br /><br /><br />*<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b>So</b></span><br /><br />So the banister is weak from years of leaning<br />So the smokebush turned yellow this year not red<br />So the sherry made locally burns going down<br />So the wind cleared the leaves from the balcony<br />So my cigarette butts buckle like bad ankles in the ashtray<br />So I wear only the clothes given to me as gifts<br />So the cupboards are indifferent<br />So I dreamed I tore your letters into strips of sentences<br />and tossed them exploding at your feet<br />So you didn't mean anything slipping your hand<br />in my pocket under the table<br />So the oil burned for eight days and nights<br />So life is open season on the living<br />So your birthmark burns a hole in my memory<br />So that brown slur of a river stole you after all<br /><br /><br /><br />* <br />
</span><br />
<div align="left">
<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><b>No Solution</b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: times new roman;">
</span>
<br />
Today I became you<br />
so I would not have to go on<br />
reaching for you in the night.<br />
"Leave me alone," I said,<br />
hugging myself in the dark.<br />
I was lying.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<b>Morning Inventory</b><br />
<br />
New fat.<br />
No new hair.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
<b>Poem</b></div>
<br />
There in the muddy gutter:<br />
the pink petals of a plastic geranium.<br />
<br />
No.<br />
<br />
It’s the shredded blossom<br />
of a real candy wrapper.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
</div>
<b>I Ask You</b><br />
<br />
Shouldn't we be doing our laundry naked<br />
if we really want to do<br />
a thorough job?<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Banana on the Counter</b><br />
<br />
has your name on it.<br />
Connect the spots and you'll see.<br />
Don't get too excited.<br />
It might not be you.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
The banana on the counter<br />
has been there for days,<br />
ripe as all get-out.<br />
Its favorite all-purpose non sequitur could be:<br />
"I hope the rain doesn't hurt the rhubarb."</div>
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter<br />
does not miss this morning's donuts<br />
more than I do.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter points north tonight<br />
out of no particular sense of allegiance.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter<br />
never laughed at the gag about its slippery peel.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter<br />
does not theorize<br />
the possibility of achieving<br />
"a primordial intuition of another's lived experience."<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><b></b><br />
The banana on the counter<br />
does not feel<br />
that pumpkins have it worse in October.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter<br />
does not claim to know<br />
why I scrub the saucers<br />
so hard.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><b></b><br />
The banana on the counter may indeed swear<br />
the bread is breathing<br />
in all that plastic.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The banana on the counter could be longing<br />
for a hiss at the Cheshire Cat moon.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><b></b><br />
The banana on the counter doesn't think<br />
those five-dollar ties I bought<br />
were such a good deal.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><br />
<br />
The <i>banane</i> on the counter<br />
neither loves nor despises the French<br />
for leaving off a syllable.<br />
<br />
<b>.</b><b></b><br />
The banana on the counter<br />
cannot tire of the relentless gaze,<br />
nor can it know<br />
the precise feel<br />
of this late-hour appetite.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Intersection</b><br />
<br />
We were stopped<br />
at a green light<br />
waiting for a long funeral procession to finally pass<br />
when<br />
out of the silence<br />
my old father said—<br />
shaking his head in wonder—<br />
"They sure go fast, don't they?"<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Lidless</b><br />
<br />
You lie once more beneath the black anchor<br />
that swings in place<br />
of the cheap candelabra fixture<br />
you swear was there<br />
hanging so elegantly over your bed<br />
as you drifted off<br />
hours<br />
maybe years ago<br />
<br />
The heart you forgot you had<br />
as you fell (with no memory of falling)<br />
off to sleep<br />
echoes now off the walls of your pillow-cave<br />
and the miracle of waking<br />
is no small thing you think<br />
no tin-whistle prize<br />
no more than a notion now lost<br />
on the slow wind rising in the late summer leaves<br />
the same wind you insist is innocent<br />
of all you shall forever hear in it<br />
<br />
Of course you are not alone<br />
<br />
But when has this ever calmed you<br />
there on your back in the night<br />
suspended in the sea of all<br />
those stars you can and cannot see<br />
adrift on that old coarse whisper of a dream:<br />
<br />
a wish no more:<br />
<br />
eternity<br />
<br />
<br />
* *<br />
<br />
Acknowledgment is due to the editors of the following publications in whose pages these poems from <i>Open Season</i> first appeared.<br />
<br />
<i>Avatar Review</i>: "No Solution"<br />
<i>City View</i>: "Intersection"<br />
<i>The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review</i>: "Love Letter from Michigan"<br />
<i>Hiram Poetry Review</i>: "The Exchange"<br />
<i>Jeopardy</i>: "Thunderheads Thirty Miles East"<br />
<i>Lucid Moon</i>: "Poem," "Morning Inventory"<br />
<i>Poet & Critic</i>: "Maneuvers"<br />
<i>Stand Alone</i>: "So"<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
<i>Open Season</i>: Copyright 2006 by IA Books<br />
ISBN: 81-89617-13-3</div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
* * * *</div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
From <i>The Moment Forever</i>:<br />
<br />
<b><br />The Poetry Writing Instructor</b></div>
<br />
In a small office<br />
at a large university,<br />
she praised someone else’s tiny poem<br />
as "transcendently exquisite."<br />
My nose itched.<br />
<br />
She insisted that I strive for weightier insights.<br />
She gave me a list of models to read.<br />
Just because I quoted a line from Byron<br />
she pronounced me "well read."<br />
<br />
"Why don’t you take the assignments seriously?"<br />
she asked.<br />
"<i>Something</i> devastating must have happened<br />
in your personal life this semester.<br />
You can’t go on writing about the moment forever!"<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
By the stream,<br />
reading a haiku by Basho—<br />
Look! Small white butterflies!<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
Cloud on the horizon—<br />
you look like a smiling fish.<br />
What a leap!</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
Canada geese<br />
asleep on the river sandbar in the late September sun,<br />
their long necks curved back<br />
along their bodies,<br />
heads tucked deep in their feathers—</div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
How nice to be your own pillow.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
<br />
<b>Richard Tillinghast</b></div>
<br />
told me that Keats<br />
used to get all dressed up<br />
to write poetry.<br />
<br />
This is a pajamas and slippers poem.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
*</div>
<br />
<br />
<b>Disembarkation</b><b></b><br />
<br />
Some in our tour group<br />
slow down to look<br />
at yesterday’s mayflies<br />
littering the dock.<br />
<br />
Some shuffle ashore<br />
a little faster.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
After the fireworks—<br />
summer night sky full of stars:<br />
the big "ooh, ah"</div>
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Cat sleeping on the church steps—<br />
"Hello," I say.<br />
Only an ear moves.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
That crowing rooster<br />
sounds like a dog<br />
imitating a rooster.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Windy autumn night,<br />
the elm tree emptied of its yellow leaves…<br />
now filled with stars.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Tiny green leaf<br />
caught in the spider’s web—<br />
Today’s special: fly with salad.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
Crow lands—<br />
disappearing into tall grass<br />
to join the chirping crickets. </div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Snails<br />
climbing all over the sign that says:<br />
"Climbing Prohibited"<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
</div>
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Moon</b><b></b><br />
<br />
Moon,<br />
who hasn’t seen you?<br />
<br />
Well, many of course.<br />
The sightless,<br />
and the many small lives who never made it<br />
into the night?<br />
<br />
"Cliché I suppose,<br />
but one thing history’s great and horrible and<br />
everyone in between<br />
has gazed upon is that moon," she said,<br />
as we drank beer on the rail trestle<br />
one autumn night, years ago.<br />
<br />
Here is my translation<br />
of Li Po’s famous poem, "In the Quiet Night":<br />
<br />
Such moonglow at the foot of my bed—<br />
Could there be hoarfrost so soon?<br />
I lift my head and gaze at the bright moon.<br />
Lying back, I think of home.<br />
<br />
"Why bother with another translation of Li Po?"<br />
a former colleague asked me one day<br />
when I ran into him out walking a local nature trail.<br />
<br />
"Bother?" I replied. "If you want to know about bother,<br />
I will tell you."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
</div>
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Grabbing sage from the garden—<br />
grabbed a handful<br />
of caterpillar guts.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Aubade</b><i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>for Wini</i><br />
<br />
Bruise of morning and I reach<br />
for you in your sleep.<br />
You smile, claim a deep breath, dream on.<br />
<br />
I lie awhile in the graying segue of winter light<br />
then rise to read at my desk,<br />
idling a mind on mannered lines,<br />
looking quietly for trouble.<br />
<br />
I wait, remarking the day,<br />
moving from page to world to page:<br />
<i>brooding birds</i> clot the bare branches<br />
swaying slightly in the etched air;<br />
a few flurries now, <i>ghosts of last summer’s moths</i><br />
returning.<br />
<br />
And all <i>is</i> nothing until I hear<br />
your first rustlings in the far room<br />
as you gather the sea-wash rush of linen about you,<br />
astir in the spare glow—<br />
<br />
waking to a name called<br />
from the shadows of the shared world.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
Snowy rooftop—<br />
a robin lands, slips, skims back to flight<br />
this spring morning.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
Gnat lands<br />
on the magazine photo<br />
of a fruit stand.</div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
* </div>
<br />
<br />
Late September—<br />
dead cicada blowing across the tennis court—<br />
"Out."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
* *<br />
<br />
<br />
Acknowledgment is due to the editors of the following publications in whose pages the following poems first appeared.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Buddha’s Temple</i>: [That crowing rooster]<br />
<i>Old Red Kimono</i>: "Richard Tillinghast"<br />
<i>Sequel</i>: [Canada geese], [Windy autumn night—]<br />
<i>Short Stuff</i>: [By the stream,], [Cloud on the horizon—], [Blurry bird on the bough], [Cat sleeping on the church steps—], "Disembarkation"<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
<i>The Moment Forever</i>: Copyright 2006 by IA Books<br />
ISBN: 81-89617-14-1</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
* * * *<br />
<br />
From <i>Sablier </i>(Book I):</div>
<br />
<b>I</b><br />
<br />
Bickering essence,<br />
were you ever more than badgered trace,<br />
roughed in, roughed out,<br />
roughed up?<br />
See me on this.<br />
Yet what ossuaries we are,<br />
as the dark weighs in<br />
awash in late autumn rain,<br />
the sodden dead leaves plugging eaves<br />
all over town,<br />
where I keep seeing<br />
the latest cattle-rancher rain ponchos<br />
enshrouding most sadly the executives.<br />
Eyes averted you go forth,<br />
nosing around for the apish melody of love,<br />
whistling away the miles,<br />
wreathing the hazy length of some gorge.<br />
One gives the wind room in yet another poem because<br />
it is ever with us.<br />
<br />
A small wave teeters<br />
back of a big one<br />
and you there,<br />
tapping your foot to the exegesis<br />
because you know better, don’t you,<br />
than to lounge for long in the charmed fog of the enigmatic<br />
(where I admit I stroked her calf beneath the broad quilt of daylight,<br />
vying for a stake in these hours of mere attendance deemed being).<br />
"You’ve got to make it<br />
through the world<br />
if you can."<br />
Damn if I don’t<br />
accept all the absence,<br />
all the lack,<br />
for from certain veiled perspectives<br />
less can be, to say the least, more<br />
arousing.<br />
Self now as sharp-dressed wreckage<br />
gone underground—<br />
In your reduced understanding,<br />
keep loving.<br />
And whether or not it is all based upon<br />
a belief in perception…<br />
<br />
You were away and the snow wouldn’t budge from the black branch.<br />
<br />
(O chalky iced-up town of my boyhood.)<br />
I am like the morning:<br />
No mere unanswered leap of wealth hung in the name of peace.<br />
How I loved the doctor’s daughter…<br />
"It’s just transference."<br />
Who can argue?<br />
"It takes a professional, let me assure you."<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>II</b><br />
<br />
New York never sleeps, only New Yorkers.<br />
To organize is to neglect certain organs.<br />
Floating that afternoon in the clear shallows…<br />
her nipples such rosy islands in the sun.<br />
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.<br />
We would gather in those days on the high bank of the creek,<br />
deep in the woods, cutting classes, smoking, Camus-like, sifting:<br />
"Let’s face it, the universe is far from benignly indifferent,<br />
it’s just indifferent, though even that formulation is, well,<br />
a formulation, though who can know, certainly the truth is<br />
not just me."<br />
"So settle down and listen to some good music," the radio advises.<br />
Nothing doing.<br />
As a squirrel curls, hunched on the limb, nautilus-like;<br />
As you dream adrift gin rivers coursing down your father’s fairways:<br />
Broad arrowhead shadow of a pine<br />
tree pointing my way<br />
not exactly<br />
of course<br />
<br />
slightly to my right (yes west)<br />
and I watched<br />
still as an eye could be<br />
as the sun the tree<br />
and everything else too numerous<br />
to mention swung<br />
that squat shadow point more precisely my way…<br />
ends flexing,<br />
square as the bill that buys this loveless advance<br />
hailed as the real<br />
world.<br />
Captive beneath clouds—<br />
dead nations wedged forth from their continents,<br />
loosed to let all borders stream down through the air.<br />
Peace of the sea heaving<br />
at a distance…<br />
forever missing<br />
with a trace.<br />
Conference notes:<br />
New décor, old confines,<br />
the primordial light, the essential buzz…Sing cuccu!<br />
Summer is a-coming though who would know it in an auditorium<br />
sprinkled with detractors.<br />
<br />
Dusk<br />
<br />
and our best translation:<br />
"Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine and our love."<br />
Know some more?<br />
…and besides we all could do worse than agree that in producing oppositions,<br />
the immediate slide to symmetry, process and inauguration<br />
risks a misuse of history…<br />
I am chewed.<br />
<br />
Chartered gristle, bouncing in ancient ardor,<br />
one’s funky slung accruals spraying.<br />
"Where does the truth lie?"<br />
All over the place.<br />
Holy smoke.<br />
Vast gob, broad worlds.<br />
Yawn breaking.<br />
A big yawn<br />
of atomized nothingness.<br />
(Remote spume,<br />
restless sleep of clover.)<br />
The age’s normative move eschews at least<br />
the now more common tactic of pressing<br />
a double measure of marginalia (critically deep)<br />
into service…<br />
a serviceable center, no less.<br />
Glide path of past, present, future<br />
paling beneath a shale sky.<br />
The song, the tale, yea verily: mind’s bon voyage.<br />
<br />
Caught ourselves remarking<br />
how greatly, how authentically the best of us felt back then.<br />
(You know, a legacy of feathered wishes<br />
scattered wind-borne on the drafts of the straw heart’s imperium?)<br />
The beast jolts from indolence.<br />
A snare’s shudder, in the pocket,<br />
delirium passing,<br />
beneath the parallel haven of the vague and the endless<br />
(selected and with an introduction)…<br />
<i>She took his hand<br />in the young spare spring<br />that bade me watch them dance<br />down the library steps just as—<br />wouldn’t you know it—<br />the sun flared forth<br />then faded back a tad<br />(the clouds passing seemingly just shy<br />of time-lapse speed all that windy day),<br />yes on level ground<br />she took his hand<br />and it must have felt good, I thought,<br />that’s all,<br />it must have felt good.</i><br />
<b></b><br />
<b>III</b><br />
<b><br /></b><b></b>Aplomb of late afternoon light— tea by the open window.<br />
<br />
Later, a little Saumur with the evening news?<br />
Secret life of cut-rate sovereignty.<br />
She actually said to those assembled, "Dashes are my textual trademark."<br />
Fine, but keep the fly<br />
from the lip of the milk carton.<br />
Tough to say where it’s all going<br />
but chances are it will be tougher to celebrate when we get there.<br />
<br />
Days in the Place Balzac—<br />
bodily dispersal—<br />
I turn out the image once more.<br />
Her dream: to wear white muslin and to live<br />
on a cliff by the sea, somewhere, someday,<br />
with me I remember hoping.<br />
Morning fields dazed in a stupor of herbicide.<br />
Earth hosting a history of guests who don’t know when to leave.<br />
"It’s love not me rolling over in utter indifference."<br />
A woman bends to kiss<br />
the wooden cross that serves<br />
as her husband’s grave marker<br />
and where will the memory go<br />
once she and I and everyone else<br />
who leafed past the news photo today are gone?<br />
A "detour of birth" you called it…<br />
"Severed by what?"<br />
Moist flare of final thought?<br />
Fade out of distilling intuition and reasonable foci?<br />
<br />
All that rigor married merely to inswept rumor,<br />
dust of the earth rising?<br />
How this ache the mind insists<br />
on being—<br />
How it returns once more<br />
to the soul’s ideal weight—<br />
Soul that remains all or nothing?<br />
"Yours is," she laughed, "a predictably romantic desire."<br />
"Yes, but the necessity that gives rise to the desire confirms<br />
the contemporaneity<br />
of such a value."<br />
"What is the furthest<br />
you have ever jumped?"<br />
…Didacticism, yes, we nodded, but a didacticism conscious<br />
of its own situatedness…<br />
Hush.<br />
Tell it to the spirit of you-know-who,<br />
cutting across the glacier in her flats and long white coat.<br />
…as the glossy republic heaves on, semi-automatically,<br />
bemused in its shimmering diet of light…<br />
If you are tired<br />
you may put your head down<br />
and rest quietly at your desk.<br />
<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>VI</b><b></b><br />
And whose narrative gloms your faith for now, pilgrim?<br />
No, one forefronts the contextual "nature" of the "Real"<br />
not to reify the notion of the unattainable,<br />
but to dissolve all the old irony…<br />
It’s all in the tenor<br />
of your self-reflexivity, sleepyhead.<br />
Notes amiss in the melody of the wreck…<br />
<br />
Work not to overbear your fine soul upon your neighbor.<br />
For when the hunch comes true we suspect genius.<br />
Or a galaxy of pearls falling from the heedless azure release of the sky.<br />
Even as the masonry is hopefully prone to outlast the mason.<br />
Enclosure turns, wed to anxiety.<br />
Should your concentration flag, your attention drift and yaw...well, where are you now?<br />
Holy Ish Kabibble.<br />
What the business looks like around back<br />
is apparently too costly for them to care about.<br />
Your bored ghost, or just a gust of wind<br />
riffling through the pages of the open book in the next room?<br />
We all catch up with the dead.<br />
No hair length but in humidity.<br />
After dinner at The Teddy Roosevelt Café,<br />
we walked the vacant streets of the mountain town,<br />
past the closed shops,<br />
past the mystic merchandise.<br />
Cute as a stuffed buffalo<br />
in the gift shop of the stern hearted.<br />
<br />
Seasons trail back o’ the hand.<br />
Impulsiveness,<br />
some say,<br />
may have once meant survival.<br />
God I just did not want to do it anymore so I did it<br />
no longer.<br />
This does not make me a hero<br />
even in America where I’m busy<br />
trying to clear my ear,<br />
pouring solutions down the canal<br />
and it’s not easy to be sure what’s in<br />
any bottle these days.<br />
Products of fear, day before Christmas,<br />
no difference,<br />
ear’s worse and what’s more,<br />
some sweaters are simply too much:<br />
Warmth, pattern, price, you name it.<br />
But thanks anyway (just practicing), yes, thanks.<br />
And remember that billboard?<br />
The one with the trench-coated executive<br />
waiting on a bench for his commuter train,<br />
smiling over his laptop computer,<br />
the line of copy beneath his image reading:<br />
<br />
Now You Are Free!<br />
<br />
You hear the old music now and you think it reminds you<br />
of how wondrous it all was back then,<br />
but no, it was not that way at all,<br />
it was a lousy and lonely time<br />
and the music was the thing,<br />
the only thing that got you through it,<br />
your only source of grace.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left">
</div>
<div align="left">
* *</div>
<br />
An earlier version of Part I of <i>Sablier</i> appeared in <i>River Styx Magazine</i>. Parts III and VI appeared in <i>Caveat Lector</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Sablier</i>: Copyright 2006 by IA Books<br />
ISBN: 81-89617-15-X<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />David Wolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765104863314154429noreply@blogger.com0