Dead Stars

No friendship can be safe 
From the destructive power of time,
From the curse of fading memory, 
From the poison of indifference. 

Our telephone line may bridge
The distance of the daunting miles.
But no bridge was built to cross
The distance of the daunting years.

To keep at bay deep fears
We pretend our friendship holds. 
But no denial can fill the loss
Of the trust we once held dear.

Courage it takes to see it clear:
The passion of youth does end,
That joy that we cherished -
That friendship won't perish - 
Lost when the road did wend
Far to the left and far to the right:
We walked our own paths,
Soon lost to sight.

If the child in you and the child in me
Should one day meet in your memory,
Tell them both to always sing
Of the joy and the excitement
In a future we held in awe;
Tell them both to always cling
To the vision of companionship 
In a future we thought we saw.

For across the sky the darkness falls:
On the sand alone I count my scars,
Your echo faint and then it stalls -
A friend like the light of long dead stars.

Gilgamesh

Startled in the pre-dawn light
I awoke in time to see
My thoughts, my dreams,
Rush up the bedroom walls,
Leap in the quiet air
Through the windowpane
To God knows where.

The ceiling did not replenish dreams,
Not the closet, not the couch.
But the bookshelf held out hope.
In the gloom was tossed a rope.
To pull me from my bed
That grew or shrank
With the weight of joy, sadness,
Dread and madness.

At the other end of the rope
Gilgamesh stood and spoke:
Do not pine after dreams
Of storms and bulls and
Birds that breathe fire.
You have not lost your Enkidu,
Your innermost desire.
Your wildness sleeps
Without need of rest or dreams.

The good life is not lived
Building walls, fortifications
To keep your beloved safe and true.
Immortality is not given you,
Neither youth nor vitality
Outlast the adventure.
The monster in the mountain
Must be slain, though it bring
The rage of gods, the winds of war.
From unknown lands your dreams will spring.

Spring Rain

After the rain
Of days and melancholy days,
When the wet sheen on all the world
Reflects a dull spring sky,
Still the swollen green of dripping plants,
With the shiniest indifference,
Demands your full attention.

By the sidewalk, the milky white of dogwood,
In a garden, the tender tone of roses,
And the lilies scatter on a lawn
In speckled yellow splendor:
All seek to draw the eye
From the pensive gray of sky.

To venture out at dawn
And hear the song of sparrows
Hiding in the great, green tops
Of sturdy oak and slender willow,
Branches swaying, dripping rain
Like green low-lying clouds -

Sight and scent and sound that calls -
The bustling of no crowd:
Nature's vigor, soon to die,
Its fleeting moment leaves no doubt,
Our blood is earth, our soul is sky.

December 24, 1914

Before the bitterness, before the hatred,
Before spawning the beast
That must be sated,
In the horror of every war since,
Came the peace on Christmas Eve. 

Few could then believe
The German call heard in the night
Across the blasted waste of No Man's Land.
The British and Germans dared to stand
Atop their trenches, within sight,
And, walking, met halfway in brief reprieve.

Though comical the call,
"We no shoot!" opened the door to all:
To sing old carols, "Stille Nacht, Heilinge Nacht,"
To hear a band play "God Save the King,"
To give as gift every simple thing -
Wine and cigarettes,
Bully beef and biscuits -
To share a human night is all they sought
And a game of soccer with a makeshift ball.

By Christmas the following year
All of the players had killed each other,
Bringing on the helpless, hopeless tears
Of British and German mothers.
French mothers, too, clutched their damp letters
From sons who believed, in December 1914,
That life could be better.

Gone are the trenches; gone are the fences.
Gone are the days a solider could see
The enemy's faces.

Our enemy bears no love
For our yuletide traditional ways.
And still we rain death from above
On the enemy's most holy days.

So let us pray today
For the youth of that children's crusade,
The ones who had glimpsed on that night
That another kind world could be made.

Dust

We parted on an old road

near the edge of a small town,

its name forgotten.  

The bus, rattling softly,

raised a cloud of dust

as it faded into memory.  

I remember the pasture

where we escaped the dust

raised by the passing wind. 

In the middle of the pasture

sat the copse of trees,

the remains of an ancient forest.   

We would go into the trees

and pick berries from vines,

wondering if we could eat them.  

His was a strange face

in that strange country,

more open, more knowing.

But his name was lost to the years. 

In those days

our souls were still growing,

our innocence showing

the faith that those moments

would not fade away.

Sunset

We sit together on the pier,

With our legs swinging,

The water lapping, glinting.  

We watch the sun sail

Across the low horizon

And sink beneath the sea.  

But that is not the passing of time for you

Or the passing of time for me.  

For the sun flies a little slower for you,

Child of tomorrow.

It sinks a little faster for me,

Man of yesterday.

How many sunsets have I witnessed?

How many sunsets have you missed?

How many sunsets until you read my name

Upon a list?

He was kind, the print will say.

He was brave,

(Though at times he played the knave). 

When you see the sun set in a blazing hail of color,

Shades you never knew you’d see,

Know that time is surely passing.  

The colors at the end of the sea

We see at day's beginning.

They fade to sunken mystery

And rise at day’s cold end. 

 

 

Commencement

Embarking now upon your lives,

As if setting sail on ships

To cross the known and unknown seas,

Recall that with each passing day

You move beneath the endless skies. 

Up above the world so high,

Beyond your earthbound, narrow sight,

Fly colossal, fiery stars

That burst with unimagined might. 

In the infinite sea of space,

Light years and ages away,

Conflagration scars the face,

Of worlds so monstrous in size

That ours is like a grain of sand. 

These worlds the stars do thrash and break

Like hapless, brittle, fragile eggs.

Then they, too, tremble, roar, and shake -

Their final cries the eons take. 

What care the stars for your accomplishments?

What care the stars for your sad failing?

They are blind to your emoluments

As they are deaf to your sick wailing. 

Thus, if you cannot even once

Impress the closest living star,

Seek no man living near or far

To flatter with your learning. 

For if you took one instant to inspect

The make and rudder of your ships

You'll find those ships, like all the world,

Are hapless, fragile, brittle eggs. 

Therefore, have a care for how you tread.

Live your days in awe of nature,

Though free of dread.

Brilliant, young, you are still creatures -

Alive like stars and one day dead.

 

 

Warning

What conversation is to be had

With someone like you

Who thinks I’m mad? 

I tell you the festival will end.

So set time aside to spend

Getting to know the silence. 

It will sound, the silence,

Like that time

When your voice falters,

Like that time

When your slow legs alter

The schedule of your day. 

You won’t recall this conversation.

There will be no slow conversion

With the looks of pure aversion

That the young will send your way. 

So take time now to listen:

See how ice on branches glistens

On a crisp, cold winter’s day,

How branches full of flowers sway

In the breeze one fine spring day. 

Hear the cicada cry out its doom

In the heat of a summer afternoon

And the silence when its cry does stall

On a quiet evening in the fall. 

Take time to greet that old man who sits in the park,

Whose eyes will not let him stay out after dark,

Or that old woman tossing crumbs on the ground,

Feeding pigeons, seeing ghosts all around –

For one day time will come, without sound,

To show their faces in the mirror.

What warning could be clearer?

Time to choose which you hold dearer -

The noise and lights and thrills of the carnival

Or that hand on your hand when you’ve been left by all.

 

Social Security

I pulled my car up
To the toll booth;
The attendant smiled
As she took my dollar.
 
She was 70 years old,
White hair pulled back.
The lines on her face tracked,
Days when she had sold
Her childhood gold
To eat.
 
Future bleak
While skies are blue -
There is nothing I can do.
So I drive away
And hear her say,
“Thank you.”
 
Thank you, America
For your long, lonely roads
Lined with many a toll booth
That mask the sad truth:
What seems a consolation -
The endless work -
Is truly there to soothe
The careless youth
Whose only true sensation
Is of cars that speed til dark.

Solitary Pine

With no one to befriend me,
With no one to know who I am,
A stranger I shall remain
On the day of my last stand.

So near me they pass –
Lovers who laugh, lovers who quarrel –
Yet my mirth I can only share
With the indifferent little squirrel.

Upon me the people confide
Their fragile human sorrows;
Today regale me with plans and pride,
But abandon me tomorrow.

No one has asked me the questions
One friend would ask another:
To what end do you grow?
How does it feel to be covered in snow?
Whatever became of your brothers?
When this forest is cleared like the others,
Which way will you go?

If my voice the wind through the miles could carry
To the people who live with their picnics and parties,
To them I’d declare all the wisdom of my days
Of a life spent on a cliff, above a windy, rocky bay.

Standing still, time slows its pace,
So I live longer, though we share the same small space.
Reflecting alone, my thoughts and world I own,
So I stand stronger, while others scatter, by the winds blown.
Dreaming alone, though I share not these dreams,
Makes life more joyful than my lonely days would seem.

And yet, like the air above the cliff always beyond grasp,
Lives the tender touch of friends, as they pass around a glass.
You, through your friends, will be remembered beyond your years,
While I, when I am gone, will have the winter rain for tears.

Quantum Dream

Bonds
Are mutually
Reinforcing.

But the opposite holds true.

Distance
And neglect build
An ever yawning chasm.

The games
That children play
Draw them closer.

But the opposite holds true.

Wars force
Nations apart
As the children's bodies pile.

Kiss the mirror
And grow nearer
To the other world
Where things still whirl,
Just the opposite way.

If I had my way,
I would spend my days
In a field at play
With the children,

Playing Molecule Ball
When each child can call
Where the ball will fly
And what it becomes
When it lands with a sigh:

A friend bearing ice cream,
A blue and white kite,
Balloons on a long string,
A dog that won't bite -

The waking world follows
A magical logic that leads to the gallows.
What the world needs
Is the science of dreams
Where the children lead and every man follows.

Radio Days

My father’s
Widow’s father
Died in the night,
His last days spent
Listening without sight
To his radio, head bent

Towards the announcer, who
In the little radio
Sounded the friend to his ears,
The old neighbor of the years,
Since blindness forced
The long, slow goodbye
To the man in the picture box.

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

And what did the radio say?
Baseball -
It was always baseball:
War, famine,
The weather,
Friends, birthdays,
And the departed wife -
Life long ago lost its time slot
To baseball and the long shots
Hit over the fence -

Fence the neighbor leaned over
On long ago tropical mornings
And asked for the news
In perfect regional Spanish:

Do you know who vanished?
And what of the Revolution?
Will you flee to America?

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

Now, in his little chair,
In the little room with the curtains drawn,
Came the news of American baseball,
Fresh as the air at dawn,
And fifty-year-old Cuban baseball.
The years came from nowhere
Through the radio:

Those were radio days,
When the sun shone warmly,
Pleasantly, on supple skin,
Wearing shirt clean enough to work in,
And trousers fashionably rolled.

When the nights grew long and cold,
In between heartache and strife,
At the kitchen said his wife:
You grow old, you grow old,
You shall wear the bottom of your trousers rolled.
Therefore, mend them; let me mend them.

Still, the radio brought no news
Of the fences left to mend,
Of the wars the years would send,
Of the years that time would spend
To bring a body round the bend
Into the last inning.

One night,
With the heavens above spinning,
Came the announcer’s voice, grinning:
Good night to all, and to all a good night.
But before then, though without sight,
Let us hear the beginning,
Of that time in the inning
When the ball was sent spinning
Out past fences that never need mending,
Where we can write our own ending
And our games are played in the light.

Summer

The dragonfly
Grasps the meaning -
To sample the meadow,
Flitting here and there,
Among the tall grass

While the sun shines brightly
And the clouds roll by
Across a summer sky
That forever will be -
But not for you and not for me.

Do you remember when as kings
Of our backyards we traced
Our trajectory?
You’d be an astronaut,
Or a pirate.
I’d be a lawyer,
Or the President.

No one can know the trajectory
Of the dragonfly in the meadow,
Where once we sat
With our beer and wine.

Now, it is true that sorrow
Fades in the wind of time.
But that summer meadow
Is never as bright
Since the only eyes to see
Are mine.

Thanksgiving 1994

Clattering of spoons,
While silver children’s voices
Round the table run.

Around the Block

When I was a boy
I used to walk around the block
So many times far
From the ticking clock.

Around the bend there was the house
Of our neighbors; the two older boys
Who washed their cars, and when wet
Their sex showed, hanging, as they’d bend
Those tall spindly legs moving awkward, and alien,
Like the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds.

Around the bend again, there was the house
Across the street, across the border,
Where lived the brown boy, that other.
He was not like us kids, white brown,
But from South America, brown brown.
And so we launched stones and taunts
Like missiles launched from our starship
That launched from the tree in our yard
Lurching at light speed to escape the dark
And the calls for dinner.

Around the bend again there was the house
Of all those children but we never saw the father
Except in stories of drinking and sleeping and jail.
But we let one of them play with us;
Not the others, though, they were babies, and a girl.

Around the bend again there was the house
Across the street, an ocean away,
Where the woman sat on her porch quiet.
They said she was an old Russian lady,
A little girl in the Russian Revolution,
Though none of us knew where that was.
So she was the silent witch from Oz.

When the radio played static,
When my mother’s shoe caught my brother’s head,
When my father bellowed in the living room
And my sister cried in her bed,
I walked around the block
To escape the ticking clock.

Suicide

Of all life on this planet,
Only Man
Can see his death –
And plan it . . .

Socially unacceptable,
Financially impossible –
Yet morally defensible.

Mother was saying on the phone
One Saturday afternoon –
“I’ve fixed your room.
We can have your favorite beans and rice.
Just wait until you see the garden;
The new plantings are so nice.”

All those years spent howling
In the black box, in the office.
But no one ever hears:
Just sign here, and here, and here.
And we need that revised report
To include the budget cuts next year.

The books show me all the things
I will never live to see:
The heroes yet to greet,
That princess kiss, so sweet,
The castles left to climb.

Silent the symphonies of the mind,
My days laid out to mine
A life for deeper meaning.
But the truth bubbles up, streaming:
I was really mostly dreaming.

Never played the piano,
Never sang in choir,
Always saying I was This or That;
Drawing breath like any liar.

Never married,
Hardly tarried
Over sunsets past a certain age –

Now I know that all the rage
Is to die screeching, laughing.
But pardon me, if in my passing,
I sit and tell the truth – for
I did so love the dancing.
I did so love your silly looks
And the passages from certain books
That we read, as if romancing.

Passenger

When I was a young man,
I was an old man,
Watching the world with wary eyes,
Though not yet capable of sighs.

Backstage I curled up in solace
With ancient tales of a golden chalice,
While the other dancers with silly stares
In laughing poses brandished their hair.

In summer sitting beneath a tree
My father explained divorce,
Returning home to my room to flee
Where I found my childhood corpse.

Years of tragedy sundering
Family, friends, like lightning a tree,
Over a cup of tea last week wondering:
What became of you? What became of me?

A ship on the horizon dwindling,
Headed God knows but I know not –
While I on the sand sit mingling
What I could have done with what I did not.

Memorial Day

Our children were forced to go to war
So they could pay for college,
With bombs to kill hundreds or more,
But they only found a village.

Hapless villagers prayed to their gods
As they were run off a high ledge;
Our children, chasing, barking like dogs,
“See? This will pay for college!”

And so they marched on Graduation Day,
Their hapless parents cheering;
And village ghosts, like out of Judgment Day,
Around the bleachers peering.

“We’ve come to see the children grown,”
The godless ghosts cried clearly,
To snatch from them the fruit they’d sown,
Tuition in lives paid dearly.

Numb and dumb the graduates were struck in their places,
Wings covered their bodies, crows’ beaks on their faces.
Cawing, hawing, into the sky flapped the murder of crows,
Unmentioned, save in prayers – a silence no memory knows.