The Death of Philosophy

If I say that my beliefs
Are a product
Of my country,
Of my epoch,

Then am I
Caught in that sly
Trap of History
With no words to deny –

For the Cage that falls
Is the Cage of Language.

My belief in relativity
Is relative to itself.
Devoid, perhaps, of authenticity,
It begins to gnaw upon itself.

The Invisible Man
Imagines the color of his eyes.
But the mirror shows nothing;
Nothing until he dies.

Who am I when I sleep?
Who am I when I dream?
Beliefs are fish that leap
In a transparent mental stream.

Happily I fish,
In my country, in my time.
For the world, by turns, shall fade
Through my ignorance sublime.

Children

The birds,
so colorful,
so unselfconscious,
in their gilded cage
with the leaves,
and the seeds,
and the water,
and their little swings.

But then you approach
and it's as if Teacher
has returned to the classroom:
no more twittering, or rummaging;
all stand at attention,
eyeing you this way and that.

What do they see in you?
A vast and towering force,
with a voice like a song of thunder -
Destroyer of Worlds;
you who with your love level the hills
with your gilded cities of ingenuity.

It is the Hand of God
that replenishes their water dish
and their seed dish.

And when you leave,
the little birds resume
their antics, lilting, pecking,
and so they do not see
that the gods, too, fuss and play
in their gilded cage.

‘Tis the Season

You have not been raped,
Or beaten, or maimed,
Or treated like an animal
With no right to think.

Blink. And you’ll see.
You have jewels, and cash,
Food to toss like trash,
And someone in the world
Who remembers your name.

Shame! That joy comes round
Once a year
To the injured faceless loathe to hear,
“We give; we give, in Jesus’
Name.”

Still, the faceless have no name
That you will remember,
Save, perhaps, in December,
That season of the year
When the poor do hope
Their name to hear.

Mourning in America

Legal rights
Are easily won
At the point of a gun.

But it takes patience
And determination
To win rights
Through agitation.

In some tenuous space
In the public square,
Face to face,
The human in you
Meets the human in me.

When faced with the thugs,
Atlas shrugged
And ran.
So here we stand:
The human in you and the human in me,
Holding up the world for all to see –
We can talk through, not around,
Our existence, with persistence.

Like roses, rights abound.
Pick them, share them.
Listen to the sound
Of the discourse in the public square.

But, oh, how you stare!
No, indeed, that is not our public square,
Where words like bullets wound all who care
To share the shoulder burden of citizenship,

Of the human in you
And the human in me.

Thanksgiving 1994

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

Discorporation

There are times
I want to discorporate
Into my component parts –
Not lungs, kidneys, and heart,
But atoms, neutrons, and quarks.

The squawks of people passing
Beneath my window, well dressed,
Laughing stupid, yelling mad,
Melodramatically sad –

That young mother, distressed,
Blowing chewing gum bubbles,
Steps into the public bus whirlwind,
Dragging her little lad – where is his dad?

Televisions and billboards squawk around the world –
The sound and fury of the whirlwind – and all the girls
And boys on the bus plugged into their little sound systems:
Little bubbles of sound destroying ear drums.

If a society presses its fingers into its human bubbles
They pop, one after the other.

Many years ago I walked on the beach,
And I watched the seagulls, squawking;
Fighting, stupid and mad, over scraps of food.
Across the ocean beat the drums of war;
Their import I understood.

To fly like a seagull, soar like the whirlwind,
Burst like a bubble –
We cannot stop the hope that in the morning
Binds everything together,
Nor the despair that in the night
Tears everything apart.

Veterans Day

I. Our Brother Orwell

Defenceless villages
Are bombed from the air,
Inhabitants driven
To the countryside;
Cattle machine-gunned,
Huts set on fire:
This is called pacification.

For freedom, for justice,
For the American Way.

II. On Sale

Somewhere in the Homeland,
At the Wal-Mart café,
She chews on a hamburger
That drips mayonnaise.
Her jeans are too tight;
Her diabetes not slight.
Her children have run out of sight.

We have all come from far away
To catch the sale on Veterans Day.

III. Until Tomorrow

He stands, listing, in the doorway,
Knowing nothing of Orwell.
He had enlisted, recalling the day,
The travel had been a good sell.
Though the journey ended in hell,
He was told that he fought very well.
Now he makes peace with his sorrow
Because, he’s been told, that
His check will come in tomorrow.

Long live our soldiers, who, every day,
Fight to maintain the American Way.

Dawn

In the pre-dawn light
I approach the window
And behold the sight
Of the empty sidewalks.

In that quiet hour
I imagine your returning,
Filled with a silent power,
Up the sidewalks.

You are always returning,
When the world is asleep –
Cracked, worn, and persevering,
Like the sidewalks.

But dead men don’t walk
Except in dreams.
And still it seems
The sidewalks expect you,
Cracked, worn, and persevering –
Returning from the long journey
With stories, strength, and learning.

The sidewalks do not reach you.
The dawn deceives.
For a while yet I shall expect you
Before your memory leaves.

Halloween

When I got the call
That grandfather died,
I wore a clown suit,
Big and white with
Blue and red dots,
And a tall clown hat.

Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Tat-tat-tat.

My face was plastered,
Clown enamel white,
Painted red lips,
And a red round nose,
Staring at the mirrors
In the back of the store.

Rip and tore, war and gore.

My boss had told me,
Go and get some rest.
So there I sat,
A thousand clowns
Staring from the mirrors;
Faces laughing, faces crying.

Sighing and crying
And lying and dying.

That night on the news
People were dying.
Machine guns fired,
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Bullets tore, spreading gore.
Victims lying, sighing, crying.

My grandfather died
On Halloween.
Sadder news we all have seen.
That night, at the party,
Nadia laughed. She said,
Clowns don't go to parties
When their grandfathers pass.

October Morning

Today -
The first cold day;
In the pale light,
The mixed sensation:
Gray sky, cold air,
And resignation.

Yet the leaves cling
Still to the trees;
Just a few turned brown,
Blown down.

Outside -
Breezes sting;
Newspaper kiosks
Through headlines
Speak to the sunrise
While a bird sings:

This week the President,
While waging war,
Won the Peace Prize.

The time is out of joint.
O cursed spite
That ever I was born
To set it right!

Music

The blending
Of the body
And sound
And thought
And feeling
And memory

That took place
Before
Either of us knew
That we would not hear each other,
That we would not see each other,
Again.

Postmodern Mood

The Modern derides
The Enlightment,
Which, in turn,
Derides the Medieval.

I'd rather affect
The Postmodern:
It thinks the derision
The evil.

Haiti

Haiti is an accident;
I prefer not to look at it.
Mangled parts abound;
Nothing astounds.

You see, the sun is too bright;
The skin and bones too tight.

Though Wilson sent Marines
To instill a sense of order –
The milat, moun andeyo,
And all that negritude –
Too much, too much,
They bust the motor.

And all through the years
The parts have tumbled
Down deforested hills:
Estime, Vincent, Magloire,
Lescot, and Duvalier.

And who will care?

Where have you gone, Daniel Fignole?
The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Mesdames et messieurs,
Gens de couleur:
Start your engines.

But they have nowhere to go,
Surrounded by the wide, wide sea,
Where the sun sets too bright
And the skin, bones, too tight.

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.

Marketing Call

The person you seek is not here.
He was deployed
To Afghanistan
Last year.

So please don’t call me.
He is beyond telephones
And the twenty-first century.

Beyond computers, too,
He might be
If his body lies
In a field of poppies.

Afghan shepherds standing
By a dusty roadside wait
For our troops to come calling
With bread for their plates.

Then to your customer
The shepherds lead our troops.
They cannot describe his death,
Only saying it was youths, a group.

So, before I hang up, I ask
How does it feel to peddle
Trinkets and frauds to others
Who could not prove their mettle
By attempting to settle
The quarrels of savages
Who could scarcely buy bread?

You smile, I hear it, you say:
Gladly I’ll sell vacations to you instead.

Locked in Time

To say I will not likely find
In the years ahead a being
That will appreciate my mind
Is to apply the prejudice of time.

In the present dwells a certain sadness,
The sense that joy will die in future darkness.

But if, from the far side of the earth,
Your life I fail to note,
Then, from a hundred years hence,
You remain just as remote.

Therein lies the trap of time,
Our minds prisoners of the present.
From day to day though I may fly,
Our meeting – miles, years away –
Stays locked beyond this moment.

Castle

Impregnable
Wall of rock
Sheer and steep
Above a moat
Of waters still and deep;

Imposing,
The yawning keep,
That beckons from
The drawbridge
At my feet.

Narrow the way
Through the iron gate:
Beyond those walls
Their world awaits.

Nobles, ladies,
In finery played
Their flutes and dulcimers
Round the table well laid:

Goblets of wine
And meats with cheeses,
Candles that swayed
In the evening breezes.

Blown has the wind of centuries,
Gone now the tapestries, luxuries,
Silent the courtyards and hallways,
Where troubadours once sang their lays.

Dance a while yet, I say.
Safe within the mind’s walls,
Lords, ladies and thralls,
As phantoms you may stay.

To Adversity

In the face of outrage,
Facing the brink,
It takes great courage
Not to drink.

Knock

I don’t sleep well, torments at night –
The soft kind.

(small noises, moving, rustling)

What can might,
What could should.

Without sight,
grasping, touching in the dream closet:
dream silent children playing in dream coats –
or smothering?

(small noises, scratching, muffling)

In sleepdark,
always misplaced, the keys I cannot find.
The hooded man ate all the light switches,
electric smiling, switching back and forth:
now lamplight through my window pane,
now sleepdark.

(small noises, tapping, tapping)

In the hallway stands the hooded man
waiting for the knock on the door.
Am I coming home?

Sadness

Sadness: it is
the force that
spurs learning;

The shadow of the moon;
yearning
for relief from light;

Nourishing vision and sight
with a tear or two.

Delirium

Never waste a good delirium,
A time when Up is Down.

You
Move your
Mouth all Around
Open shut –
To say nothing;
A delirium nothing,
Surpassing sweet – unlike
The plodding words –

The stumbling weight of all those years . . .

There was a farmer had a dog,
And Bingo was his name-o.
I pledge allegiance to the flag.
The square root of sixteen is four.
Our Father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Dad, I won the game!
Paris is the capital of France.
Can I have this dance?
Buy now: Operators are standing by!
That sissy boy; he couldn’t hurt a fly.
The square root of four is two.
Mark my words:
One day you’ll see. They’ll all see.
Darling, it’s so good to see you.
What is the square root of two?
I’m sorry, Ma’am,
There was nothing we could do.

And when the fever cools, as it will do,
And up is up and down is down again,
You see the chance is gone to start anew –
As reason, restored, confounds the brain.

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.

Faucet

Water dripping,
Drops plop, plop
Into that pot
In the kitchen sink.

And I can hear me think.
I want to sink
Into the couch.
He sits there, slouched.

This silence forlorn,
Stretches the length of the room,
Like a railroad platform.
We have arrived at the end of words.

Drip, plop,
Drip, plop.

I smile.
The tea is drained.
Our minds and our teeth
Are stained
With the knowledge
That, at least, we two strangers
Failed to cross the breach.

Palestinian Boy

Today
yesterday
Lama was not in class
Because her house fell down on her.
That is what Reda said
Last week
yesterday before yesterday.
But Mother says
Tonight
now
That Lama moved far away,
Maybe to Bethlehem.
I don’t know,
Maybe to Israel.
That is where the Devil lives.
So says Reda
Sometimes.

Rainbows

Don’t go chasing rainbows
In the middle of the night
Because you’ll not find them.
The rainbows were last seen
Flying over Belgium in 1917.

But other townsfolk say it was
An American jet patrol
Shot down a rainbow over the desert
Near Alamogordo.
Only they didn’t shoot; there was no fire,
And it wasn’t the desert.

Still others say the rainbows
Have little to eat and less to see,
Kept in a camp with barbed wire
Down the road a few miles out.
These reports you just can’t doubt.

As for our town these days,
We light the sky at night
With giant lightpoles far too bright:
The mutant children of gas lamps
Whose contribution to pollution
Blinds the turtles, the birds,
The bleary-eyed office worker
In his tower of glass.

Upward, higher, flies the light until
From their space orbit the rainbows see:
The signals, flares, fires, and flashes –
The searing heat that turns glass to ashes.

Silently the rainbows turn
And return to their home planet,
Flying through the dark of night,
Guided by the light of the stars.

Birthday

Happy Birthday
To me,
Happy Birthday
To me,
Happy Birthday –
I’m one year closer to death
so I’d best turn from the wayward
path leading me through the wasteland
of entangling briars, so base my desires,
and find my way to the one true path
that ends in authenticity, my own felicity,
only I can’t because I’m lost, no map,
and my compass fell into the bay
where my future stretches away,
tossing among the waves, though
perhaps my ship will come –
To me!

Hemingway

Today is
Hemingway’s birthday;
He would have been
110 years old.

Rain today, we are told.
Out the window,
The dry grass is gold
In the noontime heat.
Across the street,
A black man in shirt sleeves
Beneath a tree, standing,
Waiting.

A stray dog lopes along,
Sniffs, and moves along.
His coat is bright in the
Dappling light.

Out of sight, a cicada
Screeches and is silent.
Then another screech, slight.
Then the air is quiet.
It is hot and dry and
Waiting.
Everything waits.
But nothing comes.
No rain.

Sight and Sound

How can I make you see me,
Not you, but me?
You have fixed me with your stare –
My words in mid air –
And have trapped me in amber.

A practical paperweight, amber,
It can be hurled against windows,
And, finally, the cries of anguish
Can escape into air
With the pleas to reason;
Perhaps – to you – all rubbish.

And though the caged bird sings,
Still its song is not heard elsewhere.
Silent is the vast landscape
Where a new soul grows in the wooded grove
And the words fly to the trees, feeding, at night.

Oh, what a sight! The multitude that is me,
Cresting that moonlit hill,
Without a sound, they cannot fight.
They stand, waiting,
For your surrender of me.

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.

Wretched Summer

Any moment
Could, perhaps,
Be a wretched moment,
Like walking home alone
In sultry heat,
The moonlight on the street -
Indifferent the cobblestone -
The same moon shines on you
Wherever you are.

Martin and Hope

“Everything that is done in the world
is done by hope,” said Martin Luther
King, Jr.

Boy, I tell you,
This girl Hope, she is one busy gal.

Matter of fact,
Just the other day,
A fine morning,
I was walking to work.

And there was Hope!
All passed out, poor thing,
On that bench,
In a state of exquisite,
Senses-shattering,
World-saving,
Stinky exhaustion.

Come to find out,
That very night,
Sure as I breathed,
I was walking home.

And Hope was gone!
Sure enough moved on,
Her work is never done.
Poor thing, still pushing
That cart with everything,
And no time to settle down.

I wish she’d
Just one time slow down
To tell her about her friend Martin –
How he praised all around
Before he got shot.

Lincoln

Now here was a guy
Who was all things to all people:
Cruel and merciful;
Peace-lover yet fighter;
Protecting slavery and freeing slaves.

I, too, wish to be
All things to all people:
Alive yet dead;
Scoundrel and well-bred;
Kind of heart yet stubborn of head.

I wish to bring you close to me,
So close I taste your thoughts;
And I wish to flee so far from you,
Go somewhere among stars –
That little planet Pluto.

But Pluto is now a rock:
A planet no more – a victim for sure
Of the cruel narratives of history,
Of all things and all people . . .
Like Lincoln,
Like you,
Like me.

Living Alone

Alone in my home –
Stirring the soup and farting;
No need to chuckle.

(after an original Japanese senryu)

In Your Memory

Who are you
To believe
That I will go on forever?

You make me
Into God
When you leave me in the ether.

Suspending my existence
You forget me –
A quantum space that no one watches.

There I reside,
Gods and demons alongside
The stillborn visions of our future.

And so I - nonexistent - wait
For that day when
You escape your selfabsorbing kingdom.

You will think of me and
From the Timeless I will spring,
The angels flying to their frescoes.

Briefly while I live,
Narrow the window of Time,
Yet will I live and die
Before you again forget me.

Internet Love Signal

SGWM
ISO
SOS

hi AM looking
4 someone whose
NOT too serious about life
[Like a stone.]

Someone to spend time with
Home alone.
And chill
[Like a corpse on ice.]

My friends tell me
Im nice.
And fun
[Like Disney World.]

Please no guys who act
Like girls.
I wanna man whose
Prfect for me
[Like Jesus.]

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are you when they persecute you,
So I say to you, love your enemies,
For God makes His sun rise on the evil and good.
If you love those who love you, what reward have you?

For no one can serve two masters;
Either he will hate one and love the other.

As the lamp of the body is the eye,
Then if your eye is bad,
Your whole body will be full of darkness.
And if your right hand causes you to sin,
Cut it off and cast it from you.

So Judge not, that you be not judged.
Cast not your pearls before swine,
Lest they trample them,
And turn and tear you in pieces.

Therefore do not worry, saying,
“What shall we wear?”

Hypocrite! Remove the log from your own eye,
But seek first the kingdom of God,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from Evil.

For where your treasure is,
There your heart will be also.