Thursday, June 29, 2006

Their motto is don't tread on me . . .

Self-Evident Things Cornelius Saw

...................Truth is the majority vote of that
. . . . . . . . . .nation that could lick all others.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .--
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Three times in the early autumn of 1780,
ten-year-old Cornelius Banta spotted him,
General Washington, mounted, riding
among the 14,000 troops encamped and
waiting for French reinforcements to arrive.
Cornelius may have been delivering cider
from his father's mill, or following the trail
of a deer, or may have simply wandered
feverishly, drawn by the restless air of
revolution, the lives of so many uprooted
men. The ridge would have been thick with
the scent of them, the smoky fires of 14,000
Cains.

Two centuries have come and gone and now
it is late spring, the azaleas are all withering
if not entirely unbloomed, though the giant
rhododendrons overhead bow beneath
flourishes of periwinkle, white-petalled
silences, and magenta tongues of fire.
Washington Spring sifts silently through the
green cresses that it feeds, and all the place
is mist and passing flower, abuzz and good
to take the sun in. The chestnut tree that
shades the eastern bank is not old the way
the spring is old, not ringed with an age of
rippling revolutions, remains too new to
have provided cool passage to a General or
a soldier fingering the frayed remnant of a
letter from the girl he'd love if he survived
with arms and legs still ripe with her, with
hands and fingers that once might cup her
love in round caress.

I touch the little fires all around, daffodils
have given way to daisies, soft petals like so
many colored tongues in a green morning.
Last year's leaves carpet the earth here, layers
of so many leaving years. You can feel them
all, like a nerve that runs throughout, pins
and needles of the place, and too, the lives of
men that would have broken camp that late
September, to abandon this Edenic post for
war, its survivors consigned to roam the earth.
They did it, got all broken and dead, for the
General and the wide-eyed cider boy from
Banta's farm, for streams that rise when rains
fall, for spring that leads to summer, for all
such things self-evident, like bodies strewn in
raw red fields, in every posture but repose.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Heart and Soul

Villahelle: The Heart of It

The heart's gone broke long before
the body's clothed in tatters,
a loveless hour, a closed door,

some wrinkled folds, driven airs
in which each breath is scattered;
the heart's gone numb long before

loss turns corporeal like a scar
in a mirror that's been shattered,
a loveless hour, a closed door

never granting entry nor
rejoinder to the clattering
heart grown cold and underscored

by summer's passings, winter's hoar-
frosts, heart shrouded in their mantles,
a loveless hour, a closed door

we press against and cave in more,
till the earth beneath gathers round
the heart that's fallen years before
a loveless hour, a closed door.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Bonnement m'agree

Hads, Fee, Eys, Sol

One woman serves my ego: that
masculine lack of attention
masquerading as adulthood.
She uses words like “man,” uses
“manly” lots, even when I’m not.
“Unconditional love,” she said
last night. It sounded like “Don’t leave.”

Another one speaks to my soul,
her traveling-need desires what's “next,”
all the things she’s seen and done, the
spices she has risked, she hangs her
walls with them, wants always more and
hot and more. Everything but me.
The word she uses most is “friend.”

Too, there’s one whose own need touches
mine, frail and strong, running, always—
her eyes. Sometimes they rest and then
I see and say “I know.” I think
I love her like a mystery,
a thrown improbability
probing last-known hiding places.

But one—she, my ever ever;
each poem I write--her hand's on mine.
We dance along a floor of glass,
never out of sync, as long as
music plays. Play tunes out all my
imperfections. But when it stops,
then she aways. She never stays.

Ending then, these are the women
in my life, none of them a wife,
each one of them more dear than I
can say and each one with their points
both hollow and sublime—none mine.
All mine. And in their turns I see
they’re right and cannot disagree.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

The lunatic is in my head . . .

"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
.........................................--Ben Franklin