other lives and finally

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed

anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

 


Bob Hicok

white picket fence

it will take all of daylight to mend the fence.  a number of things has got to be moved away, like folders of paperwork calling from an upstairs tabletop.  but the sun is warm and inviting. the sky never been bluer 

for days.  the nip in the wind reminds of kite flying and childhood home.  where there was guitar and Sunday, eternal-hours and no talk of god.  the really big things we are resigned to ungrasp.  a praying 

mantis somewhere is in company with a newt.  and all is well in other worlds.  who will fix the fence and who will need mending.  who can keep company with the grass, the wind, the chimes, the open palmed

bush with its white jasmin flowers.

temperatures

1.  Monday morning; writing desk by window.  Gray white sky morning; clear breeze.  Sent instructions to secretary; most likely to stay home for a week (i hope not).

2.  Still woke up at 4 this morning, even if cannot run; how the body keeps its own clock; took med instead, talked to the dogs, made coffee, toast bread.

3.  News says what may be the coldest place in this tropical country made 6 degrees; it'll have to live with 9 degrees for the next few days; in this normally humid province, a mountain place along the transnational highway is having 16 degrees; word has reached the city already three elderly died from the cold; that farm animals are dying is old news.

4.  Was it a few days ago I saw a boy that must be no more than twelve pass the M* bridge, shirtless and barefoot, on the way to a junkshop by the obvious weight of his burden, rusty metal junk balanced on his head.

5.  Three things gnaw me since I moved about two years ago in this little island, supposedly to be close to sea:  poverty as clear as broad daylight, a resigned people to an apathetic government, a cruelty to dogs... Last week, I was asked to give a talk to young writers about the importance of poetry, a part of me is unconvinced.  This coming weekend (i hope i will be well by then) I will fly to N* invited to talk again about writing...do I really believe it can change the world to a better place?  Maybe.  But never in a writer's lifetime.

all is fair in love and war

and how do we even begin 
to agree with Frank Smedley

that all is fair in love and war
when we consider the odds

and fortunes of one and another
it takes little to no imagination

to see how one is on a better 
place than another.  easy to question

these things bearing no answers.








shane

sisyphus

the old universe must be tired.  from watching us.  we all are a repeat.  a too long television series with the same themes.  we seem never to learn.  if anything, the old universe must be only entertained by our indefatigable attempts to rise beyond ourselves.

consider utopia

Consider utopia and how it exists
only in the mind.  An elaborate system
fallible when set into form.  Governments
that rise and fall, imperfectly perfect
people with souls greater than their selves.

If we all are a reincarnate of previous 
souls or dust flecks from stars, are we all
but mere refuse
from utopia?








shane

what we fear

what we fear must not be death, but pain.  for the poor vulnerable vessel (the body, the mind) of the soul.  that every one will die, we are all resigned.  but in the meantime, we live and suffer the pains of living.  and because we know this, how we labor with hope.  how we labor with love.

i woke up shivering

Any one can comment about the strange weather these days.  One country can talk about their drought and heat wave, another about intense cold, these happening all at once.  It is the middle of January, 

and none of the things we used to know apply.  In this humid country, for instance, closer to the ring of fire than others, typhoons are keeping themselves at  bay, watching the too many dead and the grief-

stricken. Now coldness has come, temperatures dropping lower than people can imagine.  In the mountains, animals are dying and the whiff of their death like pollen everywhere, she said, 

commenting on my state over an elaborate breakfast of fluids.  I had woken up in the middle of the dark morning, shivering with fever. Now she looks outside the window and listens to the sound of the river.  

when half of the rest is asleep

always, when half of the rest is still asleep and the world as is known is quiet, with only shades of light in hues of blue and gray, the nip in the air still brings with it traces of the origins of sleep.  always, it is the best time, i think, to wander and wonder what is it in this world we all have to so joyously suffer.  one's perceptions so limited no matter how the travel and empathy.  not a few times did i wonder if it is better not to know a good number of things, including that one can only know so little.  perhaps it is better to be asleep like the rest and the others who sleep joyfully, fitfully in unknowing...

white nest mornings

you and i on an eternal morning, bright and white the scent of fresh linen, white sheets, a curtain bask in early daylight, the scent of your skin, soft, the gentle outlines of your curves, a geography of light, woman, breath, and warmth, and the oh so beautiful tangle of wilderness.































 

Eternal Enemies

when the poem about eternal enemies was written, it meant love and time.  how they can never seem to reconcile, except in marriage.  it was a wedding poem, "epithalamium" for isca and sebastian.  this, of course, written and read on a moment of suspension.  for the world-wise/world-weary knows, of course, there may be no eternal yet in marriage; this, of course, again, being conditional.



Epithalamium
             by Adam Zagajewski


Without silence there would be no music.
Life paired is doubtless more difficult
than solitary existence--
just as a boat on the open sea
with outstretched sails is trickier to steer
than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners
after all are meant for wind and motion,
not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes
hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,
but also compassion, deep feeling.
Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces.
Only love and time, when reconciled,
permit us to see other beings
in the enigmatic, complex essence,
unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement
in a valley or among green hills.

It begins from one day only, from joy
and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,
which is like a moist grain;
then come the years of trial and labor,
sometimes despair, fierce revelation,
happiness and finally a great tree
with rich greenery grows over us,
casting its vast shadow.  Cares vanish in it.

it can wait

What will 
a sixty-eight-year-old man do
with a four-year-old son
in a country 
more humid than
wherever  he's ever been?
See how he sits now
alone on the porch
sipping coffee
his young wife gone.
He must be thinking
of something 

or waiting.

palimpsest

Perhaps the reason why we are not meant 
to live longer than we have to is the burden 
the weight of years, in incremental memories
layering one on top of another.  

Imagine
the skin of the world seen by your mind's eye
and the thousands more associations
only you can conjure.  How at times they come

and go only when they so pleases.  Such that
in mid of something else entirely, you remember 
the minute details of her and of the scene
surrounding her.  In a vividness that could

outlast the very strength of you, finally
grown weary with all the years.







 

the things we refuse

We are what we choose
and what we refuse
                         -Edith Tiempo




How many times have we talked about
childhood, work, people, the things
we've seen, heard, read.  Their names 
now familiar.  Little snippets repeated overtime
some with more details than truly remembered

or insight.  From the last time
the night was nippy, the stroll easy, or 
the last two bottles taking their time.
I tell you again the stories I do not read

something to do with romance, tall promises 
of love.  Also, family.  Although certainly
there are no escaping these, you laugh,
the world, being, simply these.

cape town

if you come to visit a city, do so not as a tourist.  
else there will be many things you will miss.  

the tourist is always asked to see
the many beautiful things,  

of course he is also asked to see
the beautiful only.

tourists

strolling through the night market road,
they found her shawls
one carnation, one ocean hue




















 
 

two skies

east, daylight is rising.  dew and drops glisten from this dawn's heavy rain.  but west, on the other window--my writing seat is in the middle---gray.  in half an hour i will call the secretary, i will keep away half the day.  i have been gone too long from many places: how we can only exist once at a time.  sun spills on the floor.  the sound of an airplane leaving or arriving: perhaps both.