Do not give up on poetry

because sometimes it is so much easier to
start the car and drive it
than walk to the station for the bus.
What are the ways we meet others?

On the street the car is parked by a tree.
There is a squirrel, a tabby can pass by.
I do not think of the deluge 

of work that knows I do not forget.
There is an opera next month
and the leaves are turning.
What moves us?

And does poetry matter when a mother looks
at her son in a real and palpable world?

"And what did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"






lines from Robert Hayden

Do not strain your ears

Something is happening next door. 
Since the young woman with large hair
moved in, there has been cat sounds,
one time even a baby's. The young man
who grows edible mushrooms, dropped by
one afternoon to give home baked
brownies, still warm with
Brownies for everyone. Love Joe 
in red marker. I never got around

thanking him, missed the chance to
when we briefly met. 
I was opening my front door, he was
on his way to "the forest".
The weather forecast said rain.
Who am I to know?
The first sound of fireworks I mistook
for faraway gunshot. Not even 
their festive lights bring me back
to childlike wonders. 

The flowers are still abloom, yes,
but the gusts have come, leaves turning
slowly. I tell myself to return again
to the habit of running or walking
accompanying the self.
The young man next door has taken into
playing New Age music, early evenings
the young woman calls out a name
and a stray cat named Oliver appears.

body of reason

She does not know Hegel. That beautiful woman
at the screen I speak to, the screen a window
if only possible to get through. What else

does she not know. She does not preoccupy
herself with is-ness of things, abstractions
and smiles at me, my follies. Talks instead

of government politics and the series on TV.
Her work on people, the current music,
the produce market that is newly opened,

transplanting the herbs in the garden, the rain
this monsoon, and sending the dogs for groom.
These things now without me.

Where I am now, the leaves turn. Tonight
it rained on the way home. The phrase remains
no matter what it means.

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and academic German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and pocket German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?