Life’s a boat,
No ticket required,
No PFD issued,
Just you, naked, barefoot,
All agog,
Wearing only
The Captain’s braid.
In the unscrubbed mirror: Riga boating
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Category Archives: Poems
In the unscrubbed mirror: Mežitis burial ground
All these fears came here,
The agony, the misunderstanding,
The hope, the joy,
The ordinary follies
Of good love and bad;
They’ve spilled away
Into the waiting earth.
Just this echo sounds,
Fading.
O Walt, my Walt: An homage
I’m afraid my multitudes
Have become fractious
No longer content to simply
Contradict myself
I fly off the handle
At the slightest whim
Come tell me, old man
What great love-burst
Straightened your back
In your days of reckoning?
How did you feel when those
Crusted and cracked hands you held
In the stifling wards of Washington
Ceased finally to stir?
The sweet cleansing heat
Of salty tears and sweat
How you must have howled!
How the moon must have shuddered
To hear it!
With regard to veils
It’s time for a brief holiday from the unscrubbed mirror.
So, I see all this stuff
About life and love
And dying
And how the stars echo
Some frail eternal now
And, yes, it’s hard
And though our hands be held
Entwined but ever separate
That skin that marks the boundary
Also holds the keys
And all that
And all that loss
Was dross
And some plain spun funk
Reminds of deathless agony
So far,
So long
Ago
Okay, I get that,
But just what is my job here, anyway?
In the unscrubbed mirror: Survey party, Mežitis
We may embark,
The long unknown before us,
Laden with our tools of discernment,
Our wish for precision
Set athwart us like
A burdened yoke,
But the path, though unseen,
Is well worn, after all.
exiles child 