The gray sky matches perfectly
The weathered tarmac
A sense of time already gone
Cars straddle gutters
The shuttered faces of the crowd
Loom in procession
Each bearing the meaning
Of the spiraled helix
A mirror of destiny
Of inevitable withering
Still, there is that window box
With the last petunias
Of the season
Just the right amount of insouciance
With earthy overtones, and ripe plump honey
Cocoa orchid cloves, with a clean finish.
Echoes of Bedouin twig fires
A trace of Sheba at the margins
And – I’m quite certain – a hint
Of wild goat on the Ethiopian highlands,
Of pomegranates shared willfully
In the caressing, endless night
Of tribal justice,
Of Bantu, Arab, and Chinese
Exchanging wisdom and profit,
Prophets, peace be upon them,
Be damned, at the trading table,
Of long years of captivity and release,
And captivity again, burning like hunger,
Shining like anger.
Of God and injustice, all blind
To the anguish of the children
He claimed as his own.
Perfect tender bitterness
Exchanged for the bitterness
of slaves on the sugar plantation,
Of generations’ riven ancestry
Evolved into the pathos of poverty.
Then, floating like some cup-bound cloud
Above the serene acidity,
Rich, billows of silky cream,
With traces of Swiss mountainside,
Or the Dells of Wisconsin,
Ancestral hunting grounds
Usurped for pasture,
Where the descendants of wild oxen
Empty their swollen udders,
Raw as a farmer’s neck in autumn.
The precise forces of living
Hinge on a paper-thin reality
Behind which lurk the illusions
We work so hard to uncover
The precise moment of discontinuity
Comes when we discover
That a lifetime of regrets
Is only a simple misunderstanding
The precise inclination of a heart
Determines the difference
Between love
And death
If I had to choose the single biggest influence on my poetry, it would be Dylan Thomas. The wild, unexpected images, at once daring and inevitable, just turned my head as a young man. Here’s one of my favorites.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
I find the last two lines especially poignant.
I read great poets, great beacons,
Their eyes so keen,
Their voices clear as sunlight
With a winter slant, harsh,
But welcome all the same.
Personally,
I’ve grown used to irrelevance,
Come to prefer it.
My history of judgment
Is spotty, at best
My place in the grand confusion
Of existence
Is in the chorus,
Oblivious,
One small voice
Bleating among many,
One fading light
In the great kaleidoscope,
Whispering, more than declaiming,
Twinkling, more than illuminating.
But it’s me, inaudible at times,
Barely discernable,
Me
exiles child 