Tag Archives: life

The trouble with desire

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Is the world wearing you down?
I pined for it.
And still, despite long years
Of falling short, I still do.

So easy to sink into bitterness
To collect reasons, to blame
This or that, to stand upon contempt
As if it were a fit foundation

As if it weren’t just envy
Of other lives grasped whole
And lived without restraint
Right or wrong

We’re instruments, finely tuned
To one another
So all our joys and disappointments,
Trials and victories, lapses and vindications

Are funneled willy-nilly
Into dreams of each other
Nothing to be done; it’s what we are
It’s how we see what’s real

How we hold it up to available light
How we learn and unlearn
How we cling to threads
Ever unraveling

Blizzard, by William Carlos Williams

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One of the imagists, to whom we owe much of modern poetry.

Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

Enfant terrible

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After reading the October 2013 issue of Poetry.

What vanity is this? Asks the enfant terrible
His latest work selling in the triple digits

I’m not so different from the butcher’s boy
Bloody apron askew, half-smile on his face
Or the preacher’s grace in desperate ascension
The ladder fixed firmly on the gutter’s curb

So hard to tell the weeping from the laughter
At such an angle; let’s call it even
Mr. Joyce, in his second coming, inventifacted words a-flail
Would smile at such sanity, clean as a whistler’s boy

Sheep or swine, it’s all alike; I see it now for no reason
Not so much the parting of the fog as the clarity of it
Curse the winter if you like; it won’t leave
The Stars by which we swear such oaths

But fizzle in the end of all creation
A-twitch with whimsical eternity

1 1/2 haibun

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Last night, I awoke from a dream of my childhood, startled to find tears in my eyes. There were the four of us children together, including my long dead brother, second in age, just older than I, and thus relegated to the task of keeping me on the proper path of life, as determined by whatever demons and angels that informed his conscience. In the dream, he was chiding me for some transgression which I have now lost to memory, as happens with dreams. I only know that, when I awoke, I was filled with such a love and tenderness for him as I haven’t felt since he died, many years ago. I got up and looked out the window, at the snow-covered landscape revealed by the light of a streetlamp, and what came to me was the final sentence of James Joyce’s story, The Dead:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Which in turn put me in mind of the Michael P. Smith song, The Dutchman, especially this verse:

When Amsterdam is golden in the summer,
Margaret brings him breakfast,
She believes him.
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow.

What came out of all this before I went back to bed was a trio of haiku, or, I suppose more accurately, two haiku and one senryu.

The Winter snow
Falls equally
On living and dead

No tulips bloom
Beneath the snow
Only dreams

Heaven and hell
Are but regions of the heart
With contested borders

My Latvia

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This far north, Winter
Comes like some uncle,
Dearly loved, but always too early
For supper, and staying into the

Small dark hours, full of tales of
Death and sadness,
And there you are, longing
For the break of Spring

Then Summer comes,
And you rush to embrace her
Like an old sweet regret,
Anxious not to screw things up this time,
And cling too tightly

Until finally, inevitably,
She slips away, again too soon.
And Winter says,
I told you this is how it would be.