This is the first of a series of short poems inspired by photographs I have taken over the years in Latvia.
Zigrida, your arms
Used to embrace me.
Now you watch
From your upstairs window
As I pass below,
As the long parade
Passes below.
In your dream,
Things are surely different.
The angel’s swift kick sent you reeling
Into the churchyard – it was your time
Though you yelped in surprise.
Was that you, slipping through the gate?
I couldn’t tell,
For the tears in my eyes.
I
En garde, Messieurs!
My rapier is sharper than two half-wits.
I can trim your dualities two ways to Sunday,
Twice a day, et tu, brutality.
Why waste time on brilliant repartee?
A double-headed axe can twicely slice
And cleave like lipstick vine.
Entendre, Messieurs!
Your duelist tendencies bewilder no one.
Give it up. The day is lost.
Don’t think twice.
II
I had a friend who threw words
Like knives.
Thok! Thok! Thok!
And there you were, strapped to the board,
Hoping he wouldn’t lose his nerve
Among the adjectives.
Did no one tell you
Those knives were already there?
It’s only a parlor trick, after all!
One sudden morning, as the sun sprang gayly
Slung across the day
And the breeze teased the slithery waters
And crowned the trees with whispers
I slipped the irons of time.
The child grandfathered the world
Through my heart, and I saw the true meaning
Of love beyond mentioning, of life unsheathed.
I saw the fringe of being, the birthplace
Of torment and gain, hand in hand in hand.
Awash in that speck of reality
That illusion casts in the eye,
Was unbending everness, all in gale and garnet,
In anguish above and below
That which eludes the grasp.
A wisp of this and that,
And great epics are written
In groaning slabs of rock, in ecstatic wandering
Through surges of joy and despair
All identically kitted out.
Whether we arrive here or there
Means nothing, after all;
That was the secret that escapes always.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was not.
Row upon row,
Field upon field,
Rise these stelae.
Long and short,
One upon another,
Lovingly marked
As if to banish forgetfulness.
“Goodbye, fare well
On your long last journey.
We shall never forget you.
But just in case,
Here are your particulars.”
exiles child 