Tag Archives: mortality

So long

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…and the sad gypsy sang for his bottle of wine, and I sang along for mine.
-Jose Feliciano

Those days, we were dangerously close to dying,
To the end of all the longing we mistook
For grand poesie.
Lost on the road to anywhere,
We stepped toward no paradise,
Discarded all loving touch
But for human companionship,
Asking too much of the world, unable to grasp
The small treasures.

If there’s something missed, something lost,
It’s only the wide-open sky we saw
Through vinegar eyes,
Our salted wounds as yet unburied.

Come back to me, my own true self,
Come back, and we’ll slip away
To some long, true corner
And watch the setting sun.

Haiku, too

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You hear, years later,
The bomb went off after all.
Another drink, you think.

Bracero

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Out of the Mexican blue
Huddled beachless against
The Houston boxcar night
Begging for breath
Hope a dwindling dim
Names already lost
Against the standing dead

Elsewhere a coyote counts his take
Baying at a cloven moon

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.