Thursday, March 14, 2024

Rose In A Tumbler (Mondrian)




















A powder blue flower —
a rose in a short glass,
a seer's whiskey sour,
nature without surface.

A drawing to surpass
reality, it grows,
it seems, to embarrass
red and white roses.

We know the artist’s known
a multiplying power — 
the rose blooming unblown —
an immortal flower.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

The Argument from Design

 The religious impulse, it seems to me, is more about seeking than finding. There’s no greater composer devoted to this search than Gustav Mahler. The most memorable concert I ever attended was when my mother was dying of cancer and Alzheimer’s. 

The Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado were performing Mahler’s 9th Symphony, a work full of searching, sadness, desperation, resolution, and redemption. At the end of the performance, Abbado did something I’ve never seen a conductor do before, nor since. After the last note, he kept his arms up, pausing everything, the room entirely quiet, for the longest time. He waited and waited, and waited. No one made a sound. It was as though he was saying, “Consider what you have just heard, the sorrow, the wonder, and the searching in this music, and do not despair.” It was a terrifying and joyful moment, and when he finally put his arms down, followed by the loudest applause I’ve ever heard.



There is only one tree in the park.

Not this day only, but every day,

I find that tree when the day grows dark,


Never before dark, when the gray

Leaves are like a whispered amen

To a prayer I wasn’t there to say.


Therefore, I’m cautious and slow when

I start to climb (I believe the tree

Is not unknown to other men);


I test each limb before I leave the

One beneath, without assurance

Any but the lowest will receive me.


Then my doubt subsides where I chance

Upon a tangled branch, ripped free

The time I almost lost my balance.


Now I can move quickly up the tree,

Into its clotted heart, where the dark

Yields, to my callused fingers only,

The life of the one tree in the park.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Composition

At the point of the intersection
between the theoretical line
and point, there’s a dimension,

not of space, nor of time
(those have been imagined
more thoroughly than I’m

imagined by myself), but of sin.
Not the brand to trouble God,
this sin is words that begin

without being misunderstood
(because the speaker winks!)
and conclude that bad is good.

I think the pine trees think
in theorems, plane geometry;
their sap is magnetic ink,

and the splash of red I see
in rose, cardinal and Mars
is blood escaped from my body . . . 

as if I had come from a star
to civilize this wilderness.
The beach is the registrar

of every grain of sand.  Mass
is energy’s conscience
and confessor.  The soul is a gas.

Yet, right angles, in defiance
of the circle’s perfection,
assume the world, and science
escapes reality’s detection.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Violence In Peacetime

An Air Force brat, I was so used to soldiers marching by our house, I hardly noticed.

————————————————————————————-

How orderly the mower’s sound,
blades mincing, round and round,

the tender blades of grass.
I hear the boots of soldiers pass

beneath my curtained window,
and don’t wonder where they go.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Dulle Griet (Pieter Bruegel The Elder)








A creature of prentice alchemy,
slack-jawed butcher, zombie,
wrote the last Deuteronomy
in egg on the first door to Hell.
In breastplate and iron cap (bell
in a tree-tin and distant knell),
Meg schemed the death God would flee
from hated lizards' bite and miss
the jaws of soldier-swigging fish,
but not her blood-sword avarice.
The sick crone ran, her dream to marry
hot in pots and pans she'd carry.

"He is a spy,
a bloodlust fly
circling the sty
above the sky,"

she said as the egg ashes fell
on all red, fecund infidels.
Her barrel insect monster's hiss
excited her waistless bogey-
man's ass to speak; it said, "I
eat and fart and then I die!"
The hysterical diablerie
on the witch inflicted flies.
God's dancing pipers' fantasy,
with spiders from a harp to kill
those who eat apples but can't piss
a lake in payment of the toll,
blow them long and bloody kisses.
His winking, trapdoor-blinkered eyes,
opened wide as windows, see
Mad Meg charge; she desperately
desires to confound her enemy.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Lighght

A beam of light cutting the skin of space

travels at the speed of time to the beginning,

the end of things, seeing everything between,


without being seen.


Or a single photon released into a sphere

lined with silver, instantaneously covering

all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,


as if someone might see.


It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,

a point on a continuum proliferating one day

to saturate the universe with something better


than gas, heat, matter. 


It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor

at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter 

shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.


It is promiscuous,


infecting its neighbors, or looking to.

It stretches across the sky like an eyelid

and proliferates color like a drug dream.


It splits the prism


into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,

blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white; 

it is nothing at all—


until it strikes something.



With a bow to Aram Saroyan, who wrote the title in 1965.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Now, A Sonnet

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,
But not so many times we can afford 
To hustle past. Let's promise each other --
Never commit the sin of being bored.
Besides, so much has changed in just a year.
The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.
The pattern of the leaves left in the trees
(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),
Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,
Things we think but never think to say.
The colors play the least part of the scene,
And we must grant each leaf its final bow.
If we could stay to watch the last careen
To the ground, we might settle then at Now.