Image

I found the image in the attic,

In the half-light blurred, static,

Like a votive, intensely vatic.

In a shadow box, five white stones

All shaped like finger bones

Arranged in a question mark,

A gesture beckoning a dark

Something beyond conceiving

Into the emptiness of believing.

I took it and nailed it to a wall

Downstairs, only to watch it fall,

Its glass crack, the stones scatter.

I think they no longer matter,

But I’m wrong. I see them still,

Years later. They won’t, and will.

They're like ghosts no ghost can kill.

 

Echo

To the echo the mirror said,

“You repeat until you are dead,

While I’m an eternal ‘instead,’

Light’s reversal that cannot fade.”

The echo replied, “fade, fai, daid.”

Night fell — only light was afraid.

Hour

For Lucien Stryk

A strange word — an our

And a silent H that lours

Over us, a hidden power

Giving us us and taking

Us away — asleep — awakening.

Curse

Can a country be under a curse, 

A few words of malignant verse

Chanted inside a racing hearse?

To hell with superstition!

No man, crowd, or institution

Has turned our nation sour.

The Mind has forgotten the hour

Can grow late

Growing hate,

Like an ocean filling with plastic,

Leaving life crippled and spastic.

The curse is proliferating thought

That the future can be bought

And as quickly taken away —

Only the loudest given a say.

Will the worst curse have its day?

Whale

From infancy, we’re in its guts,

The beggars and the golden Tuts,

Until, when the Whaler cuts

Through blubber and sets us free,

We dive and thrash the freezing sea.

Decades on we still remember:

We were like insects in amber,

Protected, even transported,

Blind, yes, our hearing distorted

By the aggravated rumble

Of its great heart. We were humbled,

Every one of us alone.

We each had our one whale to own,

Yet we escaped to live or drown.

Enigma

It. It? What is it at the source?

We can’t know it by stealth or force

Or guess at its speed or course.

Like one word buried in a book

(Moving like a trout in a brook

That will not rise to the eye,

That will not rise to the fly),

Read once and lost between covers,

It stymies the question — hovers

Just beyond comprehension,

Beyond time and dimension.

It depends on what you know

Less than water needs wind for snow

Or an arrow a broken bow.

Lies

If I said the moon is blue

And that no lie is ever true,

Should I believe myself or you,

You who once knew the truth?

A ticket bought at a liar’s booth

Is worth a hundred billion dollars,

The blind, deaf, dumb man hollers,

As the crowd stampedes to buy its

Own, so quickly torn to little bits

And ticker-taped into the streets,

Soon grown to enormous sheets

Of gray that once was black and white.

It is a petty insane sight.

There is the found and what one seeks —

Both become an idee fixe,

One thing and one alone

That morphs, like the game telephone,

The moon into a blaring tone.