The House

My parents and six siblings and I lived in this house on Sr.

Officers Row at Warren Air Force Base. My dad was a colonel.

The house in dreams is always the same,
Though its rooms, like lungs, bulge and contract
And sometimes the rain
Bends ceilings and bursts through in cataracts,
Frightening as spitting your teeth down the drain.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The old trees, too, are still the same.
We rake and burn leaves in the driveway
And recall legendary Claire,
Who caught fire leaping on a dare, they say,
Whose ghost still turns on the faucet upstairs.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The stairway in the front hall is the same.
I find my mail stacked on the newel post,
Though I don’t live here.
Though I am still alive, I am a ghost
The others cannot touch or see or hear.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The ways we use each room are still the same,
But the television is black and white
And the kitchen is a mess.
We feel no urgency, no physical delight
In being where there is no light, no darkness.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The river runs through our backyard just the same.
Memories of trysts and laughter, beneath the willows,
Though vivid, never intrude.
The river is a dark chalice threatening to overflow,
Or frozen as stone, dead, supine, nude.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

My bedroom and closet still seem the same.
While the window no longer looks out on the trains
On the trestle beneath the moon,
The closet door mirror no longer refrains
From showing me what has come only too soon.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The attic and the basement are both the same.
We hide in one or the other with our fear—
Of life, or of death—
The attic when all that we hold dear
Disappears; in the basement holding our breath.
They’re gone, and that house will never be the same.

Natural Violence

“What stops the rain

    if not desire,”

jokes the rippled windowpane.

    Frozen fire

laves each desiccated blade.

    Living dead,

the unenlightened shade

    shakes its head.

Let he who hasn’t sinned

    be the first

to stop the stones of wind

    and murder thirst.

Another brief thundershower

    washes the soil,

leaves it dry as flour,

    water under oil —

flash-floods down the street,

    filling sewers,

desultory ending to the heat.

    A man lures

a twelve-year-old into his car

    and disappears.

She is found, not far

    from home, in tears.

Lightning is the veins of his 

    hand tearing

the limb from the tree.  Thunder is

    his swearing.

Falling out of purple sky

    like fists, hail

answers every answer “why?”

    Crops fail.

Farmer sends his milk cow

    to slaughter

for want of hay.  Now 

    he drinks water.

They dredge the river and tow

    the flatboats

until the water will not flow

    and nothing floats.

Flowering Crab

Scarlet unopened, the buds of flowering crab

bleach out in sunlight, go pale pink and drab.

After the third day, the wind loosens the petals,

and one flutters to the grass and settles.

It works its way down to the soil—

wind and water rub it thin as foil.

Then, between each cell, oxygen convenes,

until the petal of itself is rendered clean.

It dissolves into pattern everywhere;

if grown again to petal it won’t know or care.

Abstraction, Sonnet #624

The sound of time is the sound of light,
So the morning sun would seem to say;
But now, when it’s either soon or late,
Is silent, dark, when any shade of gray.
Infancy (now in its shroud of amnesia)
Saw a thing as it was there to hear
With ecstatic nerves of synesthesia,
Or like a planet without an atmosphere,
Naked to the bombardment of the stars,
Spun from space. That memory, stored
In our synapses, fights a prolonged war
To glimpse what our mind has barred;
A light the color and the sound of time
We know is not a product of the mind.

Song of the Telegraph (Charles Burchfield), Sonnet #623

I’ve always seen the world as quivering,

Motes in my eyes, random as Brownian

Motion, more than sight, but delivering

What has been awaited for an eon.

Even rocks I find on Michigan shores,

Which crowd memorabilia on my desk,

Tremble in the dimness the light abhors.

(Rocks have too many answers, so don’t ask.)

Living things are a different matter:

Trees, cats and birds shudder even when still,

And when they move they pretend to shatter

Within a blinked tear that’s started to rill.

What’s not dead is my electricity,

Motion grounding my own haecceity.

Note: haecceity (hakˈsēədē/) means “the property of being a unique and individual thing”

Horizon, Zenith and Atmosphere (Paul Klee), Sonnet #622

I see that cold red dot

At the center of all,

As I stand, myself a spot

Not round, not flat, not tall,

No more than open eyes —

No zenith on horizons,

Just air as thick as sighs

Repeat seeking orisons.

The red dot draws on will

Until I disappear

With nothing to fulfill,

Nothing to find or fear.

At the center of pressure

I can’t take its measure.

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.

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 9^th 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.

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.

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.

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.