Parallel

Parallel lives will never meet.

They walk on a different street

Though both are equally fleet.

Perhaps at the vanishing point

They will end, a dovetail joint,

That nothing can pull apart,

Not a hawk, nor a work of art,

For there’s no change of mind

Can allow thoughts to unbind.

All, futile conjecture.

(Is the math of parallels pure?)

Lives do cross, were meant to,

But in sum they are so few.

So many hearts do not reach,

Not even trying, each to each.

Rolling, rolling like train wheels,

None knowing what others feel,

Each of us made of flesh and steel.

Clock

I own a clock that can’t tell time —

Acts like an unruly street mime.

Not only does it refuse to chime

At any quarter of or on the hour,

It always runs faster or slower

Than time itself, and often backwards.

Its hands clap out nonsense words —

There are no numbers on its face.

I turn a ring to change its pace,

As though duration is relative.

Its works know no imperative,

Not like an hourglass, but a sieve. 

The Map

All directions are a trap.

Do not follow the map

Or be caught in amber’s sap.

Oh, the body can move

With the fevers of love

Or the lifted brow of thought,

But don’t learn what’s taught.

The aimlessness of dreams

Is only the ripping of seams

On a child’s outgrown gown.

You can’t dream up or down.

So do not try to run away,

Dear one. Stand still, sway,

And you’ll not wander astray.

One Word

There is one word that stands

Alone from all if’s and and’s,

Which has no face or hands,

Which, like a glistening bubble,

Floats above the verbal rubble,

Floats too high to be obscene,

Moving moveless and serene.

The word has never been spoken

Past teeth perfect or broken.

No tongue has been known to shape it,

Or fools’ babble to leak it or ape it.

Desperation, fear, or hatred’s keening

Can summon the word’s meaning,

But not the name of the word.

“There's no such thing! That’s absurd!”

Men cry — not quite saying the word.

Eliot

Damn you, Thomas Eliot!

Why did you have to be a bigot?

Someday they’ll say, “Who? I forgot!”

At first it seemed a forgivable blot,

A line here and there, not a lot,

A silver string with a nasty knot.

Now it reads like an aneurism, a clot,

A stroke, or babble of a bibulous sot,

Unredeemable, no innocent mot,

But the crisis of your poetry’s plot.

Then you wrote the Four Quartets.

Your hate may be forgiven yet.

Walking

There is little left of his hip —

Afflicted since he was a pip

In a leg brace, he would trip

On the curb, crossing the street.

He’d never been strong or fleet.

The clouds followed him

Above oceans he could swim

With a few strokes of his arms,

Setting off foreign alarms.

The highest mountains bent

Upside down for his ascent.

Only he knew where he went.

Mushroom

It appeared beneath our yew,

A large puffball that grew 

Unseen. Then there were two.

Soft, bleached skulls without holes,

Less like the dead than souls.

I picked them up — their spongy skin

As alarmingly soft as sin.

I was frightened of what grew within.