i'm working on the world

I'm working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here's one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple "Hi there,"
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time's unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won't be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don't whine that it's steep:
you'll stay young if you're good.

Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn't insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you'll be dreaming
that you don't need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it's part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you'd feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach's fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
 - Wislawa Szymborska  Read more…

Dig

Dig yourself a ditch, six
feet deep, and bury everything that you've ever
said, everything that you've never
meant, and everything that has
burned you and left you with nothing
but ash.
 - Shinji Moon  Read more…

cross a border

I’m sitting in the air conditioned nightmare of an office and the maintenance chief comes by and tells me a little story.

He’s worried. He’s married to a woman from Mexico living here illegally. She migrated to the Pacific Northwest supporting herself doing migrant labor. Picking fruit. Delicious apples.

They met through friends, dated and got hitched. She doesn’t speak Engish and now they pay a lawyer BIG BUCKS to handle her immigration case getting exercise jumping through INS hoops and she’s preparing to head south and the chief’s afraid to death she will cross the border and never return.

In Mexico she broke down after her first husband, depressed about lack of work, sat down in front of her one night, opened a bottle of rubbing alcohol and drank the whole thing. He started foaming at the mouth, went into spasms and died in her arms as his liver broke down. 

That’s why she left.

Harbingers

“And put out the servant who is of no profit into the outer dark: there will be weeping and cries of sorrow.”Gospel of St. Matthew

Two ravens traced the pewter sky
Like etchings scratched above the trees.
Peremptory, unhurried, removed,
Wheeling like so much give a damn against the setting sun.
Big as black of night,
Smug as crabbed unsmiling butlers
Or sour priests, contemptuous of some apostasy,
All black hat and cassock.

Three bats circled the house at dusk,
Crazy erratic and day-blind
Darting and tumbling in the outer dark
Predictably at close of day.
Sprung from somnolent secret dayshade
Silhouettes against the nickel sky
Carving the wind with cutlass wings
Their peeps mere hints in the gloom.

It’s all about death, the macabre, and madness
On their wings here in the woods.
They’re freighted heavily for all that
With storied loathing and dread,
Lurching through the darkling, evermore,
Unshriven, feared, and despised.
Just like those pretty girls in Salem
Whose fatal youth the pinched old ladies envied so.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.

 

drawing up

It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
 - Robert Bly  

Read more