Succession

I have been thinking of most depictions of the desert in film and video and what seems to connect most visions...wondering why hourglasses and sand seem to inextricably linked to such landscapes.

It is true that remnants of the past remain here more than in other places. During my first excursion into the desert hills around seven years ago when I arrived and everything was new, I found several bleached animal skeletons, an old corral dating back to the 1800's, and an an old adobe ruin.

When I wandered into the town from the desert, they all looked at me oddly. And they still do:

Desert Noir

The past layered like an onion:
once you pull back skin a rawness revealed
crumbling black light on the desert floor
bones & azure skies seem to drift
towns don't care for mythologies.

The same rock, soil and ash
shifted into hills and into earthen houses

the shadows of mountains in the distance stir
flowing like quicksand, the clouds

You knew it was time.

Good Enough for Government Work

With all the union activity going on in Wisconsin, I am reminded of this poem I wrote in part after viewing curbstones in a small town that were stamped with 'WPA.' Also, this violin and the story behind it actually exists. It was the first instrument I learned to play on, although I remember my teacher hated it because I guess a Stradivarius it was not.

You couldn't have told anyone in my family that.

Initially published in the Spoon River Poetry Review:

Adagirl No. 1
(inscription found on the inside of an old violin)

Washed free of the fields, now only to bake bread
and wipe the faces of her children,
my grandmother still kept
a garden, and sang songs
of frivolous things like lemon trees
while her husband sat and ate.

It was 1931 and the picture was not that rosy.
They ate potatoes, shuttered windows,
kept a bible near.
Town fathers placed wayside cornerstones
Grandpa engraved for the WPA.

Still, there was Grandma's pastry - flaky as new air,
smelling faintly of fresh lemons.

That was the year Grandpa made the violin -
stowed in a corner of the cellar
with a room full of canned goods.
Carved and whittled the spine and waist and body
of sweet cedar, fitted and preserved
with rosin & wood lacquer.

Strung her so she sang sound as any fine instrument.

For Valentine's Day, A Poem

I came across this article in my Twitter stream today, which pretty much gets to the heart of the matter:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182917


The poem to come was published a few years back by a small journal, The Tusculum Review, in Tennessee. And yes, the love poem is one of the most difficult things to write, I guess because you always risk ridiculousness and purple prose with anything that has to do with an intangible like the feeling of love. It is OK to be ridiculous in the feeling, but poetry is that most earnest of art forms, where you don't want to suck.

Like many real life romances, this one had an introduction, a bridge, chorus, refrain...and an end. Interestingly, I never did get to drink a good Georgian wine - but the rest came true:



Lines Composed While Listening To Barber's Adagio


Because the strings pulled from the cello of this my heart
have been snapped too sharp, used too much but without precision

Because these, your long silences, sound tender as a newly healed wound like some nameless elegance

Because your moods like leonine clouds that track over the sky this October night sustain me like tears and I would give you more than words; poor notes, theories of that which could be and that which will never be

Because these lines like bold strophes of abstract art might a little shock you

Because the rhythm of your voice, its poetry, its own abstraction has found itself lying among the pleasures in my thoughts

Because I do not know the true color of your eyes: dark like sherry or some sparkling foreign wine with solemn lilt I know nothing of

Because the days grow long because longing has its own grace because time is short because this aimless song these relations of words are nothing
but ceasing echoes.

The Painter and the Painting

Like the story of Dorian Gray, this poem tells a story of a painter, a painting, a personality and the marks that personality left behind. Unlike the character of Dorian Gray, the subject of this poem lived up to all expectations and probably his own, too - as noted, at least from afar.

Always a worthy opponent, the attempt at a description was well warranted:

A Red, Abstract Painting

Passion colors all it touches in its own hues.
-Balthasar Gracian

This is the color left behind prosaic marks aside and upright

In prone madness

For what once right but now discarded
drowned

Not by anything laid down but by viscosity and flurry

Even wind on the snow there cries
Bleakly through spare dark trees and black water

Red is but one significant shade of this music
it glows
From above and below like illumination

or fire

A span but a hand's breadth away

A war where there is only a door of black water

Above and beneath so you see shimmering rifts
Like moonlight crossing slowly the water
Like touch, not paint.

The Farmer's Almanac

A source of common wisdom, I was always amazed at the stuff you could find out in the Farmer's Almanac, although you don't see it for sale too many places anymore.

To me, the speech in such a book has a particular rhythm and flow, just as the days and weeks and months that ruled agrarian society did. Sometimes I see the need to return to such rhythms, as they are more natural. People forget they are also organic beings in an organic world - imagine themselves something foreign.

The following is something of a 'found' poem. Edited and shaped.



Farmer's Almanac: A History

Root crops go in on the full of the moon
and above ground vegetables go in on the full of the moon

Sage is good to season meat.
Chamomile calms you.
Mix black tea with most of these to dull the strong flavor of some.

Look for Praying Mantis, Lace Bugs & Lady Bugs in the spring of the year

They do a good job controlling pests
planting on the full of the moon.

Mohave Sojourn: An Invocation

I have always wanted to write about the desert, ever since I read Dr. Andrew Weil's dedication in the preface of his book, Optimum Health, detailing that his manuscript had been completed at a house in the "middle of the Sonoran desert." The romance behind that phrase was palpable and it stuck with me. Then I saw the film and read the book The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, and the desert again played on my imagination--through the sweep and scope of the love story that began in a more barren landscape than any of our North American deserts.

I live here in the desert now, but I still feel like something of an outsider, to be honest. The first poem I ever wrote about the desert was rejected a couple years ago by a journal in Nevada--promptly--which kept me from writing about it again until now. I felt I obviously needed more training. I also fear I will never be a 'desert rat,' as some here are wont to call themselves.

Yet the desert has its clear-eyed romance, it is undeniable.


Mohave Sojourn
Invocation, after Rilke

That it be here to end in the desert
sand and naked rocks gracefully countered
amid dead limbs of trees near the melt of rivers
with bottoms of stone and creeks fed by stream.

That it be here the skies all you imagine
the clarity which forgotten like a pavane to a death
once sung distinctly slows to a fade
the night quiet like that and full of creatures
drifting there among ancient pathways.

That it be here return to shoulders of the night
the purple silhouette ready, clearly in those mountains
that frame the floor as if it were sky.

That it be here sun an escetic prophet following
mystic bones and desert fathers to Joshua trees
parched; knows curcifixes knows wind as eternal lament
moves mountains in short order; the eye of an agate
the pinnacle of diamond.

That it be here for ache to live beyond the river
this thirst, this quench--this rich-willed land

That it be here is to lie--drenched, sweet
and dream of oceans.