Day at the Park

Three-Dimensional Sadness


He stayed the same during the changing seasons
but, among times of sadness, he left himself
and attempted to express, as an outsider looking in,
what he must be experiencing:

Sadness, then, was made whole.

In this three-dimensional wholeness
he saw himself honestly: an outsider.

The landscape of this Truth
was cold and barren.
Wind sent ripples through ponds.

All was silent except the wind
and the sound of tiny leaves moving
on the branches of enormous trees.

But in this climate there was peace.
Birds called sweetly and singular in the cold air.

He saw himself for who he really was: afraid.

Winter, in its simplicity, repeated itself
in endless, snow-capped fields,
and everywhere he looked he saw himself,
and the Nature of his emotion
which was diminished by an endless horizon.

A Poem about Love and Nostalgia

How All Love Ends

Every so often, she revisits past lovers.
Having out-grown them,
she observes the whole homo sapien:
a Thing that exists alone, solitary,
touched by nothing
as if held erect by a steel bar.

She cuts and pastes from the figure.
This happenes in her imagination,
which is an attic with antiques
covered in years of dust.

But the manikin can only last so long
as to when she stops thinking,
and then the Beloved ends how all love ends-- unfinished.

When over-filled, she spends orange evenings in this attic
sorting through the years of dusty humanity.

The nostalgic Things are kept, but the rest thrown out.

And, like that, her love is kept unfinished
and in the past.

Rilke

Here's a new poem, highly influenced by Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rebirth

She wanted to be baptized
in the warm, green water of a pond.
She wanted to wear a flowing, oriental robe,
and walk forth onto the shore
letting her bare feet sink
into the mushy mire of this water source:
this would be her renewel.
It would be faking a death,
and telling only a childhood friend she was alive.

Like this, like with the baptizing priest,
she'll let men touch her with thoughtful hands:
gestures created out of made-up aquaintances.

She'll sacrifice the worldly,
and navagate her way among spirits.
Like sicknesses,
they only break their fever,
break the confines of their bodies
with an anti-thesis: disease.

Being dead, unknown,
her rebirth will be supplicated
in the light of others dead and unknown

Poem

The House-Wives and I

Snow sits blanketing Nature,calmly,
like the slow vaporization
of lingering smoke.

Every person in the wide world is working.

But, the house-wives and I,
we are looking out windows
onto this blank landscape.

Icicles, in a muted sunlight, hang off bending branches.

There was a storm last night.
The emergency sirens went off.
On the roads,
cars were crashing into one another,
crippling upon impact.
And the locks to the cathedral were frozen
so no one could get in,
but someone left the lights on,
and although the cathedral was empty,
every window was illuminated.

And, outside, God travelled from light to light,
while holding his breath past the cemataries.

The sky was dead black.

That night a man in our home had a heart-attack.
I heard his heart tighten lie a rope stretching.

The emergency lines were jammed
because strong winds broke
the wooden telephone poles in half.

This afternoon,
one by one,
branches are snapping from the weight of ice.

The landscape is all white.
Smoke, rising from the rooftops,
slowly evaporates, calmly,
like the look of a deserted cathedral
or the sigh of a dying man,
who is the house-wive, and who is me.

Another fragment of a poem

The 'ol 98 Pontiac is on its last leg.
The clutch is being reassembled
although the wrong parts
were sent to the automobile garage.
So they're over-nighting the correct ones
but now the car won't be fixed
until noon tomorrow
while I've just started on as a security guard
and need to be in by early morning.
I'll have to take a cab there and back.

Fragment

Mid day the fire is dead.
The logs are black.
Commitments in the house have not been honored.
Time is the enemy,
while the wall clock turns to a dreadful hour.

Larry has a slipped disk.
The ambulance medics joke with one another,
but no one knows where to go from here.

The speech is on a running tape.