A Morning with Marmi

Suffused with this winter's morning light
the drapery glows a gentle eggshell white
casting stripes stretched across a blue floor
umbric bars breaking space up a little more.

The clock ticks and it tocks, the cars pass by,
the lone piano quietly drinks in their sound.
Its silent keys, its hidden strings give no reply,
but stand still with light and questions all around.

In the kitchen window a spindly naked tree
reaches beyond the curtains' faux floral lace.
Descending from her sun-basking, now I see
my cat climbing up the couch, and to my face.

She puts paws to my belly and begins to knead.
My hands brush her aside, but don't succeed,
as she deftly returns to the task at hand
for reasons only felines must understand.

It could be she was a baker in her former life,
who filled mornings punching dough for bread.
Away from pastry-cases, she was a devoted wife
even years-after her husband fell ill and dead.

Perhaps she also had a piano not unlike my own
where their faded photos and portraits would alight:
family, youth, and love, like birds who'd never flown;
and her hands would play by the curtains' white

simple scales and preludes to how things used to be
for her husband, for herself, for the naked spindly tree.

Now her paws have paused to rest,
and after purrs, her green eyes pour
a glance imbued with some request
to me, the piano, then the floor.

Eine Einladung

Freude und Freunde haben eine Wahrnehmung, 
wo ich gerne meine Wahrheit nehme. 
Leben ist ein Satz, ein Schatz, und sie die Übersetzung 
zu einem Brief, der fragt, ob ich käme.
Es ist schon geschrieben und schön geschrieben,
und er ladet uns ein, zu lächeln und zu lieben.
Unser Wein ist schwach heute und das Brot krustig,
doch bleib munter, aufgeschlossen und lebenslustig.
Denn das Warten ist nur eine kurze Zeit
in den frohen Augen der Ewigkeit.
Wir denken oftmals Leben ist Staub
und es gibt irgendwo einen Besen.
Aber sei nicht so müde, nicht so taub;

anstatt, versuch jenen Brief zu lesen.

I Hear I'm Here

I laid my head down those early nights in Boston, when I was
still not used to how the street lights would seep in and bathe

the ceiling milky blue with an incessant, vigilant light whose
subtle warmth softly burned and blinded through the eyelids.

In those nights I pressed my eyes tight and my ears would
widen to hear that the wind was still while the cars still went

and in those passing wakes, they issued a sound that echoed in
my memory as the gentle crash of waves on shores I left behind.

And as the last trolley gradually trucked and thumped the bumps
and rails of Comm Ave, I could hear how squeals of the wheels

and the squeak of lines could recall in some rare way birds and
crickets I heard on rural evenings with solely stars for company.

With familiar tones and timbres the city could almost compose
a home out of its unacquainted places. But upon returning here,

to the birds, the bugs, and waves, I have found that when those
same sounds echo in me, the cars and trollies rarely come to mind.

Though they meet my ears all the same—whether they come from
here or from there—my soul listens closely and can tell me how
they belong to the one but were merely borrowed by the other.

A Sunday Sketch

My success lies in Sundays,
when the sun lays its rays
warmly on me reclined,

while my body hums a
eucharistic hymn and my soul
remembers how to sing.

Bread and wine linger in
my flesh and memory and
I wonder if what could be
did in fact happen to me.

I take stock of myself and
all there is while the breeze
breathes and my collars lap
like waves upon the shore.

Blessings are measured in
grateful sips—a mug lifted to lips.
I spill ink and I will think
of how richly he arrays my days

and when the sun's light dyes
the buildings rose and gold
I know the eve is not far

with which he dazzles the eyes
today as in those times of old
with many a precious star.

When A Tree Falls in the Woods

I am a once-great tree
that has fallen relieved
in your welcome woods.

I held within myself many
homes and hidings for others
while I leaned upon empty air.

I stood for many years
tall and mighty, and alone
until your love felled me.

The answer, by the way, is

no, I never made a sound;

that is, until you where here.

I am poor today, but break my bark
and tap the sap that surges sweetly
from rarely open and broken me.

My branches bounty, my rent roots,
have held for far too long what I have
never tasted, though it's mine to share.

I don't care what becomes of me—
if I sink and rot or am cut and burned:
to house and to sweeten was enough.

For, as I fell before your eyes
with my trunk cracked, exposed,
you can see my fragile matter.

All my rings sing as though
they were pages of countless letters
tightly bound around my core,

all addressed to you,
your woods, and

even your axe.

Grammar and the Beasts

English teachers must not understand that
grammar is what separates us from the dogs,
who are oblivious to the fact that subjects
verb adjectival objects in, out, and through
prepositional phrases, occasionally adverbally.

Most of their students tune in and out unless tone,
like the promise of a bone, rouses them with a
buzzword or phrase to which they have something
to say, though what came before remains unheard.

When philology is forgotten we no longer gnaw
our words in euphony, working etymologically
to the marrow of their meaning.  We simply lie
lazily until it is our chance to respond or to bark.

But somedays we fall below the hounds bellow,
are shamed by the bird's delightful and aimless tune,
and cannot keep still with the lap-cat's silent and
content life of silent observation and satisfied purrs.

When we forget that words were also wrought to woo,
our courtship will recall the obnoxious quaking of ducks,
whose copulation involves more coercion than consent—
though, there are really very few troubadours among beasts.

When has the pursuant squirrel ceased tree trunk chases
long enough to leave a sonnet in the cache, so that Spring
might yield romance along with acorns?  For that matter,
has the lonesome owl ever recited Neruda under the still
stars of a given evening?  For that matter, when have we?

Perhaps, someday soon, poetry and grammar will give
us the courage to speak ourselves and each other
above the cacophony of the crow's complaints, over
the lion's angry roars, and sad lonely songs of whales.

Break and Bloom

Despite never having asked for
—and my often attempts to shirk—
this state of being and occupation, 
I am a vessel from which Christ 
overflows. Not of the immaculate sort, 
but a simpler kind,  which serves as a 
thurible swinging along sidewalks, 
incensing passerbys with an aroma 
not my own.

Despite that fallen tendency to collapse 
myself and my world into something small 
enough to be thought, his image and signature 
are radiantly written in all that lives and moves 
(even the stones quiver with their vital role to play) 
although we do not take the time to marvel 
at the Word's work, the calligraphy of being.

We think the glory is somewhere else and 
it couldn't possibly be us. But we have much 
to learn from the unmoving and unwavering 
mystery of the flowers, who have no legs 
with which to leave their native soil.  The bud 
never asked for petals to flaunt.   
      
He was simply there, 
between the stalk and the air, 
and in just being there

he blossomed. 

We are where we are, 
between whence and whither 
and when we are open to the 
to and fro we can be like this. 
But we are always blooming 
bliss by nature of our being, 
where the saddest and loneliest 
are such because they write
epics no one reads. Our longing 
to blossom and to overflow 
is not so much in some kind of life; 

for, by living any kind of life 
we already do. Rather, it is to 
erupt in taking notice and giving 
thanks for what we have and are. 

All of us are there and 
—you might be startled to know—
it's always been here. 
If only we'd break off from busyness 
and break forth in bloom.

Two Wash Your Face

At the end of the evening fold the washcloth
in two as it drinks the warm water and let the
soap sing before it greets your day-worn face.

Scrub this face and follow its broad contours
along the ways of forehead, nose, and cheeks,
as if this land were foreign and not your own.

Keeping it moving until you can drop the
cloth and feel her ghostly and future fingers
tracing your face at the end of the evening.

Your appearance is not your own to behold,
but hers to enjoy; and her eyes are so unlike
the tired and flat ones found in your mirror.

Walking in the dark hall toward bed, her hands
still run along your face like waves crashing
against the shore of you, felt long after leaving

the beach at which you both have yet to be.

Imago Dei

Even the sharpest tool in the shed is just a tool dead and dumb,
having no will in its wielding, but always yielding to be used
according to the workman's intent. To swing, to stay; to be sharp,
to rust—there are no choices to be faced in the life of an axe.

Thus, another analogy falls of short explaining human liberty:
the axe is heaped with the stick and the stone and worthless
grimy coins—while free will and the human paradox stands
as a thing too bizarre to be compared with any other referent.

We are cursed to stand as unaccompanied anomalies, whose
every portrait is smudged and blurred. But this is to be expected
of creatures made in the image of the Undepicted; whose life lets
no image be its grave, except perhaps mysterious and mortal man.

Despite, and yet somehow even through, our frequent falls
he saves images, those broken but beloved analogies, restoring
his much-mangled form into greater clarity. He holds that stick
pushing the stone, such that his hand moves within the lonely pebble.

His face emerges as he polishes the past from an unwashed coin as
words are reminding through shining from whom the wealth came.
By now we see that it is still a forester's will, which sharpens and
swings. But without an axe, we ask, what work would be done at all?

While he could not be held in any meager analogy, he despises none
of the stories each tries to tell. To be big is to celebrate in the small
and to see one's character depicted in the discarded images. Perhaps,
we like-fated beings might, in every gifted day, humbly do the same.

The Prestige

This poem comes after watching one of my favorite movies, The Prestige.

Everything is magic and it all works
by those rules known by every heart:

The first is the Magician's presentation
of something ordinary and Pledge that it
will not surprise us anymore than usual.
It could be a dull coin dragged from one
of your pockets, a lovely assistant who
we've all been watching anyway; doves
are not uncommon, but anything will do:
so far you are probably underwhelmed.

Then there's the Turn where what we knew
is taken away with the Magician waving
his hands before our faces in empty air.
To stop here would not be magic, but only
flashy robbery, which makes up so much
of our lives: lives full of things taken, stolen,
leaving.  It might definitely be called a trick,
but hardly magic.
    
                           The Turn is when time
slows as the glass vase falls, when the
heart sinks as we bury our dead heroes,
when we know her eyes have turned and
her footsteps fade off in the distance, just
as they begin to swell in our memory.
The sun must always set and over time
each and every moment will vanish ...

Here we realize that even the smallest
coin would buy something and the world
is quieter without the dove cooing—so the
audience holds its applause and its breath.

We all know we need the return, the Prestige,
the resurrection.  We need to know that love
has not been sawed in half yet again, nor has
it been lost to thin air.

                                       So now the Magician
brings back what we once called ordinary, but
now with something extra.  We count the hearts
or spades, flip it over, and find joy that what we
hold is very much ours and it always has been.
Everything that was volunteered was returned—
the only difference is, this time we're grateful.

We're surrounded by magic and know its comings
and its goings. So please look around, see the Pledges
made to you in this moment, and know that, even now,
they are making the Turn, like all those other late-loved
things which took your breath in passing and left that
twinge in your chest.  I've told you what comes next,
so, for now, what you must do is just wait ...