Poems (2003 - 2004)

Self-Improvement

I see and learn.

If I see and do not learn,

I am restless and I walk.

As I walk I wrestle until

The puzzle is jarred loose

And the continual stream

Of learning re-commences.

How to Use the Silence

There is something of a spell-caster in us all.

Whatever it was called in other times

Remains.

Find it in the waiting, the what we dread,

That is your time.

Whatever interval comes between now

And what you next expect

Is yours.

~~~

So we craft, on verge of tears,

Verse to ease these weary years

What to Choose

what to choose to write a poem on,

that problem is it’s own poem.

The Right to Choose–

The poem is there, though

Writing itself, however slowly,

Even as you think, you think

Of what to write.

Philosophical poems?

Maybe, well aren’t all poems

Philosophical?

It depends, now you get into

Critical debate.

So a poem, that represents

A critical debate?

Or how about the debate itself,

The dialogue,

Like Plato? He did rather well

In that mode, or so I hear.

So the poem wanders, and meaning wanders,

Read Harold Bloom on that,

He is an excellent scholar.

I won’t elaborate here, because that

Would kill the poem, the poem

That is writing itself as I think,

Think of what to write.

The poem sleeps when I awake,

My counter-mate, my mirror-like self-debate.

And the fulcrum between us, between

Poem and Writer, between me and my fate–

Even if I’ve come too late–

Is that that. A thing I can never describe,

Except as the why in the why I can’t wait

~~

And so you grow into your poem,

It aches sometimes, but learns to fit.

Learns to walk straight, narrow lines,

Clean in execution, wit.

To build, to plant, themes of construction,

Building, growing, never stopping,

Expansion of profits, extending our arms

Increasing our arms–

~~

Political themes soon follow

Just those conversations, those

Kinds of diplomatic negotiations.

Replete with their severity,

And Just Dignity.

Presidential medals, honor,

Nobility, scenes of grandeur.

Even if empty, stately, ceremony

~~

Enter Shakespeare, the bard–

The prophet of the Globe in London,

That godhead, massive, shadowing figure,

Whose mere contemplation withers your words

And lengthens your lines, as you seek to absorb him

Till you feel you can’t repress anymore, not seem more like

A lonely truck driver, whose days are the highway kind,

Who drives and drives and drives and drives,

Seeing little white lines, blurring, but you’re caught in trance

Forgetting all Shakespeare,

All chance.

~~~~~

I think there were a lot of great things going on–

And some frightening ones,

While I sat today in my quiet climate-controlled room

Reading Leaves of Grass and dreaming about America,

Untroubled by good or bad, hardly noticing (or remembering)

The landscape

(which becomes invisible within a skyscraper,

The grandeur of that skyline laughable inside one of the boxes).

Filling out boxes in forms, stapling evenly forms to be sent to clients.

But it extended my quiet and gave me a chance to think about America,

The Ontario shore and Whitman’s fierce denial of his own inheritance.

The power of the storm that swept him to emphatic words,

Which had some fluttery power on me, which I did my best to repress.

I admired his ferocity, but felt concerned. It seemed as if he were

Howard Dean, George W. Bush, Jerry Garcia and Ralph Waldo Emerson

All together. Rough Woodsman and tender lover,

His own avowed inclusions.

Made me want to be a diplomat, to represent this country

On the world stage.

But first made me want to become myself.

It seemed not unlike a prison cell, but a pleasant one, and I reasoned,

I was getting paid hourly for sitting and reading, so an uneasy calm

Kept me quiet. I scratched notes to myself and made plans,

Juggled out and this and that of my impending course.

We must build structures, whether we’d like to or not.

But supple structures, we must.

We must glance behind at the chaos we’ve left,

And decipher some pattern, if no pattern exists,

Our age demands it, our country demands it.

To sketch a plan, outline, something to stand on,

We have to create it anew again and again,

It will never stop, so we might as well practice

The art of construction.

It won’t be easy, but the rewards will be greatest.

Not English— not the Romantic wind will take us—

That wind ends in gnostic fury, the void as purpose,

Grand as it may appear.

No— ours is creation, what the poets did, not what they wrote

We can no longer avoid it,

Create or die will soonest become the mantra,

Already virtually is.