Have you forgotten the reason you came?
Are you lost like the prodigal son?
Do you tell fortunes there
Above the sad automobiles
& the single mothers
who are walking in a loneliness
Too steep for bare nature?
How I wish I could be like you:
Imperial, slow, half alive
Like the priests of empire,
Talking to yourselves only
In the language
Of minerals
& the unborn.
Let commerce
Appeal to the poor!
Let them
With their broken carts
Believe in magic!
Yes! You! Bombard!
I’m talking to you!
S.K.
Rain. But the quality was all wrong:
Walking Euclid Avenue I remembered the Norwegian poet:
The age of the great symphonies is over now…
Euclid; cast off buildings in all directions; ghost of Mahler
In this rain that smelled faintly of sulphur.
Borges, I walked through a keyhole just after ten am.
Then spring was green in the trees
And Mahler’s odd China—
That country of total darkness and total light
Was all my own.
Then the city’s birds were more musical
Though the rain continued gently & blue
S.K.
–after the Finnish of Jarkko Laine
How sad, everything…
Purple weeds
Growing beside the tracks,.
Candidates on the radio…
Beyond my window
A neighbor, a young man,
Introduces his baby girl
To the ducks.
She makes joyful sounds and claps her hands—
Human beings
Love this world so much
A spirit takes them
When they can scarcely walk.
My radio crackles & the script of ruin
Snicks through the air. El Presidente
His pants stuffed with money
Speaks of evil
In the catalyzed rhythms
Of nursery tales.
How sad to live
As the nation states
Begin to fall—
When denatured and unseen
Children are erased from the books.
Were he alive today
Even John Wayne
Would vomit in the beach grass.
America?
S.K.
You are a coward but Lo! You’re "in" among heroes
In this afterlife
With no signs of poverty.
At dinner you’re handed a gold toothpick
& a wormy poet sidles up
To sing your praises.
(In life you were a varnished toad,
But in Valhalla O you are suddenly blessed
With big teeth and grabby hands.)
Yep. In Valhalla you’re a hero with the others—
Marrow suckers, Colonels, bureaucrats, boot lickers,
All lately of the swamp & if truth be told
You’re all a tad slimy to be sitting at table.
But there you are,
Eating the heart out of something that still has a pulse,
A moral thing,
We’ll call it Philosophy’s lamb.
S.K.
A neighbor cuts wood in the rain
Dragging branches and prodding artlessly
With a cross-cut saw. Rain
Has fallen all summer
& the encyclopedia
Lying open on the table
Has folded its pages like a moth.
Why don’t you do something?
Why don’t you carry painted jars
Under the clouds?
S.K.
Fortune’s Talker
–in memory of "Roscoe" our black Labrador
Some are born to talk and that’s a story,
And some know what to do with the gift
And that’s a different story, "Roscoe"
Born at the guide dog school,
But too sensitive for traffic,
Roscoe was a sweet talker.
(All dogs "talk" but few have nuance)
Roscoe knew. Oh he knew
When you felt rich inside
So he had a word or two for that;
And even yesterday, lame and tired in wet grass
He had encouraging things to say
To our neighbor’s dog who is young and fast.
We should all have things to share
In praise of animal faith
And with some of Roscoe’s luck
May we be wise enough
To find our better calling:
Joy.
S.K.
I Wanted to Write a Poem
1.
Think of the poem as a museum of loneliness—don’t imagine it’s a glass room built near the house—a charming place where the old Italians grew lemons in winter. Poems are stricter than that; darker; always more isolated…
2.
The Book of Common Prayer lay beside a window. (This was the customary volume at the Royal Hospital for Incurables.) The book lay open at Psalm 23. No one has ever lived without poetry. Why keep it from the exhibit? Now it’s just as it was.
3.
They used to hang the bread from rafters. They had lullabies you wouldn’t sing to children nowadays.
& their offspring thought nothing of carrying a broken angel across the fields…
4.
Guardian moon: Lutheran Sun—Pentecost and ice breaking in the harbor. Words conspire with and without us. Let’s take a long voyage.
S.K.
Basho is that you?
I’m friendless
As the poplar
Still working with slow art,
Eyes closed, hands moving softly
On a book of wind…
S.K.
When the crows
Were talking Russian
As they sometimes did
When high in the birches
Death had pleased them
I chose to stop.
My life for yours, they said;
Our lives from theirs, they said…
& standing
Where they could see me,
I swayed
& kept my mouth shut
As it
Made them crazy…
The life inside a life:
The thistle with a worm inside,
A blossom with no color of its own.
A person’s calling
Is unpainted wind.
Inside a life, earth turns,
The old sing.
A boy can hear Blood verses
Down in the petals….
–in memory of Harry Martinson
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 