PART JOSEPH, PART VILLAGE GIRL


To be a poet one must be part Joseph,
able to milk lean cows of metaphor,
dress midnight visions in robes of many hues,
shade prophecy as fable,
and account for garbled dreams
in a proper syntax.

To be a poet one must be part village girl,
for poems are drawn from the well of dreams,
and the poet a village girl
pulling the bucket up from the dark shaft,
allowing light to sparkle through the water
as she pours this fluid into a proper jar,
then balances the vessel on her head
all the way home
to quench the thirst of her household.

NINETY FEET


Only ninety feet away, as near as a footprint on the moon.
Second base was Andromeda.
Third was beyond the farthest nebula.
Home plate was through a black hole.
Mostly I swung at air.
The hardball made a thud in the catcher's mitt.
Even my fouls never made it past first base.
Once I lunged at a pitch as wild as my bat
and hit the ball, with my arm not my bat.
I was rewarded by joining the society of hitters,
those who had made to first base.
I was a gatecrasher with a phony ID,
who soon was tagged out between first and second.
But that was variation,
the theme was measured in counts of threes,
with you stink whispered by eight mouths.
After the last game my dad drove me
but not to the pizza party.
A wordless trip of three long miles,
176 ninety-foot runs
from home plate to home.

CETACEAN CREED


Imagine our fantasies about them are true,
that they really had refined their songs
into a melody of words,
merged their herds into tribes,
invented politics, became aware of death,
and now yearn for a faith.
All their feelings are expressed lyrically
and through the flux of pressure waves.
Comrades swim in tight formation.
Soon a whale messiah, a supreme bard, summons the wayward,
singing that none should swim alone,
each should buoy the other in his slipstream.
In a world of motion,
this messiah's call travels the deepest currents across the oceans,
and all whaledom gathers and sways as he moves,
and is anointed by the gentle touch of his fluke.
The common prayer, a breach into the air.
They feel the winds which, by their creed,
sail upward to the inverted blue sea.
The clouds are worshiped as the sprays of ancestors.
Purgatory is the rocky shore,
the shoals pressed hard against their breasts
in a world where hardness is unknown
except at the end of their lives.
But their bard sees
beyond the dry terrain to the most distant shore
where the heavenly sea curves down to the land.
He sings of their loved ones who have washed ashore,
those ancestors who crawled on earth,
their sins scraped away by sand and stone
till they reach the horizon of the heavenly sea.
There they rise again, swimming upward,
breaching, spouting, filling the air with clouds,
while below those left behind
swim together with their bard.
In their world the living and the eternally living
swim in tandem across parallel seas.

CROSSCURRENTS


I curse, cradle him.
How dare he wither to such a state
that the bathroom recedes to light year distances?
That fecal smell, he averts his dimming eyes.
I give him a rare kiss.
"A man's a man," he always said,
but now pain parts the curtains of our proprieties.
"A man's a man," once with one arm
he picked up a seven year old who had scraped his knee,
"A man's a man," he said
and no tears dared come from me.
But now the crumpled bed sheet pinching his back brings groans.
On the back of his hand, five freckled spots
have measured his age with an ever darkening hue.
I link hands and see my inheritance;
his fingers part around the same design
that now faintly dawns in my skin.
I jerk my hand away.
Now mother comes, I yield my place.
Ever tidy, even now, I see her silhouette
against the sterile hospital lamp.
Napkins here, water glass there,
"Damn it woman for thirty years you've never stopped."
Then he winks at me and touches her.
Their arms link to form an L
which half frames the lamp
that now glares much too brightly.