I added new poems to the site today, but I set their publishing dates to their dates of composition. So to make them easier to find, here’s a list:
POEM: In The Hall Of The Mountain King
Leave a Commentpoet, interviewer, musician, traveler
I added new poems to the site today, but I set their publishing dates to their dates of composition. So to make them easier to find, here’s a list:
POEM: In The Hall Of The Mountain King
Leave a Commentshowed the kitten
a painting of a spring flower
he tried to eat the frame
/ / /
4 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
In The Hall Of The Mountain King
In the hall of the mountain king
the radio plays Bing Crosby on a loop.
The king sits in his La-Z-Boy,
breathing in slowly so he can watch
the bowl of his pipe rekindle.
He buys his tobacco down in the valley
from a kid too young to understand
the wooden statue of the Indian outside the store.
The king goes to get it himself;
you can’t trust a lackey with your special blend.
As the smoke curls toward the distant ceiling,
the king knows all is right in his kingdom.
Bing sings: “Where the blue of the night /
meets the gold of the day / someone waits for me.”
/ / /
3 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
In The Shadow Of Cold Mountain
The cat chases a spring
across the carpet.
What have I done
that’s any better?
/ / /
2 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
View From The Base Of A Pine Tree
Walking through a pine forest,
I came across a lone tree
in a clearing,
bathed in morning sun.
I sat at its base,
thinking of the Buddha,
who turned stillness
into a universe.
At the center of my body
there is a lens
through which my heart sees.
I put it away in the winter,
not needing it anymore.
Now the winter comes again.
Perhaps I was premature.
/ / /
1 December 2024
Charlottesville VA
Interpretation
The removal of “I” from “love you.”
The replacement of “you” with “ya.”
The careful distancing of ourselves
from our emotions, as if we were
observing things being felt by others.
As if we had dropped a coin in the slot
so we could watch from behind
the mirrored glass as two perfect
representations of (I and you)
acted out the truths we dare not say.
To use language as a disguise.
To wear the familiar as a mask.
To sit in the confessional,
no priest but simply the other,
the one to whom it is possible
to speak only in code, in tongues,
in glancing blows, in part.
/ / /
30 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
Thanksgiving Day, 2024
The Dallas Cowboys are playing
on a totally legal stream in the living room.
When I was kid in Lenox my mom got me
a pair of Cowboys pajamas because
they were my cousin Todd’s favorite team
and he was my favorite person.
We’d play The Incredible Hulk
(Bixby/Ferrigno version)
and he’d always let me be the Hulk.
When it was time for the gamma rays
to change me from a mild-mannered nerd
to a big green monster, I’d whip off
the shirt of the Cowboys PJs,
throwing it to the ground just like
Big Lou did on the TV.
And of course I’d flex my arms,
holding them down low in front of me
and growling just like the Hulk.
Maybe an octave or so higher.
The Cowboys are playing because
it’s Thanksgiving. The first one
with my new partner.
It’s a day we have qualms about celebrating,
although we got prepared plates
from the grocery store and heated them
in my tiny oven, which smells like it’s
poisoning us every time we use it.
After eating (which we did before noon
because these days we get up earlier
than either of us would probably like)
we went to the queer anarchist bookstore
and sat in the comfy chairs and leafed through
books of protest art and queer resistance
and anarchist theory and then we bought stuff
because we always do.
I’m pretty far down the page
without having mentioned that three hours away
my parents and my sister and my sons and my former wife
are all having Thanksgiving dinner together, a dinner
to which I wasn’t invited and which I learned about only
in passing during a phone call.
It’s 8 PM. My kids haven’t called, but my sister did.
When I was growing up, this is the kind of thing
my mom would have made me feel guilty about
if there had ever been any chance at all of my breaking away
to spend a holiday elsewhere, which of course
there never was.
I decided not to be that parent to my sons,
so I told them I only cared about two days a year:
Father’s Day and my birthday.
On those two days, I said, I’d like a phone call
if we can’t be together.
Perhaps I overplayed my hand,
given that now nobody even thought to ask
if I’d like to join in the family celebration.
And sure, I don’t speak to my parents,
but I’ve already seen them twice this year,
when each of my boys graduated,
and that was bearable enough that…
Anyway, it matters, but rather than say anything
I’ll just write it down here in these lines
and then go back out to the living room,
where my partner has turned off the Cowboys
and is reading one of the books we bought today
after our first Thanksgiving together,
just the two of us. I don’t know what Todd is doing,
but he’s probably with his former wife and
my aunt and uncle
and his daughter and her husband
and a bunch of dogs. That invitation
didn’t come either, but they’re too far away
to have expected it.
Funny how these days turn back the clock.
Funny.
/ / /
28 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
Jazz Means “I Dare You”
Feet hanging off
the edge of the bed,
even though I know
the cat will bite me.
/ / /
27 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
(The title is a paraphrase
of something said by
saxophonist Wayne Shorter.)
Meditation
If I sit on this couch
quietly enough, still enough,
perhaps I will disappear.
/ / /
22 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
Documentarian
Here’s William Stafford:
well along in years, lying
on a couch that’s conformed
to the shape of a poet,
writing his daily lines,
trying to get it all down
before the divots in the cushions
are all that remains
of the collection of atoms
named William Stafford.
/ / /
19 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
You should watch this.
Leave a CommentCredit Line
Playing MJ Lenderman on the radio.
He’s having a moment.
I guess we all are,
in a manner of speaking.
It was cloudy but the sun’s out now,
shining on the trees outside the studio.
They might be big bushes.
I never was very good at identifying things.
Paths, purposes, plans:
I know people have them but I can’t find mine.
My friend says the secret is credit card debt.
My limit was just extended.
Is this my guru on the mountaintop?
Save me, Capital One. I’m ready.
///
18 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
outside the window
cessation of the upstairs AC:
enlightenment!
/ / /
17 November 2024
Charlottesville VA
How To Make An America
• 1 part genocide
• 1 part slavery
• 1 part apartheid
• 1 part supremacy
Heat for 400 years
in a pressure cooker,
until the steam
escapes the valve.
Then, holding
the cooker at arm’s length,
carry it to a bombed-out
hospital or school,
set it in the foyer,
take 20 paces back,
wait.
///
6 November 2024
Charlottesville, VA
a squirrel revealed
in the fall
of a leaf
/ / /
6 October 2024
Charlottesville VA
Tonight, My Heart Is North
1.
Swallows, bat-like,
swoop over the sycamore.
A low breeze raises blades
of grass beside our blanket.
The sounds of South Sudan
mingle with the clinks
of leashes and collars
and the sneakered footfalls of walkers.
The cat chases imaginary prey
up the trunk of the tree,
squirrels passing unnoticed
mere feet away.
2.
A break with routine:
I’ll forego a shower
so as not to miss
the sound of the rain.
I waited till the small hours
to close the bedroom window —
preferring a damp carpet
to the loss of the waterfall.
Since I was a kid
I’ve loved the car wash,
the sense of enclosure,
of safety in the flood.
This pre-dawn morning,
my bed is my transport —
from its shelter
I adore this world of water.
3.
It’s been raining for days —
today, warnings of a tornado,
but none appeared.
“If one comes I’ll run out,
let it take me,” I said.
“Over my dead body,”
they said, “I’ll knock you out.”
Tonight, my heart is north:
on the shores of the Memphramagog,
where a skunk slithers
around my legs;
on the beach at Provincetown,
kneeling in the sand
to photograph the wooden Buddha
I’d carried in my backpack;
after a movie on North Street in Pittsfield,
stopping to capture the sun
as it sinks between the buildings.
Part of me is always there —
walking the rocky beaches or
breathing in the Berkshires air or
looking over the waist-high wall at Quebec or
pulling a smooth stone from the edge of the Housatonic.
That ground — the land of my birth —
captured me a half-century ago.
It has never let me go.
I never want it to.
/ / /
September 2024
Charlottesville VA