S E L E C T E D P O E M S
|
|
|
Spiritual and Religious Aphorisms
1.
Ripe Falls the Fruit
Ripe hangs the fruit, to be
shaken or plucked or snipped from
the branch or the vine.
Ripe falls the fruit,
swelled and filled by rain and sun,
and on the ground or grass wrinkles
and bursts and pours its sweet into
the happy maws of God's lesser denizens.
We nourish by falling, too.
2.
Winter, 2007
The cold came late this year
and all at once the yellow-red leaves
bid their branches good-bye and
took their leave for the sweeper and
the plastic sacks that would gather them
up like a holocaust and abandon them, together,
by the side of the road, where they will not
even be free to feed the new life of all the trees
to come.
Let us leave the bodies on the ground
that they may do their work, and so
next year I shall tell the gardener to pile high
the colored bodies along the trunks
in the woods near the back gate,
for even rotting (if there is such)
we do God’s work.
3.
Dear Brother
No, brother, it gives me no pleasure
to see you suffer so, not now, not ever;
it gives me no pleasure that I cannot
scale the walls between us, that I might
be with you on your last, long walk, but
The tragedy of life does not erase the
facts of life, or stop the planets in their glide,
or erase the scars and the wounds you
gave to me and, worse, to others unable
to anticipate one like you.
I would be merciful now, for I have
already forgiven you. But what does
mercy look like now, in this? Would it be a smile?
A ‘Get Well Soon’ card? A dinner by the lake?
Which, when I have no smiles left, no
inclination to pen your address, and nothing
to say to you at a time reserved for
the breaking of bread and banter? I cannot
smile at you, send you well wishes, eat
with you so near, and be at all sincere.
Ah, Dear Brother – you have left me in
a quandary. If God has sent you as my test,
it might be the very test I fail, and the one that
makes all the difference, and in some way
(so ingenious as to make me smile), your
darkness overshadows me even across the miles,
and makes me wonder if any virtue exists.
God is a clever God indeed;
What a perfect tribunal for thee, and me.
4. Cold Winds
Cold winds blow winds
blow cold;
Cold, cold, cold,
Like ice icy
death it’s time to go, go
to the Keys, Largo
I’ll go, we’ll go winding
down where our bodies
glow.
5.
Follow Your Road
“Follow your road, and maybe
someday your road will take you far
away,” so the Seawind song goes.
But so too, it seems, will another’s.
When we would go our own way
the road we must follow is not planted
in a yellow wood, nor even cleared
of brush and trees and stones,
but rather to be etched out of the
earth of our own God-given dreams,
foot by foot by foot,
like the passing of life in days.
Indeed, whether this way or the other,
surely we will find ourselves far away,
or if so fearful of even our shadows
perhaps but an inch or two
spans cradle and grave.
There are those for whom the idea of
meeting a mass of strangers at
the end of our road makes us
faint, sick, overcome by the thought of a
life lived inside another’s dream
and by another’s light, having buried
our own under a lifetime of timid “Nos.”
Easy it is to walk the wide road, with
its geometric plain, filled with companions,
whose voices make us forget our
idolatry.
6.
Yellow
The trees on Maniece and Otsego
were ablaze, torches of cool yellow flame
crackling and dancing at the steely sky.
How real, though, is yellow?
Why this sacred mood over pretty leaves?
Is yellow not just what rods and cones do,
as some would say, in that quite-sure way?
Or is yellow, like purple, God trying to get us
to look up from our New York Times?
Is not that crackling and dancing for you and I?
“Yes,” I’d say, in a quite-sure way.
“Yes, and these branches are the rafters
of the canopy of heaven, though I am mad
for saying so in this age of rods and cones.”
7.
The Church by the Brook
I’ll have a church by the brook
with the round window in the mezzanine,
and the youth will come from all around
and hear how they may yet care that life
came here, and that the beauty they
hoped for is just what we humans do,
and so have faith, have faith in the
beauty and in it and through it
see God, That calls to you from the
sunset, and the table, and the patch
of dirt under your new Nike shoes.
8.
Ravi
Break this Western spell with
whining string and magic drum,
and take us away to Shakti so that
by her power the spell of Walmart
may be broken, that we may see the
Ganges from New York, as sacred
once more, rather than survey her
for abuses called uses;
and so then maybe, maybe then,
the Mississippi, the Hudson and
the Rio Grande, too.
9.
Sanity
I trouble myself sometimes to ascertain
just who is sane – whether the cab driver
or the bespectacled- briefcased rider,
whether the decaying mother of three
in the cleaners, or the artist starving in her
loft in ecstasy, whether the penguiny waiter
at the Atlantic Grill, or the owner who must
prepare each day a slaughter for an army
of metropolitans who already have too much,
with no sense of irony, as people in the Delta
or the hills of Rio pluck their last chickens
and ground their last roots, whether the astronaut
who would risk all to stroll a dusty ball, or the
earthy carpenter who sings while swinging
hammer against the background of the sky to
finish the child’s room addition to the
Jones’s summer home, though the Jones
have already two others like it up by the mill,
whether the man who flees
to shelter in the rain, or the one who walks
through the tempest and laughs
as the drops drench him through, whether
the believer that God cares, or the skeptic who
claims to cling to nothing but ‘ethics’ as he distracts
his mind with ‘the ten thousand things’ that
delay the inevitable stare into the aimless weather
that is, for him, all that is.
10.
Faith
Faith is the irascible declarative,
“It is so!”
For if it is not then what is the point
of even pleasure? Or shall we stay for
at least that Epicurean bribe and
remain in the service of some funky
molecules that conspired in some occult way,
in a tiny cellular huddle,
to keep us around that they may
go on going on with their game?
As for we religious, I know of our own bad
accretions, our silly disputations, but odder
it is still that it is we who yet believe who are
called odd, when the molecule sects
install isotopes and elements as gods with
wills to pass themselves on, that use our progeny,
our bodies and minds as pawns in a tiny conspiracy,
hatched out of sight, before sight, or you or I.
11.
Peachtree
I feel the shudder
as the peach explodes
on my wet palate;
I do - yes, I do - taste all of
the dinosaurs and
the lava, and I
receive visions of
the gods whose hot hands
shaped the world and time.
12.
Old Friends
What are old friends if
not true friends who want
us only for us and the recollection
of the paths that have crossed on
the journey – if it is a journey – of
life, and cross and cross again.
Good jokes and laughter,
bad “jokes” and tears, mark the
memory of those who have touched
each other’s hearts and took upon
the shoulders each other’s fears,
and delighted at mutual success
down the passage of years.
Old friends may dwell so but
never do they grow apart, for so
long as the heart beats, there they
reside.
13.
Sex
From the moment that I entered her
I knew I was doomed, for “I” had really
not entered her, so much of me being
so far away (in Key West, I think), that this
appendage, this tuber of gristle and skin
that cannot even move of its own,
but inflates only by the caprice of millions
of others, like a fantastic barn raising
“Lift, Lift, Lift, and In!”
Is it a cosmic joke that it is shaped like
an “I” and that it sounds like “eye”
when it is as blind as the cave it
enters, like a mole, searching for
something to eat, it devours more
than it can ever know.
How often are we there
when hair meets hair?
14.
Thanksgiving Thoughts (Redux)
Please pass the turkey and giblets,
and the cornbread stuffing, too;
and, Oh, the berry sauce, and I’ll
take some rolls from the linen cloth –
hot! hot! hot! – two for me
and two for you.
And when we sit, I’ll look around
for some cider to wash down
the greens and the hen,
and we’ll partake, with the others prostrate,
in far flung huts, with sagging skins,
near shallow graves of unlucky kin.
Note to self: Next year, think these things again.
15.
Cloud Shine
Sun shine, moon shine,
but when the sky turns
we’re loathe to say “cloud shine,” too.
Do not the clouds ride
with the sun on their backs
and diffuse to the world, in unison,
the linen light no less
than the moon?
16.
Anticipation
I rise in the morning like a warrior
knowing he must don his wares and
face the nameless, faceless god
that is himself, a god who suffers
no dally and no ruse that he might
look to that spot of road under the
feet only, rather than the one that
winds on, and out of sight.
The god drags him to the sun
from where he would,
but for a moment, lie.
17.
Seeing Too
I am of the sort who fill in landscapes.
I apply my own oils and dredge
our memory for scenes, as when I drive
on a newly smoothed road with
sweet taffy lines yet unblemished
by sloughed rubber, and see the spirits
rise from the loam beneath –
the spirits of those whose lovely
brown lives were rent by the balls
of Gatling guns and iron spheres.
I am of the sort who see the crushed
skulls of Africans under the picnic tables
at the family reunion, and who wonder
how much of the dust on the
bed post has traveled time and oceans
from Bergen-Belsen or Babylon,
and I conjure rivers of blood
as I fish Swift Creek and Reynold’s Channel.
I see, too, that the sun is fair
and the sky the richest blue,
and breathed over my head by God.
And so, fellow human, do you?
Do you see, too?
18.
Song for Juliette
(November 29, 2007)
The cells, they say, were spread
like stars in the night, hot nodes
in a dark and darkening sky,
shining but fatal if too near.
“We prefer to watch from here.”
God or Nature, whatever the name,
holds the reasons for the same,
for stars and cells that run amok
and kick the pail and rend the rails
that hold the dreams of life within.
But the answer – faith only knows;
Before stars and cells we puzzle,
and strike the pensive pose.
As by and by the stars will die
specks lead on to darkened eyes
and no Beloved with leather sling
could stand that Force three cubits
high that comes to claim the stars
and you and I.
They say that we are made of stars.
Those little cells then, too.
And if they're right once pall is drawn
“Like the stuff of stars we will go on,”
and that may be all the faith we need
as we laugh and cry, naked, into our
dusky sky, inside our lovely rails,
and dream life’s dreams.
19.
Martin
January comes and so one
thinks of King, as I do now
while reading a collection of
papers from his life’s Spring;
before the thieves came, and
took away this rarest, God-cut jewel.
And so, reading above the fold,
and below, and within, I
shake and tremble for us and
think “What now?”
Who now, if not me, now?
Thoughts turn to my deeds,
and I wonder if God approves,
though my heart bursts with love
and the Spirit floods heart and nerve
and sinew, and the pains of a billion
voices echo through my brain, like his.
Who now, if not me, now?
O, Martin, come and teach me
how to enter the Way, to lift my
Cross and hold the torch of God that
maybe, in my own small way, I may
speak truth to might, before the
Big House gates, before I fade away.
Who now, if not me, now?
Who now, if not me?
20.
Tension and Soft, Moving Air
I’m a hard nut, for they tell me “meditate”
and I know, from my reading, that they are right,
and so I contemplate instead; and they say breathe
but it seems that I prefer to hold my journeyed air,
like Linus his little blue, dirty blanket.
There are those moments, though, when I
remember to breathe, like when I’m sitting
in traffic and notice the way that particular
tree’s leaves shimmy in the soft, moving air,
and I can feel the Sweet Breath move
from the tree – into my car, through the
open windows and, like the Holy Spirit itself,
through my knotted chest, and I relax and
permit the asshole in front of me to make his
left turn from the lane to the right, and glimpse
the rustling papers in his back window as he
passes, illegitimately, as Holy Spirit visits
there, too, like that specific tree, and me.
I melt a little into my seat, and remember
all the times when I turned left when I
should have turned right, or not at all.
21.
Fifty
We fret or mark the half of things, and so
fifty is a metaphor as much as years passed,
and has twice the force of forty-five as
we contemplate how long we last.
But, too, we are not one hundred, so let us
go picnic in the sun, and dance and run,
and let us write another verse as we turn
that page, and think like Zeno, for we are
always only half done.
22.
Elation
I recall being elated.
I was a boy, under the
covers with my new Hess truck,
lights on, moving through the
blizzards and valleys of
my white sheets and pillows,
the only toy that Dad would let
me take from under the tree on
Christmas Eve, and the
only toy I would need.
23.
Rest
I have grown tired of the bills,
the mortgage and the driveway tar,
and the words “I have to” which
never seem to end, and never
knowing what I think I know,
which slips away like oil or sand
into the horizons of memory.
Why this?
Why were we made to go, and
never come to rest?
I suppose, God’s love made it so,
otherwise, how do we grow?
Yet, I have grown - tired.
Yet, I would rest.
24.
Caring
After Nick’s cello lesson,
after his basketball game,
I was eager to drive home to
his mother’s dinner and
newly trimmed tree. But
he said he had a headache
and wanted something to
eat, so I pulled over and
gave him three bucks for
a bag of chips and a soda,
and felt my heart swell, filled
with gladness that I had three
bucks to hand him, and we both
enjoyed the ride
home, sated, and listening
to Elton John sing the Circle
of Life, and Don’t Let the Sun
Go Down on Me, as I reached
for a couple of chips.
And so, it would come as a
surprise when, in but two day,
I would slap his face
for the first time, for cursing
me as I counseled him to
take care of his own affairs
better than he had been,
and though I hated to touch
my own child’s face with any
but a caressing hand, that
smack was like the chips and
drink, only no music played
as his head lurched back
and my guts twisted deep
inside of me, and his deep
inside of him, as the circle keeps
turning to what must be.
25.
Miami Beach, January 2008
I like to stroll the beach between the hotels
up Collins down to Ocean Drive and
meet there the noon hour where I can
take my lunch along the strip and watch
the glowing passers-by drawn from
everywhere to a place only half real and
less than half as real as the beach that
leads me here, where I can imagine
the masted sailing ships off the shore,
years and years before.
On the beach was a young brown man
facing the spray, prayer beads and cross in
his hand, facing the ocean toward which he prayed
that maybe Jesus would come to shore and
meet him, and carry him away, and I nodded
as I passed him by, and he nodded back a
plaintive “Don’t you see, brother?”
And his dangling cross, rather than bared breasts
governed my thoughts and my day, as I came to
lie down under the sky, and thank God for
ocean, and sun, and for sending me a sign.
And so I turned to the ocean, and prayed, and
saw Jesus swimming with Buddha on the horizon.
26.
Soundings
His fellows gathr'd round the stone,
arms afold in solemn pose and
talked of light not 'fore disclosed.
And one remarked -
"I asked him, not too long before,
how we had not known. Said he:
'But none had queried me 'til this;
I have been here ever since....' "
What beauties rot in timeless holes
where fail we sound our fellows' souls
and pass by players' masks that hide
perhaps, luminescence, gold.
27.
The Mall
I used to say I am no part of this misuse
of time on Saturday afternoons,
this abuse of hard won income – splurges
on nonsense trinkets that sit on the bureau, or
in it, or under it, or in front of it, or wherever.
I resist!
I used to say that Veblen is right, of course,
that this consumption is conspicuous
with the dysfunction of shallow souls streaming
like lemmings over the cliffs of credit thrown
over the limit that their plastic cards impose.
Stuff like that . . .
I used to think I was better than the mall,
better than any mere arcade that would steal me
from my books and ‘better’ thoughts and
my duties at home, and –
But then there are the faces.
The living faces, the smiling faces, the ice cream
from the Baskin Robbins counter faces, the
beating hearts of children faces – people like me faces, browsers
in bookstore faces, friends, lovers, colleagues, fathers and sons
and mothers and daughters and clerks behind the register faces, yes,
vexed, idle, smiling, watching the clock run out on their day faces,
Registers keeping them from joining us in the aisles,
from buying the item that is placed in the pretty velum
bag that will carry it home where it will make them feel
better to be a part of a land where there are pretty velum bags
and people who put things in them, and people who make those things,
and who move those things, and who polish those things and
who live next door or down the road or across the mountains;
Feel better to be part of a kaleidoscope of color, shapes, sounds –
yes, the business owners know the score,
they peddle tiny drops of joy, not wares as I had supposed;
they know the score just as we who browse and sniff, and touch, and wish,
and buy and lay-a-way (if we must) for two weeks hence
when the eagle lands again and
we return to claim that little item that brings a smile with its feel
– it is real, after all, and
more real than homilies and ruminations in French cafes
and the black-shirted snobs in clogs and grey soldiers of fact and thinkers
who use phrases like ‘conspicuous consumption’ as though they
have an answer better than our need to see faces,
to touch things, to hold things, to give things, to bring solace to a plagued,
beleaguered spirit when yoga and Church and Marx and Jesus won’t do.
No, let there be malls – scores and scores of malls,
places to stroll and wish and buy and meet and play and do and, yes, think –
That, too.
The keepers win, but not nearly as much as I who consume
the images, the songs, the color, the warmth of human throngs who sing
and sing the same songs by the Sam Goody's and in the window, over there,
there are clogs for sale, and black shirts, too.
28.
Grace (No. 1)
Grace. Grace.
Another year passes and
I am right back to you.
No test, no doubt, no fear, no earthly
hope has been able to root
you out. You have poured out
your grace upon me and you have
called me to you. Through the dark
nights, the sunny days, the cold
winters and the warm winds of
Spring, my heart has kept its home
in its longing for you. To touch you,
to know that you walk with me
through this life, to feel your Spirit
like a portentous breeze that
whispers your name in my ear,
this is my longing. May you continue
to call me back, even as I look away,
walk away, from the very source
of life and sanity. These reflections
are themselves grace.
29.
Thoughts About Bricks
Across Broadway, from my window
I see the countless bricks of buildings,
kilned and baked years before and
filled with stories that will never be told,
just as the passers-by on the street below.
Countless stories - countless, countless - too
many to tell, or hear, or bear.
30.
God Has Run Rough With Me
Once again, God has run rough with me,
and so I may not get there with you now.
We all must heed this Captain’s call
and not too far trod toward heaven’s glade, O No!
For we must surely sigh, it seems, and wrest ourselves
back to the treacherous, edifying sea.
But why so often on bitter water
does this Captain set the sails that rip us
from sun lit shores toward stormy gale,
while we hang, scarred, in raspy ropes,
with a mere promise of blessed shores
and palms and peaceable sleep beneath
the canopy of heaven, as we bleed and bang along
the masts and gunnels and splintery deck?
For a while, let me cleave with prickly Jonah
and bid some earthly captain book me passage and even
abandon me in this abyss where I would
dare some mouthy fish come and feign my “rescue”
and deposit me on toilsome shores toward
which that other Captain’s sail had me set
to plight troth to a mission for now foregone.
And so, Dear Captain, let all Nineveh expire and the world
remain ablaze in fires started long before I came upon the stage.
Why suffer as fool to minister the fools’ parade?
Why suffer for naught but to ease a pain today
that, by our nature, will come at dawn in different dress
after this day’s sun has set?
Leave the starfish on the shore, and let them perish,
one and all.
Are we not fools to take God’s errand
when our own faces may turn to peaceful sky with
no brief to carry or orders to “heal and rectify”?
And is the voice we hear a call and not an echo
of a primal scream bounced from youth
within our souls’ caves, when first we asked
“Why?” and “Why?” again?
I am forked, though, and O would I get there with you!
But God has run rough with me, and placed my face
inside my sin and dressed me down for the dots I’ve missed,
though my arrows in first circle fell – enough for any less
than Covey, enough to spare the stripes of any, but Him,
He who dwells in me.
So for a while, let me cleave with righteous Job,
and dare a speech from whirlwinds
(I am ready now, with that precedent)
to talk back to God Almighty,
to wrestle as did Jacob of the broken limb
for that blessing that I, nay we, all deserve just
for living in this petty state from day to day.
I shall dare with a yawn his bass-toned speech on Leviathan,
and His famous question,
“Where were you when?”
I will dare them one and all.
What’s this higher light of which we dream,
and shall we have the courage to look upon it day by day,
and at what cost? Family? Friend? Sanity? Soul?
Or should we not, instead, repose?
So let me laugh a while, dear Captain –
And that is no request – as I figure out the
exits for those pains in head and chest, as I figure
out why servants, like lovers, must suffer so
and still be asked to ease alterity’s woes.
The minister deserves her rest, and push her
not too far, for ministers break too,
the ones of vision break too,
the prophets break too, and first,
who see the possibility of Your beloved dream on earth,
yet who tire of tears, torments and splits, and so are tempted
to enter that Nineveh, and live-out the time amongst them
not as servant, but as hapless friend.
But by and by, You shall not break me,
for that dream I own, and it is mine, and
my work is for those kindred souls and
not, at last, for You on high, in the seas or in the
sky.
Reward me Yes or No, that work I do is not for You
whose foggy speech and darkened clues have left me spent
and black and blue; I work for my brothers’ and sisters’ souls,
and by that toil I make my own.
And since I love them can I really rest too long
while bombs appear o’er a sweet child’s bed,
and Satan claws the hearts of youth
with bigotry and nationalist “truth” that rinses out
the sweet within, and bids they turn God’s rifle on a friend
from Palestine to old Berlin, on hapless souls, just like them?
And so in time I’ll rise, whether with vestments donned or bare flesh worn,
I’ll stand against this Satan born of “I and Other” imaginings,
and that my ministry shall be.
So I will rest, and turn my face to brother sun
and dare you, Captain, place a cloud that we may not
gaze upon each other for a while.
I have earned my time with him.
And you shall no doubt tell me hence that this was
part of plans for me, and I that much the wiser am,
one more lesson learned and lived.
And I will smile a knowing smile, and turn and take
my sister’s hand, and balm the wound on a brother’s heart, and
know that to serve is always now, one by one,
from the inside out, clad in vestments
or in my nakedness.
31.
Sienna
Today in the food court I saw a young couple
who had a pretty little girl in tow, and
they called out to her by name, "Sienna,"
as she meandered to the kiosk selling
plastic toys and little stuffed animals, things
that dazzle little girls like Sienna.
One day, perhaps thirty-six years from now,
Sienna will mount the podium at the convention of her
party, and give an acceptance speech, and she
will help determine the fate of millions.
But, for now, she is preoccupied with the
green and yellow teddy bears and oversized
crayons made of plastic, but which look
good enough to eat.
And how like Sienna we are, each of us who
thirty-six years, or months, or days, or hours
from now, will mount some new platform in
our lives, and help determine the fate of millions,
if not of people, then perhaps of blades of grass,
or flies, or grubs, or spores that will float on a summer
breeze, that allow us to be consequential, even if today
we are content to be dazzled by the wine in our glass,
the new granite counter top, or the flatware
from the Pottery Barn that we found on sale.
31.
The Shadow Lengthens
Having lost track of the time,
being caught up in the sunshine,
the waves crashing upon the shore,
I look down to find my answer.
The warmth of sun, the squeals of
children at play turned, for an instant,
into a dark winter's chill.
But it passes, and I bend to help
a little boy build his castle, also soon
to be washed away, but not yet. |
All poems: Copyright © David E. McClean, 2006-2009. All rights reserved.
|
|