and cheek bones, down to the insignia on the shirt pocket,
the ironing board and the decision against a tie,
down to the comb, even the television show he watched
while he pressed that pale green shirt, reruns and
laugh tracks, the best anyone has to fill the time
preparing for a broken heart.
But everybody knows that eye witnesses mistake
what they see for what their mind conjures
out of conglomerates and jigsaw memories.
The pub had dark wood paneling and pockets
of light. Lily and Kate were there, talking
quickly and coyly, sometimes slipping into Serbian
through the privacy of a giggle or nod.
Maybe there were other reasons
to close the world out. We were often bad.
He never got past hello and we never
even bothered with ordinary niceties.
As far as brush-offs go, this might have been one
of the most perfectly written. Turn of shoulders,
the huddle, then the pantomime: you do not matter to us
because this is where we take our punishment
and you are not allowed to make us feel worthwhile.
What did the boy in was that he could not hide
the authenticity of his hopefulness.
We know how to preen thin skin
and screen smiles through bloody teeth.
Field Guide to North American Birds
In my dream, the call
came from a rose breasted
grosbeak, but I have seen
none, only recognize
sparrows and catbirds
and hummingbirds
whom I have heard
chittering in a blur,
tickled at their luck
at being born
with the ability
to fly backwards.
Discovering
that hummingbirds sing
shouldn’t have surprised me,
but it did. While they aim
toward silence
and an almost
sightless blur,
one could imagine
their quickness
as breaking some
inaudible sound barrier
that only hummingbirds
can break. Without looking
I can tell one
just passed by.
Between afternoons
I wander into
the forest just past
peach trees and raspberry
bushes, completely
oblivious
to the blueberries
ripening in a thick grove
in the center of the lawn.
Seeking the nest
of red-tails
whom I hear but
cannot see, I catch
something
between a screech
and a squeal, a plea
and a declaration:
I am not anonymous,
you know who I am.
After dreaming
I hear what can
only be called
laughter,
and on the table,
my breakfast bowl
is full of ripe,
misshapen blueberries.
A song sparrow
left them, though
I know she was not
the one laughing.
Listen, she said,
sing.
Lawrence Hayes
Searching for God in Vietnam
—after Laura Palmer
1.
He was not in the jar of charlie ears,
not in the napalm dropped by the ton.
Not in the eyes of the forest or in the killing fields,
not in the land mines looking for limbs.
Not on the hills taken and then given back,
not in the poker game bet with young blood.
Not in the colonel’s body counts,
not in the journalists’ six o’clock scotch.
2.
Instead surely God was huddled
with all the young nurses in Chu Lai,
receiving the broken bodies
one by one, earth’s staunch
stunned angels taking in
the endless train
of stretchered flesh,
the incessant incoming dread,
their soft firm hands and quivering
hearts tending to the blasted
beautiful ones
who would never be whole
or nineteen again.
The nurses worked daily
caked in blood and disbelief,
sometimes prayed out loud
for the bleeding to stop,
or for the dying to live.
And there were the times
they rushed quickly to the scaredest ones,
boys become broken men become
boys again in the end
begging for their mommies,
looking for a last hand to hold.
3.
And at night, off shift, exhausted
and finally surrendering to sleep,
some of the nurses dreamed
of their hearts as lone candles,
then as fast-melting wax,
then the molten wax morphing
into the disfigurement of flesh
they handled each and every day,
then the dream suddenly shifting
to a fire outside
on a busy street in downtown Saigon,
the Buddhist monk a human torch
as he sits in his orange robe
in full lotus a few feet from the gas can
impossibly still inside his prayer
as his body burns
and his eyes stare cold
and the world looks on
in full daylight
astonished,
the monk’s final gift
a silent song of God’s rage
at what men do to men
every day in an ordinary war.
Newtown
1.
At dusk we come
to the small dark pond
at the edge
of these winter woods
to pour our cups
of tears and rage
into the very face
of God,
that cold black
mirror
that remains
still
and dark
and waiting.
2.
Tell me
how do you parse
pure evil,
twenty little children
cut down
like so much fodder,
all our sweet ones
who won’t ever
rise again
to greet us
laughing,
dancing
on tip toes,
so glad
when we come home?
3.
Will our hooded eyes
ever see beyond this muddied
veil, believe again in the sweetness
of gospel or grace,
feel anything again
outside this black granite fossilizing
one cold layer of the heart?
And can we ever hope
to empty ourselves enough to receive
the lost benediction of silence,
this quiet necklace of tears
we will touch and trouble
like a dark rosary the rest of our days?
Will our spirits someday return
to the ancient healing forest
that dreamt us once
in a place outside of time,
before we were born
into this fetal scrabbled light
as something human,
before memory,
before sorrow,
before breath?
&
nbsp; Will the soul finally wake somewhere
brighter one day in time to join
the lit wing of the egret
banking at daybreak
just above the swamp,
white bird lifting
through a sky so blue it hurts.
Winter Climb
This day
a clear blue ship
I climb the fresh
powdered mountain,
stand after stand
of virgin white birch,
some with their hair
pinned to the ground,
bent as if in weeping.
Halfway up,
in a small striped maple,
sewn to a lower branch
a little snow-peaked nest,
twig-weave of field hay and moss.
Inside I find
two tiny white scrolls,
curled parchments
of thin paper birch.
Gloves off,
I anxiously
unroll them,
half-expecting
hieroglyphics.
Rolled out in my palm
of course there is
nothing, just
the rich stain
of inner orange bark.
I’d still like to believe
in that kind
of miracle, mysterious
messages left by
dark-throated birds,
secrets sent in code
from the other side.
Hardest to hear sometimes
are the clear notes of the given,
how in an empty nest
a cup of snow shines.
Questions On The Cross
(They say they hung Christ on a dogwood cross.
I have some questions about this)
Did the builders first strip
the knuckled bark, plane
the crooked limbs true,
or was it a rough and rustic construction,
the wood still green and bleeding,
the old flower petals plastered
brown and rotting on the misbegotten bark?
And what was the joinery
that connected the horizontal
to the vertical, the sullen earth
with the broken sky?
Were the timbers tied
by the gut of some
unrisen animal,
or in the end simply pegged
by a single piece of wrought iron,
one thin pin of doubt?
Did some idiot savant
sing his cracked hymn of healing
in your darkest hour,
and could you hear it
through the jeers of the soldiers?
In those last minutes
of utter despair did you
lose yourself in dreams
of Magdalene,
how she once washed your feet
so gently, her long black hair
damp with tears
in the temple doorway?
And where oh where
was your Father,
and who cut you down
at the end?
Finally, what became
of the cross itself,
was it left leaning
caked in blood
in the mud on the mount
or in the end simply
dragged away by the
poor sorry faithful
to be sacrificed
into smaller pieces,
your final gift
a few hours of heat
and light to pierce
the all enveloping cold,
the dying coals
become risen ashes
the wind would scatter by morning?
Bowie Passing
1.
Mere coincidence
the earth served up
that unbelievable double rainbow
over New York skies
the day of the night
Bowie died?
I doubt it.
The Thin White Duke
went out just
as he came in,
in mystery, music,
style and grace,
patiently curating
his own last act,
courageously choreographing
his end days
of trembling and fear—
Lazarus, Blackstar—
meditations on time
past and time passing,
the finity of all that is flesh,
his life a performance piece
to the very end, sweet rainbow
arcing into the blue abyss.
2.
Every once in a while
the ineffable
gives us a clue.
You were one of them
and will always be by far
the coolest dude in the room,
the ultimate class act,
that guy up on the catwalk
in blue shoes
looking for one more dance,
one more track to lay down,
the jeweled cat collar in the sky
your final costume change, outrageous
astonishing beauty only you could pull off.
AJ Powell
Mother and Son, Morning Meditation
Silence such as it is
And the occasional riff of jazz-like anger—
Caught and carried by a neighborhood breeze
From anonymous lips
In the apartment complex across the way,
Obscenity-laced—
Or at times the sweeter song of bluesy infant-cries
Silence such as it is
With the bee-hive hum of traffic
The flotsam-and-jetsam sounds of compact cars and hemi trucks
The ebb and flow of engines
The stall and honk calling to a carpool’s congregants
While next door’s dogs bark “Intruder” at the morning sun
Silence such as it is
Threaded under by the watersong
Of our drainage-ditch creek,
A song of utility, a quiet canticle
Gurgling to stillness in an algae-skinned, peridot-green pond
In this accompanying cacophony we find our silence
Such as it is
For five minutes,
My ten-year-old son and I set a timer and forget it
While we settle into a chosen stillness,
Brief as it is,
Together in it as companions
With nothing to notice but a chattering squirrel
Or the faucet as Dad starts his coffee—
No homework or chore, no nag or complaint
Permitted trespass
We have the silence while the silence has us
And with it a camaraderie
He sits in imperfect silence
His electric-charged body slowing to a lower voltage
His bucktooth grin slackening to rest
For him, for me, temporarily there is
No pleasing or easing or expectations-meeting
For a blesséd change
He listens I think to the symphony of accidental noises
His mind maybe drifts, and his limbs loosen
We are there alone together
Mutually side-setting the world away awhile
Letting the silence
Sing us awake to each other
Bifurcated Heart
There is a bifurcated heart
Beating in my chest,
A dual heart:
Loyal and wishful, grateful and grabbing
Wanting what it doesn’t have.
Still the moon is full tonight
Hanging in the sky absolute and entire,
An orbed womb haloed by silvered mist
Birthing tides.
Whole she hangs,
Cratered by Space’s every hurled attempt
To break her. She did not break.
&nb
sp; Her strength—she is round with it.
Tonight she shows us how wrong is
Our assessment of her changeable nature.
Shadows merely cycle across her face;
Only our perception of her is ever slivered.
She is unchanging.
So also my heart.
It drums a rhythm as tight as a time table
As regular as tides
Steady while it houses
Its manifold desires and devotions.
A Poet’s Triptych
I.
I cannot capture Shakespeare’s lilting song,
The rocking sway of five iambs in a line.
Each slant and crooked rhyme reveals how long
The distance lies between his ear and mine.
For each syllabic strike that lands amiss
Upon my heart another strike does fall.
The urge and grip within me now does list;
Each nearly capsized thought I’ll keel and haul,
Then toss it on my beach of wants repressed,
And like so many words I’ve lost before,
And many other hopes I’ve not expressed,
Another grain of sand falls on my shore.
To turn my hand to poems is a wound
I cut upon myself—relief unfound.
II.
A poet is an obnoxious thing to try to be.
Smug.
Artful arrogance metering out my meaning
with a rhyming suggestion of universality—
oh please.
We are each of us alone,
and none of us is normative.
Perhaps our shared humanity is our most
carefully composed illusion.
Delusional is the attempt to write
a poem.
III.
There is no iron in me.
I am bone and flesh and compromise.
I am capitulation.
Water seeps into crevices
And soil-softness that will receive it.
Call me Puddle.
I wish I could find my mettle,
My metal-minded, mercury-fired power
To unbend the bending compliance
In my voice.
I want to speak like a prophet tonight,
A terrible light to burn behind my eyes,
A chorus of seraphim to add its vibrations to my timbre.
I want truth to blaze, tinged with sulphur.
God the Baker
I can hold both in my head,
Can’t you?
The possibility I am right and
The possibility I am wrong.
It seems the weather should’ve taught us by now:
We’re in this together and better be.