POEMS -- DECEMBER
(Please send suggestions, feedback or commentary to timiimit@mockok.com )
December 23, 2012
HERD
Tawny Roosevelt elk,
my fellow American immigrant,
I recognize your rump
drawn back in the morning fog
from forelegs washed by the Klamath.
I have been a river away from my herd
before a day's even gotten underway.Those you would join impress
only with their massive passivity.
Your ponderously racked alpha--
stately, still and ten yards ahead--
sways me most to curious musing,
"Can these creatures possibly be
dumb as Holsteins?"On my drive home you startle me again:
your alpha has led the tribe to settle
on a grassy roadside meadow
for an incongruous tourist photo op!
I smile broadly as I imagine
your leader's bemused look as a challenge,
"How now thin cows?"Tim Van Ert --"if you live, your time will come"
December 9, 2012
The Year is Not Over
Some thing was wrong this year.
The figs did not ripen before the first frost.
Every mole escaped.
All the pumpkins came out quart-sized.
Dad did not drop by with walnuts.
Donald succumbed to the Security Guards.
Diana never showed up for work.
Each eggplant grew infertile.
All flowers bloomed--purple.
Rats snuck corn husks despite two white cats.
A war continued on
while another was begun.
--if you live, your time will come
December 24, 2010
I slept and dreamed that life was joy.
I woke and found that life was service.
I served and found that service is joy.
--Tagore
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to
the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters
and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through
universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light
tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies
for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who
cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in
wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got
busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of
marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote
solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness
over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking
traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks
of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained
themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on
benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down
shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of
brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine
light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen
jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar
to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of
platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off
windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming
vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in
total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey
leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of
China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who
wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where
to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars
boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet
in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary
indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were
only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in
limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight
street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through
Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard
to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry
scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast
investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes
sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who
burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of
Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square
weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke
down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of
other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with
delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking
pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let
themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with
joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in
the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who
hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a
partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that
winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit
on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart
a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision
of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who
sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were
red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out
whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of
these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy
to the memory of his
innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar
roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid
movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked
themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of
Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who
walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon &
their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb
stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the
rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the
darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their
lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under
the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who
scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the
yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung
heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity
outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully,
gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were
growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel
suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up
clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent
editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away
unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways
& firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in
despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic,
leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses
barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German
jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet,
moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who
barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who
drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had
a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to
Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to
find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on
their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and
light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who
crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with
golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black
locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or
grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism &
were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw
potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented
themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and
harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who
were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a
wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the
wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and
Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream
of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the
tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down
to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a
wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful
little bit of
hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not
safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time--
and
who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of
the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2
visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash
of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and
stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame,
rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of
thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in
Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time
come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked
mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that
shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the
poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch!
Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children
screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping
in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless!
Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the
incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and
Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the
vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind
is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose
ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil
and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose
poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless
hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely!
Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch!
Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in
whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out
of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light
streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible
suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios,
tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the
American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and
crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten
years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down
on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all!
the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the
roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where
you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel
very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my
mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve
secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible
humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same
dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition
has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the
bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the
actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang
on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty
more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its
pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you
accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution
against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where
you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human
Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there
are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final
stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and
kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake
up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself
imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your
underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk
dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to
the door of my cottage in the Western night
-- by Allen
Ginsberg
December 13, 2010
Big Yellow Taxi
They paved paradise
And put
up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's
gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They took all the
trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and
a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what
you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Hey farmer farmer
Put away the D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Late last night
I heard my screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
I said don't it always seem to go
That you
don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put
up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Decmeber 10, 2010
What The Doctor Said
He
said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I
counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said
I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he
said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let
yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against
your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said
something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not
wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just
looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and
shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth
had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong
--Raymond
Carver
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/raymond_carver/poems/5004
December 7, 2010
The Pond
Night covers the pond with its
wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among
minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
the surface of the
pond is metal.
Within, your eyes are open. They contain
a memory I
recognize, as though
we had been children together. Our ponies
grazed on
the hill, they were gray
with white markings. Now they graze
with the dead
who wait
like children under their granite breastplates,
lucid and
helpless:
The hills are far away. They rise up
blacker than childhood.
What do you think of, lying so quietly
by the water? When you look that way I
want
to touch you, but do not, seeing
as in another life we were of the
same blood.
--Louise Glück.
from The House on the
Marshland.
December 4, 2010
Time Heals All Wounds--But One
He was a huge
hulk of a man
but the blade cut his belly
like it was a melon.
He was cheerful at first
but as weeks wore on
like his cheap shoes
and time spun out
with miles of gauze packing,
his wound stank
and Leroy shrank
shrivelled nearly
to skin and skeleton.
One day, barely
conscious, he whispered:
"Let me go, Doc,"
and I did.
--Vernon Rowe
BLOOD & BONE: POEMS BY PHYSICIANS
December 31, 2009
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as for as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
--Robert Frost
(published in ROBERT FROST SELECTED POEMS)
December 30, 2009
A Sick Child
The postman comes when I am still in bed.
Postman, what do you have for me today?
I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)
Then he says--what shall I have him say?
This letter says that you are president
Of--this word here; it's a republic.
Tell them I can't answer right away.
It's your duty. No, I'd rather just be sick.
Then he tells me there are letters saying everything
That I can think of that I want for them to say.
I say, Well, thank you very much. Good-bye.
He is ashamed, and turns and walks away.
If I can think of it, it isn't what I want.
I want...I want a ship from some near star
To land in the yard, and beings to come out
And think to me: So this is where you are!
Come. Except that they won't do,
I thought of them...And yet somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of--think of me!
--Randall Jarrell
(published in RANDALL JARRELL SELECTED POEMS
edited by William H. Pritchard)
December 29, 2009
To Turn Back
The grass people bow
their heads before the wind.
How would it be
to stand among them, bending
our heads like that...?
Yes...and no...perhaps...
lifting our dusty faces
as if we were waiting for
the rain...?
The grass people stand
all year, patient and obedient--
to be among them
is to have only simple
and friendly thoughts,
and not be afraid.
--John Haines
(published in CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
edited by Donald Hall)
December 28, 2009
Warning Lights On
Kate Lynn's two year old vagina
flashes red against exam table white paper
like the sirened light
of an ambulance wanting to pass.
You say she keeps
rubbing herself there
with objects found at play.
If she's showing us a way
she has learned to explore,
I wonder if you fear asking
who led her this way before?
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 27, 2009
Rock Music
Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
this at your school. To it, everyone's subhuman
for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.
You'll be one of those if these things worry you.
The beautiful Nazis, why are they so cruel?
Why, to castrate the aberrant, the original, the wounded
who might change our species and make obsolete
the true race. Which is those who never leave school.
For the truth, we are silent. For the flattering dream,
in massed farting reassurance, we spasm and scream,
but what is a Nazi but sex pitched for crowds?
It's the Calvin SS: you are what you've got
and you'll wrinkle and fawn and work after you're shot
though tears pour in secret from the hot indoor clouds.
--Les Murray
` (published in SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS)
December 26, 2009
Calling Down the Geese
He's calling down the geese,
my uncle, low in the gray hull.
His face billows with blowing
through a wooden throat
a note all December, all bird.
He's blind. Once a savage--
beating his wife on Christmas.
I know that, watching him
listen downwind. He smiles, suddenly,
holding my arm to be still. Be still.
I forgive. I love this moment.
He's calling down the geese,
the gander's ear, its memory,
breath drawn across the bony reeds.
--Henry Hughes
(published in MEN HOLDING EGGS)
December 25, 2009
Life Cycle of Ideas
An idea whistles with your lips,
laughs with your breath.
An idea hungers for your body.
An alert, hot to dissemble and share,
it snatches up cases of its style
from everywhere, to start a face.
An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks. It lusts to have
loomed perpetual in the night colours:
an idea is always a social climb.
Whether still braving snorts,
ordering its shootings, or at rest
among its own charts of world rule,
a maturing idea will suddenly want
to get smaller than its bearers.
It longs to be a poem:
earthed, accurate immortal trance,
buck as stirrups were,
blare as the panther.
Only art can contain an idea.
--Les Murray
(published in SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS)
December 24, 2009
Rick and Sue's Guest House
On the window, partly blocking
images of Oregon's rock rugged
coast, a plastic paste-on cornucopia
proclaims (in July) Happy Thanksgiving
while on the wall to the left
a cute cat tail swings out the clicking
clock seconds--innocent scythe
menacing the plaque placed below it
to announce Christ as the head of this house
AND the unseen guest.
But don't look down at the clear-cut below,
for that's what provides this ocean view.
Turn to the walls around you
and see Sue's photos on the wall.
In the dark of late night man's light
illuminates dung-rimmed rock
still above inky ocean
where clouded sky meets
imagined horizon.
Between me and the windowed wall
stands Rick speaking of his mistakes
which weren't his responsibility
and his accomplishments
which were.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 23, 2009
A Woods Still Intact
Farmer says he'll take his cat back there
to clear the land to plant firs and hemlock.
I don't see heavy tracks. No slashed branches
or severed limbs hang brown
like sausage aging in the smokehouse.
There's still bear scat to give a wild smell.
And dried horse turds not even kicked aside--
yes, this path still serves the slow trot ride.
--Tim Van Ert
December 22, 2009
Mixed Greens
Like the newspaper tumbling away in a wind
Our life tantalizes us with knowledge--
If only we could catch up, hold in in hand.
What magic place will teach us these tricks?
In the ocean waters below Esalen's hot springs
See otters dive and duck the waves with grace
Then surface to stare the world face-to-face
Suggesting we all can speak together.
So, planet earth, point your exit doors to Esalen
Where all growth is earthy, shammanic, organic--
Mixed salad greens sown, grown and eaten
By the green, the mixed-up and the Work Scholars.
Feeling like peasants herded into Rome's coliseum
We sweat the thumbs-down work assignments--
Thrown in the duck pond or tossed to toilet-duty for cabins.
And pray for grounds, office or (heaven!) farm and
garden crew.
Garden power from the sun, power in the seed, power to the bloom.
Go there, to the goddess, to broadcast the harvest heart-promised.
Watch the sprout diva color her life-burst lunch tray palette.
Lay your life at garden Buddha feet before this one moment's missed.
Body-work sounds harder than massage.
Which sounds softer than end-organs sangre-engorged;
No one leaves Esalen without the lingo
Of the long, liquid and languid touch.
Where else can a dozen adults snake blindfolded to hot tubs
where, uplifted with song, folks float past the Friday night voyeurs?
Or stand topless in line to sweat, chant and trade painful secrets
With red-hot rocks answering back sparklers and steam?
At Esalen the work is never complete
As long as the Work Scholars are eager to repeat;
To work week-end shifts, pay, play, pray
And to process, without violence or drugs, the feelings of the day.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 21, 2009
Wishing Kisses
Dark words dart
out of my mind--
overhead assault
deranged hunger for manna
melting from the roof of your mouth.
Cryptic tunnels
embark your cavern yawn.
Chipped tooth fixes
my attention;
some eyes easily adjust to dark viscera.
Dreams roam range
wobble their way
to your cavernous room
where I hope to tumble behind my tongue
sphere into sphere.
--Tim Van Ert
December 20, 2009
Men Holding Eggs
I'm walking over the Brooklyn Bridge
with my eight-year-old sister.
I can throw her over the wall, I think.
Physical laws make it so. Easy. There are no
nets, no arms beneath the stone.
The idea sparrows through my head,
holding a Song vase at the Chait Gallery.
A thousand years of celadon blue
breaking between my black shoes.
For years I really did it--matchbox cars,
crowded jets, an HO caboose
pulled from the Christmas tracks
and tossed out a window. In the car sometimes I panicked--
made my father stop. He'd yell, I'd cry,
cry for some G.I. Joe rolling off the shoulder.
I feel it on this bridge, clasping my sister's
lemon hand. She's whistling something, her hair
bouncing light feathers
down her back. She asks about a black schooner
tacking toward the Hudson.
There are men on deck holding eggs.
--Henry Hughes
(published in MEN HOLDING EGGS)
December 19, 2009
Song of Being a Child
When the Child was a child
It walked with arms hanging
Wanted the stream to be a river
and the river a torrent
And this puddle, the sea
It didn't know
It was a child
Everything for it was filled with Life
and all life was one
Saw the horizon without trying to reach it
Couldn't rush itself
And think on command
Was often terribly bored
And couldn't wait
Passed up greeting the moments
And prayed only with its lips
It didn't have an opinion about a thing
Had no habits
Often sat cross-legged, took off running
Had a cow lick in its hair
And didn't put on a face when photographed
It was the time of the following questions
Why I am me and why not you
Why am I here and why not there
Why did time begin and where does space end
Isn't what I see and hear and smell
Just the appearance of the world in front of the world
Isn't life under the sun just a dream
Does evil actually exist in people
Who really are evil
Why can't it be that I who am
Wasn't before I was
And that sometime I, the I, I am
No longer will be the I, I am
It gagged on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding
And on steamed cauliflower
And now eats all of it, and not just because it has to
It woke up once in a strange bed
And now time and time again
Many people seemed beautiful
And now not so many and now only if it's lucky
It had a precise picture of Paradise
And now can only vaguely conceive of it at best
It couldn't imagine nothingness
And today shudders in the face of it
Dove for the ball
Which today rolls between its legs
With its "I'm here" it came
Into the house which is now empty
It played with enthusiasm
And now only with such former concentration
Where its work is concerned
When the game, task, activity, subject
happens to be its work
It was enough to live on apples and bread
And it's still that way
Berries fell
Only like berries into it's hand, and still do
The fresh walnuts made its tongue raw, and still do
Atop each mountain it craved
Yet a higher mountain, and in each city it craved
Yet a bigger city, and still does
Reach for the cherries in the tree top
As elated as it still is today
Was shy in front of strangers, and still is
It waited for the first snow, and still waits that way
It waited restlessly each day for the return of the loved one
And still waits that way
It hurled a stick like a lance into a tree
And its still quivering there today
The child, the child was a child
Was a child, was a child, was a child, was a child
Child, child, child
When the child, when the child, when the child
When the child, when the child
The child, child, child, child, child
--Peter Handke
(recorded by Van Morrison on PHILOSOPHER STONE)
December 18, 2009
Tilt-a-Whirling
Oh, twirling girly, tell me,
how did we get here,
holding onto the edge
of a pink teacup swizzing
under a cantaloupe moon?
The lights--green, yellow, and gumball blue--
twist round my neck like birthday streamers.
Mommy, mommy, you whisper,
I'm feeling kinda hectic inside,
touch your ten fingertips to mine,
I don't want to die.
Oh, love,
I think you're sitting on my cotton candy,
pillow against me, then, and, if you must,
please, please, please, into my cold hand,
press your salt lake palms.
Your clenched neck pinching my cradling elbow,
jalapeno juice blinding your tilting eyes,
you loved me before, do you love me now?
I didn't think the end would be like this--
running shrieking circles
around each other like beauty contestants
in the breakneck of fancy holiday lights,
two blue lovers in a heavy cup.
--Melissa Huseman
(published in NORTHWEST REVIEW)
December 17, 2009
The Wiser Buds' Toads
Summer of '64 my brother and I jumped our window
to meet up with Doug La Fleur five midnights running.
With flashlights gripped tight we were gunning
to flush out them toads--since Doug had found two
in his mother's flower bed, we had to find four more
between our mom's snapdragons and roses.
That December Mike and I moved to a house
six hundred miles north on a lot so bare
a helicopter must have dropped it, complete, right there.
No southern eternal summer could prepare two city kids
for northern California's winter of '64:
we'd heard of floods--but not of sounds!
Still had the flashlights, and now new rubber boots.
Into a snowy midnight we stole, following the symphonic sound.
Deep in the tan oak woods across the street we found
a pond lined with peepers caught blowing bubble gum
balloons to power their jazz riot. Unlike their slothful
cousins, these amphibians were beyond our grasps.
But now, after all these decades, a passion grips me
so I want to squeeze the air from such tensile throats--
Budweiser's celebrity frogs have so gotten my goat!
A nauseating reminder that childhood's precious memories
are not impervious to the psychology of consumption--
and of the price we pay for watching television.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 16, 2009
Tree Choreography
Planting a row of trees
Some person choreographies
A line dance only time sees
As poplars rise, firs lean and saplings freeze.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A 1st EDITION OF HAI-CHOO:
little sneezes of profound dittycism)
December 15, 2009
Sea Being
In tides of life, in storms of
action,
Up and down I wave,
Weave I hither and yon,
Birth and the grave,
A sea without bound,
A changeful weaving,
A radiant living.
(Faust, Goethe)
Standing at the window I plucked
from your left thigh smoke we shared
and, pausing, broke it in two.
We inhaled,
held our breaths,
heralded our transformation:
watching this remaining half
drifting down
through the open window, swirling below;
not watching
the other half disappearing.
Serpentine ribbon threads the plasma.
Sacred object rides the hemmed-in surf.
Smooth undulations part waters
Sailing vibrations back among themselves.
Softly the shedding snake slides from shore to shore
Endlessly encircling, embracing, excorporating.
Push and pull being felt,
ebbing and flowing smelt.
The song of barking
seals our open letter.
Together we call to sea,
Mother of our beings.
Her vitalization
meets our stillness
in waves of elution.
Cleansed, we turn in salty tribute:
our humble creation
returns.
Serpentine ribbon threads the plasma.
Sacred object rides the hemmed-in surf.
Smooth undulations part waters
Sailing vibrations back among themselves.
Softly the shedding snake slides from shore to shore
Endlessly encircling, embracing, excorporating.
Perched on the coast's bluff,
in unadorned shamelessness
lay the pink bed--
nor more dirty nor brave
than the miner's lettuce
in full flesh around it.
Here the ocean is in recital,
the walls Monterey pines,
and the lovers naked in their adornments.
--Tim Van Ert
(from CREATE THAT LOVE THAT LOVE CREATES)
December 14, 2009
Foraging
Sedulous eyes search for what will be
smoothly grabbed by tutored talons,
processed by gut instinct,
then regurgitated consonant and vowel
to keep vigorous
generation of growth.
--Tim Van Ert
December 13, 2009
A Catechism
Who challenged my soldier mother?
Nobody.
Who kept house for her and fended off the world?
My father.
Who suffered most from her oppressions?
My sister.
Who went out into the world to right its wrongs?
My sister.
Who became bitter when the world didn't listen?
My sister.
Who challenged my soldier sister?
Nobody.
Who grew up and saw all this and recorded it and
kept wondering how to solve it but couldn't?
Guess who.
--William Stafford
(published in THE WAY IT IS)
December 12, 2009
Sonnet in Search of an Author
Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman
under the trees in full excess
matching the cushion of
aromatic pine-drift fallen
threaded with trailing woodbine
a sonnet might be made of it
Might be made of it! odor of excess
odor of pine needles, odor of
peeled logs, odor of no odor
other than trailing woodbine that
has no odor, odor of a nude woman
sometimes, odor of a man.
--William Carlos Williams
(published in PICTURES FROM BRUEGHEL [1962])
December 11, 2009
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
--William Carlos Williams
(published in SPRING AND ALL [1923])
December 10, 2009
ANTHEM
When you THINK
LOVE
Is only for the LUCKY
OR
the STRONG
you REMEMBER
LOVE
Is always there for the
EXPERIENCING
both RIGHT and WRONG.
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
December 9, 2009
I, ME, MEEE
V
O
L
V
E
My image the disciplined eclectic:
Striving to expand and enfold
Distinct discipline of the specialist.
Strong with the force of flexibility
I am rebounding to affirm
Steadiness of grounding in One being.
See here my Work and see here is my Play--
A volatile combination
Igniting life energy day to day!
Discipline offers a key to the self;
Which, free, is alone discipline--
Transcending work and play through their fusion.
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
December 8, 2009
Something Amiss in the Isles of Langerhans
Isles are always so far away
one needs a boat, to be patient
and trusting that the oarsman,
the tide, the wind will carry you
safely to these isolated reminders:
speckles, sparklers, dots in the center--
bull-eyes.
Out, ye specks--I bear no blood
of guilt, nor defect deserved.
I'll grow to be a sailor
laughing on the back of dolphins.
The isles will just be spots
in the corners of my deeply diving
blue eyes.
Bound for a journey over fitful seas,
clasp my other hand tighter
than I clasp cool iron rungs before
teetering down these aisles.
If you accept my devil's bargain,
if you love me too hard--
I'll die.
I shiver standing here.
These are cold, treeless islands.
Where's the hand I see out of
the corner of my eye as I dive
further into my fitful dreams
floating alone in waters'
dulled sky?
I remember a pleasing song,
specks and dots on the sheet;
not pinned like a common thief
to a leafless tree,
more like fruits presented without a note
on my doorstep so I can cuddle
a newborn fantasy with each
warm bite.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NOTHING ELSE MATTERS)
December 7, 2009
Anticipation
Under a half moon
my mouth moves round,
empty as the night,
before devouring the light
I imagine from your full mouth.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A 1ST EDITION OF HAI-CHOO : little sneezes of profound dittycism)
December 6, 2009
Marengo
Out of the sump rise the marigolds.
From the rim of the marsh, muslin with mosquitos,
Rises the egret, in his cloud-cloth.
Through the soft rain, like mist, and mica,
the withered acres of moss begin again.
When I have to die, I would like to die
on a day of rain--
long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.
And I would like to have whatever little ceremony there might be
take place while the rain is shoveled and shoveled out of the sky.
and anyone who comes must travel, slowly and with thought,
as around the edges of the great swamp.
--Mary Oliver
(published in NEW AND SELECTED POEMS)
December 5, 2009
Brainstorm
The house was shaken by a rising wind
That rattled window and door. He sat alone
In an upstairs room and heard these things: a blind
Ran up with a bang, a door slammed, a groan
Came from some hidden joist, a leaky tap,
At any silence of the wind, walked like
A blind man through the house. Timber and sap
Revolt, he thought, from washer, baulk and spike.
Bent to his book, continued unafraid
Until the crows came down from their loud flight
To walk along the rooftree overhead.
Their horny feet, so near but out of sight,
Scratched on the slate; when they were blown away
He heard their wings beat till they came again.
While the wind rose, and the house seemed to sway,
And window panes began to blind with rain,
The house was talking, not to him, he thought,
But to the crows; the crows were talking back
In their black voices. The secret might be out:
Houses are only trees stretched on the rack.
And once the crows knew, all nature would know.
Fur, leaf and feather would invade the form,
Nail rust with rain and shingle warp with snow,
Vine tear the wall, till any straw-borne storm
Could rip both roof and rooftree off and show
Naked to nature what they had kept warm.
He came to feel the crows walk on his head
As if he were the house, their crooked feet
Scratched, through the hair, his scalp. He might be dead,
It seemed, and all the noises underneath
Be but the cooling of the sinews, veins,
Juices, and sodden sacks suddenly let go;
While in his ruins of wiring, his burst mains,
The rainy wind had been set free to blow
Until the green uprising and mob rule
That ran the world had taken over him,
Split him like seed, and set him in the school
Where any crutch can learn to be a limb.
Inside his head he heard the stormy crows.
--Howard Nemerov
(published in THE WINTER LIGHTNING)
December 4, 2009
Alley Oops
This alley stretches out like a depressive's day.
Sax's notes were flat as my view of the future
walking Memphis back alleys.
I'm thrown into darkness like Mother would toss
our alley tabby at night.
My heart's like an alley to a youth--purposeful but forgotten,
waiting to be discovered.
Alleyways colorful as a black and white documentary.
This one stretches longer than all the runways I fear to fly.
He turned to find the way empty as the last alley bottle at 2 a.m.
A view of peoples' yards from the alley is like finding a stranger's
diary at a yard sale.
Long and unreachable, like the alleys of my childhood,
your love felt to me then.
Forgotten, unkempt as depression-era alleys were your kisses
that night.
I slip on the gravel of your words, the way my bike would falter
as I tore across our alley on way to school.
Alley shows your decapitated sunflowers--lots returned
to wild ways of weeds.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 3, 2009
HE CALLS IT CUNNING
A conning man
Appearing to go straight,
Inwardly cannot wait
To try again.
Daily compelled
By rearranging life --
New job, new home, new wife --
He won't be held.
Trained to be good,
But sports tug him forward
To cash in for rewards
That virtues should.
Programmed in genes?
Or encoded by faults
Of parents without thoughts
On what life means?
It's the playful,
Shallow world of pain
That calls to him again:
Endless cycle.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE YOUR TIME WILL COME)
December 2, 2009
The great malady of the 20th century, implicated
in all of our troubles and affecting us individually
and socially, is "loss of soul." When soul is neglected,
it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in
obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.
Introduction to Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore
COMPULSIONS
Charcoal smudge whispers
compel thoughts which carry
swirling, cold, and urgent:
child floated on papyrus,
man immersed in words,
soul spraying over falls.
Obsessions work the mind
as a child's magnet
pulls paper clips from behind
crisp, white, lined paper --
empty of study's signs
except for disguised trace
this show of force has left
in a developing
imagination.
Red dogs approach as friends
with pup-like whimpers
that we pick wild berries
they may nuzzle from hands
to spare themselves the thorns.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NOTHING ELSE MATTERS)
December 1, 2009
Ex Libris
His stare wades through a wide window
into the stream of February weeks
past cherry tree's
sated woman
pregnant with love.
This moment holds bouquets
leaves frozen in ground,
petals' leaves in night ink drowned.
Below the window
he scribbles praise
to the wood iris.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in SEEDS ON A WIND RIDE)