1.
One wrong turn on a highway
as slippery as ours, and I skid
through the guardrail and plunge
over a cliff, falling like snow.
Since I’m the first at the crash scene
and a doctor, I try to operate
on my wounds in the body of this poem.
Scalpel. Forceps. Clamps. Pen.
This is only exploratory verse.
With no obvious contusions,
fractures, or cuts, I hurt all over,
but in no place I can point to.
I don’t know what to operate on.
2.
Maybe a fleck of memory,
sharp as a glass splinter too fine
to see, was large enough to feel.
Maybe land mines litter the mind
with hidden trip wires.
Maybe I swerved to miss hitting
a dead self in the road.
Maybe I scraped myself
paddling into the vortex of a flashback.
3.
At last I’ve found the node of pain,
a small point lodged deep
where attachment flows.
But the tongs of metaphor
are useless there. Extraction calls
for interplay, contact, reply.
We don’t speak very often.
A week will crawl by,
and then so much depends
on a few slender minutes
which cascade like droplets
in a waterfall: slowly when you
follow one’s arc and fate,
swiftly if you view them all.
4.
Yes, in dreamtime I want you
to pour into the seams of my life,
fill all the vacancies, lay down
a map of song lines. But, confess,
and I awaken the sleeping wildcat,
rejection, because you will not,
cannot comply. Your silence
takes shape as leavings inside,
while it may be only the scent
of shame and embarrassment.
Rebuff weighs more then favour
on the periodic table,
and this pain is pure unattanium,
heavy enough to send fissures
through a platinum heart.
A week ago we seemed close
as a binary star, twin lights circling
without tumbling in or away.
Today you sparkle
with the cold brilliance of rime
in another universe far off
near the beginning of time.
§
In a blog devoted to poetry, please allow me the digression of recommending to you Diane Ackerman's nonfiction books. Like Loren Eiseley (to whom I promise you I shall return, if only as a topic), Ackerman writes about the sciences with the skill of a poet, the critical mind of a philosopher, the profound wonder of a child and the grace of the living dance.
Filling in the spaces
You have a wife
with a pretty name
I learned glancing
at the dedication
in your new book,
while a small ingot
of jealousy fell
through my chest.
But then reason flared:
self said to self:
You want him happy,
in a well-furnished life
quilted with love.
He exists out of context
only at work –
a floating now/here world
minus past, future, yens,
quirks, sorrows, and family.
He divests himself
of self’s trappings for your sake,
Bearing everything,
he bares nothing.
It’s a sleight of mind.
You weave his tapestry
from the minute threads
of talk, manner, and mien.
The Acknowledgments page:
many friends, your wife again,
several gents with whom
you share a close camaraderie:
a circle richly fastened. Envy burned
a single match briefly inside.
The Introduction:
when I found you
began at the beginning,
with your personality as a child,
I stopped mid-sentence
and closed the book like a handclap.
I’m not ready for your diary,
lest I fabricate what’s missing;
from vellum and a few hints,
create a portrait in mind-ochre,
a pigment of my imagination.
Remember Pandora?
When all the evils had flown,
the box wasn’t empty.
What remained was something
crueller still: hope.
A hope that persists and kills.
§
Holding Radium
1.
You handle me
as if composing a haiku –
a few pithy strokes
with an effect
that’s pure lightning.
What does it feel like
gathering a wild, dark,
iridescent thing in your hands,
tight enough to shelter it
and even calm its trembling,
yet loose enough
not to fright or imprison it?
Sometimes how we are
is the most beautiful thing
I know – an invisible gift
I’ve craved since I was little.
But there’s no word for it
in my heart’s vocabulary.
2.
Truth is so precious
I hate parting with it.
Yes, lately, when we speak,
I open the summer house
of my sensibility to you,
and air out the private rooms
where dreams and sagas
scatter like quilts on a bed.
Still, I do not tell you
everything I imagine.
There are places I’m afraid
you may not wish to go,
say my juicy, carnal, physical
mind-play. For instance,
when you joked about
not wanting to squash a plan
of mine with your ‘big feet,’
I paused, before asking: How big are they?
A tall man, you have large hands.
I wondered if all your limbs
were tall. At once I pictured you
lying naked on a summer lawn.
Succulence ensued.
All this happened in a flash,
between tock and tick.
3.
What freedom: playing with feelings
of pure experiment and risk,
knowing they’ll be patrolled
by the border guards of one’s will –
instead of being kidnapped
by those feelings, terrorised,
oppressed, hauled away.
I presume windswept borders
thrill you, even walking them
obliquely, without fall or mishap.
Mastering that equilibrium
must feel like holding radium.
It’s a skill I long to refine,
and another new word for you
to teach me in time. Spell it slowly,
so that I can read between the lines.
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