Amy
"Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails."
- Osip Mandelstam
Your moist brooding eyes
deliciously temptingly cloyingly pleading
submissively fragile, lonely, desperate and frail,
beckon, plead, and implore from your side of the bed
for shelter, protection, haven, dominion and more,
Promising, offering, paying
submission, surrender, support,
sweet succor, sustenance, song . . .
I've eaten your apples,
and tasted the drink from your wells.
I swam with you. You hold even harder when sinking,
when clinging the strongest, you fail.
You hold my head under, drown me, and swim for the shore.
Your songs I know well echo,
in the deepening bottomless swirl of your tides,
the internal, infernal, alluringly innocent chorus you sing
to call for the knight who this night
might rescue the damsel distressed.
I'm leaving your islands this Sabbath. So long.
I'm sailing for shore just as fast as I can.
I'll find me a Helen? Or build me a fortress
far from your sea and your songs.
These sheets with their ripples and waves
will bring me to safety, to land,
far from your songs, and the sinking abyss
of your desperately, cloyingly, feigning drowning embraces,
from storms which abate, then storm on your side of the sea.
* * *
Separation
When the day ends, and dim lights falter, the sun sets,
and the warm wind turns to the sweaty heat of the night,
When the pavement cracks from a brown clay sky,
and the tree leaves stilled, saw no rain for days -- dry branches hanging heavy in the still.
When the tongue dries, and the eyes sting burning in the night,
and a call or a cry in the throat like a rat in a pipe bend swells . . .
Then the rain comes, the small drops cool. The leaves turn to the gentle slant from the sky,
and the ground shivers like a spaniel waking to the whisper of the rain.
(I tell you, love:
The rain falls
and does not fall when it wills.)
Any flower can bloom in the rain down smiling,
but only best flowers in deserts or droughts
can echo the whisper of the rain.
* * *
A girl swept out to sea, Makaha Beach
Come we now to a marriage bed
to the shores of a sea so cold
on this wedding night under ice sheets
to gaze on holy union.
I heard a girl.
You slid her out on water.
At Makaha you stole that girl away.
You clasped her gently at the waist.
A waltz it seemed to us on shore.
A feat of grace and majesty.
A glide.
So slow, deliberating,
A diamond cutting glass.
* * *
Leningrad
Your shorter, more defenseless buildings
balk backwards on their heels from upper floors,
mill along the Moika, crowd around canals,
stand in frightened, frozen disarray,
timid, awkward, caught, ashamed,
children after recess still on the concrete lot,
their game of tag frozen by the stern pedagogue's gaze
through the frost-lined pane of Peter's window to the West,
While your heavy, overbearing buildings,
wrinkled old faces, flushing pink and blue, in your bitter, numbing cold,
crunch down your frozen, cracking, muddy soil,
brace on solemn, bending columns -- canes,
puff impatiently, grumbling with their neighbors,
in sullen, muted tones complain,
queue up along the Neva's banks,
waiting for yesterday's millennium,
that golden age they promised or the silver age they saw
-- Any age but this.
* * *
The Finnish Station
They were tending the train,
prying the lids and poking the limbs of that tired, resolute maiden
with all their cruel contraptions.
She stood on the platform,
her tears trying their way from the plain of her face
to the forest of fur on her collar.
He stepped back,
his hands rounding that terrible curve
from her skin to her outermost clothing.
I saw from my window their parting --
all those things done for the tearing away at train stations,
that private cutting away so cruelly done in a crowd.
* * *
Brooding
Future is a word which hardly rhymes.
It has no place in poems or thoughts;
at times I wonder at those very things
that make the present burn so bright
another day will seem too dim.
Without the thing I have, I know,
I'd even miss the fear the future brings.
* * *
Foreboding
Love now takes what need wants then.
Then now makes us wonder when
the love we need makes now again.
* * *
Return
Today, not long,
like yesterday is gone.
Open night's sack for promises gone wrong.
* * *
Recollections
Nothing is more important
than the first words of love,
except the last words of love.
Everything else is not important.
* * *
Natalya
"Future is a word which hardly rhymes..."
Within you without me
is with me always.
The end was no end,
but a mean beginning.
The future turned past,
the present remembering
a future foreboding
whose presence now is worse than its foretaste and fear.
Longer than now, your absence stays with me all ways.
An empty blank thing whose fullness spills, overflowing so
within you without me is with me always.
The end has no end.
The end has no end.
The end has no end
* * *
Lame
a bird lost one wing.
a squirming squawking thing
pretends to fly.
a limping bird without a wing --
contemptuously pitiable thing
like me
who lost our we
but I will walk for now.
though we will never fly again
I will.
I will walk until.
* * *
On Russian Trains
On this chilling, starry night, crossing flat plains.
The bland monotony of decrepit fences and gates.
Swayed buildings, bedded down in snow for night.
Trains passing through. The lonely clacking on rails.
Visions. Staccato reflections from train windows, on posts.
Lit windows flicker by. Cycles. Of trees. Seasons. Generations. Cities. And towns.
This long passing into night's longest night.
Over the land. This special land.
(Are there footprints in Russian snow?).
Most profaned and holy land.
Tomorrow comes morning. The climb up the Carpathian Range.
Customs, and questions. Entries and exits, and answers.
Transfers and duties and poses again.
But tonight. On this night. No journey. Suspension. No flight.
I am not I, but a recorded reflection. A palimpsest. Cinema film.
A collection of etchings, engravings, events . . .
Oh Lord, keep me on trains
and keep me out of my way!
***
Listening to the Pacific, Point Lobos
What draws a man to the sea at night
but the grim finality of crashing surf
the sounds of struggle assault assault
of wave and wave
the rushing sands to mounds of dying seaweed thrown
past the tracks of crabs.
In this sheet of fog
lightest side of the edgeless black
fear grows in the unseen curl of waves.
* * *
Loving
Love is all, but when all is love,
then love steps back to watch love love,
then love steps back to wait love's love;
When all is love, love fails.
Love
loves love
but lovers fail
when love needs love or love needs love.
Love loves less
when love loves more.
Or, love loves more
when love loves less.
Love love,
then,
but don't love lover.
* * *
After rainfall, Manoa Valley
Illuminating stars
phantoms of a daylight passed
lie muffled now by mound of cloud.
Silence binds on all it sees
a promise to be still.
Rain has stopped, and noise subsided.
Candles now would never shadow dawn.
Water ridden wild by pounding winds
through spasm comes to fitful calm.
Riddled, splattered drops no longer splash.
Movement tensed is now released in stillness.
All the world a tear-stained cheek.
All the sounds a fading whimper.
Universe pauses, holding breath,
waiting for one drop to form and fall.
* * *
Manoa sunsets
Sometimes the sun sets with such abandon
that even condominiums stretch and face the light.
Then the sky above knows a thousand shades of blue.
In moments, mountain rains creep down from Tantalus,
like mother
picks her way
towards
sleeping child.
* * *