Pedestrian Club

Distances are deceptive.
In Cambridge, thirty minutes' drive
into Harvard Square
translates to forty-five minutes
of walking (an hour if I'm in
no rush.)

In Beverly, nothing is more
than fifteen minutes away by car,
but that time encompasses
more distance.
Ten minutes to my daughter's school
turns out to be more than three miles,
an hour's brisk walk.
Repeatedly, I am deceived
by easy drives along the Bass
or Danvers Rivers. Everything
takes far longer to walk to
than I expect, leaving me footsore.

It's a lonely pursuit. Excepting
downtown, sidewalks are generally empty,
unused, clean, devoid of the small marks
of the surrounding human population.
Not having to concentrate
on weaving through human traffic,
I notice things along my path:
a perfectly manicured lawn,
a collection of cigarette butts,
the gnarled bark of an enormous,
ancient locust tree, a stack of
spectacular mushrooms, lining a stump.

Roughly once each mile,
I pass a fellow foot-traveler,
and every one I pass greets me,
smiling, wishes me a good morning,
as though we are old friends
or members of some secret society.
I smile back, nod, give greetings,
happy to be counted among them.

October 13, 2011

First Draft: Given

Here's another yoga poem. I haven't done yoga alone, in a natural setting, in a long time, and I was astonished by the fine details I became aware of when my mind was quiet and meditative.

Given
May 29, 2011

I remove shoes, socks,
step gingerly onto
clover-strewn grass.
My thirsty soles drink.

I stand in tadasana,
shoulder blades back,
palms at my heart,
begin the sun salute.

I have no grips or blocks.
To preserve my wrists,
I perform downward dog
on my knuckles, awkwardly.

Looking down into the clover,
I spy something rare.
I choose to ignore it,
move into upward dog.

Shifting stance, spreading feet,
I do triangle, warrior two,
warrior one, side-angle pose,
then let my head dangle, rest.

And there's another,
right between my palms,
three fat teardrops clustered
around a smaller fourth.

How can I refuse a gift?
I pick it and tuck it
behind my right ear,
beneath the arm of my glasses.

After fierce pose and tree pose,
another downward dog
reveals two more to me,
perfectly proportioned.

These, I tuck behind my left ear.
I settle, cross-legged,
stare out at the grass,
let go of my mind.

A speck falls to earth: insect?
Then another, and another.
I am watching the birth of rain,
feel it dance upon my skin.

When I can no longer see
just one drop at a time,
I begin to stir, slowly,
returning to my mind.

I look down, and there,
at the cross of my ankles,
a fourth four-leaf clover,
fourth stanza, fourth line.

I give this, and the first,
to a friend, woken by rain,
to give to his lover's daughters,
when they return from their hike.

We gather our picnic blankets,
baskets and half-eaten sandwiches,
and bring them to shelter
beneath a play structure.

Minutes later, our families
emerge from the woods,
drenched, dismayed, and delighted,
and wanting their towels.

Each of my daughters
receives their gift with wonder.
The memory of raindrops
I keep for myself.

Note: After posting this, I realized that, quite by accident, everything had fallen into four-line stanzas except the third stanza. So I added two lines after the first two and broke it into two stanzas. By another happy coincidence, this makes the poem exactly sixteen (four x four) stanzas. Technically, I suppose this is now a second draft, but it seems silly to repost it so soon after the initial posting.

Silence

In shavasana,
my body's response to
every pose that I have just held
slowly leaches out of me
into the warm bamboo floor:
the ache in the once-fractured
bone in my foot, the tremor
in my right hip, slowly easing,
the throb of my shoulders
from the seesaw
of downward dog/upward dog/down,
the screech of hamstrings and
hyperextended knees and
inflexible wrists

and behind all these physical howls.
the low cacophony of daily crises -
bills to pay, taxes to finish,
lunchboxes, birthday parties, permission slips,
bedbugs/laundry/dishes/bathtime/
pottytraining/schooladmissions/
midlifeangst/almostburiedgrief
that were encapsulated
in clenched muscle, now
like bubbles at the surface
dissipate as my body softens.

My mind empties.
For some uncountable time,
I am free of the burden
of language.

Perilous Spring

March 28, 2011

I can taste spring in my mouth.
The crocuses bud and blossom
and somehow do not freeze
when the night's chill falls
and frost still forms on
the old fall leaves.
Still, there is sun, and more
of it each day, warm afternoons,
bright skies, fog rising
from snow subliming in shadow.

In this knife's-edge time,
I can taste my future
away beneath my tongue, behind
my teeth, and rising up
into sinus and tear duct.
It sings of fresh paint
and wood floors and turned earth,
a new home full of space and light,
potential realized,
a wide yard with oaks, pines, maple
already rampant with sap, maybe
a fruit tree or two,
and still space for a garden,
neat rows waiting for seedlings,
perhaps a henhouse - fresh eggs -
perhaps a pasture - goat's milk, cheese -
but most of all, oh yes,
mostly the taste of completion,
of having found the house, the school,
the new life we crave in our bones
like thaw, like water, like sleep.

All these tastes
that linger like ghosts in my mouth
terrify me.
I cannot breathe out
for fear they will scatter
like new snow.

Grief Poetry

So, you may have noticed that I posted nothing for around 7 months. There's actually a reason for this, other than lameness.

Back in October 2009, a friend of mine died. I wrote a poem, which I had intended to bring to his funeral and/or share at his memorial service, and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. It was freaking breaking my heart.

In August 2008, two of my grandparents (one from each side of the family) died. I hadn't really gotten over that. I don't think I really have even now. Last summer, the mother of a very good friend died much too early. I only met her two or three times, but she was amazingly cool, and I was really looking forward to getting to know her. And then she died.

And then Bill died. It wasn't unexpected. He had cancer. His decline had been slow and steady. He'd been wheelchair-bound for several months. I liked him tremendously. He reminded me strongly of the grandfather I lost when I was 13. We shared a love of geology and the natural world. His passing, on top of all the other deaths in my life, just got to me.

I froze up after that. I wrote one other poem after his poem about how the grief inside me was paralyzing me (I can't find it now). And then I just stopped writing. Anything. I didn't touch any of my blogs, at all, for months.

Last month, I took a weekend off. I went away and spent time entirely alone. I thought hard about all the stuff that's been weighing on me. I made an org chart of my life - if it had been a web site design, it would have failed miserably: too complex. But examining my life opened something up, and I started writing again, posting my first poem since last October.

So I think it's time I fessed up. I haven't been writing, in part because I've been lame, but also because I've been really, really sad for the past two years. It's a hard thing to talk about, especially years later. There's nothing new to say, or add, other than the obvious: I still miss them. Now, days go by without my thinking about my grandfather or Bill, but then something will remind me, and all that pain comes back again, sharper from disuse.

I once sprained my right ankle so badly that I was on crutches for a month, and I couldn't run for over a year. Sometimes, just putting my foot down hard caused pain to flare through my foot. Today, nearly twenty years later, I really only notice it in tree pose, where my right leg has a harder time maintaining balance than my left.

My grief feels like this. It's still tender and complains bitterly when poked at. But I can take a few tottering first steps again. So here is the wholly inadequate poem I couldn't bear to share before, my first attempt at regaining my balance.

Metamorphosis
For Bill

How can I hope to hold
all the sedimentary layers
of your life, like ages of a sea,
the silty bands of infancy,
childhood, youth, adolescence,
soldier, husband, father, grandpa,
friend, neighbor, lover of stone,
in words on a flat page?

I heard of your death
in a Santa Fe café
where you should have been, too,
exploring the geology
of the New Mexico landscape:
orbicular granite, gypsum sands,
meters-deep volcanic tuff.
You would have wanted
to focus on minerals:
the pink calcite that names the Sandias,
flourite and mica from abandoned mines.

Instead, your stratified existence,
under pressure I can scarcely imagine,
underwent metamorphosis
when I wasn’t looking.
Limestone to marble? No,
whatever you have become
anew defies classification.

The Economic Realities of Modern Poetry

Let's face it: poetry does not pay.

If you're a working poet, you'll quickly find that the vast majority of poetry markets pay absolutely nothing. Diddly. Squat. Really, they're doing you a favor by putting your work in print. Maybe they'll deign to give you a free copy of their publication.

Yes, there are paying markets out there. I have, in fact, sold one poem to the now defunct Terra Incognita magazine. But finding them and managing to actually sell to them is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. I've given up sending out poetry. The reward is just too small.

But I still write poetry. I still like reading my poetry to audiences. I founded and still help run a successful poetry series in Cambridge, and I have set for myself a goal of bringing a new poem to read at the open mike each month. If I enjoy writing poetry, and I enjoy sharing poetry, and I expect no more remuneration than the pleasure of others, then really, the Internet is the perfect medium for my poetry.

Henceforth and forthwith (What great words! Why do we never use them, except sarcastically?), I'm going to publish my poems on this blog for whoever cares to read them. If you'd like to print them in your magazine, journal, chapbook, or just email them around to your friends, feel free, but please note that I retain copyright place a Creative Commons license on all my work, and if you intend to make money off of my work, you had better obtain my permission first.

Duality

05/05/2010

I am and I am not.
I am and we are.

A zen master, observing a waterfall, said:
We are all part of the stream.
When we pass over the lip of a cliff,
we separate into droplets.
These are our lives: individual, separate,
distinct.
At the end, we rejoin the stream.
That brief moment of existence
as individuals
is an anomaly, an illusion,
an artifact of semantics.
In truth, we are, and always have been
the stream.

We are and we are not.
I was not and I am.

A solitary electron, passing through a tiny hole,
behaves, not like a particle, but like a wave.
If there are two electrons,
passing through two parallel slits,
they interact like ripples in a pond
from two identical drops,
overlapping, intersecting, interfering.
Electrons act like waves until struck
by a photon - in fact,
until they are observed.
The act of observation collapses them,
pins them down, reduces them to mere points
instead of endless, expanding
possibilities.
This is called wave-particle duality.
It drives physicists mad.

They are. We are. I am.
I was. I will be.

People say, plan as though you'll live forever.
Live each day like it's your last.
Both are true cases.
You will not be tomorrow
the person you are now.
The self, reading this poem,
in this precise moment
expands outward in time,
unspooling twine through every branch
of time's unfolding labyrinth.
Along this path, you live.
Another path, you die.
An infinity of choices and outcomes,
all yours until you stop to look
and collapse again into your present.
Everything that you can be
you already are.

You are. I am. We.

We pass through the tiny slit of this moment.
My wave form reaches out, touches yours.
My existence is part of yours, you are part
of mine, we interfere and combine.
Which part of you is me?
Where am I in you? Don't look -
if we stop to think, to observe,
we'll collapse back into ourselves,
side by side but separate,
solitary, self-contained.

Or is identity illusion,
formed by a flash of light,
a shadow on the cave wall,
when the light fades,
and no one is looking?

I am you. You are me.
We have always been the stream.