poem from the past I still like -- a true story

SEARS & ROEBUCK

Mr. Roebuck upped and sold his shares
pretty early, having had it.

He lived the rest of his ninety years
modestly, in retirement.

Sniffing his garden's sensible airs,
marveling at his luck,

often he must have thought of Sears:
how Sears mucked on, poor cluck;

Sears making millions, millions! on his ashpit;
and Roebuck making...Roebuck.

Beautiful Faces

A poem biding its time in the "possibles" file for years,
maybe with this morning's tweaking ready to be seen?

BEAUTIFUL FACES

Teachings that come in dreams are easily lost,
so teasing, ephemeral,
yet no use grabbing at them fist-like,
crushing dream-diamonds to sand.

Last night I woke from a dream of faces
poised between the male and female
and me as a dream figure there in the field among them
meditating, knees bending flat to the ground,

ideal posture: legs tucked, spine straight
-- mountain-like -- a dignity
I lack in waking life, for
there my knees strain upward, ungainly.

This dream-story focused
on those faces blending the genders,
skillful means and wisdom united.
The dream was telling me such union

would henceforth be my prime devotion,
to rise up from meditative calm
and go about the brutal world
reflecting grace. So, there on my cushion

my dreamed knees at last kept flatly down...
wait, wait, let me experiment with them here
in the so-called "real,"
in this actual body, fierce of will, frail, daunted by pride.

poem

I must stop apologizing for how seldom I get to the blog.
Okay. Stopped.

Here's a piece that seemed to want to go out
into the world at this point.

TO A WRITER FRIEND WHO PONDERS HOW HE MIGHT ESCAPE
THE DISASTER OF ATTACHMENT TO AN OVERWHELMING "I"

IKI
sincere classiness
no excess, no
tawdry ostentation

SHISUMI
astringency
the blur
of melting sweetness
rots the palate
of the spirit

KARUMI
the ordinary
everyday graces

SABI
loneliness (better: "solitude")

spare brushstrokes the loved one's
single cry

WABI
simplicity

YUUGEN
the mystery

USHIN
with heart

Poem of a Purely Local Hero

An earlier poem -- always a pleasure to work
at something playful:

WAY TO GO

Reading in my slippers
I follow written ways
to sniff fine dust in Kurdistan
where camels bow their knees.

I travel hardly moving,
by turning pages roam
where words declare they're countries
as love songs claim the moon.

From Turkish sweets and minarets
next moment I'm at sea
to brave a storm off Melbourne's coast
and never miss high tea.

There's comfort in such travel,
traversing a paper map --
the hard climb up the Matterhorn
with a kitten in my lap.

Rothko

My friend Dan Gerber just returned from
NYC with great enthusiasm for the play
RED and its evocation of the ways of
Rothko, painter of profundities, and
this caused me to recall an early
poem of homage of mine:

PANELS FOR ROTHKO

Past Egypt's dead he made his way,
past shards and pipers, fragments of kouroi,
smiles on lips of archaic stone
in the humming tombs of the basement galleries;
to preach the righteousness of color,
the plainness at the life of things,
like warmth in food, like hearthfires
in deep caves.

In a suit and tie he painted this:
a meadow where a thousand birds
have gathered in their distances:
an apple that no yearning eye
has gazed upon: a light that comes
from itself, a light from itself alone,
no distillate of shade.

How like a snail a man bequeaths
a hole: a solitude: a cup.
And some a cup that pleasure fills
and overflows, and some a wound
that will not stop, that will not shut
its mouth. Here's driftwood, seasawed down
to honesty. Here's salt, once rock.
Here's silk, spun out of leafmeal
in a worm.

Poor Blog, so long neglected! But I do return now
and then, getting in the habit of posting poems
that have been with me for a great while and are
unlikely to appear elsewhere. Poems (& blogs)
feel like intimates deserving attention and care:
Be considerate, Barry!

Here's an April poem:


SPRING

Meant for children & growing things,
for hope and lilies,
Spring seeks the swamp of the snakes to spread
her Cypress knees.

*

This warming season
the moth-fly scatters its dust,
the sage gnat and the tiddlywink flea
like piccolo music leap into day.

*

Tall & proud, the waifs of Spring,
little ones, sprites on a balance-bar,
bounce like lambs in the April fields.
Plump plum blossoms flirt with the bees.

THE LOOSENING OF FORMS

My friend the poet Rebecca Foust
will be coming down to Santa Barbara
soon to teach a mini-course on
the sonnet while in town for
a reading. Been thinking about
the magic 8/6 structure of the
sonnet and the way it seems to
work even when unrhymed
("gigantesque," I believe Lowell
called the unrhymed sonnet effect
in his HISTORY).

Here's an example, loosely rhymed,
a poem that's "never been kissed,"
tinkered with over many years,
always rejected by editors (always,
to the poet, a mystery as to why).


PATTERNS OF IMPERFECTION

Some seek perfection, a seamless fit,
but something always muddens if
it’s found. Better an off-beat sound.
Better to cultivate rough weeds
to mar a neat, relentless lawn,
strike counterthrust of flint to stir
a spark to flare a shining on
from edges less well-met.

Take crystals: at a “chaos-point”
they seed -- where atoms make no sense.
From matter slightly out of joint
appears each little face that glints.
Weavers insert a deft flaw in their fabric
by which the soul of the maker springs free.