I panic, I’ve lowered the price.
My boat may sell before I sail again,
and my long reaches into the glittering sea,
moments of enchantment will be memory.
Inevitably, like a failing sea breeze,
movements in an aging life diminish.
Birds on the ocean are different
than those around my safe quiet cottage,
their cries, never echoed by obstruction
fade into the forever receding horizon,
the infinite future I now see cut.
Kent Bowker 5/12/2012
Oil from Pandora’s box
smothers our mother world,
and pop goes the Beezeal
Bub, you’ve got problems:
because –
frothy fickle freeways
push California outbound into
a grass land of otters chomping
into illusory hippies, swimming into sunsets,
encapsulating bunnies sniffing glue.
Moldy hibiscus blossoms waft no scents
of pernicious nonsense
into the empty mind of a poet.
Who’s to know it all, silly,
stuff that bounds around
the corner drugstore as candy
is dandier than pots of flowers
in the grand lexicon
of an exhausted breath.
Kent Bowker
4/1/2012
There was a time the earth was open
limitless, all could be taken that could–
but not now, the old injunctions fail,
our trained neurons scream in pain–
not further, not further!
Our inflated expansion is over,
turns taking into catastrophes,
turbulent inward contests for space,
primacy tearing apart amenities,
for each one feels the same pain
all driven by the ancient command
‘go forth, be fruitful, and multiply’.
The Buddha and Yahweh contend
for the soul, minds in flames,
inner fires of ruptured belief
face realities –
our free space is no more
no more riches to wrest from the earth
not enough water for all to drink
that I should thirst, for all my days to come.
Kent Bowker 4/12/12
A dry list of begets and begotten,
bereft of ornament, the nature of being,
inherent in each entry, ignored,
except for the small notations,
Dr., minister, Sr., or Jr –
pointless unless you knew
the pirates in the closet
or the secret tree of the family adulterer.
I imagine my poem tree
with lines as ragged
as the horizontal list of siblings
raining down progeny
like bombs into the future
of accumulated wives, husbands
and convolutions of divorce.
I forget — this is about love,
this cosmology wrapped around me
of inheritance, eyes, noses, and hair,
not of properties or moneys dispensed,
or rights in name bearing patrimony,
but of nurturing, mothers care
above each name, a perpetual shower,
fathers and grandmothers genes,
binding us all together, all
the abundant creators, and the loose ends,
in passion or lust or conventional carnality –
we exist – because of this love.
Kent Bowker 4/17/12
I’ll take a taxes to Metaxes*
to save the Greek economy,
from electronic salami, its debt –
park in the graveyard of equality,
watch the schools decay,
and pay for exemptions
for the few with yachts
of Dionysian splendor.
* Greek general and prime minister 1938-41
Kent Bowker 3/16/2012
( an answer to an existential question)
Do I even want to be heard?
My thought simply bubbles up
A line sets me off in a rush of words
And all play of image and sound
Ripples from my tongue, or
Roars, in a ranting demonic trashing
Of something wrong or evil with
Morality puffed up or in despair.
I must ease frustration, let my heart free,
Speak gently of my love for you,
Or advertise my awe and wonder
About my camp of unknown readers.
But sometimes I hold a mirror
To peer into the hollow room of myself
From my conscious dreaming
Thoughts run together, enjambing sense
And sensibility as I do this –
For you, and for me
in the doing of it.
Kent Bowker 2/1/2012
I found myself tearful today
reading an obituary of Vaclav Havel
in the London Review of Books –
my late friend and I often exchanged –-
But when Death comes close
I busy myself with inconsequential things.
Death crept in slowly
months of preparation
costume changes, poor disguises.
I said I would be back later
to read amusing things to him.
But He came and left with him..
Kent Bowker 1/23/12
My wife introduced us
and he asked, ‘do you do lunch?’
We were old when we met
told our stories through 500 lunches,
I heard about the children he read to,
trips to Operas in New York and Santa Fe,
light poetry and slow retired pleasures.
He had style, an LL Bean credit card
American fashion style – urbane, cultured -
listening to opera and jazz, ( reclining in his Eames chair).
He was our editor and publisher of poems, -
and told tales of Scholastic Mag., (interviewing Gore Vidal),
and of his Ford Foundation Follies.
But now, retired, he longed for Italy –
devouribg Italian detective stories
(Donna Leon, Camillarie, Montelbano) in winter,
and rented apartments in Rome and Florence,
sharing them with friends, almost every year.
In Rome we negotiated the Metropolitaneo
bused from Fermata to Fermata -
dinned at Fabricios Trattoria -
and sought great paintings leisurely,
So, After the glories of the Chiggi Chapel,
talking lightly of Caravaggio,
while strolling along the Via Barbuino
Raimondo found the perfect Panama hat
a grace a gentleman would divinely wear
in the evening passeggiata through Trastevere
to admire all the gorgeous Roman women on display.
Kent Bowker 12/28/11
(from Finnegans Wake, James Joyce)
Behold, the Big Bang Creation.
Behind opaque ion veils, dancing
strings curled in an uncertain eleven dimensions,
unobservable, squished up, tumbling
together, then inflating, become a fiery froth
free of the churning unknowable past
rushing into the infinite void,
time begins and in dimensions three,
the great Higgs, the Quarks with Gluons galore
and all other kinds of massy gore appear:.
Three quarks make Fermi-onic nucleons,
two quarks, Hydronic mesons, all flavors, and chromaticities;
wild clusters of Anyions (Charmed or Strange) and all the anti players.
The Universe happens then, in a swosh.
Tiny Leptons rushing from Fermions
at light speed, Tachyons grandly push
even faster, never seen again, while Bosons
so slow, coalesce into infinite galaxies
with black holes, and WIMPS holding together
all the heaven’s time lines, all our felicities
expanding through warped geodesics for ever.
Kent Bowker 11 December 2011
( An apology for a quick and ill-considered assignment based on the declaration,
’We’re here to look at your sprinkler head’ )
Oh dance the interrupt polka,
the morning news with Mars bars,
motor cars, coffee with mocha.
The sprinkler man has come
to look for drips,
and bad trips, stimulating
an irreverence for authority,
and just about everything
else, especially inferiority
to ‘Special K’ Menshes
crunching with wrenches
whence a drip.
‘We’ve come here, madam, to see’
algorithymically shattering our privacy
our secluded meditations
our secret inclinations
shattered, dispersed,
splattered and revealed,
torn, as might a spider web collapse
into a face with sticky bug cases,
our thoughts are disordered,
like commercials screwing up love scenes,
coitus interruptus redux.
The spider in the closet is aghast
her web is ruined, splattered alas
entwined in a pushy inspectors face.
Must we be open to intrusion,
listen to amplified Listerine ads,
lipstick patina, M and M’s prancing,
watch murders and bouncy babies hands
selling watch bands,
allow cameras to watch us,
cell phones to track us?
Polled and monitored
us delegated consumers
bandied about by rumors
of terrorists, or enormous debts
hide in our homy castles.
To avoid all the hassle.
must we grow beards;
hairy privacy shields?
Dear spider, interrupted,
web demolished, come back
build again in your darkness,
we’re out here where sprinklers drip
inviting inspections
uniformed inspectors
any time they wish.
Kent Bowker Nov 23 2011
The political poem is often a jumble
the language simply ill constructed
of mouthful words like a grumble
emoted rather than gracefully said,
we must then regretfully grant
it often becomes a clumsy rant.
Theodemocracy is such a fumbly word
a Mormon idea we might investigate
Elder Romney’s Joseph Smith-ian good
belief, that while democracy is first rate
arguments are no pleasure,
revelation is much better.
Georgie Bush had a big revelation;
invaded poor Iraq. It trumps contention,
allows a politician to switch his views
it doesn’t matter what the people choose
when agreement is unreachable
revelation is unimpeachable.
Beware, then, these politicians’ claims
with undisclosed beliefs; and aims;
fantasies, Gods, all that strain credulity,
biblical creation presumably,
their cliches endlessly, easily repeated, their phlegm
that we might unthinking, believe them,
and accept the scourge behind the jabbering..
Be wary, godly austerity punishes.
Kent Bowker
Nov.,14.2011
A melancholy season entraps you and I
with a dash of cold, leaves curling brown, a stark blue sky.
We sit around the dinning table
talking of TV movies, and mean streets,
the price of bananas, summer retreats,
and of cheap Sicilian Grand hotels.
We yearn for south sea oyster-shells,
for warm days gone, yet end with existential argument;
Where are we going, what to do, what is our intent
in running from here? Silly question
Mr Burbank, with your Baedeker, isn’t it?
Well, its time to end this visit.
It was nice, we must go;
I can’t paint like Michelangelo
Grand, this sense of captivity, scratching at window-panes
to open. Then Rush! Break all the window-panes;
our lives need more air, more in the evening
than an ad riddled TV show that drains
our spirits; aspirations rising through chimneys
like smoke. Knowing we must leap
out of ourselves into the night
exultant, we’re lulled, and fall asleep.
What are the higher causes? Every time
we reach up we’re dumped on the street
like soggy underwear, while priestly ghosts at the window-panes
chuckle. ‘It’s time’
says Mr Bleistein, with a cigar, ‘to meet
the bigot who will assail you, create
despised under-classes, and raise despairing hands’
No thanks, we’ve enough on our plate,
don’t need his holy distinctions that disparage me
don’t need to resolve religious indecisions;
our lives don’t need revisions.
Please, put out your cigar, and stay for tea.
No matter how this poem will go,
I never could paint like Michelangelo.
. Kent Bowker, (and forsooth, T.S. Eliot)
. 21 October 2011
Neutrinos created from pulsed Muons at Cern
aimed at a cave below fair Italy’s Gran Sasso,
pass through leagues of rock without concern
as if it were just glass, their passing so
unhindered. But with puzzling oddity, they
get there much too early, faster than light,
and, as if bouncing in a mirrored way,
change sex promiscuously.. It’s not right,
upsetting Physicists! Anomalies they shout!
But maybe it’s just refraction, just as light
must bend into density, neutrinos may bend out,
changing speed to keep its wave coherent.
Sleep well dear Einstein it’s only a curiosity
in our random, weird quantum particularity.
Kent Bowker
Oct. 16, 2011
The pain of restriction, austerity, runs deep
Into the marrow of our bones, switching
Up to down, while pompous rentiers creep
‘round declaring our multitudinous sinning
Shaming us as hollow men who work not well
Who malinger when ill, don’t want to win
Who hinder progress and perpetual growth.
But the ceilings have been reached, and we’re in
Trouble. We’re the last frontier, the candy jar,
The last source of profit a cannibal economy
Of less can feed upon, as if an unfeeling glacier
Were to come and scrape everything away.
Must we have catastrophe before old belief,
Capitalism, die, and our souls have relief?
The sunbathers and their umbrellas, water skiers
And their power boat packs are gone, summer is over.
Moorings are empty, cottage windows, boarded up.
We venture alone into the waving marsh sea.
Beating out, our cat boat climbs a wind ladder
Into the gold-grassed sea-covered marsh land
Rounding the islands of dark pine and crimson vines
Seeking passage through the white Heron’s grasses.
We all fly here, over the waters, white wings and sail,
And fold into this melancholy season beyond summer,
Before the storms to come whip the waters black..
We feel the world here as it has always been
Before mechanical man’s use changed it.
The sonnet asks for more than simple wit,
A crafty wish for love, a scented glove
To hold the sharp rose thorns that bite
The heart away, breaking all hope of love.
A story to tell ourselves all is right.
But knowing each other may be enough,
Far better than wispy vain wit, bright
Enjoyment of time together, not rough
Words of suspicion, or honeyed explanation
But tender exchange, a kiss, an embrace
Hands that seek company, deep connection,
And words honoring each other’s infinite grace.
The sonnet is but a gloss, mere embroidery,
Love’s banter, bright tomfoolery.
Thoughts in the fog of waking up
Four Twenty is a sailboat,
Four Forty is detergent,
Forever is lying awake before dawn,
Fruits are for breakfast.
Fuel is our necessity,
Filling our tummies,
Following our desires,
Finding our way to loved ones
Folding them in our arms.
Foolish
Fantasy
Frolic in the pleasure of
F , morning, noon, or night.
Forebear the critics in us,
Free the emotion, laugh…
For next will come
Grinning, garrulous gophers,
Kent Bowker
1 October 2011
I paint images of the Great Glacier’s artifact
the massive drumlin in the Essex marsh,
a large dark oval whale like form,
always distant, bold, or vanishing in mist,
a turning point for swirling tidal flows,
sometimes floating on the sea
often sinking into the marsh grass..
I try to center this island
in our bowl of existence,
. -impose the sacred onto it
. as we do onto inscrutable forms-
as the osprey hang in the sky,
or gulls hover over the darkly
wooded mound imbedded
in the simulated swirl
of rising and ebbing waters.
I paint the sea of the island,
attempt to show the water flowing
through the passages of the marsh.
I try to find the sacred embodied here,
as others in Kayaks do,
visiting the graveyard,
searching for artifacts,
arrowheads, shards, mythic remains.
All of us fail, one way or another.
The Indian artifacts are long gone.
The paintings fail to show the sacred,
lying hidden in the soil.
. (Sacred Madonnas were, after all,
. painted in the ages of belief.)
The sacred sense the Indians have
from the Great Spirit and Earth Mother;
. that we are temporary here,
. that the land does not belong to us,
. that we only borrow it from the Mother,
has been lost.
Hog Island reminds us.
The paintings will vanish
the sea will rise, flood the marsh,
wash the binding clay away,
assert the ocean, and we too
will have gone by then
linked as the Indians know
into the swirl of nature
Kent Bowker 9/16/2011
A brassy Bossa nova, feet banging sound,
drew me into dancing
as I used to dance , back to youth,
to my Fred Astaire snake pit days of fifties swing
Found a willing partner to fling, spin, and flip;
incessant motion in 5 step frenzy
captured within the loud band’s energy.
Immersed in it’s intimate sound,
beyond the pain in my knees
the wine edge vanishing in my sweat
we’re a lone couple on the floor space of abandon
fused to the music to end in…..
A painful gasping.
A quick foreboding
existing inside a choked breath
the great apprehension
transformation,
obliteration
the breath fails
gasping, I make my table, breathe fear
know the smell, the taste when it happened
ten years ago, the chest pained angst
faced the end of all love
gasp again slow
wait.
Alone in my darkest self, under old shadows, a child,
again, not knowing, angry father, raised hand, razor strap
Everyone is dancing now
Breathe slowly
wait for my future.
The long escalator from the Metro underworld
of massive Piranesian tubes, ejects me upward into
the grey, light showery day, and the wide National Mall.
I walk, away from the Capital, massive federal buildings on either side
like fortifications, defending themselves, no longer public,.
and grand Museums, Art, Nature ,and Space for the people,
I walk past the grim WWII monument, a felangistic plaza
black bronze Roman wreaths on towers.
I escape, trudge on.
A black granite V penetrates the earth,
carries names of men thrown away,
plunges into the sodden surface,
blood splattered Vietnam fields.
Black granite walls, scattered flowers
umbrellas, glistening pavement,
glistening, crying black walls.
I flee to the small,
to the Phillips gallery to find relief.
. Bonnard’s brilliant green violet mixtures
. Renoir’s boating party, Van Gogh, Cezanne,-
go smaller to a dark music room, rare De Stael’s,
suited diplomats from Slavic lands
large women, reserved seats.
A quartet plays Beethoven (Raz 3)
and a quiet wistful modern.
Kent Bowker May17, 2011
1.
A sprung light wind
lifts a breath from the sea-
stroke your back gently.
2.
After the spring rain
Daffodils reach up to you-
Dreams of love.
3.
Lavender ruins
The garden erupts color;
A breath of smoke.
4,
A cloud is a shawl
A linen streaked with rain-
Light trembling leaves.
5
Spring, grief and ruins,
makes it all seem pointless-
voices in the fog.
6.
The dying old year
Ends in wild and holy days-
Frogs are sleeping.
7.
Photographs of love
is as Spring’s water greening grass-
moon flirting clouds.
8.
Attic to Cellar
Walls and windows make a house-
our naked embrace.
9
March becomes memory
The stillness of snow forgotten-
lips touch softly.
How could our world change, become a hostile place?.
Here at the mansion on the hill, a crowd of us
seeking fun, taking time out for happiness,
parking cars, rushing in, spreading blankets on the grass
bringing picnic dinners and forgetting for a night
the other garbage stuck in our worried minds.
It’s not the end of it, our world,
It wouldn’t make sense, now in this middle time,
but we might destroy it by implacable selfishness
the ‘I want’, before thinking
but not, not before the band plays.
The Gryphon on the pedestal
has glassy eyes and rapacious beak
but it doesn’t speak
or perhaps we didn’t hear it,
we make so much noise
dancing to a metallic amplified beat
Giddings’ big band underneath the stars
where we bathe ourselves in warm night air.
. Listening to poets, a dancing in the stars,
. Zukosky’s flow of words tumbling through 800 pages,
. Jorie Graham’s rushing music, meanings compressed
. and expanded, lines like accordions.
No oracle from above commands us,
though we think we’d like it to,
nor words in the songs we’ve heard before
automatic as drum beats, even as our hearts
repeat, repeat, repeat.
Words from above would not come
b‘cus there’s no one out there, or here.
We won’t listen if it just comes from us
no matter how wise.
So perhaps it will end
this time, this species
so beautiful, so pleasured
dancing here under the moon.,
Kent Bowker 4/4/2011
Ka, the winged self shape flies free
of tombs, slips out of pyramidal
masses, Pharos spirit roams the land
dust like at the deserts edge.
I thought I knew deserts
growing up in towns wrested from one
until I saw this one.
This Egypt, the mass of it
outside the green snake
of the verdant flowing Nile.
Seeing it from the deck
of a small cruise boat,
Seeing its white and dusty expanse
cliffed, dark edged and infinite,
beyond the temples and tombs
beyond the green cultivated river banks,
the rush roofed huts, fellahin tending crops,
oxen walking forever in circles
pumping water for the fields.
Lotus columns hold the heavens
above temple Hieroglyphics
(Kom Ombo, Karnak, Thebes, the Valley of Kings)
showing the after life of great ones,
all embalmed, protected from degeneration.
A thousand generations of wooden dead
clutter the margins of the desert.
Great Nuit, star clad night, mated with earthy Geb,
begot Isis and Osiris, Horus, Nepthsus, good, evil, and Seth
murders Osiris, hides his body. Isis
sister wife roams the world to find him
to encase his Ka within her, resurrect him.
Nuit encloses all, and is the pathway of Ra.
We feel the primordial weight of the great Sphinx
the Ka of Kings here in areal dust.
Timeless land, the rivers rhythm,
death defines living beliefs;
The Ka, spirit from the river,
the Ruh, from the desert,
the Soul an escape from pain and suffering.
So many ways of being self,
mine, enbodied, is transcendent
but it ends with my death.
The Nile and desert vibrate,
generate beliefs; all deny death,
the Sun God Re, immortal,
the infinite life of Ka,
the Essens teaching Christ, the heaven of Christians,
the cold sleep of the Ruh.
the devout dead Mussulman waiting for judgement day.
A land of the sleeping; a desert,
this crowded land.
The arabic script shoves Greek letters aside
flowing like river waves from the right
across papyrus sheets, across walls
like tsunamis wiping little images away,
the great paintings are hidden or painted over
the granite gods noses are broken
this past was forgotten
in a rush to impose the ineffable One; Allah.
But it took a thousand years,
by the Ottomans and their Mamalukes.
to push the agenda onto the Copts,
the jews and Christians at Alexandria,
We lightly forget the anguished centuries between
the crash of Rome, the Christian Coptic era,
the slow crusade of the Muhammadans.
How fast old millennia are erased,
plundered and forgotten
Ka dissolves, hides its nature
in Moslem Ruh, all egos in the One
this crowded land, bread basket of Rome
flowering from the flow of the spring flood.
Ka is in the hash laden air of the Fishwel Café
in the alleys, the souks of gold, leather, spices
wikala of al Ghuri, caravanserai
of Mameluks, grand Muftis
and the high crest of minarets above old Cairo.
We are in the remains and the new
blatantly pushes against the Gaza Pyramids
new villas, glass steel towers, English hotels.
Ka is in the people now
all are Pharos, the land has changed,
dammed, the Nile changes.
Sleep, crumbling Ramses,
chaos returns,
a spring flood
renews the land.
Kent Bowker 3/21/2011
The dark sea is clouded
the smooth liquidity becomes sickly foul.
We dug too deep
broke the tissue
between us and primordial ooze.
It will spread, this thing
we unleashed when we turned our backs
on Venus and the Virgin,
We gave greed freedom,
and made a pact
not to see consequence
in wealth and pleasure.
And now the dark flows, grows
out of a great depth,
fouling a beautiful sea.
Gasses rise from fractured rocks
poisoning water,
as we suck old life out of earth,
killing nature,
for our wealth and pleasure.
Kent Bowker revised 4/4/11
The Minos corporation has you by the balls
making you invent for them,
giving protection after you fled Athens,
when you disgraced the house of Erechtheus
by wiping out nephew Talos who really did it all;
invent the saw, the potters wheel
the compass – who suffers? You, – no,
not paying for your skills like lame Hephuestus?
You make bronze bulls for Minos,
play with his wife, indulging her
appetite. Oh technician of Crete
taught by Athene to weld, cast metals,
now doing anything the wealthy want.
You’re the ultimate tool, living on ego.
You didn’t pay much attention to honor, or arete,
oblivious to the Erinnyes that bother most men.
Oh, Daedalus, think of the white bull
doing it to Pasiphae with your device
and all the results, the Minotaur
you so cleverly hid in the labyrinth
which Minos fed with maids from Athens.
(Till Theseus came, but you’re gone by then.)
And you thought you were so good
making dolls and maze dance floors,
watch Ariedne and your son Icarus dance,
he as the partridge, hobbled, rotating
bird sacrifice to the white Moon Goddess.
All the while, CEO Minos, Dorian usurper in the ancient land
of the tripartite shrine, Great Snake Goddess and Boy King,
got you, Daedalus, to ward them off, defiling for him.
It all flows, your life,
bright and cunningly wrought.
(A precursor of Odysseus, and millennia later
of physicists Teller and Von Neumann,
Minos Corporation’s dark creators
of hydrogen bombs and computers.)–
Oh Daedalus, cire-perdue
maker of bronze bulls, and the double Axe,
enabler of patriarchal power,
you slipped away when it got hot,
as a partridge, flying away with Icarus,
hardly noticing the feathers on the water
when you lost him.
You’ve survived in the secret places,
the plunging dark Cretan caves,
the labyrinth under Knossos,
beneath the maze dance floors,
(Now hiding in the impenetrable secure facilities
the SCIF’s of our military establishments)
not at all interested in what’s done
with the clever devices,
oblivious of consequence.
Kent Bowker 1/31/2011
note: SCIF acronym for Secure Communications Intelligence Facility
My childhood God was heavy
like men’s hands pushing me underwater
holding my life in the baptism
giving it back conditionally.
I built a fortress around me
to hold off the terror of this god
I must keep the heavy hands off.
I rejected that Mormon cast ,
I became outcast
I secretly cried, and now cry
when I’m made to feel outsideness,
by the sound of plainsong..
Denied morality because of unbelief
seen as outcast — unclean,
I must build a fortress around me
To survive the damning righteous air..
Refused then, feeling refused now in places that proclaim love
De-baptized by me, by them I couldn’t go into churches.
unless there was incense, elaborate ritual, great paintings
wondrous gilded madonnas. murmurs, chant and ancient smell..
‘It’s old stuff, alienation, angst, god is dead stuff’ she sd
This old stuff does not go away like the drift of Reagan’s mind
into warm Christian theology, meditations on hanging laundry
old thoughts don’t go away. God is always in question.
God is an answer without question in cathedrals
But, here, I listen to Bach’s entwining sound
And hold my fortress around me,
because I don’t believe in God.
I am only a needful being,
Like everyone else, a sweeper,
a Janus, bearing souls I love,
an atheist seeking blessing.
2/12/2006
(A polester made a new diagram of us,
to explain our political trends and thought
put us in a big metaphorical box
and made a blizzard of all our concerns.)
Black are the ribbons we travel on
to the edge of binding attitudes,
beliefs in this world, roads to go
to the outer walls. of our box.
At the Far High wall lives Authority
heavy with religion, preachy
pundits, sanctimonious legislators
families with perfect Fathers
controlling all emotion
all function, sex, shit and temper
where the Good achieve and
the achievers are the Good.
At the antipodal low earth wall are
individual antonymous men and women.
emotional, loving and exchanging
love, lives, fluids, touches, monies
engaged, all responsible for all,
the failing, the ill, the healthy, the rich,
taking risks to find universal good.
The black ribboned arteries flow back
and forth between these walls to the edges,
of our social box left to right
from fulfilment to survival of the fittest
from ecology to the joy of consumption
from empathy to just happy to survive,
driven by plenty draining into scarcity
the feminine garden of Eden into
the valley of righteous competition.
We live in this big diagramed box
linked into a nation by black ribbons
and video electronic exchange
forming new tribes yaking away
in one mind blogger echo chambers
gated, we become distrustful.
Id like a Virgil to take my hand
lead me along the black ribbons
through the labyrinth of belief
past the humanistic sciences
through the rational, irrational
mud scape of politics
refugees and cowardly men
christ, mohamad and markets
the hidden hand, creationism
the unchanging world
of untaxed fortunes
The cracks deepen
I would like to tell Virgil
the republick may not hold
in the race to the bottom.
The blizzard is here
the rotten rant too
goes on and on
until all is covered o’er
Will the sun never shine?
A poem can be an ordinary thing
slight, hardly noticed
like a sentence
in a long novel,
insubstantial
in its self
a poor little thing
conveying a thought.
Isolated from the tremulous
racket of all the other voices,
why is it
here at all?
Do we breathe?
Would one breath stand out
among all the others –
and if it failed
went missing
would we be
here at all?
12.12.10
Technology the ‘great savior’
of economy erases us
when the child learns
what his parents do not know
It’s the pace of change
the massive decade shifts
a rain of I-pads now
the internet ten years ago
each a wrenching shift
drugs flowed in.
It’s faster than generations change.
Children cannot understand parents
parents can’t teach their children.
Drugs flow in
All to make an economy work
there are only short visions
on ten year plans
drugs are in.
Kent 12/6/2010
So much in our lives is sent to the attic
a place for memories to decay, or hide,
the images of families, the nice, and the sick
in tea chests along with thin doilies and the pride
of handicraft, layered with daguerreotype
of stiff, remote relatives we never knew.
These are nothing to us now. It’s the living
we tried to bury in newer boxes, out of sight.
We sift through the unshuttered remains,
journals describing a shattered marriage, and lost children,
notes from friends and lovers
residues of a long life, class notes and skates, aluminum pans,
boxes of obtuse technical papers, all the useless receipts
and obligatory tax returns..
Rubbish Man simply flung it all
out the window.
For a moment the past flew by
descending, crashing to earth
three stories below
shattering attachments, and the voices
that roared out of the trunks
were stopped,.
leaving cluttered floppy disks in the grass,
smashed glass- framed honoraria,
and all the things we thought would be useful some time,
records and board games, monopoly houses underfoot.
Did clearing the attic encumber us less,
take the voices from our heads
bring quiet to our gut?
This we don’t know,
even though
Rubbish Man
charged a lot..
Kent Bowker 12/6/2010
(Christmas 1981 For Christmas 1998)
Horses running,
gathering,
many,
through gates joining me
along the fences, large
breathing close to me
we ran together,
frail against the rushing
the force, the mass, the fear rising
Candles in brown paper bags
along the roads that evening
at Arroyo Secco, a high plateau
village beneath sacred mountain
illuminating the roads, earth stars
celebrating Christmas until dawn
the paths horse and man together
connect the species universally
the moist flank by my cheek
the breath, the pounding hooves
by my soft clad feet
we are Indians in tune with nature…
we are not, are not in tune
afraid of power in the flesh.
with the horses coming from fields
on both sides pressing about
how small we are, how unused.
the candles for the dying year
for the souls in the road
for the shortened time
for the diminished family
for the attenuated spirit
for our fear of death
the mahogany flanks rush
all on and on, the moment
life is the moment, this one
flying along the irrigation ditches
in fear and exaltation..
This island is scared
its ancient granite has been cut
to build temples and gravestones.
Hurricane Island, a Maine island
fog drenched spruce clad
holder of fragments, unfinished
scattered grave stones, curbs, steps
drilled and cut and marred, scattered
on the shores
its ancient solitude ripped open
even to the outer sea bashed edge
the edge of the soft grinding sea
cutting fissures in the ancient stone
cutting aquiline lines.
Hard cut edges of the quarry
tower above a pool, a grand bird bath
with squawks and caws
of gull and crow contesting
air space above dense mossed trees.
Quarry men dig into the root
the oldest crustal parts of earth,
genealogists seek roots in other men
dig in old manuscripts
and grave stone legends
wanting a permanence like granite
for themselves in heaven.
Gently scoured by air sea and sand
unreachable ocean edge prominences,
ancient uncut stones, reveal
soft edged, sleeping Buddhas,
Mahabalipurim temples,
sea softened shapes
where gods emerge.
The slime beneath
the Buddha is
the beginning.
So, here is man
claiming permanence
using cut granite makers
denying his slimy beginning
his finite moment
creating heavens, nailing ancestors
into a choir celebrating
his transcendent soul
failing to accept death, the birth price.
the force of the sea
grinds away the scratches
of names, the cryings
of I, that was, engraved
in the ancient stones.
Chthonic rage
scours away all marks
restores the softer shapes,
the real sleeping Buddha
nurturing life to come.
7/26/06 On a mooring at Hurricane island.
The leaves are falling wet
decaying, the year ending,
when the living shed
exuberant bright color.
But there are trees here that were cut down
by twisting winds, a summer’s tragedies,
uprooted or broken in the middle
healthy, tall strong trees that were
crashed down to earth and now clutch
their black and brittle grey leaves
above the colored ground for years.
As were my brother’s drawings
when he was cut down in his prime
his designs, his colors, were stored away
withheld, no wonderful realizations then,
his paper buildings would not rise.
As the green leaves would not be colored
or released in the flurry of fall
there would be no light hearted spring,
all his promise was held in, tight.
We must think of our falling,
of our failures proceeding new growth
our promise, our renewal
as our cycling years continue,
As we age there are fewer leaves to drop,
thinner branches to hold them.
But, there is always more to blossom
all the way to the end,
else war, disease, human blasting winds
cut the flow and natural ebb
and promise is filed away in dark drawers,
like the clutched black leaves
that will never drop.
Only, from here, in winter
have I the scope to see the extent
of clouds and the milky way
else, as now, the leaves of my forest
occludes, shades and hides
sun and storms alike,
in summers calm and peaceful state.
Leaves fall, bare the woody structures
limbs and trunks; a lattice work
fencing, but revealing distant hills.
In summer the animals, deer
fox, coyote and fisher cats appear
at the edges of the density
of green dark enclosures,
birds dance between and above. –
We need both the enclosure
and the bare openness. The exposure
summer and winter bring
is a long slow deep breath,
our spirits inwardness and exhalation.
October 2010
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Undulant passages, a bird light song,
and a brilliant sun mocks the melancholy
music the quartet unfolds,
a cat jumps, dust motes float
illuminated
I am content.
Bare trees waving in wind gusts
screen the farther dark ridges
behind their woody lace
a barren mauve, a blue skyline.
But within tranquility is subtle shifting
nature is not content
We cannot ignore
cannot pretend like sheep.
We’ve eaten all the grass
and the wind is blowing
the soil away.
The sheep are content today
their stomachs are full
will the grass grow tomorrow?
Who can foresee,
Honestly.
(Canto XIX, Dante’s Inferno)
Skulls in the Cappuccini basement.
All the brothers, few and old
observe the future undaunted
for there is no other point
to their live’s praying potion.
The Via Veneto outside is fashion
gaiety and indolence, and tourists
come to look at the gruesome
result of long dire devotion.
The quatromille cupochin skulls
left here for contemplation.
For this is the point of belief
a demented, yes unfashionable now,
proof of existence, priests
with head below and flaming feet
in heaven
engine junk
Into his dark place, cars hanging on lifts
carded lights dangling beneath them,
arbiter of failures, renewer…
With black greasy hands
tossing out dead parts
into piles of metallic hard edges
unyielding gray rectangles
riddled with dark round holes.
ripped, tool twisted
out of larger pieces,
These fleshless residues,
engine blocks,
inert things.
Fleshy hands and minds
thinking, created,
wore out, tossed out
really dead, dead robots
will never dance, not like
Mexican skeletons in sombreros
pretending to be souls ascending.
no spiritual pretense ennobles
this hard black gray rubbish.
I remembered then my friend
telling me, long ago
from some other dark place,
‘when I came here
I was young and I believed
I was dead,
. because
. death exists.’
What could I say to my friend?
What was death to him, like junk, or
the black clad figure with the scythe
reaping us up for the guy in the sky?
His long dehydration from study
of relativity, of the darkness of the sky,
hardened his spirit into blocks
clamped still as these
cast off engine parts,
and closed perception
into thoughts of death
What does death mean
if there wasn’t life at all.
Where is the mechanic
that wd restore him,
grease joints
restore fluidity?
Nothing absolute exists
no people mechanic comes
to save one as if are we nothing
but the dark stuff.
We can open our own curtains
illuminate the junk piles
change the teachings,
see what is not life
see what is.
‘Envy, resentment, an auto intoxicant, an evil secretion
in a closed vessel, and prolonged impotence’
Camus, from the Rebel, pg 23.
.
.
Essex is this
a marsh, mud at low water
a grand drumlin, Hog Isl
center of a vast gyre
of tidal waters.
Herons, egrets, white dots in the sweep of salt grasses
an ocean beyond white beaches,
gull screams, crows roccus on the flats
and the town at the head of the river,
A great blue heron glides by
in silence.
Essex is this
Clams, farms, woodlands, granite ledges,
The great fishing schooners built here
floated down river at high tide
past Conomo Point and out
to Ipswich Bay and then to
Gloucester for fitting.
Essex rents coveted land at Conomo
for modest well kept cottages
owned for generations.
Jutting far into the river’s marsh
the Point is the center
where sea thrust empties and fills
the wide wild grass space,
But there is envy in the town
that some owning houses there
on this rented land enjoy
the sky that harbors clouds of birds
majestic storm clouds lightening
heavens rage and sweet calm.
So came Realtors and developers
and those who take away the Common
who feed on anger and thirst for profits
to set fires in the hearts of the town
until they vowed to have no more tenants
have them simply go away
leave all the cottages
many more than a century old
to be wasted, removed.
Now, we face the ruin avarice brings
emptiness, unkempt scrub,
inhabitants gone
rats will gnaw at the rubbish
beside a desolate parking lot
tourists inside their metal boxes will view
won’t like the mud
there are no beaches worth much
no one can stay overnight
except the furies;
The green heads bite.
LINDA, THE SHAMAN PASSING
We are watching Linda flicker
between living and dying
frail, morphine fogged she reclines
in her hospital bed at the head of the stairs
planning her new kitchen cabinets.
Her smile is for us to see
to say she accepts our love.
She’s the shaman sometimes, or not
the force is dimmed the light remains
clear sometimes, her poetry seems
to have been written.
Do we grieve, or celebrate
the planned on positive future.__
We will celebrate today for tomorrow
none can see longer than this___
she is thinning each week
her smile broadens across her thin cheeks
wider each week it seems
as her faith belays our fearful
expectation, her strength flickering
each day toward tomorrow.
The poet has become bird
light, translucent reaching up
the presence of invisible wings
golden, radiant in the faith in nature
there is no betrayal, no flinching
no crying, the bear stalks about
the spirit cave containing her
We can’t see these as we sulk
about in the shadow of our fears.
The Crane dances with the snake
overland to the rippling waters
of the mother’s fecund ocean
we travel in the lower world to
seed the ending start beginning
her drum beat leads the passage
of the teacher, of her living
power animal, to come to
the lady of grace, Mary.
“Barnard’s windows open into life
a hard cold thing inside me melts.
I can see all the beauty within
the violet iridescence of light
sliding past the dread night sweat
I call for help as the stream is strong
at the crossing. Weak in fear
stroke with me together
at this crossing I am afraid.
I can see the crossing, that is my job
come help me stroke, share these berries
the spring sweetness, the taste of life.”
6/18/2000
Coming from P-town to Gloucester
motor sailing in a calm, lightly ruffled ocean
in the empty bowl of the horizon
we came upon a rusting hulk
brown streaked blackened red side,
slowly turning on the flat black sea.
A long dark rusty gil-netter, lines out,
like a hopeless memory circling in the flat sea
What is beneath this surface for the families?
For the layers of families waiting
for the missing fish money.
The boat’s steel flakes fall off
in the long search for the last fish,
no money in it for paint,
in seeking it rusts away
Dark cavities behind the streaked plates
we see no seaman, maybe a hint of a face
the ship rusts, circling in the flat sea
inside the sharp edge of horizon
the songs of the sea were still
the wind slow
reaching down
for the last fish
long searching, circling
nets winding, futile,
paint chips flaking, gone.
A face appears in the recesses
of the large net wheels
fades back into the indigo
shadows in the turning boat
as if depression driving
the hunter who must hide, -
a recluse of the sea
seining for the last fish.
In its own vortex
scorpion of the mind
repetition, the laying of nets
a slow dervish dance
arms raised like railroad semaphores
for the end of the line, a train coming,
in the desolation of this lifeless desert,
the slow turning over flat water
the dervish spinning ecstasy
is a ritual to invoke
the fish providing spirits.
the slow turning over flat water
slightly scratching the surface
enscribe the tracks of the dance
over depths of the sea
seeking the last fish -
so long out- rusting away
becoming pointless
lost, seeking, -
as the families
are fading
away.
10/26/2005
Seminole
from Montenegro
High ground, wha zat
so’s ya can shoot down
at me here in my swamp?
careful, your halo tilts.
Is it a cloud your sittin in
fluffy and clean white
balloon like,? it gotta be
tethered I guess, else
You might be off, jes gone
you don’t have a choice
Ya can’t come down here
in reality swamp cen ya
It’s mucky, reality is
no place you can be upward
and straight, so to speak
and crowded too, here
in the muck wallow,
otter compromise else ya
soul get shriven by evils
greed and wantin better.
I left the ranch when the house burnt down
never rode a hay wagon again
or led the cows home at night
or see the wind waves in tall grasses,
after flinging matches in the dry air
to see smoke tails writhing.
A wall of resentment came down
between us, my grandfather and I.
A boy couldn’t see the old man’s loss of place
his big Victorian towered house come down
or understand the diminishment in a small town
that he suffered when he built
a smaller brick house from the ruins,
with the adobe Morman church
across the highway mocking him
His old world vanished then.
Ruins last forever in the ochre desert
after the irrigation ditches dry.
Remember the Navajo who came
hired help for the harvest
remembering other ruins, fires and losses.
I went back twenty years later
after they had died, he of age,
she of diabetes, the sugar beet disease,
that ravages the Morman towns,
nestled between green and black mountains
in the hot valleys far from anywhere
where grasses struggle to live
and tumbleweed clings to
swinging loose screen doors.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
(I put this poem on the Poets Against the War web site as the Iraq war began )
waiting
In Tora Bora young men chant and pray,
Feel fear, remember their initiation feast
Feel their fathers telling them
become strong and manly,
put away childishness,
prepare the lamb
you raised and slept with.
The men fire AK’s and Enfields
The boy drew a knife across the throat
Gun smoke stings, blood flows.
Strong arms grab him, raise him up,
Gun in one arm, the boy in the other,
The father dances.
At the Madrassa they memorize great passages
Sweeping verse clearing lands of infidels,
Lifting myth verse off ceramic walls
the innocent rise to clean the world.
. Enshala.
Oh, for a child to kill to become a man
believing in a wondrous prophet,
Or a wounded child locked
In the caves of Tora Bora,
Where Poems and missiles fly,
The poem is released, shots, gestures.
The wielder of the poem doesn’t live long.
Cool minds on wings above
See through germanium eyes
Laser guiding steel into ancient verse.
The missile doesn’t miss the red dot
It doesn’t see children, women, or frightened men
They’re not mentioned in the manual,
not in the mission statement, the press release.
We do not feel words on an LCD screen, see not
The body’s temperature change
The dying of the mystic light
The voice of the poem
Is extinguished now….
We’re to fear this man
of a gentle soft new beard
hearing of his hate of us,
We have never seen his
Reddened brown eyes
Straining to read in cave light.
All the men are dancing
firing their weapons.
Plunging knifes
in the throat of love.
Kent Bowker 1/30/2003 rev 4/1/2008
Shacks, oil streaked sand,
and I, Blowzy, still drunk,
gin fizz in hand stood
to greet the late sunrise
at the sea frothed edge
Long before surfers crashed here
or gay cabals claimed the beach
Hal and I came to write great novels
of sex, rewinding Henry Miller.
Shacks are cheaper here in winter
with paint splattered sinks, peeling
doors, spring erupting couches
windows leaking salt spray air
opening into a solstice celebration
for even in California
days shorten, light diminishes.
An eg o-pia in a golden haze
of exploding sunsets
black, red, azure, green flashes
girls strewn around the
lighted manzanita bush,
necking with the drinking boys,
the fashion then, went no further,
went home for Christmas day.
Lines in the mind link contusions,
compact, create unites, untie
knotted anxieties, and tie again
the new into the old
Circles of children, dogs, conversations
around ornately decorated trees
occasions translucent from year to year
blending into one complex vision.
Shacks in the mind stay there
overlay -are not supplanted
by richer rooms- or comforts,
ones own Christmas defined
in the circles of love
giving, needing, lost, regained.
My Christmas, their Christmas
until they passed away,
leaking memories, fading like
oil streaks in the sand,
the good and bad injunctions,
the discrimination long ago
of one child or the other,
inside or outside the circle of love
where lay feeling on this day.
Green red pealing branches
round red tangled bush brought
down from the dry mountains
to the beach– Manzanita,
sacred gnarled aged wood,
ceremonial shape, brings
their Muse, their goddess
their dream, to the beach,
into the sullen sea surging
dark mists of the long ocean
lapping seaweed, vomit of confusion
awakening the sodden, forgetful
youths on Christmas morning.
and their dreams of creation
of possibility, of the new,
muddled.
Dec 24 1997 Kent Bowker
1
In the caravan of joy the way is always smooth
the light heart all hopeful leads us on.
Despair is back in the luggage train
where we can’t see or get rid of it.
It’s in this balance of nature, of mind
we feel life and deep released joy.
2
Scribblers all disdain evil, desire good,
ignore complex muddy moral mixtures
flowing around our confused lives.
For what evil do we actually see
in our pampered american lives?
3
Our world of comfort is a subtle disease
blocking ears and eyes from the ominous
mummer of the injured heating earth
sounds of elephant and dolphin
crying over savanna and dark sea telling us
the taste of air and water are changing.
superman 1958
I INSIDE
I, like Icarus following Daedalus
into realms of undreamt invention,
flew too high to a myth empty place
of facts, and intelligent mechanisms,
where awe and love are irrelevant,
where Ocham’s razor cuts
and in hubris fell
We attended the cyclotron,
physicists, student devotees.
We made the instruments
prepared sacraments of lead bricks,
emulsions, glowing electronic tubes.
I, Icarus see all dimensions,
can see clouds of probability,
can sense the flow of quanta,
the personifications of the fields,
My young soul rushed in to
experience physical nature,
feel the dualities in reality,
feel the shadows about each fact,
romance in the shadows of facts.
The boat of question passes through air locks
into the chamber we built for creation,
all of black iron and brilliant copper.
We cannot go there, into the empty space.
But we did, once, with the vacuum gone,
crawling between the dead Black magnet coils
to trace paths of violent interaction, feeling the chamber hum,
seeking the holding hand of the universe.
A chill penetrates this inner temple, black and golden.
Intruding we felt subtle fear, a threat, the chant
of the incantation preceding creation,
the secrets of blackness before the light,
and remember the stories, the cost of knowing,
the cost one man paid to see this light.
Pure energy drilled his eyes, and mind,
chilled, and cut, particle by particle,
painless inside, flipping the eye’s fluid
grain by grain into white opalescence.
We looked for the pieces that govern creation,
quest for the creator and destroyer
inside this strange machine of magnets,
electric fields and fluxing energy
transforming the nature of matter,
pulling out strange particles,
the fragmented glue,
the terms of the equations,
the lines of the languages,
we use to know the origins
of fire, earth, water, and air.
2 THE GODS
A ranting salivating spitting
Doctor Teller on the podium
propounding thermonuclear stuff.
Sirens announce the closing gates.
We watched the blackboards
endless trains of white symbols
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Serber
on stage teaching us__
The closing gates keep us out,
preserve us to copy aquiline atomic
symbols flowing out of their hands
rippling over the black surface.
We hear the resonance in their words.
Feel the binding forces, see the orbits dance,
marvel at the beauty in the quantum order.
Doctor Teller rants on the podium.
‘I become power, knowing
the violence in creation
I master violence beyond feeling,
violence beyond restraint, beyond love.
All is consumed, all enters in
the soup, identity of all elements,
flesh, bone, water, love,
all one in the soup of violent creation,’
No one led us here,
We chose our great quest
seeing glamour in brilliant men.
Oppenheimer, a willow man with pipe,
nucleus knowing, singing mantras
of Soma flowing from Pandrapati,
God of the first creation
governing all new creations
without end, forever,
flowing into descriptions,
symbols in equations,
the collisions in the machine.
We looked down on the world
from the Berkeley hill station,
San Francisco, Oakland, a bay, bridges.
All below and our thoughts above,
focused, bending the proton beams,
bending time around and around,
spiraling gyre of emergent mass chasing light.
Wondering at the size, at the silent power
enamored of coincidence of symbol and reality.
Life outside the energy, the community of us,
seems without meanings, washed out,
outside of the school of theorems,
the new sense of the universe.
We are pulled by the minds of singular men.
The eye of Teller, ego bent on power,
powers to burn across the heavens,
our Oppenheirmer exiled-sent to honored limbo.
Our Gods scattered by red-hating Senatores
away to little colleges, elsewhere–
a community broken, but locked in by fervor,
strong wills bending all to one master,
the pulse of cyclotrons, the pulse of driven men,
the pulse of dreams, the pulse of our life.
3 SOME ARE GENTLE SOULS
DRIVING UP THE HILL WE’D SEE deer, rare fowl
Sheltered by the security fences, the walls
around the cyclotron and the growing laboratory
around the new machines we were building.
Driving up the hill at all hours
to feed the machine experiments,
checking counters, scintillation detectors retrieving film,
gentle spirits seeking knowledge, degrees, PhD’s
Driving up the hill, through the gates, layered fences.
Past the armed guards, showing badges, smiling.
Reminded of the ownership, of the power.
Reminded of the limits of expression,
Reminded of the Corporation…
The gentle souls, intellectuals, physicists,
truth seeking, keep private counsel
do their physics, expand abstract wonders
exalt in the crystal clarity of the truth
embodied in matrixed wave functions
embodied in group theory, in the quanta
held in their counters, film , detectors.
Ideas overwhelm the reservations, the dark reflections:
neutrons that take one’s vision,
beryllium dust that spots lungs, and kills,
daily millirad doses on our film badges,
The anemia of those who went to tests
came back to do research or teach
at a distant, safe collage somewhere.
The beauty of physics obscures realities.
And white blood flows in Hiroshima
White blood in the veins of soldiers
sent to trenches near a bomb
by the stupid military, we know
it happened, but it’s secret.
The mind is divided, severed, bright, and dulled
to fit the blanding apple pie, suspicious time.
Apparatchiks, Personnel directors, security men,
Inside the security wall. petty questions, biases.
They scrutinized theorists, Jewish physicists
‘Just necessary these people’, Serber, Oppenheimer, Frank.
They Trust the ‘good’, The blue eyed, and blond,
the experimenters, good old Lawrence,
Alvarez, and doctors killing cancer.
They Trust applied scientists irradiating rabbits
tinkering with thyroids, growing monsters.
They Trust practical workers, engineers
mechanics of unlimited power.
Inside the wall suspicions
‘Do you know any pinko liberals?’
Security everyone’s business.
Fences enclosed the buildings.
Fences enclosed the people, inside and out.
Fences cut through our minds.
4 THE CAVE
A silent presence now spreads
beyond the baked cracked desert,
beyond Oscura’s castellated crest,
growing out, a cancerous wave,
A new wave from glassy hot Trinity,
slower than the quick blast wave
slowly into our life, into our minds
and it split our spirits in twain.
The power to erase all creation,
shakes all creatures on earth,
releases ancient furies
rational thought banished.
We do not know yet, to tremble,
as Icarus knew. The tripartite shrines
forgotten flat stones in Cretan caves.
used to speak of this to us.
Old gods, the trinity of all,
the earth, the mother, and the void/creator
unseen by Christian Moslem Jew
the Chthonic powers are here again.
We erect new concrete steel caves
to placate the unlimited power
the sane and mad have unleashed;
We fear its unfolding use
We fear its deadly residue.
Big Pronouncements, big noises,
grandiose statements on and on,
and I cannot see clearly
any of this
any more.
I mock myself,
these feelings erupt from dark memory,
from having two minds for fifty years afterwards,
all gloom in one mind joy in the private mind
hiding love from power.
Most of us went away still under black security clouds,
still keeping our private lives private,
making livings, making families inventing for the country.
for the corporations making money.
Who are we, what had we hoped for in our wonder?
not these conference tables,
not endless simulations, games computers play.
I watch my friends, their down turned mouths,
Scientists listening to ever new horror
debating merits of multiple warheads
options, hopeless counter measures,
as progress moves faster on
and complexity baffles men,
inside the steel shell of secrecy.
We will not be forgiven for this.
Not knowing the way of gods.
Pandora’s tale of woe forgotten
how good intentions turn black
we didn’t know the best in us
would crack open the monstrous egg.
We will not be forgiven
for dividing work and love,
for accepting progress and practicality,
for accepting nationalism and ownership ,
for dividing this life from love.
We will not be forgiven
for our oaths of secrecy for not speaking
for not telling of radiation, of rusting reactors
of missile roasting lasers, of public lies.
Silent, we retire, leave it all,
Icarus has fallen slowly, aged,
drained, gray, still silent
oaths remembered resented.
And we turn our backs on new men
on the new hot science
tweaking the eye of a new bomb
seeking profits in the codes of life.
The sea is clouded
the smooth liquidity
became sickly foul,
we broke the tissue
we turned our backs
on Venus and Virgin
we made a pact
not to see consequence
in wealth and pleasure.
We wear veils
when our voice
doesn’t work
so much to say
it tumbles about
cluttering thought
the room is too small
the sentence too brief
nothing fits in easily
speech halts
___________________________
THE CATS KNOW
Today the old dog
was put to sleep,
yes, death, she was
suffering too much
we couldn’t know clearly
but falling down stairs
pooping as she struggled
to walk across a room
but she was a hundred and one
and in just a few days changed.
The light went out instantly
warm stillness remaining
into the earth before it cooled
we cover our feelings
with shovels of clay
but cannot forget
her devotion
always protecting
her sheep, her back to us
looking outward,
The cats know.
_
The Pastor is up there giving
an homily for our lost friend
and beyond, symbols, a blank wall
we should see through, a cross,
a tapestry, or a vast vacancy.
We are to focus on the absent
but only see a wall of backs
bare heads, necks, hair, collars, moles
faces left and right stare ahead
not seeing each other
turning backs on the many
obedient, should we worship thus
not seeing each other. Not facing grief.
Why do we ignore the living?
in these white churches
should there not be drama
the Gods there in front
playing out the life, the death,
at the center an amphitheater
where we can see crying
lamentations, and damn the Gods
for it, hold hands, touch.
Face the past, remember.
Stand in a circle, see each other
affirm our presence
the dead is gone.
Low Tide, Conomo Point
1
I wander in the body of this era
find the fluid bathing the mind
Washing logic, dirty clothes
Love, hate , anger, fear.
2
I need so many words
to explain anything,
even the obvious
depends so much
on the other.
3
The morning sun inflamed uncut grasses
outside, tall waving, fuzzy seeds,
heavy from a wet late summer
Reminded me of old monks yearning
reaching for words, like seeds
seeking to plant elsewhere,
Before me is life, its meaning
beyond dreams of transcendence
its growth its seeds its transits,
yellow tints, soft oranges,
glittering dew, light in the tangle.
4
The shrouds tighten
when our boat heels
as we tighten when aging
in a wind unrelenting.
Every year the patch of sky
grows smaller as the trees rise
enclosing my space, my vision
my eyes are sun pained
after days on the water.
posted by Kent at 10:37 AM 1 comments
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Birthdays,
How many things can we say
in celebrating birthdays?
count years pilling one
on another, pretend some
are more than another,
an accumulated wisdom
here, a step to somewhere,
achievements and losses too
until what counts truly
is continual love
and the sweetness of life.
