So many famous poets of today
fêted by universities
darlings of journals
lions of the lecture circuit
whom history, respecter of no
cliques and claques
harvards and yales
publishers dust and dead
will winnow
out
a rock
shatters the window
to a billion crazy bits
winter splits the walls
rots the door frame
ice pries open cracks
I clutch about me
what remains
of timber, rags and lath
cannot conceive
this cold had been
kept out
by the invisible
I smelled shit on my fingers
while eating bread
a monk said the Buddha
is a good stick
to shovel shit
my anger at the shit
kept me from God
You give yourself
Unendingly
To loving me.
And I, in taking
Find a sanctum of embrace
Beyond heart's breaking.
As on the windy beach
Where bamboo poles
Balance a roof of leaves
I held, caged larks
Your fingers in my hands
Shaking within your outsized sweatshirt sleeves.
So I would hold
In deeply vaulted cave
Embers of ruby
Flakes of pirate gold
Banked flame
If waking to dark, could
Wondering, feel your warmth
Breathing with mine
Unsurfaced
Sensed the same.
You were my raft.
Under your gaze, reborn
My spirit flared.
How to accept
Being both sent and kept
Further to tear
What was already torn?
Now when I most need love
Crushed by the magnitude
Friendship withholds
I cannot bear
To look
Into the garden.
I am the buffalo
In the drawing room
The goat in the garden
The bull in the china shop.
I am unbridled energy
Shattering all facades
Smashing the stage-set
Tearing the scrims and screens
The mise en scene.
Befriend me at your risk
If you have gods
You could not stand to see
In smithereens.
My glare disperses
Sacred bric-a-brac
My love releases
Moat-encircled dreams.
I've scooped out the flesh of the world
like the inside of a gourd
till it's empty as a soap bubble
a thin film over nothingness
a shimmering zero
in morning silence
harbor flat
a faintly hammered glass
what's torn, reborn
in any random shape
hears motors
roaring capillaries, sirens
clock's weary catalog of seconds
her stray finger in my mouth
memory's food
sole on instep
palm on chest
I reach into the emptiness
beside me
In a sluggish tide of legal documents
pushed with the garbage
of crime and politics--
twenty-eight years of marriage
soaks through the hands
of lawyers, legal secretaries
to the high court
in waivers, stipulations, disclosures
summonses, allegations, depositions,
appraisals, actuarial computations
the inner-lives of families
to the grindstones of jurisprudence.
So is a severance severed
and every street and alleyway
of marriage duly sealed
and marked with barriers.
Only the traffic of the court
connects us now
and even that shall end
leaving two citizens
tasting strange sunlight
full of empty freedom
and unquiet thoughts.
Being out of touch
and out of time,
I do not turn to you.
I cannot fake
the tenderness that skirts
the fringe of crime
The gesture neither random nor ordained.
From loss of courage
from the years that make
Falstaff of Mark Antony, I clutch
the faded rhododendrons that remain
after the touch of time
the time of touch.
He survives
by eating the apple of arrogance
in his heart.
Since there is nothing to inspire
going on
he builds the stubble of the wind
into a Windsor of the mind.
He walks in smug humility
fixed on his secret wealth
like a miser's cellar of gold,
Like a people
slaughtered and expelled
from every land
who must be
to be anything
Chosen.
crossing the shore's last ledge
the sea-floor dropped away
a lonely swimmer over the abyss
I hadn't felt her hand
sustaining me
until she vanished in the spray and mist
and I was struggling
simply to exist
you were always among us
close as bodies
at a love-in
great man
in a thrift-store suit
a sheltering force
at protests, picket-lines
waving the colors of life
now we feel
naked
yet your poems
still connect us
to starry dynamos
roaring with laughter
your spirit strides
with Walt
among whose gentle lilacs
your brash sunflowers
blaze
© Copyright 2-2-97 Martin A. Abramson. All rights reserved.