Carousel

Source: KQED

Unpublished.  "Rings like silver..." and "rainbow across my shoulders" are from traditional railroad work songs -- some of the words survive in "John Henry," "Spike Driver Blues" or "Nine Pound Hammer"; "even if it is built of jade..." is from a poem carved into the wall (see image) at the immigration detention center on Angel Island, also by anonymous, "..black ink" is from the same poem. 

Carousel

born in motion & a song one face released
in brightness turns back into the dark
with arm recurved
intent on seizing
the brass ring from the devil’s jaws

the devil who named me named this song
a railroad spike in the calliope to ring
like silver shine
like gold pour out like
the black ink of white men’s laws

i was born of water how could i lift
the hammer bring it around
quick as ice
as firm as quicksand raising
this rainbow across my shoulders

so i drowned here amidst the soft
willows bent to kiss the riverbank swirl
in open branches
my body spun
in slow turns before the border

so i was thrown back into the sea here “even if
it is built of jade it has turned into a cage”
carving the wooden jail to
turn the carousel
with my fingertips my lips my tongue

in darkness among the wooden crates
do our yearnings hide
in the back alleyway
a busboy hauling out the night trash
pauses to look up where the sky would be

looks down for this iron spike this song for
his and not the devil’s praise
for a song of turning
treasure back from
broken heaps of conquistadors’ gold

Song

Unpublished. The interpolated italicized bits are from a misheard song fragment that wandered in and stayed. Imagine your own picture of a broken bedframe here.

Song

We speak too much who speak of love
in singular, pale tinted glow,
as though to say would make it so,
make touch the same as being touched,
claim ownership at third remove
these twisting paths. We speak too much.

I would see

We ask too much who ask of love
to bear this weight, witness unnamed
baggage bent so lately lamed
laid heavy beside your broken crutch,
a battered cart when the pills wear off
and the road wears on. We ask too much.

I would see you dancing

We seek too much who seek in love
strange solitude in constant keep
of another’s watch, the ragged sweep
of velvet gliding over the mirror’s clutch,
to free the image as the glove
frees the mailed fist. We seek too much.

I would see you dancing
I would see

We learn too much who learn in love
the awful depths true loss can mine,
the child’s meek coffin the shattered spine
of words gone smash, to waken in a rush
naked screaming in the snow; I’ve
never said this but we learn too much.

I would see you dancing
I would see
I would see you dancing

We find too much who find in love
both means and damp motive past
the boundaries between first and last,
dissolving as you rise find no such
arms still lingering for you above
the twisted bedsheet. We find too much.

I would see you dancing
I would see
I would see you dancing
home oh home to me

We say enough who say we love
and mean in faith to steer it true
then revel with the wrecking crew
on broken bed and unstoppered scotch;
call the splinters a treasure trove,
come laugh with the mirror and say enough.

Art of Viewing Stones

Source: about.com

Unpublished. Suiseki is the Japanese art of looking at stones; there are more examples here.

The Art of Viewing Stones

In each a tale released by summer rain
to fall in baskets stacked beside
the rooster’s gate,

in each a color
grown from shadow’s stain,
slim tinctures born of folded ground,

to mime motion back into this fossil river,
dry bones tumbling
liquid as

the too-bright shine
in new lovers’ eyes searching
out their own reflections without reflecting on

what escapes them that first faltering instant,
slips into the cracked angles
of singing stones,

the part of life not
itself alive, love neither kind
nor loving but reaches back to dark elsewheres.

This is what the stones recall, their mouths
rammed full of clay, the part
each fossil knows:

to find is not to make,
the figure carved by the eye itself
from glass or gaze alike here has no home no life.

You left me here but I am not here. Let me tell
you where I think I am,
of mountains still

to come,
tell how seeds tell
of the curled petal, see me become

a river turned to stone, here in this stone
the moment held in the eye between
figure and ground.

Nantucket Whaling Museum

Source: Nantucket Historical Association

Unpublished. At one point I stopped using punctuation, the word "and," and capitalization. I don't think it helped any but am reluctant now to change this one back, as it seems to fit the tone and tale. Always a mistake to borrow directly from the greats but it is a true story, being in Nantucket and looking for the Quaker graveyard. Obvious quote from Blind Willie Johnson's "Tear This Building Down", and a less obvious borrowing from Tom Waits.   Oh, and this.


Nantucket Whaling Museum

tired of painting the outside of things
the tooth of a whale looks nothing like a whale
tired of looking in from the outside of things
got to get inside the whale

an island boy at sea for months
under alien stars a wooden roof
his jackknife twirls at
the craft of every prisoner
to cut from boredom & mutton bone
fairy castles of elsewhereness
hard hands lost in the delicacy
of leaving behind a part of their own choosing

so the tooth of a whale comes not to the whale
but a wheel to fit a woman’s hand
a seahorse’s leg a mermaid’s slipper
a jagging wheel
to crimp blueberry pie for mother girlfriend
or a wad of tobacco
the boy considers his options
dips his fingertip into lampblack
tracing the web of scars incised along the back
get inside the whale

from a glance it’s clear no one comes
to the scrimshaw room on purpose
pale annex to the whaling museum
as for me it was raining & i was headed out for
the quaker graveyard
lowell yes imagining eavesdrop
but there are two graveyards as it turns out
& either way i was wrong
neither way leads to the end of the whale

trapped between blood & the stench of burning blubber
the sharks roll back their eyes as though even they
would not know what they do
as we refuse
the purposefulness of the wholly useless
the unicorn’s horn the gorgeous cartouche
carved into a jail cell wall
the hieroglyphs scrawled across the dying whale

last of summer it was & the last months
before sylvia was born
i came out from the museum & its odd ivory hoard
crossed the carriage road slick with rain
& was seated for lunch by an irish girl
tourist to tourist on summer furlough
islanders cast up on every island
the jonah special: get inside the whale

if the whale had his way he would
tear this building down
tear this building down
the adventuring boys hoist their gear and hie out
past trousseaus emptied of ivory & gold
to oil rigs in the gulf to trade porn for beer
& back again for no one remembers now how to whittle
no one remembers the end of the whale

then all shall don the robe of blubber
pass beneath the battered rib buttress
perfumed by ambergris the whalebone font anchors
an island a whale a body paused
to take on water & passengers
from the belly i hear the rumbling
of the pacific in unpeaceful gravid wildness
button up your overcoat
take with you leviathan in your jacket pocket
get inside the whale

Memorial Hall

Not a poem, but a picture, to go along with the previous post -- Harvard's Mem Hall is a fantastically hideous building, a beautiful grotesque perched atop the Yard.  This is from another blogger, I think it's sunset on New Year's Eve. The thing on top of the tower wasn't there when I was an undergrad; I think it looks like the kind of knit cap a hacky-sack playing Deadhead might wear. Oh great now I have to go find another image and compare....

Source: Nandishore Kotipalli

...Which Passeth Understanding

Poems should stand by themselves but in this case, a bit of explanation is required. I wrote this in 1999, four years after my college roommate and friend Steve O'Donnell died from AIDS. I was privileged to stay up with him on his last night on earth; I miss him, still, very much. 

The title is borrowed three times over: first, yes, from Paul's epistle to the Philippians 4:7; second, from the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens gave to the sculpture he made for Henry Adams' wife Clover's grave site in Washington DC, depicted below -- Saint-Gaudens, who not incidentally also sculpted the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common that Lowell of course memorialized in turn -- called it "The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding" but most people call it "Grief" although not Adams, who wanted it to represent nirvana, or Guanyin, the goddess of compassion; and third the gloss that T.S. Eliot wrote for the last line in "The Wasteland," where he footnotes "Shantih Shantih Shantih" with "Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word." A lot to put into three words, and I'm afraid the reference to the ineffable mystery of god's intentions is meant with anger and irony, even now.


The poem itself is a fabrication, a made thing, but does borrow from two true things: a put-in for the undergraduate production of "Mother Courage" where Steve was set designer and I was borrowed help and we did finish at dawn and walk home; and various trips to the upper floors of the Harvard Science Center in the middle of the night, for parties, tossing paper airplanes, and other moments of genteel undergraduate mayhem.


Finally, yes, it's a formal sonnet, iambic pentameter, coda and all. It seemed like the best way to contain what it contains.

Source: Alice Lora

...Which Passeth Understanding

The dead are easier to speak with than
the living. Politely silent, unperturbed
by fictions draped over their past -- disturbed
they settle back like dust where dust began.
We talk more often than we did before --
you’d think four years would be enough to shake
this sense, this presence only absence makes.
I lie awake and say this to the door.

Another all-night put-in left us outside
the Loeb, cold in dawn’s ghost light. You said
let’s go up the Science Center. Sixteen years
ago. It’s time.  Out on the roof the sky
tipped up – as Mem Hall’s tower turned blood red
you raised your arms and made the sun appear.