Poor Justice

Walking with two cups of French Roast
Across an uneven field,

Coffee dashing across my clothes,
Staining my palms and nails,

I think of Justice and her stillness—
How one step would upset the scales.

No hope of romping across Swiss alps,
Of holding fresh tea leaves,

Or taking a lover in Cleveland
(That blindfold bespeaking her wild side).

No, she must remain rooted in place—
A prison-bronze gilding her ungently,

Perspectives brought before her
which the stilled scales answer—

Scales held like her distant cousin
Atlas holds up the world. They dip,

Hold, judge, sway, pronounce guilty,
While, blindfolded, she guesses

Outcomes from the cries and whoops
Of the storytellers before her.

Power Outage

Bricks of darkness clatter through the windows.
Virtual space yawns, collapses us back
into the body, into the pink cove
of the mouth, the arch of the synapse,
the dove of loneliness, the blackbird of company.
It is uncomfortable, so much of the self:
gums and guts sounding the body’s memory,
these stories recalling the taste of health.

Somewhere we hope hearts still beep
And the bombs lie asleep in their sheds.
We have learned the cost of silence is cheap.
It is time, it is time to go to bed.

Glassworks

Why this perpetual desire to be seeing into?
That a poem should be translucent
as the soul, the experience of experience,
written, perhaps, at a train station,
seated by a wide bay of windows—
while the baker and the lemon merchant talk below
(the poem should smell of bread and lemons).
Ultimately, we want windows, not words,
Or perhaps we want to be the poet,
not the reader of poems,
gazing again out of the window.

But for all this talk of windows, souls,
walls deserve their due: without them,
no privacy for the afternoon lovers,
draped in each other like wild silks;
no way to shut in the stove’s thick, shadowy light
and shut out the world’s bitter, toothy wild.
And for the poet, it is not
airiness and sweep and light,
but the earthen room, the wooden chair,
and the pen, cradled and spun like
the glassmith’s pipe.

Jack B. Yeats Poetry Sequence

Written in the National Gallery of Ireland, January 2009

The following is an ekphrastic poem, meaning it is description of a work of another work of art. Unfortunately, the National Gallery of Ireland does not offer digital reproductions of the following three pieces, but I hope the poems stand by themselves.

“The Cavalier’s Farewell to his Steed” (1949)

His face a storm of light, a lightning-crackle
Of brain-movement, forward facing, directional brilliance,
While his legs full of midnight gore, gloop and buckle—
How like ourselves, our ideas and molasses movement.
Wait, hold a second, there to the left:
Is that blue murk and dabble his face?
The blue shadow, an eyeless gaze
Cast at the steed, nostalgia stumped—
Oh the lollipop-movement of a two-faced man.

There are more questions:
There, on the thick ribcage of the horse,
Is that saddle and swelling regalia, velvet fashion,
Or killing crimson, yellow pus past the flesh gates, blood forked?
The boy’s steed bears it’s desertion and load regally,
Head swan-high. “We always knew
It would have to end,” it seems to say.

And what, finally, are we to make of these borders—
Frames within frames. As if the artist were cutting out
A pain-memory, and caging it there: “No take-backs.”
The steed, facing a sloppy, navy-night.
The top, a ceiling, a thick black bar—
Nor horizon or hallelujah here for the having.
The ground, yes, we can recognize
The muddy squabble of earth and grass.
But what, what is this brimstone crying blood?
This smear of judgment in the Cavalier’s path?

Can he break the molten with his head of light?
Or is his mindflare not enough,
Prejudged, already damned upon his feet, walking
Into the abyss?

“The Liffey Swim” (1923)

First of all, I love the squareness and focus
Of the man’s grey bowler cap,
And the single lock of blond hair tumbling
Free from the woman’s scone-brown bun.
It is almost enough to distract us—
If only the lock weren’t notched like an arrow
To the one crowd-face staring our way, eyeing us:
A sad olive shawl, bags under the charcoal eyes,
The pink smudge of a frown.
No doubt she has lost a child, young,
And she is watching the powerful bodies,
Sluicing the waves, for a hint of him,
Or inspecting us, patient these 80 years.

Then the deep-suffering gasp of the swimmer
His mouth an unquenchable O
A lung-pit infinite in its appetite
Swallowing our air.
He is laboring upstream, arms
Blurred into a shepherd’s crook.
I imagine him dodging the unseen I know now:
The murky trash, the many bicycles
With their sharp, silent spokes.

“Four Scenes in Search of Characters: Beginning with Naples, Scene I-IV” (1942)

Don’t worry Jack; I’ll cast your characters yet.
This one you’ll like: a man in Amazonian blue and scalded orange,
A smooth indecipherable face and a startling jacket:
He is you Jack, born into your own swirling world.

He, well, you stand staring out the window
Commenting on the floody beauty of that yellow wave.
You say it looks like God
Washed together water and light on a lark
And then, bored again, dumped the sun-beamy wash into the sea.

Of course, all this is spoken to a lover, sitting on the corner bed.
You have absconded, leaving the loose weave of family.
All this is very common, but here Jack, you are in for a surprise.
She is not wild brush stroke and creamy, floating flash,
She is not one of your indefinite, golden-butter, so-modern figures.

Her name is Amelia
And her skin is the crisp rosy-white of the peach
Cradled in her left hand.

Jack, surely you remember it was she
Who threw open those shutters
Letting in that magic, tea-scented, tan air.

Amelia casts a gaze, but she is not interested in the wave
Of water and liquid light. She is looking at you, Jack.
You know she is out of her place, carried from our world
Of sharp edges and over-exact electrons.

When she dances, the inhabitants here
Wonder how her arms leave no ribbon-trail,
No melting brush of color. They wonder
How she is always exactly where she is.
You love this about her, Jack, love
Watching the pure line of her fingernails
Bite into the spongy blob of the peach
Bleeding snow-white, indefinite juice.
You whimper, full now of the wide, salmon-pink
Brush strokes of desire.

When you make love, you drape her in your colors,
Trailing a half-globe of lyrical reds and pleasure yellows—
Love in rainbows, she calls it.
Hours later, you lay in the dark
Watching the echoes of your body, Jack,
The arch of your wild back,
The bow of your bowler,
Still falling to the floor.

Grounded

Dugout, pithouse, cavehouse, burdei, yaodong –
each a calling back to the world
of whirled earth, of square and honest plantings,
each born of dirtscrape, turfscrap, cow dung.

Whole towns dig down to the roots of things:
Mangup-Kale, the Goth’s submerged city;
The Barrio of Guadix: where old maestros
di pico still tunnel today, lost in their earthing;

And Cappadocia, home of rock-cut temples,
their daredevil majesty stamped on stone. Inside:
a dim, cool, sacred space, underhanging on arches,
columns, frescoes. I have stood there, simple

in my joy, an Antaeüs, clay king,
cheeks dimpling at the dusty thought
that spiritual strength arises
from the earthen fact of things.