New Shadows    

    Lucky as a Night Barista at Teaism

    (After Waiting for Godot)

    Hot brews shatter my muteness,
    dispersing drinks from the bar,
    scooping dry teas from glass bottles
    like captured Amoy ships,
    I hear everything again.

    But habit is a great deadener, he told Gogo
    after I led my blind master away
    to take up my night job.

    Under track lights, bald pate glistens
    mirroring pewter pots, porcelain cups,
    hands dance across samovar and faucet,
    smile shellacs tables where
    people bend sipping heat.

    If they ask, I counsel:
    Young Hyson tempts nakedness,
    Lung Ching Dragonwell burns lips.
    I sell solace in Silvertop Yin Hao,
    romance in Jasmine,
    oblivion, memory in the Sencha.

    Still they take their chances
    with the Hao Yo Keemun,
    gab as I filter the Lapsing Souchang,
    giggle over old maid shots—
    Earl Grey, Orange Pekoe.

    Few reflect on English treachery
    flooding Chinese markets with Indian Opium
    addicting the poor to fill home-savored teacups.

    Time passes:
    no older then contemplated leaves,
    a pot full of residue,

    or the rope that burns in the man's hand
    for whom I bear the bags
    all my days.


    Lost and Found

    We've come to the wrong place.
    -Becket: Waiting for Godot

    We've come to the wrong place
    to this injured shade's stunted branches
    a crucified pirouette holding
    chained blue jays and cardinals.

    We've waited years for a tree to come down
    to bridge the banks at the foot of our hill
    laying its poplar barked longitude
    across latitudes of cold creek.

    We've toe-heeled through mud
    to loquacious mutes and blind seers
    in rooms where dollars cushioned
    the torn cradles of buried children.

    We've attended raucous rains,
    pelting downpours, owl-hooting,
    crow-calling winds, fierce sun shouts,
    midnight stark star silence.

    We've dressed in rough silks
    donned stoneware berets
    danced in ballet slippers cased in granite
    limped through each marathon.

    We've bent ourselves hesitant and clean
    at dawn birdsong choruses,
    traced bones and lips when
    timbers' hairy chests heaved and swayed.

    We've stippled the green lawn,
    galloped over stenciled fences
    to sing our own diseased homage,
    to sip thimbles of fog.

    We've wakened to discordant lullabies
    sensed tangled roots, splay shoots
    unearthing from feeble clay ravine.

    We've come, emptied,
    seeking burnt memories:
    but the place is wrong

    Now, this trunk leans down,
    a gentle giant clasping each bank
    calling us to cross, one to the other again.

    Pilgrim and soldier,
    we chew the thick air,
    the circle squared.


    Ode to the Elder

    "Let us not waste our times in idle discourse ...
    Let us do something while we have the chance.
    -Becket: Waiting for Godot. Act. II

    We are Moorish Arab, Sephardi Jew,
    Prague gypsy, Irish bard
    teasing the sitar, lute, fiddle, cello:
    all hollow-bellied stringed creatures sighing.

    Pale silver eyebrows arch
    over caramel-pebbled eyes,
    shiny as newly washed stones:
    they pelt my face at eye-level.

    As you tease, I imagine
    a tiny boy pulling back a rubber band:
    lobbing wadded arithmetic paper
    into a coy girl's inkwell.

    You conjure cardinals
    yellow chickadees out of season
    flutter red maple branches:
    night's crest-tipping raven wings,

    string beads to light the wooden houses
    mirrored in inky Lake Anna,
    mull a sweet German wine:
    under fluid-eyed Walter Russell sculptures.

    Your kibitzing warms better
    than the daily hot oatmeal
    my Texas grandfather swore brought immorality,
    carries me across Europe's stone-laced villas on your handlebars.

    Meeting you is like swaying in a pub sing
    bold voices belting out sea shanties:
    willowy plaids entwining,
    when I'd only known dark café corners.

    Or being seated beside a stranger
    who's reading the same book
    we two parallel, silent:
    your tale referenced in the volume before me.

    Memory, an acquired taste,
    we touch its texture,
    leave years,
    the bones and threads, intact.


    "Frozen in Fear"

    Water from springs,
    snow melt,
    scant summer rain,
    creates high altitude lakes
    luring migratory flamingos
    to roost.

    On frigid nights
    ice forms like lace
    around their legs:

    the morning sun
    sets them free.

    -Description of the Azmain of Chile,
    a high desert between the Andes and the Pacific.


    Daddy's Bathroom Manners

    Why my father left the door open,
    the lights off,
    mystified me,
    those nights he rose in the dark

    to use the toilet
    or when he'd scuttle in tattered pj's
    long past retiring,
    to the bathroom:

    water entering the bowl
    thundered on my teenage ears
    his form crossing the hall by my bedroom
    wounded.

    He, child of Victorian parents
    stentorian in verbal thrusts
    sloppy suited and shuffling,
    urinated

    as if to call us forth
    to hear, too see,
    to understand

    what?


    In a Real Poet's Salon

    Among post-menopausal femme fatales
    flowery tunic-topped widows,
    black-haired grandmothers,
    and adoring interlopers

    the handlebar-mustached poet
    sashays knowing giggles
    from gadflies' throats
    and buzzing bees on the wall.

    Silence refines my voice:
    I slip on the role of mourner
    like a sacred pinafore.

    In this circle
    they see through veils
    and lead.

    I do not shout.

Connection

    Waiting

    Stark's at the end of the steel, was as ugly as proud flesh.
    -Wallace Stegner
    (for John Snow)

    Steeped in miasma and sighs
    we don't dare turn too inward
    over one small mortality.

    The gentle Dr. Snow, crease-browed virgin and vegetarian,
    tilts bald crown, strokes beard like a rough sketch
    and waits, twenty-two years,

    frock-coated, waistcoats rippling, front bibbed,
    he snaps a bow tie around steel stiff collars,
    and dispels untethered theories,

    rues that parasite-rich brew
    spreads and blooms in swallowed water
    to harvest the living.

    Orating shyly at the Medical Society on
    "Asphyxia and the Resuscitation of New-born Children,"
    he ingests, tests anesthesia's volatile fumes to eliminate sensitivity.

    Admitted to the Queen's bedroom,
    her life, the birth of princes, trusted to his hands,
    he knocks her out with chloroform
    he understands so well.

    That September, when 600 redden, chaff
    in St. Anne's Place, he wades through Soho's cowsheds,
    past slaughterhouses, to survey ancient cesspools,

    chart rooms, workhouses, and crowded cellars,
    their air drenched in boiling grease,
    to the water's source,

    traces death to a sick child's wrung nappies
    tipped into a leaking sewer, feeding
    the fatal epicenter, the Broad Street pump.

    Days later the parish guardian grips
    the end of the steel, removes the pump handle:
    and the epidemic ends.

    Eighteen years more they wait,
    those Victorians with a pompous lack of logic,
    to swallow the German germ theory of disease.

    Dr Snow,
    we still wait for antidotes
    to displace miasmas,

    someone to see the obvious and act—
    lift the lever,
    remove our current plagues.


    Seeking Miracles

    Focus, abandon
    will and grace
    lead to the center, to memory.

    Read it well,
    the finger pointing
    is not the same
    as the object pointed at.

    Drop everything you expect
    then let your eyes see
    what waits to be seen.

    Out of an underground cave
    language unknowingly
    raises heart and its motions,

    thought born here
    climbs to the brain,
    silently becomes insights

    intelligence
    only then journeys outward
    in words.

    If we smother heart language
    with ready-made ideas

    we are not listening.


    Existentials

    (Tashkurghan, Afghanistan,
    February, 1974)

    Across the room Tom laughs
    "Oh yes, we could coin a phrase ..."

    I've just said something
    about our Peace Corps cook
    how we were dealing with an artist of sorts
    how I admire someone
    who can create with food,
    how it's really a kind of existential act
    since all the work
    passes away again.

    "Oh yes," he grins,
    that Irish ruthlessness ablaze.
    "Right down
    the old existential funnel

    of existence ..."


    Svetlana's Other Daughter

    After a Kazakhstan school bus skidded over barriers,
    stacked like timber
    in a country where protests burned illegal,

    her Russian-bowed 10-year old
    dropped at the Tian Shah Children's Camp
    wasted into fever only days after she arrived,

    brought home
    just in time for burial,
    causes eternally unknown,

    the institute professor, an oval-eyed mother
    stretched her pained body over
    the 5-year old daughter left behind,

    taught her fear, suspicion, anger,
    imprinted in her the need to dissemble
    to survive.


    Four Quips

    (From The Writer Observed by Harvey Breit

    E.M. Forster, he claimed, was
    altogether looking like a spare
    intelligent, ruffled heron.

    Christopher Morley:
    as intelligent
    as any thin man.

    He echoes Nietzsche's claim:
    perhaps all vulgarity consisted
    in man's inability to resist stimuli.

    Or, that:
    the mind must learn to think
    as a form of dance.

    Pound, he recalls, thought:
    what matters is not the idea a man holds
    but the depth at which he holds it.

    While T.S. Eliot found:
    the main difference between
    the good and the bad poet

    was not so much one of talent,
    as it was the inability of the bad poet
    to be unconscious at the right times.


    Ropes

    I needed the ropes, she kept telling me.

    Not for special effects,
    holding up actors in movies,
    dancing them from roof to courtyard
    until the final scene, their halters gone,
    they fly.

    I kept my ropes on me
    lapped one piece over the other

    tied one side only
    after I'd finished the first.

    We coil them so they won't kink,
    flemished, singed,
    or bound the ends with twine tape
    to prevent fraying.

    Ropes bear tensile strength:
    pull but not push,
    twisted and braided fiber
    to connect,
    skeins fed into winches and capstans.

    Childhood taunted, exhaled,
    the ropes key to our games:

    Every dawn,
    the venetian blinds' long cotton cords
    flipped up, slates spun to open straight,
    edging in the world outside;
    at night, dropping the curtains on light.

    Sisal rope swings on oak trees,
    so tall we'd leap to the seat running,
    clutch airy pendulum.
    Jump ropes turning spun coils faster and faster,
    slapping asphalt newly bridging ditches.

    The fat rope dangling from the gym vaults,
    we'd wrap our legs around,
    scoot up like sailors on stormy mastheads
    high as light fixtures and heated rafters
    to win blue ribbons for "Top of the Rope."

    Later, three sheets to the wind,
    we'd sail, manning jib-sheet, cleated halyard,
    raising, lowering the mast
    skating up the river, our lines,
    controlling everything.

    I needed the ropes,
    each innocent's gamble,

    blended cotton, linen,
    manila hemp, or sisal,

    held me in air or water
    raised me for decades
    from dead ground.