Old May Values Under Threat

Tribute and homage as the 19th century, the dead and graves, no escape,

Frank Winters and his staccato rhythms firing,

talking poetry and his mother with all who will listen.

Never done, never enough,

head down in the study of the father and father’s father and mothers.

Hands of today.

Regard, relinquish, find heart room of encouragement, solace, criticism, community.

Rooms social and existential, painterly and full of dance, music, late nights.

A voice of things and bees,

patient excitable as a dog for a walk,

sleeping all day-ready at a flash and go

deepest sense of brain stem, scent, smell, fear and belief.

Suddenly there are a lot of bees around,

Some sun through morning haze,

the air somehow clean with our inactive cars and mending hearts.

Common, mutual, sufficient.

Some blow up of the face shield, a light mist falling cold.

Start of May,

Green surroundings sounding the harbor, waves buck up, go away, repeat.

Wake up, go to sleep, repeat.

Blown sand in the corner, up against the barn.

Haphazard, the decay and growth of things.

Wilderness logic,

Walpurgis night, to take off on of the Elgin Marbles in The British Museum.

Parthenon in the rain.

Singular to me, to you,

all places at once in retreat as by flood, fire or pestilence,

the circle of the world closes for a while.

People line up with signs, shuffling their feet in the cold.

Ovid, Pasternak, how much more can the Russians suffer.

How many refugees squandered with their children on the shores of Greece.

How many and how many more?

Nouns of suicide,

names of places dug out from the stone, Antibes, Kerala, Ellora.

Trip down the river in a flat boat.

Sun and birds, the banks and the hanging limbs of trees over dappled, dark water.

Water, name of the suicides.

Tragedy big on stage. Lovers denied and adrift, armies, sand, time.

Beluga whale, tiger of Siberia, Ibex with an arrow or slit throat.

More blood spills.

The spit for the meat turns over the crackle of the fire,

the lick, the song, the long seductions in the crowded rooms

spilling out to the patio down the steps and to the ground,

red as sunrise, supple as the horizon and her garment of clouds.

Great gowns and lumpy spatters of blood,

rivulets on the wind shield and down,

half buried in wet mud, a tooth, molar from another time.

The nimbus drifts over head,

morning come to evening and a steady rain.

A hard lift to get it all down and clean up after the party.

Broken coronation, the people without a savior for another year.

That is what pockets are for.

Pieces of paper, oily morsels, song for another season.

Stage colorful, curtains maroon, paint on the canvasses of the alcove.

We are ready, vacuuming and ready.

Some sad feeling means things are never over.

Birthday sopapilla dripping with honey,

never over, not the same,

bandit sleeping mid morning, broke, waking up hungry.

Not the same as his father knew.

No longer, not same, not new, ongoing.

Time alone, father’s fathers we carry as a sing song,

the lilt of the old Irish way along stone paths

among the hedges, churchyards and mud sticking on a wet day to your shoes.

Track us in, bring us along, old dead wayfarers and freelancers on a dime,

a careful dance with the mouths of others wanting.

Fill the time of your interests with a whisper and a mutter moving on with purpose or

after being out, sitting down.

Raspy voice in the choir we want so much.

Just a little time to think.

Think about me or better yet, think of another.

You are good.

Holding by hand another hand,

a sprout in the mind’s eye of a fulsome tomorrow.

A gamble but to be sure is not in the string of crashes or words on the page to tell.

Tempting teeter totter, mumbly peg, twister, sieve for all valuables, screen for meaning,

tight ropes, high pulleys, the shaped stone.

Grateful Samaritan able to give it all away.

Sun comes out, dries the rain,

We came down the lane early to beat the crowd.

Something just for you, ready as a peach, as a sun about to rise, equal, democratic,

feeding all of the grass with light.

Light divine, light abundant, light hot,

same now as then, tomorrow clouds,

tomorrow and tomorrow until we are done,

as early as those before,

laying in their love with hope, fear, fatigue, inadequacy,

language poplars fast to grow to wooded bones, homes, boulevards, buses,

fog wet with exhaust,

nights lit by incandescence,

the moon, the fleet lights, the klieg, the laser and the neon.

Up there somewhere, she tickles ivory and makes it rain money.

She is the gift, the little voice, the proper call on promenade,

Ever a lemonade

A lip and cold ice on a hot day, shade.

Inside she weeps the tree,

deep roots,

tender sprigs of eye and spine,

A little too open to the elemental worry of things even while being overcome.

Every way which snares another paw or

cuts another crop short to its stubble like face of an old man breathing,

the hands of people talking at a table.

To carry on the lip synch of the passion play.

Tend the fire, sweep,

believe that only hours pay good money these days,

only time is the currency.

Metaphor of money with every cent wasted.

Clean air has value, water, tigers and stereotypes.

The best eyes are of the mind.

Pay the ideas and makers of truth and fantasy.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

Old May Values Under Threat

Comments

Old May Values Under Threat — No Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply