Teach us to smile and

be still to always

have an answer, oh lord and

not give up, like the poem said

to care and not to care,

to be silent and still.

not looking at

unrepentant chaos eating
itself tangling the hours.

Teach us to sit and think

not skid off the dirty

 wings of time as we

go forward into

the future.

She eats ground

with the sharp teeth of her

heels,

stomping out the strident

fanfare of her

displeasure..

at some point all the floors

are raw and bleeding

the anger threadbare and

of unremembered origin.

Liberty

The old days are simply that,

and there is a new colossus that should

stand, invisible, but unavoidable

on the burning sand reaching out

his mighty hand toward the bitter

fog of night.

Instead of a homely woman with a

torch, and say

"Poor huddled masses, yearning

to be free, stand up on

your own hind legs and

fight where you are."

STAY HOME

" we don't need you and we

won't feed you

any more"

"I have all the winners, the

ass kickers, the ones who

won't be pushed

aside, ,"

Beyond the ocean walls, in letters

one hundred miles wide,

"Buffet now closed"

their are no more places left inside.

Sestina...

I was lucky enough to teach a small group of students the other day and one of the other teachers left an example of the the "sestina" for us to follow. It is a form of poem dating back to at least the 12th century which has six stanzas of six lines with an ending stanza of 3 lines. The trick is that the writer can only use the same six words to end the lines of each stanza and use all six in the last three lines. What a friggin' hassle. I just had to try one and it was hard and very confining and not that much fun. Sestina might be Latin based meaning "sixes" or it might mean " trying to swim a breaststroke, fully clothed, with a backpack....."

Glory be to the Father

who keeps this carnival together

who forces two ornery gases to be water

at first, so profoundly slow he can't be seen

keeping dark away with soaring light

but even so his will alone keeps hungry blazes still

In our home alone does water

stay and go reflecting festive light

infinitely elsewhere her clever body - cold and still

what lies beneath will not be seen

until destruction brings the fire and ice together

for she is a carrying wing set free by her giant Father

Circling now, he keeps the nebulous herd together

moving with such speed he can't be seen

The entropic wolves seeking to devour all the light

get sent curling into the dark abyss where all is still

like rain rippling on the silvered water,

Only what is done or made is evidence of the Father

Let us now turn from physics and how it all fits together

or even if there is or ever was a Father

just love that in all this black nothing we have light

enough for flowers and white beaches on the water

Outside, space is awful,dark and still

and for all our sensors and scopes, not one blade of grass is seen

Well, every one of us has a Mother and a Father

so we should huddle in our family tree tied all together

or, if not a tree, we are all sailors on the water

and hold on to each other through stormy seas and still

on dark and cloudy days we'll bring the light

that even in the lazy fog can still be seen

So even if no big hands ever packed this snowball together

into a gigantic chunk of power and light,

and no fuse was ever lit by the happy, playful Father

we've got lots of pretty lights and dancing water

There's no reason to be dry and still

for all the joys we've seen.

It's sad I've not flung the ashes of my father on the water

so he and the sea he loved will be together forever still

yet when the light goes out there will be something left to be seen.

elephantine symphony of

color and sound,

strange shapes gather and

dance to a nameless tune

old when they put the

last prophet underground

Dry angelic bliss

is unlieashed from your

craggy peaks.

Breathless, they

stood dripping wet

from rain, perfect and silver

against the green of Summer

There was paint on

the steps shining under water.

Her banana seat leaned

in toward the wall sharing a

secret with the potted plants.

There were the eyeglasses of his two

black wheels with red

glistening rails, lying on their

side, forgotten on the lawn,

paying court to the cracks and the dandelions.

She moved her face toward him, freckles on her

cheeks, innocent of paint or artifice,

just a small streak of chain grease beside her nose and

a little scratch on her chin.

His arms,brown and skinny,

all of her pale and soft

entwined without a grasping rub

that becomes required later.

There is a kiss.

A kiss that tastes like cinnamon gum

and something like salt

from a summer day.

There is a kiss

that hangs in its own space,

telling its own story,

saying goodbye.

the moving van playing the role of

that Casablanca airplane,

the train, troopship,

gleaming silver cross in a tropic sky

There is nothing before

it,

nothing after but

the feeling that

the feeling that it

was the most perfect kiss of

his life.

Vaudeville

Their world is flat.

The horizons are cheap curtains

poorly painted suggestions,

with the Eiffel tower or singing cowboy from the

last masterpiece hastily obscured

to make way for strip malls, haunted amusement parks,

cubicles, the boudoir with a streak of something dark

on the sheets.

The actors may give out with lines

not knowing what they really mean.

They hold their empty children singing lullabies

may as well be holding a loaf of bread with quicksilver

inside

krasota.

along the veins of rivers

blue on the flat white paper

the cities and towns are

hard, black scorchmarks

printed names that hurt the tongue,

that look out of focus

to American eyes,

From L'vov to

Kursk, Anadyr and

Kazan.

The names are bitter

burnt bread on waves of static.

Here are the words we learn

first

TANK, Rifle, Cannon, Rocket,

pilot, WHORE, Bullet, son of a whore,

it's curtains for you,

PANTS, table, library, ..if you don't know, we show

you, If you don't want to, we make you.

target, I knock down pears with

my prick.....destroyed.

I buy kvass and pirozhiki

from the Babushka, and speak

the soft, light, words like a

smart child, bowing, thanking her

with the long, formal, nicety

that comes from Chekov and Tolstoy.

"clever one" she calls me.

She comes from village, Butyrkovo

"..you know it? They do spoons there from birch....very pretty"

Black ink frankenstein stitches meaning rail lines, north to hash marks

of two runways, pimples of fuel tanks, one

muddy turd of a lake,

"I don't, k sozhaleniyu,

but it sounds nice.