And muffled heartbeats endlessly
Aform, atumble with the crumbled dregs of foam
And murmurings of travel where the wandering
Daft stumbler of the roads gives up and stands,
His shoulder creaked with weights
Of toys left over from a time when he ran out with boys
Who, in the hour, then grossly grew to men,
Have left him for some other roads to town.
So he went out through hills to where
The customs, laws, aims, dreams
And circumventures ran them down
To nothingness
Where fences rusted, rotted and gave way,
Where open fields barked foxes, sang with sparrows
Mocked with crows, accepted snowflakes
In sparse payment for old crimes
Those summers killed, deep buried now, and best forgot
And laid with white.
There, every night, a nightmare rouse and whirl
Of chaff and seed
Snuffed up, is sneezed in four directions;
Thus spent free it flounders, wanders, lingers
Molders deep across the dry and cereal land.
No matter, look, but more than looking, hear:
At starting of the dawn, at spent of dusk,
Beginning or shutting down the storms of year
The paper blowing in a dustboll on the empty road
The seaweed thistling the sand shore shoals
In murmured rustling code which speaks to naught
So Nil gives back a throated trickling of sound:
Far Rockaway.
That Rockaway which Far, which Rocks, which tumbles down
The landfall-click-away-along-away
Like time which dusts to ruin and to brine
Down destiny’s incline to desert stills,
To ruined clay
Like trollies which excursioned off the cliff
And fell in ticket-punch confettis celebrating dooms
To plunge, to steep, to drown in deeps, and dream of summer days
Now in Forever’s Keep…
As whirlwind dying in your ear lets pollen say
In soughing whistled whining all awhisper
Far
Far
And far beyond far
Rock O rock to sleep in deep night crumbling to night,
To rambled star…
Far Rockaway…
PLEASE TO REMEMBER THE FIFTH
OF NOVEMBER: A BIRTHDAY POEM
FOR SUSAN MARGUERITE
Across the green of years
A croquet ball comes rolling in the tender moss
To kiss the bright-striped wicket-pole
A kiss of Time.
Through hoops, beneath the shade of trees grown old
When fogs themselves grew tired of their mist
And so turned gray and fell to mold,
Through hoops, the summer sun spins like a globe
Unraveling
Forever circuiting a game
Where players change their faces
Prompt with every thirty years…
And shadows of the men upon the lawn
Grow tall at dawn or short again at dusk,
Or, drenched by rain, erased,
Are sketched out by a newer light
As gulls dip down the freshened air with cries
Like beggars gone asouling Harvest Night.
Forever rolls the ball, the wooden round,
Forever waits the wicket to be touched,
Then, ricocheted, the bright stuff spins aback
To start the game again around about;
The toys always the same,
The players always stunned by miracles of doubt.
But yet, for all the seeming lateness of the day,
How rare to find one player who refused to play…
We linger here in sun with mallet tender in our hands awhile
And all just finished, in the midst, or new begun; we smile
Taking or giving the weapon,
Standing aside,
A groom of time or tomorrow’s bride,
Retiring to the convent of eternity
Or, rawborn, yelling for some fame
We feel, deserving, waits us on the field in that long game.
The tide of players gently rolls,
The ball goes wafted on from each,
The tide subsides but then to rise again
And where the Keeper? and what the Score?
We gaze about, give sums, make calculation
To our secret selves and thus, while never knowing more
Move on, our turf prints denting here and there the green
Until late showers of rain in afternoon
Urge grass to rise and all the faint-made hollows fill,
To find no trace, no track, no path
Where we have, endless, been.
And from the far side of the field we stand and wave
To others who commence, who breach the day
Assured that it will never end.
A lie? A joyous lie;
To them we cry, we shout,
“By God now, yes! You’re right!
There is no night!
But only dawn and noon
There is no moon!
But only sun and day!”
In silence then we sadden forth bur private smiles and go our way.
The ball rolls on the whispered grass.
The wicket waits. The hoops resound like harps.
And all the ground of nineteen wondrous years is filled with cries:
“Begin! Begin!”
For what is always trembled on beginning
We know now never dies.
THAT IS OUR EDEN’S SPRING, ONCE PROMISED
What I to apeman
And what then he to me?
I an apeman one day soon will seem to be
To those who, after us, look back from Mars
And they, in turn, mere beasts will seem
To those who reach the stars;
So apemen all, in cave, in frail tract-house,
On Moon, Red Planet, or some other place;
Yet similar dream, same heart, same soul,
Same blood, same face,
Rare beastmen moved to save and place their pyres
From cavern mouth to world to interstellar fires.
We are the all, the universe, the one,
As such our fragile destiny is only now begun.
Our dreams then, are they grand or mad, depraved?
Do we say yes to Kazantzakis whose wild soul said:
God cries out to be saved?
Well then, we go to save Him, that seems sure,
With flesh and bone not strong, and heart not pure,
All maze and paradox our blood,
More lost than found,
We go to marry stranger flesh on some far burial ground
Where yet we will survive and, laughing, look on back
To where we started on a blind and frightful track
But made it through, and for no reason
Save it must be made, to rest us under trees
On planets in such galaxies as toss and lean
A most peculiar shade,
And sleep awhile, for some few million years,
To rise again, fresh washed in vernal rain
That is our Eden’s spring once promised,
Now repromised, to bring Lazarus
And our abiding legions forth,
Stoke new lamps with ancient funeral loam
To light cold abyss hearths for astronauts to hie them home
On highways vast and long and broad,
Thus saving what? Who’ll say salvation’s sum?
Why, thee and me, and they and them, and us and we…
And God.
THE FATHERS AND SONS BANQUET
Strange grief, gran
d joy, remember? Once a foolish year
We gathered in some old gymnasium
That smelled of sweaty seas that dried to dust;
There sexual exercisers, going gray,
Came them to table
With their sons, not yet, yet hopeful, after lust,
And sat in twins along the white and silver way
To eat back chicken and sad peas
And drifts of long-departed winter snows,
Those sweltered and destroyed-by-summer-night ice creams.
Then strangely for one moment in it all,
Someone said something that wasright.
And each sat tall up in his flesh and knew his bones
And none knew whether he was boy or man,
Son or father of the son;
When all was Team,
Found twin.
Suddenly bemused, befuddled and befogged by tears,
By love surprised, expressed,
Only to be lost a second later
When, hands unclasped, shoulders unhugged,
Clean ears unkissed, brows uncaressed, all bent them once again
To the untouchable flavors of swiftly melting time.
The scheme that was divined into the light
Sinks now again in yarns of numb spaghetti
Never to be unknit by rhetoric.
So, unspun, the dream retreats
To its dumb and brute-bone hiding place
As tears salt-dry the cheeks, start back in stunned
And blinded eyes
And leave no trace.
Remembering all this last night,
I saw my father stride within a memory film
Which ran the length of me
But measuredhim!
Behir-d my flesh in amiable disguise
I found him lurked in my not-knowing
But now seeing and appraising eyes.
He long has slept away to moss.
All the more reason then for my sad searching
And my sense of loss.
For he is hardly here in nose or jaw or ear.
But, ah, look! There! atumble in the hair on wrist and arm
Like glints of gold and amber and bright sun,
There everything I was and am and will be soon
Deep run.
O, sometimes twice a day I catch him treading by!
Or, if alert with only simmers of half-vision
On the flexed wide sill of patient eye,
Some dozen times or more, especially at noon,
I capture him in fry and burn and brazen heat;
He lifts my hands to catch a phantom ball,
He runs my feet to hurdles that fell down
And ruins stayed some forty years ago.
I plan to catch him so, in shocks, abrupt entrapments,
Rare delights,
A hundred thousand times or more before I die.
My dad, old pa, that loving father there
Awrestle in bright sweat,
All nestled in the clockspring copper twine
That furs me with a sunset fire
And speaks with light and tells more with a silence
Than my lost sad soul can half divine.
He rambles where the ants of childhood scurried on my knuckles,
Now lost, now found, he waves for me to see him
On that most strange hearth, my wheat-field arm,
My whorled palm and fingertip, my harvest flesh.
Dear God, praise Him, that He connives,
That He burns wide my gaze withboth these lives:
To see the father in the son all snug
And tucked and warm and happy-fine inside.
Miraculous! that pore and blood
And cell and gene and chromosome
Are that odd immortality we rarely note or speak of
For a home.
Yet home it is, and threshold of the fire
Where father, playing at a death
Did sink, retire, and stoke him up a warmer blaze:
Myself… a bon rekindled with genetic praise.
His fingers hover as I hover out my grasp,
My breath of exultation, thanking Providence,
Sighs out a prayer with every gasp.
Thankful for me, I give my thanks to him,
In twin thanksgivings then we share our single heart with grace,
And love this soul, this flesh, these limbs,
Our basking place.
We are the stuff of each other’s dreams;
He the long since melted and vanished
And I all that remains of those dimly remembered
Warm June summer night ice creams…
And now at last
From the long lazing drowsy fathers and sons banquet of life
We wander home
Two on the same sidewalk
Ambling as one.
And still tonight, tonight,
Alone and shaving, the rippled mirror bright,
My own gaze seeks beyond this lather-mask and foam;
Old One, I miss but find you here,
This is your home
And yours my marrow
And I your son.
Never were there two of us but only one.
Once the one was you.
But with the changings of the sea
The tide, gone out, returns,
And now, now, now, O, now…
… that one is me.
TOUCH YOUR SOLITUDE TO MINE
Sweetest love, come now to meet me,
Touch your solitude to mine;
Take, enfold, protect and greet me,
Save me from my world with thine.
Give me more than I might borrow,
Much of joy, yet some of sorrow;
Search and find in Love’s high attics
Horizontal mathematics,
Toys to prove the simple sums
That honeys, nectars, pollens, gums
Of Love’s taking, giving, grieving,
Sweetly seeding and conceiving
Will thrive our days to myth and lore:
Two separate minds, one flesh the score.
Deftly sing it, lady, praise
How I lose me in your maze,
Gladly lost there, never found,
In your honeyed underground.
People asking then for me,
Tell them where I buried be.
Tangled in your private wild,
Say that you grow large with child,
So one day from secret earth
Middle age will find rebirth.
I not to tomb, but hence to womb
Where your maidenhair then growing
Clothes this ancient peach afresh,
Robes it round with April flesh.
O, men by thousands, such as I
Would gladly ‘neath your sweet grass lie
To claim what’s tucked beneath your lawn
Will rise as fresh and young as dawn.
Love’s Time Machine will shelve me there
And chaff the old to new and fair
And, nurtured, kept, by nectars mild Be born again as your last child.
GOD IS A CHILD;
PUT TOYS IN THE TOMB
God is a Child;
Put toys in the tomb
And He will come play.
What’s new in this?
Why, not a thing at all.
It was known and tried
So many years upon a year ago,
When kings knew swift-lost sons
Who went to dust in summers
That turned wintry chill
Within a night.
All humble-proud, those captain kings departed
To the tomb
And there by still sarcophagi of amiable sons gone cold
And rambled off across the abyss rim
Astroll upon the meadows of parched space,
The weeping monarchs set down toys
That only yestermorn were in th
e hands of child.
These fragments of lost play,
Strewn all about like breadcrumbs for some mighty bird
To come and pluck and eat,
Were thus left there
In hopes that God or gods, a singular or plural Presence
Might, paused curious, see,
And step in across the mortal sill
To spend a while each night in splendid joyful wakes
By sleeping son;
To nudge his stuffs, to wake his soul perhaps;
So boy and God might squat awhile
On tombstone floor and rattle numbered bones
Or tremble ghostly xylophones and shiver harps
Or trace in dust a hopscotch pentagram
And dive in it
To swim on river tides of moon
Let down through windows of the vault.
Could God refuse such sport?
No, no. Our God, Forever’s Child,
Will always play and show rambunctious wills
Among the molecules and atom storms
As well as knockabout of toys within a silent dungeon keep.
Let the world sleep.
Let father sit outside the door
And only now and then peek in at toys
Placed there about the box where his son hides;
And if he hears twin laughters,
One seedling-sparrow small,
The other vast as weathers off the sea,
Let him not look at all
But weep, and turn his tears to joys
That there, hid down, asprawl in floury gusts of midnight tomb,
There be a frolic of brothers/fathers/sons…
Oh listen! Let the sound fill up your heart!
That tumult of the large
And oh so pitifully weak small happy boys.
ODE TO ELECTRIC BEN
Ben Franklin was that rarity:
A man whose jolly-grim polarities did tempt our God
To hurl his bolts which, fastened to Ben’s ears,
Lit up his cerebrum for years
And thus illuminated reams of history.
His dreams, electric dreams,
Were knocked together out of Boy Mechanic schemes;
He wet his finger, held it to God’s Mystery and Storm.
God, in turnabout, gesticulated, touched
To know Ben’s warm or cooling weather.
So somehow these unconvivial two
Fell in together and were friends.
Their means quite different
But most similar-same their ends:
To Light the Universe,
Or light a world,
Large thing or small.