Genealogy
Someone in my large family
began to research our
ancestors. The story goes that
she stopped when
she found a Jew. This is what
I am: descendant of
bigots. Oven builders. What
does one do with
such a heritage? Where am I
welcome? Here, friend,
on this foolish foolscap, with my
little marks against the past.
There are More of Us
They don’t want us to talk against
the war. They don’t want us
to talk at all. They have brought out
the old slogans, the billboards
that bristle. They try to turn us into
goblins, silent goblins.
I will lie down and harden myself
against their efforts.
I will continue to believe that poets
belong at the White House.
Tell me to shut up. I will gather about
me men and women with
pitchforks. There will be no stillness
in the marketplace. There
will be no soft place for you to land
the jets, no place of purchase for the men
with the batons. Pass it on.
We will not go away. We will grow like
weeds. And if you say “the
bottom line” to us, we will tip over your
desks and emasculate your enforcement.
This is what we are, a muscle made of voice.
Love in Civilization
Remember what we were like
before we had an icemaker
or a fax machine or, God, a
VCR? Why, we might as well
have been living in a cave,
scrabbling for lice and roots to
feed our wilding children.
God bless our happy home, under
the spreading limbs of
old Yggdrasil, opening its
loving leaves just enough
for our satellite to get a clear signal.
The Judge’s Narcolepsy
“Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost.” Leonard Cohen
How we used the words we were
told to use. How
we suffered under the withering
gazes. How the room
filled with a perfume from the
abattoir. We stood
up when they said to standup.
We left the decision making toall
the others. We died,
sentence by sentence. How we feel
about that. How we sleep.
The Buddha’s White Mango
Where the Buddha led the young
couple a tree sprang to life.
The Buddha picked one of its
white mangoes and gave one half
to the man and one half to the woman.
The medicine is powerful,
The Buddha warned the couple.
Love, while heartily desired,brings
pain also, the pain called love.
The Earth, Yggdrasil, 1954 Young
“Bodhi originally has no tree”
Huineng
Once, here was—what?,
scrub brush, tangled vine,
sumac. Once, here was
what we now call a lot,
untilled dirt, space, really,
empty space. Once no one
ran about looking for
fireflies or for the black and white
cat which scales our tree
in search of baby birds.
Once no one ran toward Yggdrasil
on perfect three-year-old
legs, saying, Watch this,
a gymnastic only a parent
could love. Once it was
all nothing, back before
the beginning, which was
a long time ago,
before Jesus or The Beatles
or Chloe. Let it all live on,
eons after also, when
Chloe’s children run toward
trunks larger than their
parents’ bodies, on this
mottled ball, floating
free as a gift
in the spindrift of space.
Trust the Machine
I put everything in there,
words, phrases, the occasional
tetrastich. I let it sit.
In a few months I return to the
machine to see
what’s become of it all.
It’s gone.
Someone explains to me that the
ether is hungry.
Everything is temporary.
Everything I hold dear I cannot,
you know, hold, dear.
Kali
Kali is destroyer.
Through eradication
of all things
good is born.
I pull this once blank
sheet of possibility
from the printer
and wish it were all gone.
All of it,
beginning with the cursor,
here, by my name.
.
