A walk on water

After you walk on water
You must heed the call of the weedy depths
Or suffer the consequences
The circular reasoning of centripetal force
Does not stand up to scrutiny as
The pulling is always away

All good laws come in threes
But the apple does not fall far
Which makes it possible to walk on water
But only provided that
You
Disappear
Thereafter

Free will

The more desperate I am
The further away it slips

Meet my brain –
The Chinese handcuffs
The harder I pull
The more stuck I am

There is a lesson –
Let go of the wheel
Control is an illusion
Thought up by a fool

Free will is a lie?
Biology is destiny?
Perhaps…

Now what was I talking about?

Nostalgia

Nostalgia sticks in my throat

Like a chained bull charging the red burlap curtain
Blood-blind
Thwarted in his unapologetic elegance
Pendulous testicles the size of a TV pundit’s ego
Clanging like the bells of St. Mary’s on Easter Sunday

Like a punch in the gut from fifty falls ago
A bowling ball still rolling around in my viscera

Your love is a steel blade on my tongue
It splinters my words
I cannot remember a time when it was not so

Epistemic ennui

Is it epistemic angst that unites banks?

Why does bank need to be united?
Is it the proletariat? Is it a mosaic?
Is it so that it can eat cake and drink champagne?

A bank divided might suffer from epistemic uncertainty
And that is not OK.
If there is one thing I want from my bank
It is certainty of epistemology.

But what makes a united bank go bad? What makes it divide you
From your dividends?
Is it the banality of their business?

I don’t think so. I happen to think that
Nothing makes a united bank go bad like
Epistemic ennui.

Period.

So the tree

I am a knot in the trunk of time
A fork in the road of all that is
An evolutionary accident
So the tree
Bows to me with compassion
Because I do not yet understand that
The shadow is not the whole story

In honor of Adrienne Rich’s birthday

Here is a poem by Adrienne Rich “What Kind of Times Are These?” It is as relevant, if not more so, today as it was when she first published it. I copied it from the Poetry Foundation’s web site here, where there is also an audio of the author reading it. Enjoy!

 

What Kind of Times Are These?

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

 

“What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich.

Source: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995)

Clouds

My daughter taught me about cinquains. Here is one.

Clouds
Wispy, determined
Slithering, sliding, sailing
Dragging away my dreams
Thieves