Other Places,
Other Times
A Prayer
I rose early, early in the morning
with the sky caped in black
the birds still asleep under the spell
of a cloudless, cool Spring night.
It felt easy, easy in those moments
while alone in the silent woods
absorbed in their own green growing
to avoid being caught in the usual churn.
I paced slow, slow by a stream like
a serrated knife: straight on one side
beneath a rock overhang but notched
here, opposite, by vagaries of flow.
O to stay long, long in those quiet moments,
those not looked for simple gifts gone now,
and have all that heart hoped then:
a life well lived.
Chinese Proverbs Refute Chairman Mao's Droppings (牛粪)
To sleep well again after Khrushchev (secretly) denounced Stalin, and the intellectuals
led an uprising in communist Hungary, he "let a thousand flowers bloom" in order to lure
out the snakes of independent thinking. After, bludgeoned by criticism, more than half a million atone
with manual labor in reeducation camps for thinking freely, their lives forever marked and scarred.
A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.
Because sparrows eat grain, and for other perceived anti-revolutionary tendencies,
he mobilized the people to defend the nation. Neighborhoods, households and work
units poured outside to shout, beat pans and make a rumpus continuously so that
the bandit sparrows, safe only in the air and in flight, could not find any safe perch,
and, drowning in exhaustion, would repent their crimes and drop from the sky dead.
It's better to be without a book than to believe a book entirely.
To make a "Great Leap Forward" he proclaimed that, to become a great nation
"Everybody make steel." To meet steel quotas, in homes, offices and all work places,
in furnaces large and small, people melted scrap iron and tended fires day and night,
fed with wood from the newly bare mountains. One hundred million peasants stopped
farming for food and were redirected to help the nation achieve this revealed destiny.
Patience is a bitter plant, but its fruit is sweet.
Providence Rhode Island, 1962
The widow had a woodpile beyond the garage in the rear
assembled from nearby buildings demolished for the highway
by loading pieces of wood on a child's rusted red wagon.
She had crossed the churning ocean from her father's farm
as a young woman, trading a dirt-floored home shaded by trees
for a three-story wood tenement beside the railroad tracks.
She worked hard, initially for one dollar a day sorting rags.
She met and married a fellow emigrant. She bore and raised children,
losing only one to the Spanish flu. She helped the newest greeners.
She fed people as she could during the Great Depression years.
One who she had helped had left a mark flagging her place
to the many homeless passing by along the train tracks.
Later, her living children now grown, her husband long dead,
she burned coal and wood in a cast iron kitchen stove
and fed her grandchildren soup, sausage and apple pancakes.
At times at night, she remembered dancing as a girl one Sunday
with her brothers and sisters and neighbors near a full hay wagon
in a cleared field ringed by birches and pines.
The family in Naples, Italy
spread across the entrance of a narrow side street
are friendly at first, smiling to me striding by.
Several grimy children run over to cavort beside me.
A large seated man (the father?) waves me over.
But I wave, smile and walk on.
Their curses and some small rocks now hurled at
my back as I hurry toward the bay gleaming below
there to mentally wash away this unintended insult
and lay down this most vivid memory of Naples.
Faith
After the second great 20th century war
in a remote corner of Zambia a crone
with a battered hand-crank phonograph
and one scratched and worn record of
Churchill calling for wartime sacrifice
played the record repeatedly in her yard.
She told the growing crowd of listeners that
it was God's voice anointing her his agent
and commanding they obey her completely.
Many believed and built a clay temple to
house her and the rumbling voice of God.
An embarrassed government sent soldiers
to destroy the temple, killing hundreds.
Sakhumi 1967
(Assembled from an account in
Ryszard Kapucscinski's The Shadow
of the Sun)
In the modern city of palm trees and bougainvillea,
close beside the ruins of an ancient Greek colony,
some of it on land and some sunk beneath the sea,
a hungry traveler dines in a restaurant built on rocks
that plunge like divers headlong into the Black Sea
and watches fat and lazy fish navigate underwater streets.
The Abiding
Hard to say where my mind was that time
or even what day, month or season it was
when sitting in a middle school classroom
my knees just fitting under the wood desk
the teacher, his hair greyer than his years,
stood and began to recite, with emotion,
Farewell to a Friend, by Li Bai.
As if unleashed, something within me stirred.
Two friends parting as the sun sets in the sky,
one starting out to travel to places far away.
Then, as if guided by the poem just recited,
he turned and drew the images it conjured:
- the hills of the northern border
- clouds roaming above the landscape.
Like a great wind, love for ancient poetry shook me,
a love that, these many years later, does not subside.
Belief
In 17th century Russia, Old Believers
unmoved in the tumult of doctrinal change,
intransigent in their long-held beliefs,
insisted on pronouncing Alleluia three times, not twice.
And, conversely, crossed themselves with two fingers, not three.
Made their processions round a church clockwise, not counterclockwise.
Accordingly, Czar Peter created an Office of Schism to hunt them down.
Which scattered to Siberian taiga and foreign lands these simple folk desperate to main their essential beliefs.
Pitched Roof in Winter
Fallen snow muffles all the straight lines.
Only its spine, the ridge, peaks through up top.
Below, snow fills the valleys between roof and gable.
Snow piles drag downward to the hipped edges at either end
to eventually fill and overflow the gutters. As the sun rises,
melt snow falls from the drip edges of gable ends
Bad Fairy Tale
This one doesn't have a prince or a witch.
And, like most, no fairy either. Just some
people oddly costumed who listen intently,
as if bewitched, to fulsome assertions and strange
fabrications. Then sally forth with clubs and cuffs
to storm some ramparts and make their ogre a king.
The Wrong Vote
It's not so much that you chose poorly
and, content with your life, never noticed,
or realized later, with regret, that it was a mistake.
It was how you never paused to consider
how improbable were the promises made
how - believing as you did in monsters and atrocities,
unlikely were the accusations leveled at the opposition.
You imagined you, and all of us, could
take the chance and bet on disruption.
You kept tallying your grievances,
dwelling on all the changes never made.
You chose the wild ride and hoped for the best.
Things were good. Things were bad.
Everything began to change in foreseeable ways.
You noticed the things gone, perhaps forever,
and felt regret now that they are gone.
One for the road
In this color summer photo
a brown dirt road spills down
from a low hill at the horizon
to fan out and fill the lower frame.
At the center of this country road
a brown splayed and flattened form
with only two boots in high relief that
identify the remains of a Russian soldier
outside a village somewhere in Ukraine.
Rooms
She claimed she didn't remember me,
how I helped her get here to escape gambling debts,
or how, to heal my heartbreak, she taught me to dance.
That night, after she drank too much,
I brought her safely to her hotel room.
The next day I returned there and asked for her.
The clerk said there was no Lulu in that room.
There had been a Mimi in that room, but she had left.
Later, I learned that a jealous boyfriend killed her there.
But I prefer to imagine her transforming into a white crane
that flew away to live in a perfect upper world.
I asked for that room. The manager said it needed to be redecorated.
Intending to occupy it when ready, I moved into a neighboring room.
There, through the thin walls between the rooms, I listened
to the manager's elder daughter in Lulu's emptied room
as she obsessively rehearsed conversations with an absent lover
her heels clicking on the wood as she turned in small circles
repeating herself as troubled people in love sometimes do.
To me, as she paces she is a leopard gradually shedding its spots
finally becoming wholly white and solely good.
Mountain and Water
On the finest silk fabric available,
luxurious but demanding to work with,
the artist used both black ink and empty space,
combining complementary opposites,
to depict the mountain, representing integrity,
and what one thinks of as solid and enduring,
as well as water, representing wisdom, as
adaptive, fluid and dynamic as the rushing river.
The mountain's elevation speeds the water's flow.
The water's flow shapes the mountain's surface.
The mountain's yang and the water's yin
together creating the beauty and stability
it's heart-weary exiled creator pined for.
re Guo Xi's, Early Spring