Harold Bench, Too

Someone has torn off the plaque from the bench,
Exposing a dark patch on the bleached wood.

That's all the memorial left Harold,
Whose parents had this bench built, in his name,

At the fish-rich mouth of Silverton Creek
On a rocky beach by the walking path

With a perfect view south across the lake,
Before, someone said, they left town for good.

This is the sixth year I've come to this bench,
Spring, summer, fall, to sun after a swim

Or to sit alone and study the lake
Like a monk or a Romantic poet,

As if I ever had the discipline
And sweet, melancholic trust in Nature

To ever master either profession,
That enlightening, terrifying awe.

I just watch or talk to the passers by,
Who invariably ask if I've swum yet

Or how much, and how cold it was. "Cold, eh?"
They fish, throw sticks to their dogs, fly model planes,

Take their kayaks out, occasionally
Get into the water and swim like me.

"Cold, eh? But invigorating. So clean!"
I agree. One of them tore off the plaque

That declared "In Memory of Harold."
A few years would have done it anyway.

Let's not get too self-righteous or morose.
I never knew Harold. I like this bench.

This is the second poem that I've composed
To praise it while sunning myself on it,

And maybe the hundredth time I've scrambled
The brown-shelled eggs of small ideas while here,

Drying off, shivering, sweating, stalling
As long as I can, hiding out from life

By living under the full, slow movement
Of the shadows around the sundial pines,

By diving under the fast, cold moment
Of a rush from the creek hitting the lake.

It's not Harold that I knew, mourned, and loved.
This bench is Harold and his pilgrimage

From human meaning to human meaning,
To defacement, to weathering, to change.

Jhator: Alms for the Birds

We do like to feed each other, don't we?
Toddlers will force feed the doggy, mothers
Will hatch plans to trick food into toddlers,
Fathers will open waistbands and wallets
To pretend a suburban restaurant
Is the setting for personal potlatch,
Roman banquets complete with attendants.
A loner's not a loner invited
To a holiday feast but a witness
To the feast-giving family's honor

And largesse, be the feast teetolaling
Or debauched by beer and bud, strict vegan
Or danced around suckling pigs on spits,
Whether every last centavo be spent
For a once-in-your-life extravagance,
Or whether nightly leftover excess
From the back of baronial kitchens
Furnishes tables of dumpster divers
Who pride themselves on tricky fine dinners
For bourgeois friends impressed and horrified.

The loner's not a loner, invited.
It doesn't matter to us whether food
Used to be something that ate us, the guests
Something we've gulped with relish ourselves in the past,
The vermin under tables, nails, and skin
Revolting parasites to be lured out,
Trapped, snapped, and executed or benign
Aids to digestion toiling deep within
The paradox of omnivorous grace,
Scarecrows without flesh, bodies for the birds.

YHWH = K&S-R/R = Delta Z

Once upon whoever I was at the time,
I sat in this exact car seat in this
Exact car at this exact spot
At this exact time of year in the rain,

Trying, for the life of me, to process
An equation said to encompass all
Processes. Right here, by this road,
This abandoned railhead, this stream

Of relentless recreation while rain
Tried to explain to me on the window
That nothing explained anything,
Nothing was ever the same, ever

The same nothing I was and would
Write about forever because I couldn't
Understand being something that knew
Itself as nothing that knew it wasn't.

The shiny motorcycles rumbling past
Were similar then, not the same.
The blood in my veins, not the same,
My daughter in the back, not at all,

But this thing in my brain, nothing
But something inside my brain,
Feels now how close everything was
To the same, calls it exact, exactly

And rebuilds, once again,
The same impossible equation
The shell game of all shell games,
Covariance, comparison, the Name.

Graffitify

Why the desire to caress the walls
Of stalls and tombstones
And signs sufficient to themselves
With--what the hell best to call it?

Think about it. The enormous effort,
Never accomplished by any genius
Anywhere for hundreds of millennia,
The collective accomplishment

Of an agreed-upon system of signs
For transcribing aspects of speech
Sound for sound, word for word,
So scratched bones, clay, stones,

Could be interpreted as sayable
Things someone once had said,
And then the rarity of it, the magic
Of mastering the difficult trick,

The art of carving time into items
That could convey the illusion
Of eluding time altogether to talk
To other generations entirely,

Who is the imp within the scribe,
The scribe within the ordinary
Child battered into years of practice
Who wants to gouge godawful rhymes

Of little or no charm or hopefulness
And even less originality as stains,
As furious, impotent, heartbreaking
Attempts meant at mockery,

Obscenity, identity, omnipotence
On the bare face of public space?
Why spit in the eye? Why rhyme?
Once in a while among the runes

There's something wise or kind,
A bit of unique autobiography,
A sobbing, scritched out cri-de-couer,
But usually, for centuries, mad stupidity--

Banging body jokes in broken lines,
Boasts about what would shame
The boaster, were he to be caught
Fulfilling his crooked rhymes,

An amazing expense of spirit
And culture hard come-by in a waste
Of outrageous effort, mostly tame,
To set down dreams in doggerel

That appears to want to defile
The emptiness of the world, to layer
The venting of anger, disrespecting
Even worthless mysteries of others,

As Viking crudities chiseled inside
The Neolithic tombs of Scotland,
As cowboys' bullet signatures
Pocking apart old Utah rock art--

I stopped in a forest in Canada
Where the waterfalls fell in a rage
That felt the mountains were prisons
To break, gravity a joy, trees a cage,

And I stepped in a tidy, whitewashed
Outhouse picturesque as a cottage
And found five lines, plus a drawing,
In bad ballpoint, describing--what?

The General's Memoirs

What do you forgive the man

Who has forgotten everything?
Do you let him lie all afternoon
On the tattered green couch

Beside the pile of books, of work,
Of things that should have been undone
Yesterday, when he was still of a mind
To solve things? That's a lot

To ask of yourself in the name
Of what might have been a gift
Of extraordinary life, maybe was
So, but is now a heap of little errors.

If I have to read or hear one more time
About the artist perpetually in debt,
The composer making a shambles
Alongside of all those masterpieces,

If I have to wonder one more time
About the ordinary, vacant souls
My mother tended to in nursing homes
And all the schemes they might have been,

I'll just go back to sleep. How can we
Try so hard to elaborate imaginary
Worlds no mortal animals can live in
Who aren't content to be immortal?

The Hours of Moths and Owls

Sukha: "Papa, you read the book of secrets while I play games, OK?"

My wife has taken my place in the night.
She stays up late with moths and owls,
Building things, battering lit panes, and hunting for the answers

Daylight too easily, glibly, marketably provides.
I have become a night sleeper,
A morning tea-drinker,

A grumpy-then-acquiescing father,
An afternoon napper like my Dad.
I have a daughter. I have a memory

Like an attic filled with decades
Of being up late and among the spiders

Hunting down theories who listened for owls
As the white-footed mice tilted brief ears, young.

The Thanks

The cheap, pocket paperback book
He gave me from the creaseless shelves
Of his life's lending library
Was a red-backed Penguin Classsic
In perfect condition, except
For the acidification
Of its twentieth-century
Paper-pulp pages turning beige.

No comments, no dog ears, no stains:
Had he ever read it, he read
With such reverence for the text
As fine, material object,
However cheaply mass-produced,
A Torah could not have complained.
This was no Torah. A novel
From the era of great novels,

It had pretensions to saving
Humans from their humanity,
But did not claim to speak for God
Directly, nor, as was the case
For some contemporary tales,
To be in fact spoken by God.
It was just a story, weary
Of what it felt compelled to tell.

I took it for its size, texture,
And promise of most serious
Appearance whenever spotted
Casually opened in my hand.
The author and title conveyed
Enough seriousness to warn
Even the well-read stranger off.
The volume spoke both thrift and heft.

Also, I had never read it,
Although, as with so many works,
I had heard enough about it
To pretend, with some insouciance,
That both the author and his tale
Were old acquaintances of mine,
Even though it had been a while,
And memory had slightly blurred.

I began to carry it with me,
Partly intending to read it,
Partly intending to have it
At hand when bored enough to read.
Fitfully, one page here or there,
I actually read the damn thing.
It's greasy now, stained, creased, and real.

I don't really care for it now.
I don't like the world it pretends.
I find the tone contemptuous,
Generalizing to a fault,
Mocking what the author missed
While dreaming of a great success.
He got his great success. Censors,
Grudgingly, let him slip through.

Time made a temple of his name
Throughout the land he satirized.
He sold well. He dreamed greater dreams.
He panicked and destroyed the work
He knew was nothing more than this,
The thing he made clever at first
But could not make true to the end.