Early Snow

Winter crept right up on fall,

Slugged it with a blackjack, took its cash,

And left it bleeding in the snowy street,

Still dressed for a party that was over now.

It was an ambush. It was beautiful -

The shock of white against the blazing leaves.

Thank Heaven for surprises, even those

That catch us gormless and make fools of us.

Fall fell, but spring will spring up; spring will take revenge,

And color, coming back in triumph, will

Make mincemeat of its bragging frozen foe,

Who, knowing when he’s licked, will lick his wounds,

And dream in dark places of his next attempt.

Thank Heaven, too, for rivals; without them,

How would we know what secret stuff was ours?

How would we forge the straight shaft of a soul,

If not in fires meant to vanquish us?

Let us be tempered by what means us ill,

And that which does not kill us, let us kill.

Stan Lee

Really sad to hear about the passing of Stan Lee – shameless huckster, unrepentant cheeseball, ham-fisted prose stylist, inveterate limelight-hogger, and stone-cold genius. His creations will endure as long as pop culture exists, and his imagination brought color, vibrancy, and gosh-wow excitement to an all-too-often gray and serious world.

In the words of The Man himself: "Marvel is a cornucopia of fantasy, a wild idea, a swashbuckling attitude, an escape from the humdrum and the prosaic."

Thank you for living, Stan Lee. Excelsior.

Small Talk

People who hate small talk just don’t understand subtext.

Witness

Everyone in New York is on the phone.

They are all having conversations

They want me to overhear.

They follow me on the streets and into cafés;

They talk on subway platforms, even subway cars.

It is all very urgent. It cannot wait one moment.

It has already been put off too long.

Most urgently, I have to overhear it;

It must be at such a volume

That I can't miss a word.

I guess I must be everyone's alibi –

Their conscience, maybe, or their chronicler.

I must be somebody very important,

Or else anybody else would do.

I hear you, New York City.

None of this is lost on me.

I will remember the time of your dentist appointment

And what an asshole your landlord is;

I will remember your sister's birthday

And how much you've always hated her,

And every detail of your hip surgery,

And why Carlos can go fuck himself.

And in return I ask for nothing.

There's nothing to remember about me.

I'll be slipping out of here like a ghost this evening

And making my phone calls tomorrow in Connecticut,

Where only the river can overhear me –

The river that does not care at all.

Stress

 

The kind of stress where people want things from you is better than the kind of stress where you want things from other people.

Unseizing the Day

Someday you will die.  But not today.

Today you will live, and worry over trifles,

And aggravate the people you love most,

And stoke your vanity, and nurse a grudge,

And waste an hour staring at a screen.

This is what it means to be alive –

To always be failing to cherish what you have.

To always be distracted, busy, blind,

And always fumbling in pursuit of dust,

While treasure gleams behind you, patiently,

Praying you’ll madly dare to turn around.

It’s too much pressure to imagine death.

It’s too much to live up to.  Let it go.

Assume instead that you will never die,

And never read a poem that begins

By bluntly telling you your death will come,

Because, however much the poet means

To celebrate the inconsequence of life,

He’ll only do the opposite.  He’ll seem

To say that you should seize the day,

When all he really meant to say was that

The day can seize itself, if necessary,

And you can dream away your short long life,

Because you’re human, and that’s what we do.

Experiment

If you were to let go of your most cherished beliefs – just for a moment – what do you think you would suddenly see?

Epiphany

“I have it!” they scream,

Bursting from dark laboratories,

Clutching a sheaf of arcane scribbles

Or a half-exploded beaker,

Eyes alight with a fervid passion

That frankly makes me nervous,

And crowing that they’ve found the secret

To great sex, endless love,

Spiritual fulfillment, and retirement savings.

They look so proud of their hard-won discovery –

So eager to share it with an adoring world –

So self-impressed and fierce in their belief –

That I’m not certain I have the heart to tell them

How I was never looking for the formula.

I was never in the market for secondhand bliss.

I was only ever looking for something improbable –

So fortuitous, in fact, as to seem ridiculous –

And utterly unrepeatable –

And of course, like everything we know of,

Working hard at vanishing.

Wisdom

If you're not part of the fun, you're part of the bummer.

Networking

 

"Networking" is such an ugly word. I prefer the term "forming superficial social connections to later exploit for economic gain."

Old Soul

I know I'm an old soul because my soul is constantly complaining about the temperature and reminiscing about how cheap everything used to be.

Onward

Time has a way of kneading out the knots,

Untangling the string, tracing the true path,

Unveiling to the hindsight what the foresight failed,

In all its lancet-eyed vaingloriousness, to see.

Time, the great killer, is a healer too –

Mellowing pain, and letting wisdom grow

In the dark earth made fertile by bleak fire.

Time does not love us, but we grow in time,

Gaining in strength, in wounds, in memory,

In scars of hate, God willing in love too.

Is there a better way?  Not that we know.

We clutch and climb; we tumble backward, fall;

We rise and climb again, with weary strength,

Not knowing what awaits us on the way,

Or what new vistas glimmer from the peak,

But sure that up is up, and falling’s fine,

And even makes a better story when

We reach the top and meet whoever’s there.

Is all this comfort?  Let’s not hope to say.

But if you pass me on the straggling climb,

And meet my eyes with yours, and speak no word,

I’ll hear, in some far-buried cave in me,

A soundless whisper preach tenacity.

Train Stations at Night

 

If a train station in the fog

At one or two in the morning

With a late train speeding past it

And a single lamp showing as a blur

Is not the acme of loneliness,

Then please don’t tell me what is,

Because I don’t think I could bear to hear it;

Even the station is almost too much.

Heroes

 

Every moment is an opportunity for heroism,

Though probably not the burning-building kind –

Unless you happen to be in a building

Which happens to be burning,

In which case please stop reading this poem

And save at least yourself.

The rest of you, consider heroism

Not as a seven-story leap through fire,

But as a way of breathing, smiling, cocking your head,

Sipping your coffee, unwrapping a chocolate bar.

Think of Paul Newman.  He did ordinary things –

Onscreen and in “real life” –

Let’s say about half the time.

But it was Newman doing them, and so

The can of beer he popped or the dog he scratched

Attained a kind of mythic meaning for

Us onlookers – and maybe for him, too.

You’re not Paul Newman, I assume.  But still.

You could do dull things a little less dully.

You could maybe even do magical things,

Unthinkable to you now, if you begin

With a dog or a beer or a chocolate bar

Or putting on boots, or calling an old friend.

And meanwhile, if you see that person from

The first stanza – the one whose shirt’s on fire –

Please roll him (gently!) on the ground for me,

And offer him a little of Paul Newman’s beer,

Which Paul, who knew how thirsty we might get,

Heroically, mythically, simply, left behind.

Wisdom

In the present, there are no problems.

That’s what the wise people say.

So no one invites the wise people

To parties anymore.

It’s doubtful they would come anyway,

Unless at the moment of decision

The thing that seemed most natural

Was putting on a coat,

And moments later they were seized

With an unaccountable urge

To open the door of their apartment –

And so on, ad nauseum.

For normal people, meanwhile,

The present is never just itself.

It always arrives in a false mustache,

Crudely impersonating the past,

Or smuggling in the future

In the hollow heel of its boot.

It’s always telling a lengthy story

That turns out to be pointless,

Or making some prognostication

That turns out to be wrong.

It’s always hitting on the hostess

But never sealing the deal,

Or vomiting all over the furniture,

Sick from a drink you never saw it take.

In short, it’s a nightmare party guest,

But at least it shows up at all,

Unlike those wise people you stopped inviting,

Who are off somewhere being authentic,

Living in something they call “the moment” –

Forever putting on and taking off coats.

Membership Drive

I am the spokesman for the Society of Individuals.

We have no members.

Please do not join us.

Cache

There are still things I won’t move
Because he put them where they are.

It’s been three years.  He isn’t coming back.
But a small backpack still waits for him
In a half-neglected closet,
With gloves and goggles in it,
In case he rises from the dead
With a sudden urge to go cross-country skiing –
Which, to be fair, does sound a bit like him.
 
But honestly, it’s hard to see him caring
What happened to his stuff, if he came back.
He’d want to hold us very tightly, and
Find out what we’ve been up to, and we’d want
To know if he’d seen God or the end of the universe,
And he’d have interesting things to say about all that.
Eventually, sure, he’d get around to skiing,
But we could always buy him new goggles and gloves;
We’d make a whole excursion of it, happy just
To spend time in his presence, doing anything.
 
He won’t come back, though.  We can wait and wait,
Along with that small backpack, all we like;
We’ll just keep growing older, and someday,
Someone will move the backpack, and one more
Quiet evidence that he ever existed
Will then be gone forever, like he is.

Encounter

 

Once I met a human being.

It was a man or a woman, as I recall.

It was black or white or possibly Chinese,

Or Indian or the other kind of Indian,

And it had an age and a color of hair.

But mostly, it was just a human being,

As full of doubt and courage as myself,

And when it spoke it was not age or gender,

Nor hair-color, faith, or citizenship that spoke;

It was, instead, the human being speaking,

In the words it could find at that particular moment,

And I listened with all the attention and empathy

That I could muster up at that particular time.

We parted, then, and I went back to my

Momentary and eternal concerns,

And so did he or she, and we mostly forgot,

But never forgot completely, the words that we had said

As one human being talking with another –

Wearing our skins, but speaking from inside.