Cathedrals

 

Cathedrals were built to glorify God,

Because we don’t yet know how to glorify ourselves -

Although God, after all, is touchingly human:

Violent, insecure, making worlds in his spare time,

Occasionally torturing himself to death -

A cry for help if ever I saw one.

 

He made us in his image, didn’t he?

And we’re such fractured, ungainly things.

It’s all well and good to blame women and apples –

But who made those? The answer writes itself.

 

So God, perhaps, is the most human of us,

Which puts cathedrals in a different light,

As monuments to human frailty, and 

The lengths to which we go to dress it up.

TGV

 

The sun is still low

As the train gathers speed,

Knifing westward 

Through the wakening fields.

 

There’s mist in the hollows,

But the steeple is crowned with light 

Above the clustered village 

Where an old man walks alone.

 

There is something healing

In the fact of movement.

You do leave worries behind,

If only for an hour.

 

In an hour you will be yourself again,

With all your familiar self-torture;

For now you are only a speeding body

On a French train, headed west.

La Vie

 

La vie est simple; elle est belle;

Il n’y a que de bonnes nouvelles;

 

La vie est simple, triste, et douce;

Le loup qui chante, le vent qui pousse,

 

Ils n’apportent que les bonnes nouvelles:

La vie est simple, triste, et belle.

Frank

 

The man behind the desk

Is always smiling.

Are you from here? I ask.

I’m practicing my French.

 

No, he says.

I’m from Normandy.

I knew my great-grandparents.

They spoke Norman patois.

That world has vanished.

My grandparents remembered the war.

They left their house

An hour before their village

Exploded.

My grandmother turned to my grandfather.

“That’s it,” she said.

“We have nothing.”

They ate grass for a week,

Like cows.

 

It was the same last year,

When the Ukrainians began to come.

Two women arrived – rich women, beautiful.

They had beautiful hats, a baby,

And nothing else.

I gave them a room, a meal.

They hadn’t eaten in a week.

People told me I was crazy,

But we have to look out for each other.

That’s vanishing too.

People are out for themselves.

 

What’s your name? I ask.

Frank, he says,

After Frank Sinatra.

Really? I say.

Yes, he says.

Goliath

 

Technology companies 

Are always reminding me

That I used to be younger,

Greener, more smiling,

And that things which feel very recent 

Are at least five years ago.

 

I don’t know why they do this.

Does it make them any money?

Does someone get a bonus

For making me feel old?

They’re selling my own past back to me,

But they’re selling it for nothing,

As if their quarterly profits

Take second place to causing people pain.

 

I have to get out - out, in the bright sunlight,

And leave my phone in the car,

Or better yet, at the bottom of a lake.

I have to defeat

Three billion-dollar companies 

Just to take a walk

In the shadow of the shifting leaves.

And Sometimes...

 

And sometimes you’re in Paris,

Wandering along the Seine,

Killing time till a café dinner

And a long-awaited sleep.

 

What can you say about Paris?

Everyone already knows.

Paris is books, baguettes, accordions -

A string of clichés

Pulled tight around the heart.

 

Layover

 

Glorious Dublin,

Green in the golden sun,

Hedges and lanes along the shore,

Winks past in the tiny window.

 

I’d like to vanish

Into the emerald heart

Of the happy island,

But Paris is beckoning,

 

And I only have time

For an hour of Irish welcome,

A Guinness for breakfast,

And a promise to return.

Apocalypse

 

We sat on the deck 

While trees cracked in the wind;

The wind sang like doom, and lightning danced.

 

It felt like the end of the world, 

But we knew it wasn’t. 

 

It was only a late-summer storm

Battering a sturdy house.

Liminal

 

“We have common cause against the night.”

-Ray Bradbury

 

The buck is vanishing into the mist,

Which is vanishing into the dark.

Outside the house the world is dissolving,

Yielding to entropy, while inside,

Things are only brighter, better defined,

As we make our nightly stand

Against the night.

Look, I Didn’t Make the Rules

 

Hope is mandatory.

Everything else can be faked.

The reckless optimism 

It takes to open your eyes 

On an ordinary morning 

Is nothing to sneeze at.

 

We’re hopeful things at bottom;

Maybe that’s our tragedy.

Hope is the mother of disappointment,

But disappointment is the mother of wisdom,

 

And wisdom brings new hope,

Completing the circle,

Because hope, after all,

As we know,

Is mandatory.

The Good Stuff

This is the good stuff.

The air, the sun,

The luxury of breathing,

Stolen time between time.

 

The towers of ambition crumble,

But even their ruins make enough shade

To sit with a sandwich in,

Watching birds play,

 

Dreaming of nothing,

Blank as a jewel,

Letting the light

Fade slowly into the dark.

Equinox

The world sits on a knife’s edge,

Teetering between light and dark,

Summer and winter, heat and cold,

Drowsy noons and drowsier nights.

The balance is always changing,

Because that’s what balance is:

An endless wobbling between two poles -

Practiced, unconscious,

And somehow beautiful.

What I Know

 

I think that I’m weak, but I know that I’m strong.

I think I’m alone, but I know I belong.

 

I think I’m unworthy, but something deep-furled

Still whispers to me, You deserve the whole world.

Deserving

 

There’s a poster of Churchill

Pointing like Uncle Sam

With the caption DESERVE VICTORY.

I gave one to Mike Lavoie.

 

The slogan is agnostic

As to whether you win or not.

In war, as in the ordinary,

Nothing is ever certain.

 

What you can always do,

Always try to do,

Is deserve.

When you fail, fail gloriously.

When you triumph, do it with grace.

 

Nothing is final

Except the final defeat,

After which they may say of you

“He deserved better.”

Make it true.

 

Untitled

 

I am not entitled.

I am the windfall heir

To a thousand centuries

Of toiling humanity

 

And a few billion years

Of bubbling universe;

I am one of the bubbles -

A poem in space and time.

 

To what could such a creature

Be entitled?

Who would write up the deed,

Or notarize the claim?

 

In what court of justice

Would it plead its case?

Before what judge

In star-bespeckled robes?

 

A bubble owns nothing

But its moment in the light -

A moment to dance, be grateful,

Marvel at itself, and die.

Emptying

 

When you are full of memory,

Sloshing it, overflowing,

Burdened and bewildered with it,

Lay yourself down.

 

Let yourself empty,

Seeping into the warm sand,

Until the sky and the clean mind -

The ocean too - are one blank sky,

 

One sweep of nothing,

Innocent of all meaning;

One radiant void

Foaming with unborn thoughts.

 

Then rise in the twilight,

Brush the sand off your knees,

And get back to the business of living 

In a brighter and better world.

Fear and Stillness (A Fool’s Prayer)

 

I have become afraid
Of the one thing that will heal me:
The lifesaving stillness
At the center of the mind.

I try to find ways
To avoid dropping in
To the pool of forgiveness
Ringing deep in the dark heart.

Like the wounded animal
Hates the sting of the balm,
I hate my own wisdom,
And I cannot see why.

Grant me the courage
To do the easy thing.
Give me the strength
To abandon all striving.

Only there,

At the bottom of everything,

Is the peace I need

To be human again.

Epitaph

 

We jumped-up monkeys

Wallowing in pride,

We lived like others,

Like others died;

 

We strove and suffered,

Loved and failed to love,

Awash with yearning 

For some grace above,

 

And never rested

From one hopeless quest

Which plagued us only

And passed by the rest:

 

Half-mad for stories 

From our tender birth,

Of all the creatures 

On this killing earth,

 

We were the ones

Who wondered what it meant -

Just hounds for meaning

Following a scent.

A Word of Thanks

 

I’m thirsty, but there will be water soon.

I’m hungry, but the stove is lit.

All my deprivations are temporary,

At least for now,

Which makes me one of the luckiest people

Ever to walk this earth.

An Old Man Speaks About Death

 

“Well, I don’t see the percentage in it,”

He said. “What’s in it for me?

What do I get for my trouble?”

 

I told him it was traditional,

But this failed to impress him.

 

“You might get tired,” I said.

“Sure, I might,” he answered.

“I’d lie down for a spell.

No need for more than that.”

 

“You may not have a choice,”

I resorted to at last.

And he screwed up his face,

Suddenly sly.

 

“I’ll allow as how,” he confided,

“They may get me in the end.

But they can’t make me like it.”

And he moved on to other subjects.

LaGuardia

 

I thought I saw a rat

Out of the corner of my eye,

But it was the reflection of an airplane

Scurrying across the polished floor.

 

Now, in my imagination,

The sky is filled with soaring rats,

And cats are chasing phantom airplanes

Into their bolt-holes,

Where I suppose they refuel.