Rust

"You need a new wheelbarrow," my neighbor remarks

watching me trundle my shallow, rusting

cart to the curb, orphaned limbs and sticks

protruding like morning hair fresh

from an unmade bed.  "I've a better one

that a friend brought for our yard sale."

I'm not impressed.  He doesn't know that when

I lift the handles, the weight shifts

from my hands to those of my father sleeping

beneath the debris of a Missouri winter.

He doesn't know that this handcart

carries the fragments of my mind, the tributes

housed in the rubbish of winters turned

to spring, similes and metaphors waiting

the right poem, fractured lines

of hyperbole and hope, alliterative alleys

of childhood discards.  How could he see

beyond rust, the sonnet reclaimed? 

Jeremiahs All

In almond trees and boiling pots, the word

            of poetry finds it womb.

From the imperceptible breath

            of photosynthesis, carbon

dioxide and water mystically melded,

            oxygen generated, released.

The heat of growth breathes and bubbles

            in the cauldron of creation.

Cool winters dream the seeds, fruit

            releases from its pulpy uterus

like water escaping from a cylinder in vapor.

It's the transformation that calls us,

            the energy ignited in changed

molecules, the sudden event we neither

            perceive nor understand.

God brushes our mouths with finger tips

            transfiguring halting words

into language of nuts and stews,

            roiling and frothing,

the initiation of thought and idea

            making us Jeremiahs released

from the paralysis of infantile speech.

The Voiceprint of the Seer

Huldah. Huldah, the king’s trusted seer,

a mother-figure beyond any doubt.

You spoke with an authoritative sound

and set the pattern that men would follow.

You recognized a sacred source for what

it was and had no fear in giving voice

to its mandate, its insistent voiceprint

on your mind.  When Josiah needed a seer,

you were happy to provide the  king what

he needed.  You knew he would have no doubt,

would recognize the one  that you follow,

would heed  the message of God you sounded.

You had watched him grow, heard the kingly sounds

of the man in the little boy’s voice.

Your life was being shaped to follow

the one who called you out, made you seer

of things others missed. Your vision enlarged, doubt

diminished, so that you knew what

dangers lurked in Israel’s future, what

idolatry would spawn, and the sound

of God’s anger at those who doubted

the power, the violence  in his voice.

Prophetess to the women,  a seer

they would recognize and own, follow

as loyally as the men followed

Jeremiah, his sense of what

was right and just.  And you, female seer,

did you ever question God’s certain sound?

Did you immediately know his voice?

Did you ever feel a slight hint of doubt?

For us, you ease every fear,  every doubt

we have when we hesitate to follow

the muttering within that demands a voice.

We look at you and we wonder at what

we might say, what new message we might sound

to those who wait the insight of a seer.

The  voices of reason are needed  when doubted

certainty reigns, and seers falsely follow

whatever treacherous tenor resounds.

Peacock Prophet

            . . . his head on the long blue reed-like neck

was drawn back as if his attention were fixed

in the distance on something no one else could see.

            --Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person”

Flannery’s peacock stalked into her tale,

his prophet’s eye evaluating the scene.

His strut foretold that he knew the crisis

these mortals would face, the descending doom

on their unwitting heads.  He knew that the death

of the judge had ushered a new order.

He had seen his tribe decrease, reordered

to fit the widow’s distaste for his tail,

its reminder of a world where death

and life sought justice in a colored scene.

His night call sounded in her ear the doom

that lived just beyond the threat of crisis.

The priest sensed the answer to crisis

in the peacock’s display, saw an order

in the green-gold pattern of deferred doom.

He saw the sacramental sense of the tale

unfold through eyes that seemed dim to the scene

of culture-embedded stagnation and death.

But the women characters, bound to die,

calcified minds lost in their own crises,

were unable to change or shift the scene

that beat a rhythm of boundless order,

a set of events that formed its own tail

like some giant chameleon of doom.

Displacement, the common factor that doomed

each character and brought on grizzly deaths

to two, was the human lot in this tale.

Each person was made to face a crisis

in his or her sense of place and order

within that space.  But the peacock had seen

more than they could see.  His vision of the scene

was linked to a golden ideal that doom

could neither understand nor reorder.

Guizac’s work ethic could never match death’s

certain visit nor avert its crisis

for his kin in this parabolic tale.

Even Astor, whose life measured the tale’s

span by the widow’s three husbands, had seen

more changes than he could explain.  The crisis

of mutation beyond his ken, the doom

of displacement was like the knell of death

to his segregated sense of order.

When order was restored, the peacock’s tail

had escaped death.  The priest, still on the scene,

served the plumed mystic of doom and crisis.

The Nature of the Vortex

Richard Hartner placed his hand

on his father’s old gun broken to receive the shell

in its chamber, and thought of the life

that gun had known at his father’s side or pegged on the wall

by the kitchen door, obsessively cleaned, ready to whirl

into action each time the family needed meat in the house.

Richard longed to rerun his childhood trek to that house

the day he shot his first squirrel, its furred tail in his hand

as his mind spun with a mesmerizing whirl

of scampering fur stopped by the single shell

that penetrated the wall

separating life from life.

His father had taught him that to live

responsibly one must respect the house

of his birth, that this house was a  virtual wall

protecting all who lived within against the hand

of doubt and despair, a turtle shell

into which one could retreat when life began to whirl

out of control.  His father had plowed this land, leaving a whorl

of rich loam to incubate the seeds he sewed, the life

coaxed from its stubborn shell.

He’d felled the trees and designed the house

that he later built with his own hand.

In his mind, the land offered a protective wall

to keep his children safe from an alien world, a wall

that somehow connected him to a grand design, a whorl

akin to the print on God’s own hand.

An energetic man, he had treasured life,

but he hadn’t known that a house was only a house,

a shell

that could be crushed like the shell

of a terrapin crossing a busy street, its cartilage a poor wall

to fend off the metal monsters beyond its mind, its inadequate house

left fragmented in the road.  Richard’s mind filled with a whirl

of monsters of another kind.  His own life 

was reduced to the halting fingers of a useless hand.

That hand trembled as he slid the shell

into the gun’s breach.   His life had hit the wall,

and he could find no way to stop the whirlwind within his house.

Sestina for Suzanne

Suzanne has buried husband number three

and all her dearest friends have come to mourn

the pass.   The casseroles devoured, the plates

returned for future use. The widow plans

to be a model saint and stay away

from matrimony’s snare, to die to live.

For years, Suzanne has set her goal to live

within the rule of masculinity.  For three

and more have sought her hand and took away

her will to choose by her own lights.  To mourn

the passing loss of this one man, she plans

to move beyond her first  instruction--plates

and knives, crystal and linen cloths.  She plates

intent with golden hope, a wish to live

a life fulfilled where she takes charge of plans

and determines each move she'll make.   Her three

resolves are not to whine, nor cry, nor mourn

the passing loss of former self.   Away

she says to seal intentions plot, away!

In days to come, she drops her coins in plates

from church to  church while some devout still mourn,

and others celebrate the mass of live

and die hedonistically.  Of three

new aims--to go, to see, to do--her plans.

                                                    

Art galleries, plays, and symphonies, the plans

were carefully made to spirit self away.

To Asia, Africa, Australia--on  three

large continents, her photographic plates

record the camels, pandas, kangaroos—all live

evidence of cultural life for which to mourn

if lost to modern man.  She would not mourn

the loss of her own dignity.  New plans

she made to snorkel seas for fish that live

in freedom’s coves, to bungee jump away

from heights unknown, to carve her name in plates

of stone—to do, to see, to go—these three.

One day mid-mourn, she met a man.  Away

she threw the plans requiring license plates.

To live, number four was better than three.

The Flight of the Hawk

A sestina is a hawk, its distance

controlled by short wings

and long tail.  It’s the sprinter

among raptors. Flight beginning

close to the ground. Launching

from fence posts, it centers

its prey, spiraling downward, the center

a target distanced

only by the pivot of the launch,

the strength of the wings.

From the apogee of beginning

to the collapse of the sprint,

it frees the sprinter

for the growing definition centered

in startling beginnings,

distanced

understanding of the wings

of doubt and belief true to the launch.

The sestina launches

orbiting motion that sprints

to the core of unknown significance, wings

of character and dialogue centering

the delight of distanced

experience, a narrative’s beginning.

Each hawk repeats the rhythm begun

by hawk-fathers, time-launchers

whose wings have spanned the distance

of infinity, wings spread in sprints

that define and catalog the center

of conquest, the descent and ascent of wings.

Word wings

rise, their quintessence begins

to shape in relief the thought-centered

impressions that fly free from launching

emotions, sparks ignited to sprint

from the heart’s distance.

And so words are feathered wings,

their distance from time’s beginning

measured by the launch of their sprint.