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Lanterns on the Water
A Poetry Collection By:
Timothy P. Holmberg
Table of Contents
Lost & Found
Perfection
China Doll
Our First It
The Diamond
A Lantern on the Water
For the Warriors
Lay Me Across the Water
Comparing Scars
River Child
My Father
Inside Out
The Some of the Parts
Where is Jesus? / ¿Dónde está Jesús?
There You Are
Excuse Me, Sir
Communion
Collecting the Garbage
A Poet’s Dream
The Cool Flame
Home
Lost & Found
Lost as the rain from three months ago,
the rain that hissed on the asphault,
poured down so fast it stung the precocious spring leaves.
I'd been eying the skies,
drawing invisible lines between me and the marching anvils,
smelling the air for the scent of rain.
Why did I want the rain so much now?
When rain clouds stretched the whole of the sky,
and even the eves hanging over the cracked sidewalk
couldn't keep me dry,
Then I'd rush to find my way out of it.
But when the blue skies are flaming with sunlit columns,
and rains trail their colored bows across matted foothills.
When the withering leaves of the sage brush
sweat with relief at a gulp of late spring rains.
Then I know that I too want to be found.
To feel some cool drops of precious rains,
soon to be lost to long summer days,
but now found in cool puddles on my forehead,
running like tears tracing my stretched smile,
soaking my shirt til it hugs me with its wetness.
Perfection
I think I may be the Maria Callas of poetry.
Deep emotive verses,
streaming banners of notes,
followed by a misplaced clunker.
But I like my clunkers
and clinkers
and clankers.
I anthropomorphise them,
and then I can't scalpel or scrape them away.
Like those indians you mentioned,
the ones that leave an imperfection in each work.
I like that,
not because I am lazy,
though I can certainly find my way to the lazy boy chair.
Perfection is a journey,
a pursuit, a destination never meant to be found
by imperfect creatures.
Even if the genuine garment were offered to me,
I think I'd prefer to be the naked emperor.
We're never really closer to perfection
than when we are completely naked.
China Doll
Every childhood has a doll.
A small creature of gentle nature
that speaks a silent language
that only a child can hear.
Mine was a china doll.
He was my constant companion
through cresting suns and setting moons.
He traveled with me
and never strayed far.
In this doll,
woven into his threads
was every giggle and tear
that I experienced.
But one day,
by fate or by accident,
we two were separated.
Alone he sat
in some cold distant corner
of the empty backyard.
A snail crossed his smiling face
painting the pearly streak of a tear.
Weather and leaves and soil
slowly encroached and covered him.
His blue cap
dented from the rock
at the side of his head.
The red stripped shirt
and blue shorts became food
for mold and worms.
Each year
his frozen smiling face watched
as another layer of compost
was deposited around him.
He slowly sank into the strata
but his smile remained undaunted
by his advancing doom.
One day, many days hence,
I ventured out to clear the undergrowth
in that forgotten corner of my yard.
I prepared the earth
for a new planting.
My shovel cut through
layers of the past
driven by a purposeful foot.
Eager arms pressed down
on the lever of the shovel’s handle
to coax my new vision into life.
As I turned the shovel,
my doll tumbled free.
His shirt was half eaten,
the shorts and cap were
faded almost white.
One eye was closed
winking at me from the past.
Though the painted expression
on his face was faded,
his smile still shined through.
As if he knew this day would come.
The yard melted away
and I was drawn back in time.
His shorts reformed
his face began to glow
with the intensity that sun,
and then soil had faded.
The moment slipped
quickly from sight
as the yard came flooding back.
My tender hand reached down
to push back the earth and decay
and cradle the figure once more.
A weathered fragment of destinies forgotten,
an icon from my past so persistent
it could resist the grinding wheels of time.
As I turned to the house
to commune with my precious discovery,
the shovel I’d propped against the fence
slipped into the archeological site.
Alas, the yard I explored as a child
is now the territory of another child,
another doll
and another set of dreams.
But perhaps somewhere in that yard,
in the back left corner
where the giant pine still grows,
Beneath a cage
of time thickened roots
and composted needles.
Perhaps somewhere
down there
my little china doll remains
A destiny refusing to die . . .
Our first It
In the womb we are sheltered from the world of imposed its.
We are protected from the swirling tempest beyond our curved walls
as our parents-to-be go into it overload.
All the its remain outside, as we simply become our own first it.
An act that we will not repeat for years to come,
and some may never repeat at all.
We grow like a cake rising in the Easy-Bake-Oven of life.
The metaphor is appropriate, in the amateur-ness of it all.
The recipe is a basic one, the ingredients are all prepackaged
and just require a little . . shaking as it were.
One egg
Millions of sperm in their own juice
Shake vigorously, and heat for nine months.
Voila.
At the end of the birth canal lies a portal through which
upon passing we become someone else’s It,
the fulfillment of an unfulfilled dream of potential;
the baton carrier of our parent’s desires;
and the embodiment of a myriad of possibilities
that our parents lost somewhere along the way
like so many shiny pennies.
Our children are the ones for whom we would build
the perfect world,
the perfect future,
and perfect life,
full of all the chances we never had.
The irony is that in our parent’s quest for our future,
they unintentionally perpetuate the same loss.
In their desire to give us something,
they often unknowingly take something away
the Leprechaun we will chase for years.
The battle lines over our it are drawn before we become aware.
The first battle is unique in that the generals
have no control over the outcome.
It is a civil conflict on the surface,
fought with an almost English sense of order and honor in battle.
Well-defined ranks of soldiers on either side,
readily identifiable by their colors;
blue on one, pink on the other.
In place of soldiers are names,
Frederick,
Joshua,
Timothy,
and the outlier, Sunbeam, on one side;
Caitlin,
Brenda,
Heidi,
and the eclectic, if not hoity, Anastasia on the other.
We are protected by an ocean of amniotic fluid that gently buffers us.
Not even the dim light that passes through the veined amniotic sack
like light through a wild lace curtain
hints at the frenzied pangs of parenthood outside.
We are simply supplied with everything we need to become ourselves,
nourishment and oxygen are bought to us,
excrement is taken away,
and with no contract,
expectation or responsibility placed on us.
A welcomed freeloader with a nine month lease.
At the end of our lease,
on passing through the portal of the womb with much exertion
we are greeted by the doctor’s hand impacting our buttocks
like a champagne bottle across the bow of a ship.
Through ultra-sound many of us are named as our keel is being laid,
long before our stern impacts the water.
We will sail through life from beginning to end and beyond
with this name emblazoned across everything associated with us.
In our zeal for civil order, everything that we do
will be documented with the prefix supplied by our victorious parent.
We are placed in a room with other its,
nice and neatly swathed in fresh blankets
that will never match the silky perfection
of our previous accommodations.
The plastic bin that bears the product
of our parent’s battle proudly displayed on its bow
is placed carefully along-side the others to form a veritable fleet –
a pediatric Spanish Armada (hopefully with a better fate).
Off in the distance bobbing and tapping and waving
are strange men vying for our attention.
In their eyes are the faint reflections of futures
and its that we will see for years to come.
This waiting room is like a buffer between the world that awaits us
and the one we have just left.
In it we are both alone and surrounded, protected
and yet exposed –
and although our needs are provided for,
for the first time,
we must ask and wait.
Although years of training,
indoctrination and guidance lay ahead of us,
for the time being our parents dreams
will float over our heads
like a mobile over our crib.
All the while we stare at them
not sure what they are,
always out of reach and bobbing over us
in much the same way
they teased and fascinated our parents.
There is a moment in our early lives
that lies just outside of itdome.
A brief period when we are sitting outside in the back yard,
playing with our toys –
ones intended to stir potential its within.
The sun shines on our young silky skin before we know the sting of a sunburn.
The pansies in the flower-bed blaze in glorious colors.
The sky drips a liquid sapphire blue that almost lifts us into it.
A butterfly lands on our hand before we could think of wanting to capture and possess it.
Somewhere within us stirs an instinctive feeling
that this moment of Zen is to be appreciated
because it is fleeting.
Soon the Its will be upon us.
We are to be subservient slaves to preordained destinies,
as our parents had been.
A sort of arranged marriage between human and future.
It takes us a long time to realize
that our parents have passed us the baton of their dreams
much less know what we are to do with it.
At first we wonder whether the baton is edible,
then we feel it must be a tool of some sort,
perhaps a hammer or a throwey thing to get the dog’s attention.
Later we realize that our parent’s baton
is both precious and imposing,
a duality that confronts us
before we know how to respond.
My father is a complex mix of its.
An eternal son,
a dreamer
so fascinated by his dreams he will never achieve them.
Like a moth always flying to the light bulb,
never daunted
but ever repelled by the glass shielding his dreams.
He is a millionaire with holes in his pockets,
a pro fisher with no boat,
a gourmet with a happy meal,
and a heart of gold hanging from a frayed piece of twine.
The baton that he passed me
I have often felt was passed with the belief,
and almost the desire to see me struggle under its weight.
That in so doing,
his own difficulty with it would be validated.
The Diamond
Our personality starts as natural diamond,
smooth, velvety and untouched.
Over the course of life, a marriage of forces
will convene upon our fresh surfaces.
The natural diamond we start as
has the lure of limitless potential
that is slowly cleaved from us by the hammer of life.
Each blow establishes an irreversible geometry,
and once this pattern is complete
we can no longer re-order our facets.
Parents and others are often attracted
to the possibilities inherent in the untouched stone of a child.
Our parent’s facets having been set long ago,
the natural diamond within a child reminds them
of all the potential that life carved from them.
As a child, I resented my father’s cutting.
He sought a geometry that was not within me.
A jeweler must love the stone they are to cut;
they must recognize the uniqueness of the stone
and the shapes that lie within.
They must have the ultimate precision and care,
for the skilled jeweler knows that the slightest miss
can shatter the stone.
My father had an abundance of precision
coming from an engineering background,
but lacked the ability to see within me.
Later in life, and despite my resentment,
I have come to understand the paradox I lived in.
For if not for my father,
who would plan my cuts?
Who would polish my facets
until I was ready to be set
into the ring of my life?
Michael Angelo once said that each stone he carved
had a shape within and his job
was simply to remove the excess.
This is what I wanted from my father
and what I would want for any child.
My father’s inability to see within me
became one of my facets.
The light streaming from this facet
still shouts for someone to look deeper
into the frozen liquid for a glimpse of my soul.
But harsh fates,
halted my cutting process.
As if while being cut,
I was set free of the jeweler’s clamp.
I flew through the air and landed in an obscure corner
still ringing from the last unsuccessful blow.
My father, the jeweler, searched the room
but never found me again after that.
As a consequence, at the age of 42
I still have fresh surfaces,
ones that I am reluctant to cut.
I hold my hammer at the edge of flight.
I know that if I am ever to sparkle and play with light,
my geometry must fully emerge
from the chaos at my corners.
But I cry for the remaining beauty
of undefined potential,
not fully wanting to cleave it from me.
For it is a reminder of a time before
I first felt the furry of life’s hammer,
before all the violent blows that followed.
But I will make the cut because I know that if I do not,
then soon life will once again send its hammer on my surface
and take that last potential from me.
A Lantern Upon the Water
Now I set thee, mine lantern, upon the water
To thee, I release the sorrows upon my brow
In thee, I place the poisons swaddled in my flesh
Their furies, I give over to thee to fuel thy flame
I commit thee to the ocean’s cool womb
I render thy fate to the winds . . .
When morning’s light paints the dome of the sky
When sun’s rays drive the winds upon the waters
You and I, mine lantern,
shall know each other no more . . .
For the Warriors
For all the warriors who have ever taken up arms
and stood ready for the fight
who have ever felt the awesome weight of a weapon -
be it the elegance of a sword,
or the cold precision of a gun
for those who have ever spilled blood,
or held back the pulsing dam of an artery
for those who have felt the connection between fellow warriors
whether it be through the cadence of a drum
or through the shocking pulse of exploding shells
or the steady drum beat of a racing heart
for those who have taken aim on those whom we call enemies
who have seen fearful human eyes staring back at us through our sights
who have felt the cold metal of a trigger pressing against our finger
who have felt the chill of an icy buttstock against our cheek
For those who have charged on a hill
to hoist our flag on high
or descended into a valley of death and despair,
and never crested the other side
For those who have frozen in their minds the vision of a kill
who have seen the shattered silhouettes of broken human bodies
who have seen the red mist of blood tint the first light of dawn
or even those who have seen the quiet dismemberment
of a cherished and righteous ideal
When the ringing of the shells subsides
When the stinging of moist wounds begins to fade
When the startling sensation of lost limbs begins to die
We who are warriors know the battle is not yet done
For as private as we would wish to hold these great and tragic things
For as terrible and haunting as our memories may be
we know that if there is any victory to be had in war,
we have one more thing to do
Until those who have ever called us into action
have seen the visions in our eyes
Until the passive, the listless and the disinterested
have heard the cries of our fallen friends
Until the peaceful placid masses
know how fragile and special a gift they have
The flag of our victory is not yet ready to fly
For every measure of blood that was spilled,
an equal measure of ink must follow . . .
Lay Me Across the Water
Under a fading cobalt sky
as my eyelids meet for a final kiss,
let the oceans gently rock
the fading embers of my soul.
When eel grass in the shallows lies curled and still
When winds no longer wrinkle the waters
When moonlight sways its hips on a liquid stage
When night fog blankets the osprey in its nest . . .
Then, lay me across the water.
Let the water and I become one.
Let it comfort and sooth,
the salty canyons on my cheeks.
Let me feel the peaceful calm
that spreads across the waters
as the rocking of the day subsides.
If the earth was my mother,
and my father the sky,
and I, a humble child of the two,
then it was always in my destiny
to rise to meet the heavens,
and bathe the earth.
Ever between, but never apart.
Let me drift upon the ocean,
gently carried into the night.
Let my foggy soul stir with the infant sun
as it roles night’s carpet westward.
Let adolescent light drive the mists
of my shapeless drifting soul,
so I may rise into the heavens
to join the frothing clouds.
Let my father in the sky
embrace me in his winds,
and move me across the land
for me to gaze upon below.
Let the memories of a life,
a life that was lived
draw my gliding soul
into cool warbling tears
and release me to the earth below.
Let me spread across the fields,
gently bathe the matted meadows.
Let me roll from the feathers
of the dutiful nesting sparrow.
Let my mother collect me up
into streams and rising rivers
that cut across her face.
Let her merge my shapeless waters
with the mud gathered on her banks,
and there upon
I shall walk the journey
that takes me to your shores,
where I will lay across the waters
I will lay in peace once more . . .
Comparing Scars
What a silly thing to do.
To roll our pant legs up
and peel away our shirts.
To point to this scar
and that gash.
Lauding the tyranny of our tormenters.
But isn’t it a tempting exercise?
To claim that trophy of suffering
that bloody crown of thorns
To wear the robe of suffering
so all who see will bow
and bless our wounds with a salve of salty tears.
And our wounds do deserve tears.
They should evoke shame.
Serve notice for a debt beyond reckoning.
So let me begin this macabre exercise
by gently placing my penitent finger on your leg
and trace the curves of your cuts
I was never 3/5 of a person₄
Never felt the acid teeth of a whip
Or stood as a bidder’s prize
But I was there . . .
I never shoveled broken glass in the shadow of a swastika¹
Nor heaved shriveled relatives onto a pile of stinking corpses
Nor watched my mother’s ashes land on my tear stained cheeks
But I was there . . .
I never watched pale-skinned men spoil the forests I called home
Was never herded into ever-shrinking barren lands
Never mocked as a prop for cowboy glory
But I was there . . .
I never huddled quiet under the floor of a van
Never stepped on a frozen corpse in the desert night
Or picked the Red Devils² on special at the store
But I was there . . .
I never stole away on a boat across an ocean
Only to become a slave stitching garments in LA
Or sold into the service of lecherous perverts at the age of twelve³
But I was there . . .
So, “who am I?” you ask
this person in the shadows
this stranger in your night.
I will tell you who I am
though you really should already know
since I have always been in your midst
I am the one whose love dare not speak its name
To whom even God has turned his back
Whose price for freedom is to lay shackled my own prison
While you were 3/5 of a man, you said I was no man at all
Yes, I was there . . .
You spit on me in the concentration camps
Yes, I was there . . .
Once I was your Shaman, then you chased me from your tent
Yes, I was there . . .
You stole my wallet to pay the coyote, then left me for dead
Yes, I was there . . .
Your hands pushed me from the boat to a cold ocean death
Yes, I was there . . .
I have watched my dear sweet brother
strapped beaten to a highway fence.
Denied the mercy of death.
I comforted my sister
when you stole her child
and gave it to her drunken Christian mother
I buried my son
when he slashed his arm from wrist to elbow
when you would not stop his classmate’s bullying
I kissed the eyelids of my dead uncle
when he found a lonely rest at the hand of AIDS
in and empty hospital room
But this game is rediculous you see.
Because there is no victory in such sadness.
No glory in such tragedy.
We are each other’s oppressor.
There are no saints here, only sinners.
No hand among ours has not reached for a stone.
The only penance that can be made
is in the clasping of scarred hands.
Author’s Notes:
Comparing Scars is a poem I carried inside me for a long time. It first began to emerge during national debates over gay rights. Many were comparing the struggles of gays and lesbians to that of the African American community. This provoked a reaction from some in the black civil rights movement that denied the parallels. “you were never 3/5 of a person” “You could hide and pass where blacks could not” But in truth, I felt that the subtext was still one of discrimination. What benefit is there in stripping yourself of dignity and chaining yourself in your own prison within, or in becoming your own tormentor. The events also crystalized a building view of mine that discrimination is universal and exists in every corner of every culture. The violation of human rights embodied in discrimination is not weighed on a scale or searched for gradations. It is simply wrong. And it only requires ignorance to persist. I wanted to emphasize our equality in imperfection. I treated the history of discrimination’s tragedies like a patchwork quilt, and I used the repetition of phrases to both shear and bind “stitches” of the quilt. I endeavored to treat each patch of the quilt with the care and respect they deserve while also emphasizing the fact that what was being stitched together was not a work to be proud of. It is a cloak of suffering. But if we learn from it, the cloak can be a blanket that heals.
1. Reference to Kristallnacht or “night of broken glass”, November 9, 1938, when Jewish store owner’s windows were smashed in violence instigated by the Nazi party’s Joseph Goebbels.
2. ‘Red Devil’s’ is the name given by migrant farm workers to strawberries. Picking them requires constant bending over that results in chronic pain and irreversible damage to the lower back.
3. Traffic in under-age human sex slaves is rampant in certain parts of Asia.
4. The 3/5ths compromise counted black slaves as only 3/5ths of a person for voting and taxation – Article One, Section Two, Paragraph Three of the United States Constitution, repealed by the 13th and 14th Amendment.
River Child
My orphaned children alone among thousands
The arc of my life will have closed before yours has opened,
but my connection to you is no less stronger
My inner voice, is my lone bequest
like the whispers of the mountain winds
as they drive the needles of the pines
I will be with you, ever with you
There in the shallows under a rocky roof I placed you
nestled in the grains of crumbled mountains
cradled by arms of eddying currents that hold you in tight
The currents are my hand that will gently guide you to the seas
Follow my lead and never stray far
Drift with me like a leaf on the water as I carry you past your foes
The crab and the bass will look straight at you
and never know you were there
Stay low away from the gaze of the feathered fishers
hold tightly still even as they stab their beaks at the river’s bottom
Soon you will taste the salt of millennia upon millennia and even then
the vast and deep blue will open up before you
Drift from my arms and go forth to your life
Ride the waves and thread the shimmering shafts of light
Cast your warp and your weft until the tapestry of your life is full
And one day, you will hear the calling as I did
and my mother before me
The sweet song of melting glaciers gliding over polished rocks
drawing you to your destiny
calling you to complete the great circle
Weave yourself into the currents of the great river
dive low into the deeps, then vault quickly through the air
Stay ever away from the tempting shallows where waters run slow
for there lays death.
Do not be afraid when you see your circle close
Release yourself and shed your clothes
O child of mother river, swim to your father in the sky
My Father
Strangers after eight years
of breathing the same air,
walking the same halls,
smelling the same Christmas tree.
We who were near strangers in the same house.
Thrust together like the earth and the moon
when the sun in our lives
vanished from our midst.
A shapeless embryo of independence
fighting the desperate gravity that tied us
each to the other lest we be hurtled
helplessly into empty space.
So we orbited each other
in the chill of an artic night.
Neither willing to concede
how much we set each other’s tides.
The trash overflowed the can
The dishes piled in the sink
The laundry festered in a mound
The aquarium turned murky green
All the scents slowly weaved
a tapestry and a stench.
The fitting aroma of a home
that was rotting like a corpse.
And the shocking pain you felt
when your grandest of illusions crashed,
was my house of horrors too.
Full of empty mirrors and pouncing demons.
Your belt revealed itself a vicious snake.
Leather hissing though polyester loops.
The crack of dead skin
teasing blood from living.
Mercy left the buckle in your hand.
My shirts became curtains
for an unblemished canvas
now blooming with fresh roses.
Baked salt stained my cheeks.
The phlegm of my nose frothed for revenge.
But like a pot removed from the flame,
boiling anger quickly faded.
Silently I watched you sit there,
slumped in your favorite chair.
Staring at silence.
Shivering in the emptiness.
You and I stared at the same things.
Empty clothes that once held a mother – a wife.
Shriveling plants in neglected pots.
Frozen moments in gilded frames.
You followed your rainbows,
chased your pots of gold.
Dragging me in your wake.
Chaining me to your visions . . . and vices.
But your flights of fantasy
showed me flaming Baja skies,
bathed me in the Sea of Cortez,
bowed our fishing poles in unison.
In my eyes you placed the boldness of the sea.
Through my hair, you sent the winds of imagination.
On my back, the warm comfort of coral sands.
In my heart a fleck of gold from the sieve of your pan.
But it could not last.
We had to fall from the clouds.
Neither of us had wings,
not made of wax and wood.
Your failures were my trials.
You lost your job – I lost my meal.
You lost your house – I lost my bed.
You lost your way – I went adrift.
We fell into the cradle of a 1970 Cadillac.
Your room in the front seat,
mine in the back.
Our life packed in our trunk.
I lay cradled between piles of clothes.
One pile clean as “Spring Streams”,
the other stale with sweat and food stains.
Two aromas intertwined
to define my pubescent life.
Every morning I rolled out the back seat
in front of my school, in front of my friends.
With clothes crumpled like cocktail napkins,
draped like a flag on my broken pride.
My eyes turned to indictments,
mouth spit anger.
Slowly my orbits grew bolder.
The distances between us ever wider.
Until finally, on the 18th pass,
I flew off into space.
Leaving you to your cradle,
your gaze exiled to my back.
But the tides of my oceans still
carried the rhythms you set.
My eyes still sparkled
with your dreamer’s gold
Leaving you was folly,
foolish prideful revenge.
An expression of things
foreign to a dreamer’s heart .
Your head fell into a hasty vise,
clamped by your foolishness,
under the cradle of your car.
Your cracked head spilled dreamer’s gold.
Your folly that day laid bare mine
as I stood by your hospital gurney.
My eyes tracing a spider’s web
of cords and tubes,
trying not to see your misshapen head.
I had sought to do to you
what had been done to us many orbits past.
To take from you some measure of light
at the center of your life.
My pointed finger met the wet of your eye,
but it was I who had become blinded.
By anger
and pain
and a longing for lost dolls
and playground sands.
You had always been the calm in every storm,
the even keel across rolling waters.
Your strong arms held back the destructive tides,
even if it was you who had summoned the storms.
Within your recovery lay mine.
Your fractured head,
my fractured heart.
Two precious objects not beyond repair.
Inside Out
We place embarrassments in latched boxes,
store our secrets in sealed mason jars.
Hoping to hide our stains – our sins
Feeding an irony that only sustains them.
If everything in the universe
is truly connected and one,
then there is nothing to hide
that is not already known.
A universe bounded in arcs .
Circles within circles each connected to the next.
No darkness in any corner
that cannot bleed light.
Nothing lost that cannot be found.
All of us yearning for purification
that can only come from release.
The irony of life elegant
as rolling steam when you crack the crust
of a fresh loaf of bread.
Souls moving through the universe,
contained and sustained on a wobbling blue ball.
Each of us tainted water inside fragile vessels of clay.
Avatars on whose five senses are cast a stage.
A peep show to a limitless universe.
Five functions between alive and not dead.
Girdled in casings that are but condoms,
membranes that segregate us, each from the other.
The Genesis of every secret we will ever know
Our division from the universe,
the very thing that allows us to distinguish,
to become unique.
Empowered and confounded at once.
The Some of the Parts
Am I ever to be
Anything more
Than the sum of some ooze
And a solitary egg?
A renter of atoms,
And a borrower of water?
Will I be a sum?
Or a some?
Or a one, connected to the One?
Where is Jesus? (spanish translation follows)
When did the Christians lose Jesus?
They keep coming to my house
asking me if I have found Him.
What a terrible thing to lose,
such a precious gift.
I do hope they find Him.
He came to such harm last time
when He wandered from His friends.
They were so angry then, I heard.
It seems nowadays,
the only safe place to keep anything
is in your heart.
But they always want to keep Him
in that empty house at the end of the block.
No company except dried out Books.
Why are they afraid to let Him out
into the world to walk among us?
I think He’d like it out here.
Sure, things are not so pretty.
People suffer and sin out here;
walls are sprayed with graffiti.
But someone told me that He
had an interest in that sort of thing.
If so, we sure could use Him.
I hope He knows it’s not all bad out here.
I mean, sure, it’s not as quiet
as in that pretty stained glass box.
But this is where the tortillas are pressed
And the corn stalks grow 10 feet high,
Where the sounds of accordions and trumpets
float like Monarch butterflies through the windows.
He would like Lolita,
the prostitute down the street,
she makes the best Posole.
And Freddie that drives the Impala
with the tricked out sound system.
Oh, and Juan-ita the girl who was a boy;
she makes the best outfits.
Why do Jesus’ friends cut the flowers
that grow out here and hide them in there?
Maybe they make Him feel better.
I wonder if He knows
that the flowers they take Him
are not the sweetest smelling.
They always take the prettiest ones,
but the ones that smell the best
grow from the cracks in the sidewalk . . .
¿Dónde está Jesús? (en Espanol)
Cuando perdieron los Cristianos a Jesús?
Siguen viniendo a mi casa
y me preguntan si yo lo he encontrado.
Qué cosa más terrible que perder eso,
un don tan precioso.
Espero que lo encuentran.
Llegó a tal daño la última vez
cuando se fue de sus amigos.
Estaban tan enojados entonces, oí.
Parece que hoy en día
el único lugar seguro para guardar algo
está en tu corazón
Pero ellos siempre quieren tenerlo
en esa casa vacía al final del bloque.
Ninguna compañía, excepto los Libros secos.
¿Por qué tienen miedo de dejarlo salir
en el mundo a caminar entre nosotros?
Creo que le gustaría aquí a fuera.
Claro, las cosas no son tan bonitas.
La gente sufre y pecan por aquí;
se rocían las paredes con grafiti.
Pero alguien me dijo que él
tenía un interés en ese tipo de cosas.
Si es así, seguro que podríamos usarlo.
Espero que sepa que no todo es malo por aquí.
Quiero decir, claro, no es tan callado
como en aquella caja de cristal manchado.
Pero aquí es donde las tortillas se presionan
Y los tallos de maíz crecen 10 metros de altura,
Donde los sonidos de acordeones y trompetas
flotan como las mariposas monarca por las ventanas.
A él le gustaría Lolita
La prostituta en la calle
Ella hace el mejor pozole.
Y Freddie que maneja el Impala
Con el sistema de sonido ataviado.
Ah, y Juan-ita la chica que era un muchacho
Ella hace los mejores trajes.
¿Por qué los amigos de Jesús cortar las flores
que crecen aquí y las ocultan en allí?
Tal vez hacen que se sienta mejor.
Me pregunto si sabe
que las flores que se lo llevan
no son las de mejor olor.
Ellos siempre se llevan las más bellas,
pero los que huelen mejor
son las que crecen de las grietas en la acera . . .
There you are
There you are,
hair draped like hay
made wild from the breezes
Thin frost of taught skin
gleaming at first light
while the sun is still your friend
fresh dough still a stranger to iron knuckles
still glistening with moist exuberant yeast
unaware the tempered life requires a second rise.
your face an empty canvas
not yet painted by time like mine
still a stranger to rivers of steaming tears
No hairs yet sprouted
from the curled crest of your ear
Muscles rise and fall
under the skin of your back
like lovers under fresh sheets
like an orchestra playing a waltz
beads of salty sweat roll haltingly
licking the oily youth from your back
denim pants clutching desperately
for a hand hold on wind carved cliffs
We loved in a glance
merged for one lingering moment
cast off expectation, duty and mores
like dirty sticking clothes
just to steal one moment from omniscient eyes
Can two creatures so conditioned
ever find love for more than the spray of sparks
issued from two passing stones?
But there you are
and here I am
And in this moment
The sweating summer grasses,
the dancing grey clouds of gossiping gnats
the cart sagging full of July apples
All bowed and stepped silent to the side
so that we might press our lips
and let you drift from my embrace
like smoke wafting aloft my pipe
Excuse Me Sir!
Excuse me sir?
I’m afraid I’m lost
Indeed . . .
Ehm, I was trying
to find my way
to the beach
Well, then you are lost.
Oh dear,
what do you mean?
Just that you seek
the wrong thing.
Well, I’m pretty sure
I came to see the beach . . .
Then that is a shame.
A beach is just sand
and salt and
sunburn.
Pity that you do not seek
the sunset which is fire in the sky.
Or close your eyes and feel
Father Sky’s fingers run through your hair.
Or lay upon the emerald ocean
and let it rock you as in your mother’s womb.
I guess I will have to
find it on my own
Indeed . . .
Communion
Bent on burning aching knees,
tongue drying in the morning air.
Heavy heads bobbing behind me.
“Please, Jesus hurry, I need to go.”
Was that a sin?
I know the day will come
when some enterprising Catholic
will make a vending machine -
hopefully with padded knee rests.
Clattering of one dollar coins,
gives way to a mechanical click,
and a pale wrapped wafer,
embossed with a cross.
The recorded voice,
digital and serene - “This is My body”
It’s not so wrong, is it?
I mean, wouldn’t Jesus have ordered take-out,
if He had the last supper today?
Clattering cup.
The whiz of grape juice
streaming past florescent light. - “This is My blood”
Crunch, slurp - “Do this in remembrance of Me”
Open the slot marked “trash”
Thank God that He is everywhere.
But if He is everywhere,
Then, why am I here?
Oh, yeah, Communion . . .
Collecting the Garbage
We sure do love objects that stick around
We seem to value them so much
A commode from 300 years ago
“You sir, do I hear $5000?”
Who cares who sat on it! 5000 dollars?
“Sold, to the lady for $6,500”
(applause)
Guess she needed it.
But the word or phrase
that lingers on stage
or loiters in our lexicon.
The reviled and odious cliché,
will quickly find my editor’s red pen.
A Picasso doodle on a scrap of paper
A play-bill from a flop in 1823
Some smirking drag queen
from the middle ages
These we’ll hoard and stash
and slash in the Louvre.
But what about words?
and phrases?
and furoughed brows?
What of doffed shirts,
and snowflakes ‘pon rosy red noses?
Or end rhymes
and cheesy poses?
Why do we burry these things
and brand them cliché?
Ah, but puckered up mummies,
we’ll dig those up by the score.
To fawn over and box up in glass,
and protect them with lasers
‘til they come out our . . .
The open mic audience
sips steaming soy lattes
listening to some puffing chest,
unloading ‘abstract inflectionism’
to bobbing heads and clapping ears,
that don’t even know
what the hell he just said.
Sure, collect up broken clay tablets.
Mount them to the walls by the hundreds -
probably grocery lists and junk mail.
“How ‘bout a gnawed on chicken bone
from the Stone Ages?”
Garbage cum treasure.
The landfills of history plundered.
Trash cans are for words!
A Poet's Dream
I want to be society's enema
To clean the bowel that feeds the bile.
To wade through effluent and flatulence,
and find the tenderness desperate for nourishment
So society - stop shielding your bosom.
Let me embrace my destiny as I embrace you.
Let us both find relief worthy of rings of smoke.
The Cool Flame
Storm clouds scale the Astorian cliffs tonight
trailing winds like lashing black hair
tucked under anvil shaped helmets.
Wet strands dragging across Columbia Bay,
Pressing its waters into rows like pews in a church.
Green canopies prostrate themselves in fearful swaying masses
Shadows leap from their shivering branches
The clattering sword of a marching cloud has found the heart-wood of a tree
Crusts of bark and concentric rings of bound up seasons flew like glass.
The impaled tree lay in drooping halves
Sagging arms of a felled centurion.
Ozone faded with the purple haze,
but a red glow persisted.
Somewhere from deep within the tree’s carcass
A smoking ember fed on molten sap.
The ember grew slowly,
until fierce winds fanned it bright.
An abandoned robin’s nest fought buffeting gusts
to save the contents of its emptied palm
finally loosed its failing grip
and fell beside the hot ember.
Purple smoke jumped skyward ushered by a puff of flames
Soon the leeward side of the tree was alight with cool flames
Tap dancing up its exposed grains.
Hungry flames crested their wooden canyon
to gazed onto a fearful forest
The flames snapped their fingers
lofting glowing kites onto a stream of wind
It is the cool flame that burns sloppily, fast.
Gorging itself on fuel
Stuffing more in its mouth before it has chewed
What it already has.
I was born to be a Phoenix
Seeking fire for my own renewal.
But the fires I sought
Were cool flames
And the renewal within them
Was sooty and messy.
If I am going to make lofting myself from ashes
more than masturbation
I needed to find the slower hotter flame within
Home
Cradled between the dock's tines
a dark figure sways to the rhythm
cast by salted winds
In permanent communion
prostrate, at the junction of two worlds
Sheltered from the silent rain
of early morning dew
Oblivious to the whislting osprey
as its wings comb morning’s cool hair
Shielded from gnawing woodworms
incessantly borrowing deep within the keel
Gently tugged by braided lines
holding my world to its meridian
Tucked in a nest
of jutting masts
Fungus tongues drip musty odors
as they lick at moist mahogany grains
Chronicling the rise and fall
of my half lit lover
Set between the bow
that quietly waits to part the sea
and the stern that bids its time
to sip a soup of froth and smoke
Deep within this rib cage
I sleep
Jonah in his whale
Spliced so perfectly
one to the other,
no one could ever find the seam
Timothy P. Holmberg
Table of Contents
Lost & Found
Perfection
China Doll
Our First It
The Diamond
A Lantern on the Water
For the Warriors
Lay Me Across the Water
Comparing Scars
River Child
My Father
Inside Out
The Some of the Parts
Where is Jesus? / ¿Dónde está Jesús?
There You Are
Excuse Me, Sir
Communion
Collecting the Garbage
A Poet’s Dream
The Cool Flame
Home
Lost & Found
Lost as the rain from three months ago,
the rain that hissed on the asphault,
poured down so fast it stung the precocious spring leaves.
I'd been eying the skies,
drawing invisible lines between me and the marching anvils,
smelling the air for the scent of rain.
Why did I want the rain so much now?
When rain clouds stretched the whole of the sky,
and even the eves hanging over the cracked sidewalk
couldn't keep me dry,
Then I'd rush to find my way out of it.
But when the blue skies are flaming with sunlit columns,
and rains trail their colored bows across matted foothills.
When the withering leaves of the sage brush
sweat with relief at a gulp of late spring rains.
Then I know that I too want to be found.
To feel some cool drops of precious rains,
soon to be lost to long summer days,
but now found in cool puddles on my forehead,
running like tears tracing my stretched smile,
soaking my shirt til it hugs me with its wetness.
Perfection
I think I may be the Maria Callas of poetry.
Deep emotive verses,
streaming banners of notes,
followed by a misplaced clunker.
But I like my clunkers
and clinkers
and clankers.
I anthropomorphise them,
and then I can't scalpel or scrape them away.
Like those indians you mentioned,
the ones that leave an imperfection in each work.
I like that,
not because I am lazy,
though I can certainly find my way to the lazy boy chair.
Perfection is a journey,
a pursuit, a destination never meant to be found
by imperfect creatures.
Even if the genuine garment were offered to me,
I think I'd prefer to be the naked emperor.
We're never really closer to perfection
than when we are completely naked.
China Doll
Every childhood has a doll.
A small creature of gentle nature
that speaks a silent language
that only a child can hear.
Mine was a china doll.
He was my constant companion
through cresting suns and setting moons.
He traveled with me
and never strayed far.
In this doll,
woven into his threads
was every giggle and tear
that I experienced.
But one day,
by fate or by accident,
we two were separated.
Alone he sat
in some cold distant corner
of the empty backyard.
A snail crossed his smiling face
painting the pearly streak of a tear.
Weather and leaves and soil
slowly encroached and covered him.
His blue cap
dented from the rock
at the side of his head.
The red stripped shirt
and blue shorts became food
for mold and worms.
Each year
his frozen smiling face watched
as another layer of compost
was deposited around him.
He slowly sank into the strata
but his smile remained undaunted
by his advancing doom.
One day, many days hence,
I ventured out to clear the undergrowth
in that forgotten corner of my yard.
I prepared the earth
for a new planting.
My shovel cut through
layers of the past
driven by a purposeful foot.
Eager arms pressed down
on the lever of the shovel’s handle
to coax my new vision into life.
As I turned the shovel,
my doll tumbled free.
His shirt was half eaten,
the shorts and cap were
faded almost white.
One eye was closed
winking at me from the past.
Though the painted expression
on his face was faded,
his smile still shined through.
As if he knew this day would come.
The yard melted away
and I was drawn back in time.
His shorts reformed
his face began to glow
with the intensity that sun,
and then soil had faded.
The moment slipped
quickly from sight
as the yard came flooding back.
My tender hand reached down
to push back the earth and decay
and cradle the figure once more.
A weathered fragment of destinies forgotten,
an icon from my past so persistent
it could resist the grinding wheels of time.
As I turned to the house
to commune with my precious discovery,
the shovel I’d propped against the fence
slipped into the archeological site.
Alas, the yard I explored as a child
is now the territory of another child,
another doll
and another set of dreams.
But perhaps somewhere in that yard,
in the back left corner
where the giant pine still grows,
Beneath a cage
of time thickened roots
and composted needles.
Perhaps somewhere
down there
my little china doll remains
A destiny refusing to die . . .
Our first It
In the womb we are sheltered from the world of imposed its.
We are protected from the swirling tempest beyond our curved walls
as our parents-to-be go into it overload.
All the its remain outside, as we simply become our own first it.
An act that we will not repeat for years to come,
and some may never repeat at all.
We grow like a cake rising in the Easy-Bake-Oven of life.
The metaphor is appropriate, in the amateur-ness of it all.
The recipe is a basic one, the ingredients are all prepackaged
and just require a little . . shaking as it were.
One egg
Millions of sperm in their own juice
Shake vigorously, and heat for nine months.
Voila.
At the end of the birth canal lies a portal through which
upon passing we become someone else’s It,
the fulfillment of an unfulfilled dream of potential;
the baton carrier of our parent’s desires;
and the embodiment of a myriad of possibilities
that our parents lost somewhere along the way
like so many shiny pennies.
Our children are the ones for whom we would build
the perfect world,
the perfect future,
and perfect life,
full of all the chances we never had.
The irony is that in our parent’s quest for our future,
they unintentionally perpetuate the same loss.
In their desire to give us something,
they often unknowingly take something away
the Leprechaun we will chase for years.
The battle lines over our it are drawn before we become aware.
The first battle is unique in that the generals
have no control over the outcome.
It is a civil conflict on the surface,
fought with an almost English sense of order and honor in battle.
Well-defined ranks of soldiers on either side,
readily identifiable by their colors;
blue on one, pink on the other.
In place of soldiers are names,
Frederick,
Joshua,
Timothy,
and the outlier, Sunbeam, on one side;
Caitlin,
Brenda,
Heidi,
and the eclectic, if not hoity, Anastasia on the other.
We are protected by an ocean of amniotic fluid that gently buffers us.
Not even the dim light that passes through the veined amniotic sack
like light through a wild lace curtain
hints at the frenzied pangs of parenthood outside.
We are simply supplied with everything we need to become ourselves,
nourishment and oxygen are bought to us,
excrement is taken away,
and with no contract,
expectation or responsibility placed on us.
A welcomed freeloader with a nine month lease.
At the end of our lease,
on passing through the portal of the womb with much exertion
we are greeted by the doctor’s hand impacting our buttocks
like a champagne bottle across the bow of a ship.
Through ultra-sound many of us are named as our keel is being laid,
long before our stern impacts the water.
We will sail through life from beginning to end and beyond
with this name emblazoned across everything associated with us.
In our zeal for civil order, everything that we do
will be documented with the prefix supplied by our victorious parent.
We are placed in a room with other its,
nice and neatly swathed in fresh blankets
that will never match the silky perfection
of our previous accommodations.
The plastic bin that bears the product
of our parent’s battle proudly displayed on its bow
is placed carefully along-side the others to form a veritable fleet –
a pediatric Spanish Armada (hopefully with a better fate).
Off in the distance bobbing and tapping and waving
are strange men vying for our attention.
In their eyes are the faint reflections of futures
and its that we will see for years to come.
This waiting room is like a buffer between the world that awaits us
and the one we have just left.
In it we are both alone and surrounded, protected
and yet exposed –
and although our needs are provided for,
for the first time,
we must ask and wait.
Although years of training,
indoctrination and guidance lay ahead of us,
for the time being our parents dreams
will float over our heads
like a mobile over our crib.
All the while we stare at them
not sure what they are,
always out of reach and bobbing over us
in much the same way
they teased and fascinated our parents.
There is a moment in our early lives
that lies just outside of itdome.
A brief period when we are sitting outside in the back yard,
playing with our toys –
ones intended to stir potential its within.
The sun shines on our young silky skin before we know the sting of a sunburn.
The pansies in the flower-bed blaze in glorious colors.
The sky drips a liquid sapphire blue that almost lifts us into it.
A butterfly lands on our hand before we could think of wanting to capture and possess it.
Somewhere within us stirs an instinctive feeling
that this moment of Zen is to be appreciated
because it is fleeting.
Soon the Its will be upon us.
We are to be subservient slaves to preordained destinies,
as our parents had been.
A sort of arranged marriage between human and future.
It takes us a long time to realize
that our parents have passed us the baton of their dreams
much less know what we are to do with it.
At first we wonder whether the baton is edible,
then we feel it must be a tool of some sort,
perhaps a hammer or a throwey thing to get the dog’s attention.
Later we realize that our parent’s baton
is both precious and imposing,
a duality that confronts us
before we know how to respond.
My father is a complex mix of its.
An eternal son,
a dreamer
so fascinated by his dreams he will never achieve them.
Like a moth always flying to the light bulb,
never daunted
but ever repelled by the glass shielding his dreams.
He is a millionaire with holes in his pockets,
a pro fisher with no boat,
a gourmet with a happy meal,
and a heart of gold hanging from a frayed piece of twine.
The baton that he passed me
I have often felt was passed with the belief,
and almost the desire to see me struggle under its weight.
That in so doing,
his own difficulty with it would be validated.
The Diamond
Our personality starts as natural diamond,
smooth, velvety and untouched.
Over the course of life, a marriage of forces
will convene upon our fresh surfaces.
The natural diamond we start as
has the lure of limitless potential
that is slowly cleaved from us by the hammer of life.
Each blow establishes an irreversible geometry,
and once this pattern is complete
we can no longer re-order our facets.
Parents and others are often attracted
to the possibilities inherent in the untouched stone of a child.
Our parent’s facets having been set long ago,
the natural diamond within a child reminds them
of all the potential that life carved from them.
As a child, I resented my father’s cutting.
He sought a geometry that was not within me.
A jeweler must love the stone they are to cut;
they must recognize the uniqueness of the stone
and the shapes that lie within.
They must have the ultimate precision and care,
for the skilled jeweler knows that the slightest miss
can shatter the stone.
My father had an abundance of precision
coming from an engineering background,
but lacked the ability to see within me.
Later in life, and despite my resentment,
I have come to understand the paradox I lived in.
For if not for my father,
who would plan my cuts?
Who would polish my facets
until I was ready to be set
into the ring of my life?
Michael Angelo once said that each stone he carved
had a shape within and his job
was simply to remove the excess.
This is what I wanted from my father
and what I would want for any child.
My father’s inability to see within me
became one of my facets.
The light streaming from this facet
still shouts for someone to look deeper
into the frozen liquid for a glimpse of my soul.
But harsh fates,
halted my cutting process.
As if while being cut,
I was set free of the jeweler’s clamp.
I flew through the air and landed in an obscure corner
still ringing from the last unsuccessful blow.
My father, the jeweler, searched the room
but never found me again after that.
As a consequence, at the age of 42
I still have fresh surfaces,
ones that I am reluctant to cut.
I hold my hammer at the edge of flight.
I know that if I am ever to sparkle and play with light,
my geometry must fully emerge
from the chaos at my corners.
But I cry for the remaining beauty
of undefined potential,
not fully wanting to cleave it from me.
For it is a reminder of a time before
I first felt the furry of life’s hammer,
before all the violent blows that followed.
But I will make the cut because I know that if I do not,
then soon life will once again send its hammer on my surface
and take that last potential from me.
A Lantern Upon the Water
Now I set thee, mine lantern, upon the water
To thee, I release the sorrows upon my brow
In thee, I place the poisons swaddled in my flesh
Their furies, I give over to thee to fuel thy flame
I commit thee to the ocean’s cool womb
I render thy fate to the winds . . .
When morning’s light paints the dome of the sky
When sun’s rays drive the winds upon the waters
You and I, mine lantern,
shall know each other no more . . .
For the Warriors
For all the warriors who have ever taken up arms
and stood ready for the fight
who have ever felt the awesome weight of a weapon -
be it the elegance of a sword,
or the cold precision of a gun
for those who have ever spilled blood,
or held back the pulsing dam of an artery
for those who have felt the connection between fellow warriors
whether it be through the cadence of a drum
or through the shocking pulse of exploding shells
or the steady drum beat of a racing heart
for those who have taken aim on those whom we call enemies
who have seen fearful human eyes staring back at us through our sights
who have felt the cold metal of a trigger pressing against our finger
who have felt the chill of an icy buttstock against our cheek
For those who have charged on a hill
to hoist our flag on high
or descended into a valley of death and despair,
and never crested the other side
For those who have frozen in their minds the vision of a kill
who have seen the shattered silhouettes of broken human bodies
who have seen the red mist of blood tint the first light of dawn
or even those who have seen the quiet dismemberment
of a cherished and righteous ideal
When the ringing of the shells subsides
When the stinging of moist wounds begins to fade
When the startling sensation of lost limbs begins to die
We who are warriors know the battle is not yet done
For as private as we would wish to hold these great and tragic things
For as terrible and haunting as our memories may be
we know that if there is any victory to be had in war,
we have one more thing to do
Until those who have ever called us into action
have seen the visions in our eyes
Until the passive, the listless and the disinterested
have heard the cries of our fallen friends
Until the peaceful placid masses
know how fragile and special a gift they have
The flag of our victory is not yet ready to fly
For every measure of blood that was spilled,
an equal measure of ink must follow . . .
Lay Me Across the Water
Under a fading cobalt sky
as my eyelids meet for a final kiss,
let the oceans gently rock
the fading embers of my soul.
When eel grass in the shallows lies curled and still
When winds no longer wrinkle the waters
When moonlight sways its hips on a liquid stage
When night fog blankets the osprey in its nest . . .
Then, lay me across the water.
Let the water and I become one.
Let it comfort and sooth,
the salty canyons on my cheeks.
Let me feel the peaceful calm
that spreads across the waters
as the rocking of the day subsides.
If the earth was my mother,
and my father the sky,
and I, a humble child of the two,
then it was always in my destiny
to rise to meet the heavens,
and bathe the earth.
Ever between, but never apart.
Let me drift upon the ocean,
gently carried into the night.
Let my foggy soul stir with the infant sun
as it roles night’s carpet westward.
Let adolescent light drive the mists
of my shapeless drifting soul,
so I may rise into the heavens
to join the frothing clouds.
Let my father in the sky
embrace me in his winds,
and move me across the land
for me to gaze upon below.
Let the memories of a life,
a life that was lived
draw my gliding soul
into cool warbling tears
and release me to the earth below.
Let me spread across the fields,
gently bathe the matted meadows.
Let me roll from the feathers
of the dutiful nesting sparrow.
Let my mother collect me up
into streams and rising rivers
that cut across her face.
Let her merge my shapeless waters
with the mud gathered on her banks,
and there upon
I shall walk the journey
that takes me to your shores,
where I will lay across the waters
I will lay in peace once more . . .
Comparing Scars
What a silly thing to do.
To roll our pant legs up
and peel away our shirts.
To point to this scar
and that gash.
Lauding the tyranny of our tormenters.
But isn’t it a tempting exercise?
To claim that trophy of suffering
that bloody crown of thorns
To wear the robe of suffering
so all who see will bow
and bless our wounds with a salve of salty tears.
And our wounds do deserve tears.
They should evoke shame.
Serve notice for a debt beyond reckoning.
So let me begin this macabre exercise
by gently placing my penitent finger on your leg
and trace the curves of your cuts
I was never 3/5 of a person₄
Never felt the acid teeth of a whip
Or stood as a bidder’s prize
But I was there . . .
I never shoveled broken glass in the shadow of a swastika¹
Nor heaved shriveled relatives onto a pile of stinking corpses
Nor watched my mother’s ashes land on my tear stained cheeks
But I was there . . .
I never watched pale-skinned men spoil the forests I called home
Was never herded into ever-shrinking barren lands
Never mocked as a prop for cowboy glory
But I was there . . .
I never huddled quiet under the floor of a van
Never stepped on a frozen corpse in the desert night
Or picked the Red Devils² on special at the store
But I was there . . .
I never stole away on a boat across an ocean
Only to become a slave stitching garments in LA
Or sold into the service of lecherous perverts at the age of twelve³
But I was there . . .
So, “who am I?” you ask
this person in the shadows
this stranger in your night.
I will tell you who I am
though you really should already know
since I have always been in your midst
I am the one whose love dare not speak its name
To whom even God has turned his back
Whose price for freedom is to lay shackled my own prison
While you were 3/5 of a man, you said I was no man at all
Yes, I was there . . .
You spit on me in the concentration camps
Yes, I was there . . .
Once I was your Shaman, then you chased me from your tent
Yes, I was there . . .
You stole my wallet to pay the coyote, then left me for dead
Yes, I was there . . .
Your hands pushed me from the boat to a cold ocean death
Yes, I was there . . .
I have watched my dear sweet brother
strapped beaten to a highway fence.
Denied the mercy of death.
I comforted my sister
when you stole her child
and gave it to her drunken Christian mother
I buried my son
when he slashed his arm from wrist to elbow
when you would not stop his classmate’s bullying
I kissed the eyelids of my dead uncle
when he found a lonely rest at the hand of AIDS
in and empty hospital room
But this game is rediculous you see.
Because there is no victory in such sadness.
No glory in such tragedy.
We are each other’s oppressor.
There are no saints here, only sinners.
No hand among ours has not reached for a stone.
The only penance that can be made
is in the clasping of scarred hands.
Author’s Notes:
Comparing Scars is a poem I carried inside me for a long time. It first began to emerge during national debates over gay rights. Many were comparing the struggles of gays and lesbians to that of the African American community. This provoked a reaction from some in the black civil rights movement that denied the parallels. “you were never 3/5 of a person” “You could hide and pass where blacks could not” But in truth, I felt that the subtext was still one of discrimination. What benefit is there in stripping yourself of dignity and chaining yourself in your own prison within, or in becoming your own tormentor. The events also crystalized a building view of mine that discrimination is universal and exists in every corner of every culture. The violation of human rights embodied in discrimination is not weighed on a scale or searched for gradations. It is simply wrong. And it only requires ignorance to persist. I wanted to emphasize our equality in imperfection. I treated the history of discrimination’s tragedies like a patchwork quilt, and I used the repetition of phrases to both shear and bind “stitches” of the quilt. I endeavored to treat each patch of the quilt with the care and respect they deserve while also emphasizing the fact that what was being stitched together was not a work to be proud of. It is a cloak of suffering. But if we learn from it, the cloak can be a blanket that heals.
1. Reference to Kristallnacht or “night of broken glass”, November 9, 1938, when Jewish store owner’s windows were smashed in violence instigated by the Nazi party’s Joseph Goebbels.
2. ‘Red Devil’s’ is the name given by migrant farm workers to strawberries. Picking them requires constant bending over that results in chronic pain and irreversible damage to the lower back.
3. Traffic in under-age human sex slaves is rampant in certain parts of Asia.
4. The 3/5ths compromise counted black slaves as only 3/5ths of a person for voting and taxation – Article One, Section Two, Paragraph Three of the United States Constitution, repealed by the 13th and 14th Amendment.
River Child
My orphaned children alone among thousands
The arc of my life will have closed before yours has opened,
but my connection to you is no less stronger
My inner voice, is my lone bequest
like the whispers of the mountain winds
as they drive the needles of the pines
I will be with you, ever with you
There in the shallows under a rocky roof I placed you
nestled in the grains of crumbled mountains
cradled by arms of eddying currents that hold you in tight
The currents are my hand that will gently guide you to the seas
Follow my lead and never stray far
Drift with me like a leaf on the water as I carry you past your foes
The crab and the bass will look straight at you
and never know you were there
Stay low away from the gaze of the feathered fishers
hold tightly still even as they stab their beaks at the river’s bottom
Soon you will taste the salt of millennia upon millennia and even then
the vast and deep blue will open up before you
Drift from my arms and go forth to your life
Ride the waves and thread the shimmering shafts of light
Cast your warp and your weft until the tapestry of your life is full
And one day, you will hear the calling as I did
and my mother before me
The sweet song of melting glaciers gliding over polished rocks
drawing you to your destiny
calling you to complete the great circle
Weave yourself into the currents of the great river
dive low into the deeps, then vault quickly through the air
Stay ever away from the tempting shallows where waters run slow
for there lays death.
Do not be afraid when you see your circle close
Release yourself and shed your clothes
O child of mother river, swim to your father in the sky
My Father
Strangers after eight years
of breathing the same air,
walking the same halls,
smelling the same Christmas tree.
We who were near strangers in the same house.
Thrust together like the earth and the moon
when the sun in our lives
vanished from our midst.
A shapeless embryo of independence
fighting the desperate gravity that tied us
each to the other lest we be hurtled
helplessly into empty space.
So we orbited each other
in the chill of an artic night.
Neither willing to concede
how much we set each other’s tides.
The trash overflowed the can
The dishes piled in the sink
The laundry festered in a mound
The aquarium turned murky green
All the scents slowly weaved
a tapestry and a stench.
The fitting aroma of a home
that was rotting like a corpse.
And the shocking pain you felt
when your grandest of illusions crashed,
was my house of horrors too.
Full of empty mirrors and pouncing demons.
Your belt revealed itself a vicious snake.
Leather hissing though polyester loops.
The crack of dead skin
teasing blood from living.
Mercy left the buckle in your hand.
My shirts became curtains
for an unblemished canvas
now blooming with fresh roses.
Baked salt stained my cheeks.
The phlegm of my nose frothed for revenge.
But like a pot removed from the flame,
boiling anger quickly faded.
Silently I watched you sit there,
slumped in your favorite chair.
Staring at silence.
Shivering in the emptiness.
You and I stared at the same things.
Empty clothes that once held a mother – a wife.
Shriveling plants in neglected pots.
Frozen moments in gilded frames.
You followed your rainbows,
chased your pots of gold.
Dragging me in your wake.
Chaining me to your visions . . . and vices.
But your flights of fantasy
showed me flaming Baja skies,
bathed me in the Sea of Cortez,
bowed our fishing poles in unison.
In my eyes you placed the boldness of the sea.
Through my hair, you sent the winds of imagination.
On my back, the warm comfort of coral sands.
In my heart a fleck of gold from the sieve of your pan.
But it could not last.
We had to fall from the clouds.
Neither of us had wings,
not made of wax and wood.
Your failures were my trials.
You lost your job – I lost my meal.
You lost your house – I lost my bed.
You lost your way – I went adrift.
We fell into the cradle of a 1970 Cadillac.
Your room in the front seat,
mine in the back.
Our life packed in our trunk.
I lay cradled between piles of clothes.
One pile clean as “Spring Streams”,
the other stale with sweat and food stains.
Two aromas intertwined
to define my pubescent life.
Every morning I rolled out the back seat
in front of my school, in front of my friends.
With clothes crumpled like cocktail napkins,
draped like a flag on my broken pride.
My eyes turned to indictments,
mouth spit anger.
Slowly my orbits grew bolder.
The distances between us ever wider.
Until finally, on the 18th pass,
I flew off into space.
Leaving you to your cradle,
your gaze exiled to my back.
But the tides of my oceans still
carried the rhythms you set.
My eyes still sparkled
with your dreamer’s gold
Leaving you was folly,
foolish prideful revenge.
An expression of things
foreign to a dreamer’s heart .
Your head fell into a hasty vise,
clamped by your foolishness,
under the cradle of your car.
Your cracked head spilled dreamer’s gold.
Your folly that day laid bare mine
as I stood by your hospital gurney.
My eyes tracing a spider’s web
of cords and tubes,
trying not to see your misshapen head.
I had sought to do to you
what had been done to us many orbits past.
To take from you some measure of light
at the center of your life.
My pointed finger met the wet of your eye,
but it was I who had become blinded.
By anger
and pain
and a longing for lost dolls
and playground sands.
You had always been the calm in every storm,
the even keel across rolling waters.
Your strong arms held back the destructive tides,
even if it was you who had summoned the storms.
Within your recovery lay mine.
Your fractured head,
my fractured heart.
Two precious objects not beyond repair.
Inside Out
We place embarrassments in latched boxes,
store our secrets in sealed mason jars.
Hoping to hide our stains – our sins
Feeding an irony that only sustains them.
If everything in the universe
is truly connected and one,
then there is nothing to hide
that is not already known.
A universe bounded in arcs .
Circles within circles each connected to the next.
No darkness in any corner
that cannot bleed light.
Nothing lost that cannot be found.
All of us yearning for purification
that can only come from release.
The irony of life elegant
as rolling steam when you crack the crust
of a fresh loaf of bread.
Souls moving through the universe,
contained and sustained on a wobbling blue ball.
Each of us tainted water inside fragile vessels of clay.
Avatars on whose five senses are cast a stage.
A peep show to a limitless universe.
Five functions between alive and not dead.
Girdled in casings that are but condoms,
membranes that segregate us, each from the other.
The Genesis of every secret we will ever know
Our division from the universe,
the very thing that allows us to distinguish,
to become unique.
Empowered and confounded at once.
The Some of the Parts
Am I ever to be
Anything more
Than the sum of some ooze
And a solitary egg?
A renter of atoms,
And a borrower of water?
Will I be a sum?
Or a some?
Or a one, connected to the One?
Where is Jesus? (spanish translation follows)
When did the Christians lose Jesus?
They keep coming to my house
asking me if I have found Him.
What a terrible thing to lose,
such a precious gift.
I do hope they find Him.
He came to such harm last time
when He wandered from His friends.
They were so angry then, I heard.
It seems nowadays,
the only safe place to keep anything
is in your heart.
But they always want to keep Him
in that empty house at the end of the block.
No company except dried out Books.
Why are they afraid to let Him out
into the world to walk among us?
I think He’d like it out here.
Sure, things are not so pretty.
People suffer and sin out here;
walls are sprayed with graffiti.
But someone told me that He
had an interest in that sort of thing.
If so, we sure could use Him.
I hope He knows it’s not all bad out here.
I mean, sure, it’s not as quiet
as in that pretty stained glass box.
But this is where the tortillas are pressed
And the corn stalks grow 10 feet high,
Where the sounds of accordions and trumpets
float like Monarch butterflies through the windows.
He would like Lolita,
the prostitute down the street,
she makes the best Posole.
And Freddie that drives the Impala
with the tricked out sound system.
Oh, and Juan-ita the girl who was a boy;
she makes the best outfits.
Why do Jesus’ friends cut the flowers
that grow out here and hide them in there?
Maybe they make Him feel better.
I wonder if He knows
that the flowers they take Him
are not the sweetest smelling.
They always take the prettiest ones,
but the ones that smell the best
grow from the cracks in the sidewalk . . .
¿Dónde está Jesús? (en Espanol)
Cuando perdieron los Cristianos a Jesús?
Siguen viniendo a mi casa
y me preguntan si yo lo he encontrado.
Qué cosa más terrible que perder eso,
un don tan precioso.
Espero que lo encuentran.
Llegó a tal daño la última vez
cuando se fue de sus amigos.
Estaban tan enojados entonces, oí.
Parece que hoy en día
el único lugar seguro para guardar algo
está en tu corazón
Pero ellos siempre quieren tenerlo
en esa casa vacía al final del bloque.
Ninguna compañía, excepto los Libros secos.
¿Por qué tienen miedo de dejarlo salir
en el mundo a caminar entre nosotros?
Creo que le gustaría aquí a fuera.
Claro, las cosas no son tan bonitas.
La gente sufre y pecan por aquí;
se rocían las paredes con grafiti.
Pero alguien me dijo que él
tenía un interés en ese tipo de cosas.
Si es así, seguro que podríamos usarlo.
Espero que sepa que no todo es malo por aquí.
Quiero decir, claro, no es tan callado
como en aquella caja de cristal manchado.
Pero aquí es donde las tortillas se presionan
Y los tallos de maíz crecen 10 metros de altura,
Donde los sonidos de acordeones y trompetas
flotan como las mariposas monarca por las ventanas.
A él le gustaría Lolita
La prostituta en la calle
Ella hace el mejor pozole.
Y Freddie que maneja el Impala
Con el sistema de sonido ataviado.
Ah, y Juan-ita la chica que era un muchacho
Ella hace los mejores trajes.
¿Por qué los amigos de Jesús cortar las flores
que crecen aquí y las ocultan en allí?
Tal vez hacen que se sienta mejor.
Me pregunto si sabe
que las flores que se lo llevan
no son las de mejor olor.
Ellos siempre se llevan las más bellas,
pero los que huelen mejor
son las que crecen de las grietas en la acera . . .
There you are
There you are,
hair draped like hay
made wild from the breezes
Thin frost of taught skin
gleaming at first light
while the sun is still your friend
fresh dough still a stranger to iron knuckles
still glistening with moist exuberant yeast
unaware the tempered life requires a second rise.
your face an empty canvas
not yet painted by time like mine
still a stranger to rivers of steaming tears
No hairs yet sprouted
from the curled crest of your ear
Muscles rise and fall
under the skin of your back
like lovers under fresh sheets
like an orchestra playing a waltz
beads of salty sweat roll haltingly
licking the oily youth from your back
denim pants clutching desperately
for a hand hold on wind carved cliffs
We loved in a glance
merged for one lingering moment
cast off expectation, duty and mores
like dirty sticking clothes
just to steal one moment from omniscient eyes
Can two creatures so conditioned
ever find love for more than the spray of sparks
issued from two passing stones?
But there you are
and here I am
And in this moment
The sweating summer grasses,
the dancing grey clouds of gossiping gnats
the cart sagging full of July apples
All bowed and stepped silent to the side
so that we might press our lips
and let you drift from my embrace
like smoke wafting aloft my pipe
Excuse Me Sir!
Excuse me sir?
I’m afraid I’m lost
Indeed . . .
Ehm, I was trying
to find my way
to the beach
Well, then you are lost.
Oh dear,
what do you mean?
Just that you seek
the wrong thing.
Well, I’m pretty sure
I came to see the beach . . .
Then that is a shame.
A beach is just sand
and salt and
sunburn.
Pity that you do not seek
the sunset which is fire in the sky.
Or close your eyes and feel
Father Sky’s fingers run through your hair.
Or lay upon the emerald ocean
and let it rock you as in your mother’s womb.
I guess I will have to
find it on my own
Indeed . . .
Communion
Bent on burning aching knees,
tongue drying in the morning air.
Heavy heads bobbing behind me.
“Please, Jesus hurry, I need to go.”
Was that a sin?
I know the day will come
when some enterprising Catholic
will make a vending machine -
hopefully with padded knee rests.
Clattering of one dollar coins,
gives way to a mechanical click,
and a pale wrapped wafer,
embossed with a cross.
The recorded voice,
digital and serene - “This is My body”
It’s not so wrong, is it?
I mean, wouldn’t Jesus have ordered take-out,
if He had the last supper today?
Clattering cup.
The whiz of grape juice
streaming past florescent light. - “This is My blood”
Crunch, slurp - “Do this in remembrance of Me”
Open the slot marked “trash”
Thank God that He is everywhere.
But if He is everywhere,
Then, why am I here?
Oh, yeah, Communion . . .
Collecting the Garbage
We sure do love objects that stick around
We seem to value them so much
A commode from 300 years ago
“You sir, do I hear $5000?”
Who cares who sat on it! 5000 dollars?
“Sold, to the lady for $6,500”
(applause)
Guess she needed it.
But the word or phrase
that lingers on stage
or loiters in our lexicon.
The reviled and odious cliché,
will quickly find my editor’s red pen.
A Picasso doodle on a scrap of paper
A play-bill from a flop in 1823
Some smirking drag queen
from the middle ages
These we’ll hoard and stash
and slash in the Louvre.
But what about words?
and phrases?
and furoughed brows?
What of doffed shirts,
and snowflakes ‘pon rosy red noses?
Or end rhymes
and cheesy poses?
Why do we burry these things
and brand them cliché?
Ah, but puckered up mummies,
we’ll dig those up by the score.
To fawn over and box up in glass,
and protect them with lasers
‘til they come out our . . .
The open mic audience
sips steaming soy lattes
listening to some puffing chest,
unloading ‘abstract inflectionism’
to bobbing heads and clapping ears,
that don’t even know
what the hell he just said.
Sure, collect up broken clay tablets.
Mount them to the walls by the hundreds -
probably grocery lists and junk mail.
“How ‘bout a gnawed on chicken bone
from the Stone Ages?”
Garbage cum treasure.
The landfills of history plundered.
Trash cans are for words!
A Poet's Dream
I want to be society's enema
To clean the bowel that feeds the bile.
To wade through effluent and flatulence,
and find the tenderness desperate for nourishment
So society - stop shielding your bosom.
Let me embrace my destiny as I embrace you.
Let us both find relief worthy of rings of smoke.
The Cool Flame
Storm clouds scale the Astorian cliffs tonight
trailing winds like lashing black hair
tucked under anvil shaped helmets.
Wet strands dragging across Columbia Bay,
Pressing its waters into rows like pews in a church.
Green canopies prostrate themselves in fearful swaying masses
Shadows leap from their shivering branches
The clattering sword of a marching cloud has found the heart-wood of a tree
Crusts of bark and concentric rings of bound up seasons flew like glass.
The impaled tree lay in drooping halves
Sagging arms of a felled centurion.
Ozone faded with the purple haze,
but a red glow persisted.
Somewhere from deep within the tree’s carcass
A smoking ember fed on molten sap.
The ember grew slowly,
until fierce winds fanned it bright.
An abandoned robin’s nest fought buffeting gusts
to save the contents of its emptied palm
finally loosed its failing grip
and fell beside the hot ember.
Purple smoke jumped skyward ushered by a puff of flames
Soon the leeward side of the tree was alight with cool flames
Tap dancing up its exposed grains.
Hungry flames crested their wooden canyon
to gazed onto a fearful forest
The flames snapped their fingers
lofting glowing kites onto a stream of wind
It is the cool flame that burns sloppily, fast.
Gorging itself on fuel
Stuffing more in its mouth before it has chewed
What it already has.
I was born to be a Phoenix
Seeking fire for my own renewal.
But the fires I sought
Were cool flames
And the renewal within them
Was sooty and messy.
If I am going to make lofting myself from ashes
more than masturbation
I needed to find the slower hotter flame within
Home
Cradled between the dock's tines
a dark figure sways to the rhythm
cast by salted winds
In permanent communion
prostrate, at the junction of two worlds
Sheltered from the silent rain
of early morning dew
Oblivious to the whislting osprey
as its wings comb morning’s cool hair
Shielded from gnawing woodworms
incessantly borrowing deep within the keel
Gently tugged by braided lines
holding my world to its meridian
Tucked in a nest
of jutting masts
Fungus tongues drip musty odors
as they lick at moist mahogany grains
Chronicling the rise and fall
of my half lit lover
Set between the bow
that quietly waits to part the sea
and the stern that bids its time
to sip a soup of froth and smoke
Deep within this rib cage
I sleep
Jonah in his whale
Spliced so perfectly
one to the other,
no one could ever find the seam
