Category: Poetry

“disfruta la magia”

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Notes toward a personal essay about the murder of trade unionists in Colombia by soft drink bottlers and about how the political is the personal: “disfruta la magia”

To believe a thing is made from people is to forgive.  It’s the things that make the people here: the things made of people there.

I was born in the russet flush of autumn, 1985, in an evergreen place. My growth in the intervening years has been a gut-wrenching display of limbs beating upon membranes of things. That’s not how it feels, of course,
Being alive.

To be in the Round is to Be. Each of us a Rebel. Each of us a Gifted Student. Each of us a Birth of the Cool. Each of us a King of the Lizards.

I became a data point in the carbon rush of 1996, in a climate-controlled room. My reduction in the exaflops since that shining moment has been a substantial work of engineering prowess. That’s not how it feels, of course,
Being golden.

Ink beneath the gloss.
Acceptable loss.
Consummation to Consumption.

Sixteen Pines

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Sixteen pines mark my quarantine transect
this little quadrangle a world of worlds

of being and becoming
of platonic forms shaping
future dream etudes where I

spin in Fibonacci circles to see it all
and always fail

These sixteen pines a Myrmidon crew
serving petulant songbirds dashing
from light to shadow

Their songs the hymns of Ithaca
the hymns I have always known

Well, such is the aviary
these sixteen pines
a mighty dialectic

Firelight Composite

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From inky black, pull starry future
To drape o’er young shoulders and wish it so

Now wash the garment in strange elixirs
Bell upon chime, we watch the spring days go

Shed the cloak of night in diurnal climes
To sweat o’er the troubled skein of the self

Now in the dog days to heaven you climb
Bell upon chime, place the cloak on the shelf

Shadows draw to vespers unclothed still
By the evening firelight learn fear

We lost so much time climbing autumn hills
By firelight, by sunlight, month over year

Oak leaf alights upon Earth in repose
Its airborne life but a blink to commence

To become the soil in winter gray glow
No cloak of night to warm the lapis winds

Shine like inky black
stuff of future past

Verses on a Plague Night Walk

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When the sodium lights first come on

Those are the moments 

Those moments of departed daylight

Departed vision 

Those adolescent moments of endless

Possibility

.

Each footstep a promise to the future

Each breath an assurance of its promise to me

.

Tonight we walked the twenty-something streets 

In those adolescent moments

Senses awakening to the edge of night

Inhaling understanding as we each day grow

Footsteps to tomorrow 

Imayo for March 18

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Laurel leaves falling in spring — they strike the ground delicately and finally

Sun’s transit across the drawn windows — it traced a lonely analemma until today 

Until today things were as they were — the world our grandparents built spinning its human orbit

Tomorrow we shall build anew — raking the endless leaves in the warm spring sun 

Happy Thanksgiving, Grand Marshal Andrew Jackson

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King Mob on the Meridian claiming
this land is ours 
in the affirmative mode which animates even
the Communists here 
the three-pounds of flax 
who wax zen on the temple mounds of the erased 

Shuck oysters and weave the
folksonomy of despair from threads golden like
the ever yellow afterglow over the bay below
you sing of this place like you own it, you
like you could own Cassiopeia and
Wite-Out the inky spaces in between