Tag: Poetry

“disfruta la magia”

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

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

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

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

Verses on a Plague Night Walk

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

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 

Happy Thanksgiving, Grand Marshal Andrew Jackson

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

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 

Aviary

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

A winged ceremony before my house!

I broke in upon a Robin to the east, plucking things from the earth

A Cardinal to the north, bathing with an invitation in the basin before the door

A gaggle of Finches to the west, shifting beneath the shrubs behind the hedge

This quadrilateral domain is theirs more than mine:

Cradle and bunk bed and tunnel and train and flight pattern and gravestone and

yes, this backyard transect

I caught them at guilty pleasures:

Buried beneath the mantle of my rented lawn;

Bathing upon a pedestal;

Flittering beyond the shapes of my steel instruments;

Raucous like a jungle aviary in the warm sun slanting before the rains resume.