Want more poems?
More sample poems and audio clips of the poetry reading may be found at http://www.bodhisara.org/poetry.htm
Want to see Mark read his own poems?
"Flight from Duxford" at the Green Street Cafe:
www.youtube.com /watch?v=VNMgAUwV1T8 |
Burying My Father
Your body lies beneath my hand, a cold stone. You look good. Better than when dying perhaps, but fixed like a photograph fresh from a chemical bath. What kind of death in people makes them love this preservation? I want to drag you out of that box by your armpits, throw you in the back of the car and bury you in the garden like a dead cat, nothing between you and the raw soil you tilled, billions of hungry mouths ready to eat you out of the limits of your skin, guts exploding with gases like a newborn star, the grass by the fence row sparkling with spring rain, waving in the wind, roots reaching softly down into your corpse to resurrect it. Real Drinkers There was party drinking, holiday drinking, marriage drinking, funeral drinking, card-playing drinking, been working too hard drinking, bad weather ruining the crops drinking, and let’s have a drink drinking. Voices and laughter filled the house as the bottles drained, a small Manhattan skyline on the counter, Dad at the bar, or me as a teen, mastering the mixology portion of his universe. The shot glass rested unused on the shelf. Real drinkers, Dad said, never added pop or anything sweet. We were not alcoholics. We were Catholics. We had a religion to uphold in the face of Bible Christians and Mormons sobering the West. Dad’s gospel: Never take yourself too seriously. Straight, it burned like a foretaste of hell. On the rocks, it jingled. Each sip poured amber waves of grain alcohol over the brain until it floated, edges melting. Whiskey, the great smoother-overer and sociablizer produced states called snockered and soused, one S-sound after another sliding toward sex and sleep. Maybe sin or cirrhosis. But never stumbling or shitfaced. Real drinkers held their liquor. The real drinker’s etiquette: Offer refills quickly. Nudge, but never insist. Look the other in the eye when you toast-- let life distill to two people meeting, poised on the rim of oblivion. With a flat clink of the glass, the straight shot of his eyes meeting yours, my father would say Here’s lookin’ at ya. Flight from Duxford Laughter, smoke, the triumph of your luck last night at poker fade behind you with the hedged fields of England, and, in your chariot of steel sheering the wind, humming its hymn of glory—a constant drone beside your brothers—you gaze over clouds to that blue yonder and an ever-receding rim of earth. You peer down into passing chasms to the gray furrows of the North Sea. Alone in your cockpit, there is only the vast morning of your youth and the trip before you. Not long ago you were riveting at Boeing; now a P-51 bears you, buoyed by the invisible. But flying back a sudden cavity in sound, an eerie whisper of air enshrouds your fuselage—that class you skipped, the one that taught you how your life raft inflates, matters now three miles off the coast of Holland, hydraulics bleeding, hit by flack or the blast of your own bombs, your prop stopped, and the sea rising to meet you. At 1000 feet you bail: One short swing and I was in the water. I had almost figured it too close. Just floating, embraced by the sea, brine like blood in your mouth. Above, your buddy marks you with carrion circles, eyes on the gas gauge while your vital heat drains. You see your mother coming to the door, the telegram, the wave of the news taking her down. There is a great tenderness where all things touch, where the puny will is weightless. And a strength. You shear the valve bare handed, the rescue launch reports, reaching you hanging on, half-inflated. Why did you survive? Never a report of your thoughts 30 years later when the tractor tipped you off, split you open between the legs, and left you in the summer fallow staring upward at that constant blue, gauging your luck. A partner there, again, a witness who got help, and you lived another 28 years, hips bolted onto the spine, a colostomy, a sphincter transplant that leaked, done in finally at 80 by drowning in the fluid of your own brain. Suspended from two towers of grace, the span of your life hung. Where are you now, O twice survivor? Give me your altitude and velocity. The clouds here have condensed, rained, and slowly vanish into air. Tassels of the unmowed grass beside the roadway grasp the last few rays of sunlight and hold them, waving them before my eyes, and long contrails to somewhere stretch across heaven. Dusk in the Palouse The thin, semi-desert air gives up the heat of summer swiftly. Like stepping away from a campfire, a chill meets you, and with it the sweet, fertile smell of wheat straw growing damp, erotic in the folds of the hills slipping into darkness. Sounds begin to carry as on water through the still air, a voice across the highway by some acoustic magic speaks quietly in the ear, and one by one stars appear in the auditorium of heaven like people seating themselves for a show. Standing outside, looking into the lit house, to that world oblivious to dusk, lost in its whisky glow and conversation, standing in the cool twilight growing darker as the day flees west, soft curves of silhouetted hills fading, pores in the earth sweating dew, you hear the tall grain stir and whisper come away from the human and be of the earth, of the dusk, of the silence waiting to be heard, go into the venereal hills, at home in the house of night. Planting Garlic I love to imagine the first blind rootings in gravity’s dark light, the sodden waiting, the slow ignition of their tiny green rockets as I bury their pink-skinned cheeks in the corpse-cold ground soon freezing to stone. My neighbor says the mounded beds look like freshly dug graves. He’s right— I am an undertaker for the living, consigning innocents to birth not death, though not every womb is warm. Let this planting stand for all inhospitable beginnings, for what shivers unseen awaiting its chance. Foot to shovel, back to wind, sky dour with coming rain, crows squawking, a few creaking pines, the hoarse whisper of corn stalks blowing, their dry matter to be thrown on the pile-- I could work up a good sweat of melancholy here if wonder were not constantly interrupting. I’m fifty. I take no comfort in the rites of religion. Let me see the miracle before me, the one I too am. Let planting bring me to my knees. |
