All of the above are original poems of my own writing. Click on the heading in the Table of Contents to jump directly to that one. Don't copy them or pass them off as your own, okay? Copyright Joelle Dickerman, 1999.
Two Songs of Life in a City of Wings
I.
I walked down the grey stone stairs
When, singing flew nine small birds,
Drab as slate, as clay,
And landed like dead leaves,
Tiny feathered life
Clinging to twisted wire,
Feet heedless of the barbs.
I paused on the long grey stairs,
And nine small birds
Scattered singing upwards,
Vanishing like thrown stars
Into a cloudy sky.
II.
Men too build caverns,
Not only the slow and patient drip
Of acid waters through weak stones.
Men build with steel girders,
Concrete stalagmites
An overarching hang of roof,
And,
Wheeling in and out beneath the eaves,
Whitewinged pigeons soar.
Not knowing, in their ignorant wisdom,
That these caves were never built for wings.
This figure of steel and air
So utterly beyond our usual experience,
It invites hyperbole, disbelief.
A single drab spike
Upthrust against the flaming sky,
Cables shaking with a note too deep
For any human ears to hear,
A pitch echoed by our moving bones,
The soundless song behind our busy world.
The television's droned for days,
Reciting endlessly the details, picked over like bones
Beneath the dry gaze of a world bounded by glass and wires.
In a thousand thousand darkened rooms,
Voices whisper:
"I never knew him, of course." "What
A pity, his poor family, so tragic."
"He was a good man."
"Yes. He always was."
A thousand murmured eulogies,
Repeated alone together,
In a thousand towns and cities.
Perhaps no man has ever had more funerals,
For each of us buried him, in our hearts.
Always seek the barrens.
Let it be only one plot of land,
Let it be razed and shorn, let it be
Home only to weed plants, crab grasses,
But there will be a mystery there,
The mystery of the thin places, the barren lands,
The places not made for man
Or woman either.
Stones
And twisted, weathered wood like bones,
and the strange, crackled red earth
Have haunted this place. Life renacent tangles wild
Crawling from the edges inward,
Heart-leafed morning glory, shorn of bloom in evening dimness,
pale-crowned lamb's-quarters,
and the bitter, the ragged datura,
Flowers of the night, witch's weed if ever was one.
Nothing here, for a wandering woman,
Nothing here, but the barren earth,
Burning sky, bitter herbs standing in hardened soil.
Why do I return here, evening after evening?
I can say only, that there is a mystery,
The mystery of the barren places,
The places in between.
Drive for long enough, and one starts to feel the road.
Flinch away from concrete banks, the imagined feel
Of rough stone grating down one's side.
Drive for long enough, and you forget your back,
Your body. All that's left is the hands on the wheel,
Feet on the pedals, and windshield-eyes gazing out.
The wind sings as the pedal goes down,
And the acceleration goes on and on,
Until the air is a solid wall,
A hammer-blow of sound,
Brutal wings of force beating faster
And faster,
And there is nothing but the speed and the sound,
Soaring through an emptied mind,
And the motion goes on forever.
Is flying like this?
(Is dying?)
When there is nothing but motion left.
A pale ridge of sand divides
Tide from tide, shore from sea.
The ocean is still for all it's movement, quiet for all it's roar.
The land, here, is never without commotion,
Blazing with lights, alive, kinetic, expansive.
The black night sea goes on forever,
With the eternal rush and roar of the tides.
And I,
I walk the ridge of sand, the tide line,
Looking down between the city lights
And the lightless waves on the shore.
Watch the candle burn, beloved.
A pure light wavering, clear and empty.
When all the candle is gone,
A stub of wick floats, anchoring flame,
In a pool of clear wax,
The flame clawing upwards,
Waving blue-orange-gold and white.
Life burns like a candle flame,
The fire clinging for a moment
After all the fuel is gone.
And it's so quiet, beloved.
The flame stands so quiet, so still.
There's nothing to it but the light;
The wax and wick dissolving into light.
By the narrow walkway,
The wall breaks.
A tiny concrete alcove cluttered
With rain-washed detrius,
Faded, crumpled papers.
Strange litter,
Overscattered with curls
Of wet red hair.
The wind blows, and drying strands
Flutter aimlessly, drift,
Tangle with one another.
Red silk wires
Glinting in the fitful light.
Behold!
This forlorn alcove
Has grown a veil of gold.
I.
The building slope up forever,
Leaning together like children's blocks,
Wierd shadows thrown upwards
Through the moving leaves,
Dancing on the towering walls.
Orange light hums and scatters,
Waxing magnolia leaves,
Flooding paths, steps, courtyards,
Making pools of light in the
darkness.
Night falls back
Defeated here by the searing actin lights.
We carve out our spaces,
Reserving them to ourselves.
The buildings slope up forever,
But above them
Between
them
The sky is closed,
Opaque as ink.
There are no stars in
the city.
II.
We have cast the stars out,
Turning quietly from
The huge
uncertainty of the infinite sky.
We have made ourselves smaller
By reducing our horizons.
We
have tamed our nights
And with them ourselves,
And perhaps it is
better this way,
That we should adapt our world to our comforts,
Re-make the earth in our own image,
Defend, surround, entrench
ourselves.
But I look upwards still, gazing into the blinded sky.
I am searching for a star in the night.
Young maple trees along the street
Are now reborn as flaming
torches,
Blazing vibrant in this time,
Before they fall to
ashes.
Beyond them and above them and between them
The sky defies
perception,
Defies belief.
To look hurts,
Not my eyes, but my
heart.
Such pure intensity of color
Is too much to be born,
Yet never to be turned away from.
I realized this morning
In passing up the stairs,
That I stood
witness
To the changing of the seasons.
All small things
An icier feather to the wind,
And the dust of
early-fallen leaves
Powdering yellow into the cracks,
The pits
and crevices of the sidewalk.
And so I stood a moment,
Wishing, I think, in some small way,
To mark that instant
When I realized, this morning,
That winter was stealing softly
in,
And that, scolding madly,
It was the last of summer's
starlings
That hopped from branch to branch
In a cage of
green-spined holly.
We grew: short and soft, then longer,
Harder, more brittle, fused together,
Made ourselves a safe case, safe frame,
For the too-tender flesh.
And time passed.
The intricate machinery of our joints,
Our links and hinges,
Grew rough with age.
We were brittle again, pitted, gnarled.
And we changed again, finally.
Finally, we grew still.
We are the dust beneath the marble stones,
The bleached and jagged fragments
Turned up by plough or pick or stumbling foot
In the killing fields of Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia.
We are the pale slivers, cased in gold, that deck the cathedral
altars.
(Holy saint, pray for us. . .)
We are the silent presences of Auschwitz and Treblinka, forgotten but
not
gone.
We are the mute witnesses of all things,
Our testimony buried under aeons of stone,
But unstifled.
Do not forget us!
Once we ran as you now run,
Once we did as you now do,
And soon you shall lie as we have lain,
All the bones together.
The wind moves the barren branches,
Wan sun sparks errant flashes,
Winks and twinkles off of abandoned strings of lights.
The quiet dead time of the year, called the beginning,
But first, the land lies fallow,
And nothing moves, no dog, no cat, no roving fox or possum.
Only the little gray birds, with no hopes,
And no fears either, perch silent in the bare gray boughs.
No white crystals, no snow yet this new-born year,
Brown grasses mat the empty yards, burdened under the
Killing kiss of frost.
Sleep in January. Sleep deep, sleep silent,
Under the sullen gray clouds that bring no snow,
Sleep, all of you, and wait for the new dawning of the year.
Black water,
Quiet deep stones in the sleeping earth,
Shot through and rimed with silver thorns of frost.
Only dreams come through that black ice,
Inspirations passing between death and birth.
Press your hands on the searing-cold darkness and look downward,
Into murky, sluggish depths beyond all knowing.
Fragile lace of frozen leaf trapped between
Ice and ice, thin ribs of frost tracing its lines on the surface.
Cold burns to the bone, clear pools of glossy moisture form
In melted handprints, thin fingers glazing over quickly
Into ice again.
