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Here find a few pieces I've had published in the last four or
five years, mostly overseas - all U.S. rights reserved for me and my posterity. If you find something that
strikes a chord in you, please write and tell me so. The little
skill I have allows me to write for my own pleasure. I'm always amazed that anyone else gets something out
of my work at all. There's also the feeling that to tell someone outright how they should think or feel about
a piece of art, music, cinema, speech, poetry, to me is the most supreme arrogance. Critics! Feh........
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A Wake for Mozart's Girl
Schism Canyon Nativity
Possessed
Secularism
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Schism Canyon Nativity
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Intelligent and wary, it emerges to groom itself on the hot bright cliff,
watches
the paths of the canyon through the gray-green mists below,
and waits for its name.
They never ask the right questions; never feel its hungry covert gaze,
nor read its presence in the soft mangled bones, droppings in the dust,
the occasional aloof print in the soggy creekside.
Once it thought it heard some distant call of its own kind,
and tensed-whether to spring,
revealed in that instant, puissant, itself;
or to back quietly on its hind claws into the shelf shadows,
under the cover of stone-
time hung and stretched taut,
the silence between breaths expanded to fill all space, eternity passed,
and it remained- motionless.
Sometimes, it might have been stone; caught with jaw on forefeet,
the pinpoint eyes blind with gazing after nothing,
flies unnoted, the day cycled into moon
and stars and dawn again,
horizon rolling into forever;
sometimes, life screamed within each sinew, inexpressible-
scratched, snarled, snorted, spine traveling snake-wise over the scrub,
feet in the air fluttering, running the narrow ledges straight up, blurred and impossible
in every stride.
It wants powerfully,
and it hopes coolly,
its trust placed in mountain, desert and storm, all things immutable and without breaking nerves.
Between seasons in the high country, first fear, then wickedness; lastly, longing,
moves its sexless self-regard; and from its inwardness
comes the shapeless whelps, licked to form creatures
of every desire, known and unknown in their parent's heart-
to come down from the high keep,
to walk upright among the unfathomable,
to slowly learn the speech and manners of men;
to love distantly;
to hunger deeply,
and to speak scornfully, in low places,
of those not of their kind.
Laura Kate Barrett
Medianante Journal, Vol. 14, 1994
(all U.S. rights reserved)
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Possession
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The gift exceeds whatever we've asked;
and though we've never reached for it,
we suddenly know exactly
how big the moon is.
Hastily examining pockets, it becomes
so surely, sadly certain
that we can't take it with us.
Walking away in the dark, the path wide and lonely,
we look back;
knowing that the time's gone, the offer,
so large and whole, passed.
We stand a while, looking over our shoulders
at the empty night.
Every time.
And when we have
taken that emptiness into ourselves,
to numb our hearts
against the hurt of hope,
we turn back on the path,
to find-
as complete!
as near! as the first time-
the silver
sliding light
at our feet.
Laura Kate Barrett
Medianante Journal, Vol. 14, 1994
(all U.S. rights reserved)
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Secularism
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We imagine all we could ever be;
and further,
this morning we imagine
the sun came up with the face
of a woman with a golden question
burning at her lips, her smile generous
and opening on hunger and tongues of fire,
or perhaps the motive breath of the infinitely small-
terrible and pleasing is her countenance,
and with searing fingers her expression
gently shapes the hours of the world.
When our eyes were wide,
they opened purpled to her radiance
in the dry and scorching air-
happily blinded with grace,
running blistered by mothers' tears,
shed against this day, and all days;
eager in bright agony
to break the crazed baked earth beneath ingenuous feet-
spent, in all our innocence,
against the moment of renaissance.
Now those eyes have narrowed,
and in the decreasing circle of light we stand,
holding to that dust-glinting
shaft in the still and sterile dark,
hoping only, reaching in brokered faith,
that this warmth will fill our hands.
Awesome in its perversity, the profound silence that,
unwilling to dream of other suns,
able only of motion in magnetic necessity,
arches above the choked and fecund planet,
to fall flaming in sweet gravity's well-
as one we cry, should she not rise,
and join the bartered past's chorale;
in all our aching revery,
her children named,
and not yet born.
Laura Kate Barrett
Envoi Magazine, Vol. 117, 1997
(all U.S. rights reserved)
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A Wake for Mozart's Girl
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Everything he wrote I sang,
and gladly, madly sang again
between the heavy counterpoint
of knuckle, knee and leather belt
laid earnestly against the day
and hour of my disrespect.
I courted oblivion- to be so bad -
daddy'd not forget some flawless noon
and careless, fling my heart en pique
against some stone, and walk away-
his girl all broken and scared to speak,
between the dustless chalk
and the breathless drone
of a child's day,
long hours cruel.
Who could know that revelation,
the small strange glory high above
the bass and muttered midrange rumble,
the mustachioed music lady's grumble as
the static on bird radio;
on the board she'd draw
trebled stiff flagged code-
I heard staccato
on five thin wires
drawn from the living liquid metal
of horn and bow and angel's tears.
I knew his story, every word.
The boy too bright, too finely made,
who forced again, in fear and shame
his father's focus- created himself again,
hopeless, helplessly loving,
within the airless laser of his god's regard-
"Father, do not let me burn in hell -
do not cast me from your grace-
o, do not deafen yourself to me-"
requiescat in pace,
the good father turns to flee.
All the anthems of my age
tutored me in hopelessness-
no giant genius shone serene
to guide the jungle GI's home
to save their souls on what were once knees -
among the broken colored heads
the graces tidily turned up nose and fled.
And every gilded altar groaned
beneath the weight of fragrant grease,
as oily functionaries frowned,
and damned the profane cry for ease.
Raging reckless recluse, wanton,
I let those touching me leave marks,
and wore the welts of unconsidered
contact deep within my dress.
Through the mens' crashing tuneless mutter,
all my mother's doves would coo-
their excrement a spattered comment
on wise girls' whispers after school.
Broken to be burnished brightly,
the mad boy's music mended me;
borne up again from the little death
in every fumbled grasp and rolling eye,
beneath the grunting fuck's release
whispered still his aching cry
for love beyond all losing
on some further, finer shore.
I lost my son one winter's day,
and looked behind me for some trace
for all the hope engendered there -
in spite of cruelty, shame and fear-
for some future safety, some other home.
No lock of hair, no scrap of baby's lace,
torn in peripatetic haste;
his father left me quite alone.
But for memory's descant that played -
over the hum and hollow buzz
of the madding travelers' company,
inured with me from want
in shared distress
at prospects alien and vile -
it was his Requiem, and I,
its favored child.
And now, as in that moment,
memory lifts the shoveled lime and pauses,
powder cratered in spats of rain
to dust his corpse and fill again.
The boy lies open-eyed in the pauper's grave,
the once-rich velvet still sick-bed stained-
but some phantom lingers at his lip
to tug a secret smile from death,
that sings on through the centuries,
in every perfect phrase a faith
in love requited, gracile and true -
an answered healing hymn for me,
and the past's bruised virgin
on her knees.
Laura Kate Barrett
Envoi Magazine, Vol. 117, 1997
(all U.S. rights reserved)
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 lawsamussymsagnes,1997, 1998, 1999
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