Wikipedia
In a house on Newtown
on a Friday evening,
I met one man, who was from Albania
then Kosovo, then Montenegro
With an arm like a weathervane,
he explained that he now lives
up on McArthur Street .
Eventually I understood enough
to ask him if he was a refugee,
he nodded in Albanian.
I retrieved
six children from his vocabulary,
and St John’s
then his lexicon grew.
He told me: I work
-flails his arms- feed Horses,
-smoothes out an invisible beard-
-aims an invisible scope -
No work. You go back.
10 years, Big camp.
He sighs. Our
I can read about it on the internet,
then suggests that the Albanian
should drive me home now.
We get into his honda, and he fluently
does a three point turn, accelerates,
comes to a full stop at the intersection
and follows my hands; left, straight, left.
The Wave of Kanagawa
I
At cool dawn
a docked boat
creaks.
One
padded foot,
then another,
drops in,
rocking
the hull.
II
Echoed shouts issue
through the mist
on Sagami Bay
Early hands heave
sopped cordage.
Others
slip doweling,
clunk oars,
or slide
anchovy crates
under cedar
seats.
III
A last shout
echoes.
Two hands
press the dock
away
from the gunnels.
Lucid clouds
slide over ripples
at the stern.
Beyond the horizon,
wolves shadows
streak across the ocean.
The oshio-boats
bound for busy streets,
rise on a swell.
To the crew, Fuji
get submerged, again, and again.
Shadows careen towards the oshio-boats,
shadows so close their howling is audible.
The boats are besieged
and towering waves
hiding the enemy,
break out into foam,
and the oshios
are overtaken,
overturned.
Their swallowed crew
tumble slowly,
hearing what babies hear
in the womb.
IV
Fluttering,
rose blossoms settle
onto etched stone
The Coast Mountains
A vibrant, mountainous, azan is called,
which reverberates, soundless, in the sky
and penetrates her soul through her eyes.
She reaches for her well worn gore-tex shawl
and begins a pilgrimage to those walls
of scree and basalt, whose ragged spires arise
like minarets from prayer halls, where inclined
seekers, finding what is greater, exalt.
She breathes more rational oxygen here;
free of rhetoric-haze like the valley
and street’s, where self-righteous poets adhere
to fabricated notions the prophets
did not supply. On her spire she is free
from allure, except, if it’s naturally clear.
From the overpass over Arctic Ave.
The sweet smelling spice of musk and incense,
drifting down the restaurant’s decorative hall,
passes saris and beads and a Taj Mahal
made by palette knife, whose oil paints present
marble, minarets, a dome, and a sense
of prestige, as the sapphire pool falls
like it’s in prostration, towards the walls
of a world wonder. The magnificence
is shared by my here in an overpass
over Arctic Avenue ; in a room,
looking at asphalt which’s prostrating too,
but down between parked and glittering glass
extending out to a pond gently blue,
where tourists don’t gather, only the grass.
North of Quadra Island
My kayak hull scrapped into the landing.
I pulled off my skirt with dexterity
like an oyster; fingers clamping, barely.
Then, from there, I evolved into standing.
I stowed my kayak in some shrubbery,
lumbered through the rain, and in front of me,
saw the orderly pile of a cabin.
My map did not say that this would happen.
I enter onto dry, planked, cedar trees.
I peel off my false skin of neoprene pain,
replace it with a furry hide of wool,
and ignite my caned and flammable heat.
I look at the walls, which flickering, explain
that when soup stews, I will become full
dry and content, then will lay down to sleep.
Mathematics
Raw, intricate; left of the equals sign
are algebraic functions not yet confined
by veiled, patient and terse right hand sides.
Poets toil as they strive long to refine
life’s complex functions into fourteen lines,
often giving up when their attempts are denied;
scratched out theorems, sweaty palms, lost time;
leaving blackboards with chalk-tries spreading wide.
Poets, don’t quit you must hope for your poems.
Did Pythagoras summarize chaos to gold?
Did Fibonacci find elegance in the flower?
Ratios were found for shells spirally grown,
A sequence was present in petals, behold,
for expression, terse lines do have a power.
Mark van Fraassen
Standing at the west coast,
on cool and riddled lava,
wearing rain coats, a mist
fumes from the crashing sea.
On bright summer holidays,
my sister and I tested the strength
of our bare feet on this basalt,
saying: we’ve got van Fraassen skin.
In June at the continental divide,
on a half submerged limestone cobble,
we watched as half of our father’s ashes
issued from a glacial stream into
our arms on each other’s shoulders.
Standing the in same way at the ocean,
a gust of wind pulls at our jackets,
and disperses the rest.
Little we see in nature that is ours
Little we see in nature that is ours,
not even the scars we have made.
We believe that our rule is majestic,
though we’ve forgotten species, and poisoned rivers.
We’ve lost sight of existing in a nature
of Islam; we don’t act like an Orchid petal.
Could cradle a petal
and realize that its essence is ours,
that matters physical nature
is of the invisible things out of which mountains are made;
that babies breath and cirrus clouds are what’s in the river
that cuts through eons of stone? It’s majestic,
and common enough to forget it’s majestic.
While breathing the perfume of the petal
our lungs are moistened by a river
which became air. The breath is ours
and the orchids at once. The physical world is made
to follow invisible laws. We are made from nature.
We have disdained that nature.
We think we are a shrine at its center, our will so majestic
that bare roots and tainted wetlands are merely sacrifices made
to us, lords of the petal.
We have decreed borders between things ours,
and things useless. We are blind past the bend in the river,
blind that our bodies are buoyed by the river,
blind that divinity is not in our nature,
blind that molecules are not permanently ours.
They are guided by an essence more majestic.
Science has proven our link to the petal.
We understand elements; how organs are made.
We’re organic; derived from dirt, and have made
skeletons out of rivers.
There are two kinds of awe. One for the petal;
ponderosas and sunsets serene in their transient nature,
The other’s for the things we do, rulers terribly majestic,
like Hiroshima
Humans and orchids are made in accordance with our nature.
Humans are molecules in a temporal river, our mind is not majestic.
We can clench for earth to make it ours, but soon we’ll dissolve and reappear in a petal.
Can you Love Sonnet
I miss when the radiance of morning light
illuminated the down and feathers on the lawn
that settled there after the goslings’ flight,
honking and rising with mist at the dawn;
how your hands on my ribs raised me aloft
and resting on your shoulders I could see
endless water and Precambrian rock.
Onto granite grains you lowered me;
eased me onto the pink flecks of cool sand
for a moment of rest, and then squeezing
the edge of my body firm in your hands,
you suddenly flung me, with a heaving,
into the lake. My underside got soaked!
Yes, you loved me, my hull, gunnels, and yolk.
A Reason
The snow, making layers, was pale
and pushed, by the wind, into drifts.
No one could see through its veil
to rotting grass or stony detail.
Jagged obtrusions could not persist;
the snow, making layers, was pale
and covered the rocks which prevailed
on the hills in decaying autumn. Under the ski lift,
no one could see through its veil
to the broken, cold, and forgotten shale
or the rotting logs. Underneath the cliffs
the snow, making layers, was pale
and allowed me to follow a trail
delineated only by my ski tips.
No one could see through its veil,
and through it I sailed,
purified of my past, to forgiveness.
The snow, making layers, was pale
and a medicine for me, with its veil.
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