Category: Life of Rob
A protrusion of gratitude
My simple, but genuine gratitude for our life here in Edinburgh…
A protrusion of gratitude
Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations
of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.
That literature of land partnered with time
makes for fragrant mornings in settings
of coal-kissed stone, unsullied
by lesser things.
No more exile here –
just a protrusion of gratitude.
November – A Poem a Day (finale)
Our Own Now
It is left to time and chance
this risk of memory and loss.
I doff my cap to my own history
while learning presence in present tense.
Swept along the brisk and roiling
river of time, we can watch ourselves
on the shores of our own lives
wishing we were on the other side
or maybe in the water,
going the other direction.
Maybe it’s just good to stand
and look for awhile.
This much I know,
at least I see the river if only this once
and listen to it move
while I laugh a little on
this still ground.
November – A Poem a Day Challenge (6, Day 11)
Day 11 –
My simple, but genuine, thank you to our life in Edinburgh…
A protrusion of gratitude
Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations
of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.
That literature of land partnered with time
makes for fragrant mornings in settings
of coal-kissed stone, unsullied
by lesser things.
No more exile here –
just a protrusion of gratitude.
Where poets learn to see
Grey ash, dead-branch-dim
d
e
s
c
e
n
d
s
into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –
apathy.
Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,
hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere
to land, to inhale.
Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,
wrestling out colours, lines, faces –
not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.
Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.
These
lazy
letters, unfinished sen
Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,
we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,
the oppressive weight of art.
As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,
in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.
Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.
Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live
the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?
That prodigious, crowing dark –
where poets learn to see.
Prayer
We press the world between pointed palms,
where the weary stretch for heaven’s notice.
Our best vision, through closed eyes – steps
weightless
on scabbed knees, waiting.
Wine-soaked, bread-fed words squeeze
themselves through parched lips to
arrange with dancing in mind. But first,
they must learn the art of walking naked, blindfolded
through haunted alleys,
danger-gripped, clammy with doubt.
We stretch out long necks, seeking only glimpses, emancipation.
But, the lecherous bully of shame spends all his time
butchering the still,
small voices of light that sneak
in through backdoors where hope still keeps
windows open.
Tragic, is it not, how shades pull tight against wayward shards
of sun, the down-payment for our breath?
Like running in snow, our legs just get heavier –
too much weight tossed about over time.
A leering fatigue replaces what’s left of inadequate strength –
thickness filling muscles too weak to move past their own demise.
Still, hope is what came, long after our tight-
cinched belt of faith lost its grip
and hungry shame gave way to
garden surrender.
Only then does our Amen make sense.
Lines from a French Train
Composed on a train somewhere between Paris and Montpellier, October, 2019
Sometimes, it is easier to find the whimsy
when there is no memory of a place.
Sharp jagged edges can polish themselves
out in conversations with fellow travellers.
Their questions are better than
my unqualified answers.
Laughter jumbles out, jostling about in
the accidental chaos of shared days –
days made strong in the looking
away from the timekeepers and toward
their owners. Remember,
we must all live our lives on our heels
sometimes. Then, we unburden our-
selves in the company of strangers.
I don’t assume the elbow room was mine.
This kicking straight of cramping
knees was not an action reserved for
my taxable legs.
I don’t pretend to know the steps to a dance
composed without my song, by other tribes.
Their rainbow isn’t signed by my god.
Nor is the stretching road built with
me in mind.
I don’t expect my expectations to equal
the readiness of others to serve them.
I don’t believe, even for a minute, the whisperings
of my inserted presence, that my voice
gets top billing, priority, and loudest.
My tongue is not the first or strongest, the purest,
or even necessary.
It is only,
mine.
Toward a finished poem
I’ve been feeling like a suburban home,
family-bound, dog-eared, cat-haired, dust-bunnied.
The floor sprawls, covered in lines of loosely connected
bits of string and tape, shoes without mates,
things without name or purpose or place,
shoved in too many drawers, beside stray Tupperware lids
unsure where home is.
I’ve been thatching a wayward garden,
long since surrendered her virginity to the fate of
time and neglect. Her gnarled roots now
the bed of fools – those with nothing to do
but wait for another dry Spring and
long, parching Summer to follow.
I’ve lost the memory of how to cultivate in her
whatever tempts or teases a solitary bud.
I’ve lost my place in the song,
where happy, drooling drunks drop their lines
of sprawling melody, disconnected from time or tune
or taste, but dripping, soaked in the solicitude of friends.
Old lyrics lie waiting for my attention,
faithful old soldiers of forgotten wars,
older still, fought on fields among the family
of tables and tumbling talk, well-practiced lies
in well-memoried songs.
I’ve been acting like a poem in progress –
a toss-about of lost words, tongue-tombs tied
together by accident in a free-falling frenzy.
Outdoor syntax lost in the mall,
painted-on ivory-tower lips for her rent-a-friend parties.
The ironies, playground of op-eds and writers of no
fixed address, wasted in wordless
sentences no one can read.
But the best poems are never really
finished
What’s so different?
What’s so different,
now that one bundle of thirty,
arbitrary and detached, passes,
barely noticed, from one to another?
We have a time.
What’s so different,
as we look out from inside the same
rooms with their corners, known but
unobserved, safe but stultifying?
We have a place.
What’s so different,
the streamers fallen, wine now flat
in decanters of promise, jokes all told,
recognized, congratulated?
We have another.
What’s so different,
these moments of grey ineptitude
encased in more moments, equally
lacking in certitude?
We have ourselves.
What’s so different,
promises made, unkept from the year before,
through wine-stained teeth, and
blurry, careless shrug?
We have a hope.
What’s so different –
she still can’t remember your good things;
he still doesn’t recognize your worth;
they still haven’t apologized
from last year’s infraction?
We have more time.
What’s so different?
We’re alive to ask the question.
I could say that
I could say that this hour
is set apart for prayer, the obligations of my station.
My expected obedience.
A fitting praise.
A suitable gratitude.
A reasonable confession.
An obvious adoration.
A humble intercession made in proper posture.
I could say that.
I could say that this hour
is ours to do the business of heaven,
The diary of eternity.
The stuff of paradise,
changing sheets and fluffing pillows
for the angelic choir.
Making coffee for saints.
Cleaning up after holy gatherings
of those whose leisure time fills the eons.
I could say that.
I could say that this hour
is to learn the language of God.
Syntax of saints.
Songs of millennia of songs sung
and sung again.
Singing still.
Poets poeting.
Writers wording.
Artists arting.
Lovers longing.
So many people still laughing at old jokes,
funnier with each telling, always new.
Always the first time.
Constant punch line surprise.
I could say that.
I could say that this hour
is an exercise in self-discipline.
The prowess of patience.
the wages of praxis,
paid in full with each Doxology.
Invocations only please.
There is no need for Benedictions
to forever stories.
You don’t preach any sermons.
You are the sermon.
I am your words.
I could say that.
I could say that this hour
is the first of many just like it.
A rehearsal in minutes for what will
soon become lifetimes.
Epochs.
Never less.
Always more.
Without the constant threat of boredom,
the language of loneliness,
all sentences run on.
It doesn’t matter, if they all matter.
There’s no hurry for anyone
to make their point.
I could say that.
I could say that this hour
is mine alone.
These shoulders carrying
no burdens, since I never need to
look over them to see another.
A solid silence,
never morose.
No longitude of self-abasement.
No latitude for self-praise –
coordinates of old religion in the checkmate of grace.
I could say that.
I think I will.
Rob's Lit-Bits 