Kenneth Hart
Darwin’s Theory
This morning the sky takes on the look of one of those inspirational calendars,
all illuminated-edged cumulous with light rays stabbing through like purifying swords,
His Glory in pastel script right about where my neighbor’s SUVs are parked out back,
one black, one silver, miracles
of engineering, collecting light and splotches of berry puree
from the chickadees singing high hosannahs in the overhanging branches.
Gnats speckle the air like protein-filled snowflakes for the looping swallows
tying knots on the air, and in the distance, “M” shapes I always crayoned
into early drawings to represent gulls.
I should know not to answer a knock on the front door this early on a Saturday,
but when he shakes my hand and introduces himself as Cain, I think,
strange, for a mother to name her son after the world’s first murderer.
No older than thirty, clean shaven, handsome, slicked hair and a tie under a black
leather jacket,
he asks, in a drawl, “If you died today, do you feel you would go to Heaven?”
I am still in pajamas, socks, not half-finished with my coffee,
hair wild and head banging from so many beers last night at a downtown bar called
Darwin’s Theory,
where the unsaved, drunken fishermen, local dregs and tourists on holiday
lined up like rotisserie chickens above the alcohol flames, basted well into the night,
our cracked song and laughter and arguments rising from that pit and spilling onto the
street in a cacophony of what Cain might have called devil worship.
He hands me a small glossy pamphlet and an invitation tomorrow morning
to the Baptist church a few blocks away I didn’t even know was there.
I don’t dislike him, and like him more when he shakes my hand a second time
and leaves three minutes after he knocks.
Door to door he goes, alone (though never Alone, I guess) under a tousled sky,
he certainly feels better than I or anyone else from that seedy bar feels this morning,
many of whom are likely still asleep.
Maybe a few will be in church tomorrow. Cain will be there, pleased
if he recognizes a face or two from the day’s work, whose names he’ll surely remember
as he reintroduces himself after the sermon and the singing and the prayers.
But I’ve got my backyard and my coffee and my birds to look at, my little paradise,
even as I hear the gear-shift and braking of the recycling truck two blocks away,
a symphony of our soft drink and liquor bottles jingling through the shrubbery
like a Greek chorus, prophesying some new dispensation,
while honey bees nuzzle the dianthus, and climb stunned out of the blue trumpet
of my neighbor’s lily--
mutual mutations casting shadows on the fresh-cut lawn, its chemical green
for which God can only take half the credit.
This morning the sky takes on the look of one of those inspirational calendars,
all illuminated-edged cumulous with light rays stabbing through like purifying swords,
His Glory in pastel script right about where my neighbor’s SUVs are parked out back,
one black, one silver, miracles
of engineering, collecting light and splotches of berry puree
from the chickadees singing high hosannahs in the overhanging branches.
Gnats speckle the air like protein-filled snowflakes for the looping swallows
tying knots on the air, and in the distance, “M” shapes I always crayoned
into early drawings to represent gulls.
I should know not to answer a knock on the front door this early on a Saturday,
but when he shakes my hand and introduces himself as Cain, I think,
strange, for a mother to name her son after the world’s first murderer.
No older than thirty, clean shaven, handsome, slicked hair and a tie under a black
leather jacket,
he asks, in a drawl, “If you died today, do you feel you would go to Heaven?”
I am still in pajamas, socks, not half-finished with my coffee,
hair wild and head banging from so many beers last night at a downtown bar called
Darwin’s Theory,
where the unsaved, drunken fishermen, local dregs and tourists on holiday
lined up like rotisserie chickens above the alcohol flames, basted well into the night,
our cracked song and laughter and arguments rising from that pit and spilling onto the
street in a cacophony of what Cain might have called devil worship.
He hands me a small glossy pamphlet and an invitation tomorrow morning
to the Baptist church a few blocks away I didn’t even know was there.
I don’t dislike him, and like him more when he shakes my hand a second time
and leaves three minutes after he knocks.
Door to door he goes, alone (though never Alone, I guess) under a tousled sky,
he certainly feels better than I or anyone else from that seedy bar feels this morning,
many of whom are likely still asleep.
Maybe a few will be in church tomorrow. Cain will be there, pleased
if he recognizes a face or two from the day’s work, whose names he’ll surely remember
as he reintroduces himself after the sermon and the singing and the prayers.
But I’ve got my backyard and my coffee and my birds to look at, my little paradise,
even as I hear the gear-shift and braking of the recycling truck two blocks away,
a symphony of our soft drink and liquor bottles jingling through the shrubbery
like a Greek chorus, prophesying some new dispensation,
while honey bees nuzzle the dianthus, and climb stunned out of the blue trumpet
of my neighbor’s lily--
mutual mutations casting shadows on the fresh-cut lawn, its chemical green
for which God can only take half the credit.
Elvis English
Marshall McLuhan's Last Stand
The phone
was
a tool
meant to
free us.
A new kind
of slavery
named:
convenience.
Lately,
it has
become
consciousness.
A Zuckerbook
influenced
adult high school
called social
ME!dia.
We live now
in ghettos
of our
own
likes . . .
AdWolves
jaws,
snapping turtles
of
surveillance.
People
bent
in
a
phablet
induced
scoliosis.
Constantly
lurking
downward
into someone
else’s life,
while the
moon
writes
sonnets
to Shakespeare
and tornadoes
of
collective
consciousness
whirl
and Miles
Davis
asks:
Does anyone
live here
anymore?
Seamus Heaney
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
From THE SPIRIT LEVEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
Billy Collins
On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that it is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk thought the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
From THE ART OF DROWNING (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)
Lucille Clifton
moonchild
whatever slid into my mother's room that
late june night, tapping her great belly,
summoned me out roundheaded and unsmiling.
is this the moon, my father used to grin.
cradling me? it was the moon
but nobody knew it then.
the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.
we girls were ten years old and giggling
in our hand-me-downs. we wanted breasts,
pretended that we had them, tissued
our undershirts. jay johnson is teaching
me to french kiss, ella bragged, who
is teaching you? how do you say; my father?
the moon is queen of everything.
she rules the oceans, rivers, rain.
when I am asked whose tears these are
I always blame the moon.
From BLESSING THE BOATS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1988-2000 (BOA Editions, 2000)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
‘Souls eat souls in the general emptiness’
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
‘It’s all taking place in one mind’
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There’s a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather’s Nebraska
sinks with it
The seas come in over Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like salt
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel’s Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago’s Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of New Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
Mannahatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes
Elvis English
Sweepings
Out of the heartache, a single tear fled
back down the road that had led them here
when the hope was that passion and love
were soul-mates
swinging like chimpanzees
on tree limbs of time.
In primitive French caves, charcoal etchings
squirm on the spear points of those
stuck with the belief
that love will always be
a cure
for
loneliness.
Elvis English
New Year's Greeting
I was a sea
but now
I am a child.
Soon
I will be
a planet,
and moons
will orbit me.
Eventually,
I will surrender
again, again?
And
become
the peace
of space
revolving back
into what
I was
before,
when,
it will begin
all over again . . .