Prologue
When you were young, shiny and new
Clamoring to be seen
To be picked up
Taken home/thrown into use
Your faces smeared with incandescent light
Your bulging shelves outstretched and eager
In a bargain parade.
Working, coiling, grinding days
To construct the world that surrounds,
To enrich in labor,
To be tossed aside
Depleting novelty…
Discounted, resold, secondhanded, thrifted, gleaned, shopped.
Use emptied you/emptied you into utility.
Silly magic words escape you
While the world through you was enriched
Fading in newness
Fading in use,
Until finally abandoned
Long-enduring permanent legacy to the land
Though temporally ceased.
Junk Replies
You see my tattered shelves and rusting sides---
Would you love me enough to keep me in fit repair?
Could you love me enough to keep me in my youth?
The proudest tools this nation ever built
We charge fresh hills to bring power and energy
To drive the motors West.
I am rusted and resting,
Kiss my scraping lips.
The melting point of silver flame kissed my aluminum arm
At the hands of rebels who philosophize against technology.
Take a look at my feet (see where they pierced me!)---
Rubber scraped black paws
Spun on jagged roads of coal.
See my family tossed loose!
Taking strength in what remains,
When we were shiny and full of new beer
In plastics of blue and green---
Now our exposed bodies in the rainstorm
Senescent…obsolescent.
You left us to decay in a fractured sanctuary
On the altar of broken idols.
The melted can kneels before the cracked saints
Where little wrens dart to and fro
Singing hymns to subjunctive hypotheticals…
Sculpted into flame fading into soil.
Oh, come again!
Come again!
Jealousy for new things
Slippery cemeteries
Forlorn parks
Decades tossed to the wind.
The immobility of bronze toys, heaping games
And fortunes won and lost.
Nature Beseeches Her Artificial Children
Nature speaks in a hush to these half-consumed fragments:
On the day you arrived I offered my best gift to the Holy House.
You came with proud men
Who abandoned you at my gate.
I will reclaim you
For my appetite know no sate!
I possess an endless hunger for slagheaps
And towers long in decaying.
Evermore you return to my hand, to my dust and soil.
Your days in the sun were magnificent in star-studded regalia!
Glimmering and shiny in colorful pageant
Reflecting your hour upon life’s stage.
What have you lost?
What lies forgotten?
Your style is void for it is hammered into every new thing
To dart to the fore
Perchance to recycle,
Or lie snug in my deciduous breast.
Now the slumber begins.
You are my feast!
Then to the other side,
To break through the veil
Some will pierce, others fly,
Some, invalid, will crawl,
Some, consumed in the fire, will wake
Others, mangled corpses with the crows’ pecks,
Will rise and will return to the elemental dissolution and void,
Stripped bare to the invisible.
You are metaphors,
Pale forms,
Geometric orphans
Whose mother dreams fortified dreams
Of your earthly sojourn I intone,
Of thee I sing!
The fallen white torch ash
Uncoils the hour’s passing;
Green leaves in bud
Or in full fisted waving,
Indicate time of year.
Rusting metals measures decades,
Traces of things thrown down
Whose useful hours upon life’s stage
Were bartered in brief joys
And momentary contacts
Then cast into secure oblivion.
The Poet Speaks
My youthful muse raged in first beauty:
Sweet milk on a dirty morning in late May
Ruddy, green spears pierce
Chocolate fields in a crisscross grid.
The glutted stream, snaking, coiling through the pasture,
Multicolored calves nuzzle one another
While their mother gnaws and tears with broad mouth
At the yellow green grass.
Such newness is all that remains of sacred traces
Invisible to man’s eye.
Sea froth and sea drunk,
The tilting flight of a gull,
Autumn leaves,
First loves,
No stable thing won my heart.
Then came inspiration for the letter---
Human enterprise and woe,
Yearning for justice
And God’s steady Law.
Now I turn to your stranded occupation of pride and futility
Your confession of beauty mingled corruption
Comforts me.
To broken things I turn
And structure fragments to my liking
Walk with me and see great glimmers of things that might have been.
I call forth broken idols and solitary sing your praise.
While a busy world fits ready for battle.
Gathering new and shiny things for merchandise
Plastering slick streets with autos
Shimmering in petroleum parade.
You retire to your original home,
Neither resurrected,
Nor damned for torture,
Insensate,
Long enduring
Exempt from place
Defrocked of style without yearning.
Litter and trash cannot endure as you have endured---
Neither garbage, nor junk…
They are soft currency in time’s market
Whose value will neither sculpt into exhibit form,
Nor resurrect.
Whose paradise is uniform landfill,
Monotony of rubbish,
Flitting ephemera
Who flash and fade on beaches,
In parks, and along highways with the mangled, roadkill corpse.
You are idols of a calm religion
Whose history waits to be written
Whose first hymn I intone.
You are a signal and marker
Of time’s indifferent escape;
Abiding strong outside of use!
Mother Time brings forward the world.
Every bright, shiny thing parades
As wondrous and ruddy as newborn flesh!
To meet the sparkle of parental eyes
Greeting these babes with pride
And when time has squarely brought these things to pass,
Swiftly turns with season to abandon these children outdoors
No matter how well designed.
To even newer things!
Ever and anon to newer things!
A toast to new things!!
Left in the wake
Of ever-renewing nature and her blooming seasons
An aging poet sings a sad song.
The works and the hands of man are caught up in the vortex of elemental dissolution.
He constructs wild dreams
And plans for civilization,
Conjures eternal life
In a plastic cup.
Like Mother Time
He abandons these projects
To linger/
In a second nature/
In a fading twilight.
To come to a standstill,
To resign,
And surrender
To dust’s slow certainty.
To have outlasted your creator
Neither moving, nor decaying,
While nature cycles endlessly
You survive the frivolous onslaughts of decades
Your stillbirth is permanent
Though the hands of your maker have withered.
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