Month: October 2016

In Absentia 1

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In absentia

Prelude

1

 The Beaver Pond

Tomorrow, early, my love, you’ll fly away.
Today, you’ll walk round the Beaver Pond
where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey

webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond
of tent worms. I hate them when they swing
from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond

caught by the morning sun in early spring
or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall.
I love American Goldfinches when they sing

that last departing song. I love most of all
those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright
blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird call?”

The hunting hawks give everyone a fright.
They perch on top of a garden tree
then step off into space to claw-first alight

on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free
from fear, his unfinished symphony of song.
It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me
out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea:
don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.

Monkey Chews

 

 

 

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Monkey Chews the Cud
(after Octavio Paz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stéphane Mallarmé)

Brilliant in his rising, a new sun shines on monkey’s world,
dispersing darkness, fragmenting it into shadows.

Sunshine and shadow: heads and tails of an age old
combination sealed back-to-back on the self-same coin.

¿Cara o cruz? Heads or tails? Sunshine or shadow?

Solombra, perhaps? Or is it just the act of perception,
as Wittgenstein would have us believe, and nothing more:
the metal always spinning on its milled edge, never falling,
the coin on its axis, a new day with its potential,
sunshine or shadow, thrown dice still skittering,
a new world imperceptibly poised in its own making?

Monkey scratches his head. Such enormous depths
are not for him to plumb, this early in the morning.

Better by far the banana peeled, the fresh skin thrown
away for someone else to slip on, and monkey
sitting there in silence, chewing his morning cud.

 

Existentialist Monkey

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Existentialist Monkey
(after Albert Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus)

Monkey watches Budgie tinkle the small bell hanging below
the yellow plastic mirror in which Budgie gazes in fascination
at his own reflection, nuzzling and nipping himself with his beak.

Black and white soccer balls cover the floor:
“Budgies for the Cup!”
A crimson ladder has another bell on top.
Budgie squeezes a soccer ball between beak and claws,
ascends this ladder, and pushes the ball upwards.

When he gets to the top, the ball slips slowly down.

It falls to the sandpaper floor.
Budgie descends the ladder,
takes a new grip on his soccer ball,
and steadily climbs the rungs.

Budgie is clever: he can imitate the telephone, the doorbell,
the pop of a champagne cork shooting from the bottle, the cat, the dog …
When Budgie whistles, the stupid dog leaps to his feet
and rushes, barking, to the door …

Budgie is two thirds up the ladder now. He pauses for a rest,
stretches his wings, and looks at himself in the mirror.

“There’s a pretty boy!”

“Il faut imaginer Budgie heureux.”

Limericks for Meg

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Limericks for Meg Sorick
(with many apologies)

Lying sleepless at night in my bed,
with my pillow tucked under my head,
unable to sleep
and tired of damn sheep.
I start writing limericks instead.

Now, of limericks I’m really the king.
Mine flow like a song you can sing.
I tap out the beat
with fingers and feet
and they end with a zing and a ping.

My Teddy Bear still sleeps with me.
He’s as cuddly as cuddly can be.
The hands of the clock
and their dickory-dock,
take us from two until three.

On the floor a family of mice
think our bed is warm, comfy, and nice.
I must watch what I say
because they won’t go away:
if I speak they’ll be in in a trice.

My cat sits quite still on the mat
then says “I think I smell a rat!
Go get your gun!
Hurry now! Run?
I bet it’s a big one, and fat.”

A rat, that’s what she said.
I hastily got out of bed,
ran down stairs
saying multiple prayers,
and tripped, and fell on my head.

I got back to my feet in some pain,
went up to the bedroom again
Teddy Bear, mice and cat,
were tucked in, fancy that,
and snoring away like a train.

I decided to sit on a chair
and pretend they just were not there.
I picked up my pen,
wrote limericks again,
and started to tear at my hair.

My inspiration now was all wrong.
Rhyme, rhythm, and wit had all gone.
The hands of the clock
sang tickety-tock
as the dawn came creeping along.

Now here comes the end of my story,
I’m afraid it’s a little bit gory.
I beat on that bed
till the wild-life was dead
and I’d covered myself in false glory.

You can see from my limericks, Meg,
how they all show a fine turn of leg,
with neat little feet,
a strong rhythmic beat,
all borrowed and ripped off a peg.

The End

 

Monkey’s Book Burning

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Monkey’s Book Burning

(Remembering Cervantes’s Scrutiny of the Library
and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)

Who burnt Monkey’s books?
Who took them from their shelves,
evicted them into the courtyard,
built them into book stacks, like hay,
then applied gasoline, and a lighted match?

Monkey watches in horror as smoke
and flame devour his beloveds.
He tries to approach, but the fire is too hot.
One book jumps out from the smoke,
still smoldering, and monkey
snatches it and carries it away beneath his coat,
the fire burn branded into its cover,
the skin still sizzling on monkey’s hand.

How many books were burned that day?
How many monkeys now walk in the woods,
trying to re-create their lives, circulating
their memories by word of mouth?

Moth is to candle as book is to flame.
Monkey runs his hand in and out of the candle.
He recalls the bonfires in other, far off streets
and coughs through the throat burn of smoke
as he touches the blistered scars of flame.

Monkey Watch

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Monkey Watch
(after Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell and the Myth of Icarus)

Monkey senses things that are invisible
to other minds. He knows that ink in a pen
can run dry, that word flows can suddenly cease,
that mechanical pencils can so easily
break down into their component parts.

New Year’s resolutions can lie broken on the gym
-nasium’s floor. Scattered on the ground, they lie
shattered, tattered like the beribboned tresses of trees,
blown blind by winter’s feverish, age old wind.

Time has grown feathers and traced
its moth flight round the candle flame.
These solar spots that beautify the moonscape wings
of the meandering moth are too hot to handle.

Suddenly, there is the scent of burning flesh,
of flimsy wings crisping, of high-flying Icarus
left roasting in the candle’s open fire. Monkey contemplates
the dry, tight wrinkles on the back of his paw.

Then he moves his hand slowly and casually through
the candle’s flame as he meditates
on the brevity of life and the multiple meanings
of an existence that precedes all essence.