Poems from selected publications...




MY LEFT HAND

Never mind the crushed knuckle,
the one that held the nail for the hammer.
Everything you do is bent, gnarled,
upside down, devilish, illegal,
like speeding, wrong and exhilarating.

You think for yourself,
backwards, from effect to cause.
You scratch up on itches, down on dogs,
stroke my beard like an absent friend,
gesticulate with forkfulls
of food, broccoli flying.
Your fingers, lazy and forgetful,
send me unzipped into the street!

How did you get so strange?
Like an elemental particle is "strange"
- a quark or boson flying everywhere
and nowhere at once, through walls
said to be solid but transparent
to your excitable turns.
You feel the unseen world as it really is-
bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean,
filled with delight!

When you were young, you acted restrained,
nose picker, ass wiper, marble flicker,
retired deep into your sleeve at night, speechless.
Now you reveal your jaguar spots,
far more alert than the rest of me.
You spring swiftly over the keys
ravenous for scattering prey.

You come away gripping a hairy tail in your fist,
offering up to my ears the sound you were seeking,
or a handful of feathers of the bird whose soul
you needed to possess, the bloody carcass
of a freakish longing that only you relieve,
enough red meat to spell me for a day,
though I be tarred and feathered and run out
of town by a mob of flaming right hands.



The poet known today as Horace invented the poem about poetry, Ars Poetica, "the art of poetry," during the Pax Romana in the first century BCE. Horace's chatty hexameters instruct readers in the why, how and wherefore of making poems and plays. In China, the foundation for lyric poetry was laid in the 3rd century CE by retired general, statesman and poet Lu Chi in his brilliant prose poem, Wen Fu, "The Art of Writing." Emerson, America's greatest prophet of poetry, accepted the challenge his hallucinatory essay, The Poet," and also in wild lines like these: Poets are colorpots; Dovesnecks & opaline; Exquisite daintiness; Vapors of wine; Delicate gloom; Barrel of opium; Blowing simoom.

The modern and contemporary poets from around the world gathered into this anthology have accepted the weight of that long tradition of writing in the art they love about the practice, purpose and power of the art they love. The result is an abundance of eloquence that will not fail readers in their quest to understand the mysterious flow of poems to capture what Denies Levertov termed. "the uncommon speech of Paradise." or as Gwendolen Brooks said, "we hail what heals, sponsors, restores."



FULL MOON OF REGRET

I regret last night I did not tell you
how much I love you.

How much your radiant
beauty means to me.

How your palette of warm colors
lights up my night.

I stare open-mouthed
at your marvels,
unique, so far as I can see,
in the universe.

I regret I only send back to you
an enigma, a made-up story,
a bit of rock and dust.

Though it is a love story,
for we both love stories.

Mine is of the sad man in the moon,
always loving, but always distant.

What I feel from the embrace of you
is so much more than I return-
your tides, your months of light
and dark, your moods.

Last night I rose splendid
on your horizon, full as I can be,
bleeding for you.  And later
tried to light a path directly
to each of your eyes alone.
So you too could be illuminated.
Did you see me?



TEACHING POETRY TO OWLS

A fruitless task in early summer, Great
Horned babies screeching all night from cedar
branches for parents to feed them. Scree! Scree!

During the day, even, heedless young ones land
on the ground, unfurl their scary new wings
like huge eyes, even the dogs wary.

Not yet the frightening guttural questions
of adults- "Who?  Who?  Who are you?"
"Who full of why in the night?"
"Who trying to sleep, but cannot" and so listen
to the babies' plaintive note, "Scree, Scree,"
meaning "feed me, feed me," for which
ragged parents' work their magic wings,
feathers defeating all sound with softness
until the rabbit feels the needle claws
pierce its already broken neck, and the vole,
so adept at avoidance, suddenly becomes a pellet
of pressed fur and threaded bones, its life borrowed

by the silence of the night in which terrible
surprise lives and hunts and calls out
"Feed me, feed me," and answers with claws.

Poets too feed by listening and calling out,
mimicking the rusty screeches, mumbles,
moans and tremolo of older poets gone before.
Listening in the night, and calling out hunger
for syllables and the silences between,
"Feed me, feed me!" as talons of blood
and ink pierce the defenseless page.



WHEN I AM EIGHTY

When I am eighty
I am going to throw a big party
for myself

When I am eighty
I am going to dress up
in white pants
and a white shirt
with black suspenders
and let a white horse
nibble out of my hand

When I am eighty
I am going to get up
at three in the morning
and walk and think
in the quiet

When I am eighty
I am going to tell story after story
and laugh and laugh
and think all my ideas
are good ones

When I am eighty
I'm going to be mad as hell
if you don't do it my way

When I am eighty
I am going to send grandchildren
on treks along back country streams
and go home and read the paper.
Because I will know
there are younger parents
to find them.
But without me
no one would have any
good stories to tell.

When I am eighty
I will hold the fine silk goblet
of my wife in both my hands.
That will be all the life
I can handle.



TEXT FOR A CARVED STONE STELE TO BE PLACED NEAR COLD MOUNTAIN CAVE

Five pilgrims from America ascended
peaks and descended elevators
exploring poetry, Buddhism and history
in the autumn of 2006.
Stories of their wine drinking linger
throughout the country, and in their minds.
At Han-shan's cave they were briefly still.
Ask the current hermit of you don't believe.



I CARRY THE GRIEF OF THE WORLD
And this is the condemnation: that Light is come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light...JOHN 3:19

I carry the grief of the world
in a joyful body.  What should I do?

I step out the door at dawn, pleased
to find the sun once again cool and friendly.

At evening, I retire to my hut
desperate and murderous,
 the earth retiring in flames.

At midnight, the moon mocks
monks who see in her brave shine
cool enlightenment, not hot despair.

Soon enough, dawn will arrive
as the Devil himself
striding over the rim of the earth
horned head hot with laughter.

What witless pact we mortals signed
to gain the slave toiling inside our dishwashers,
lighting our way at night, amusing us to sleep.

I already feel the heat, the shame,
and it is not yet noon.



FINDING MY OLDER BROTHER

In history this never happens. But in life, all the time.
My older brother, who died before he was born, has been found!
He is 1,200 years old, more or less,
the poet known by the cave where he lived
- Cold Mountain, Cold Cliff.
No one knows his other names.
No one knows the state where he was born.
Since the day I was born, I missed his voice.



A MESSAGE FROM BASHO*

"Don't merely follow in the footsteps of old masters-
Seek what they sought," Basho wrote 300 years ago.
So I enter the cave called the Goodhue County Jail,
eager to see your cells and compare them to my own.
Ahh, you are lucky!  No clutter.  Easier, then,
to ask the unasked question, the unanswerable one.
To find, after wild summer storms, the still pond
where a frog, attentive to your approach, leaps in, kerplunk!

*Japan's most famous poet wanderer.
English translation by Sam Hamill.

THE POET STANDS BEFORE THE PRISONERS

You with time on your hands, in a shitload of trouble.
Me with time on my hands, and no fear.
What could possibly hurt a poet?
That no one pays attention?  Ha!  We can wait a thousand years.
I'm excited to have any audience, not to mention a captive one.
For like you, I relish my day in court.  To argue the pain
of absent fathers, the joy of finding the father within.



Driving Across Wisconsin

September 11, 2001

Do the trees know what has happened?
Is that why that one's crown
is rimmed with fire, that one's arm
droops a flagging yellow?

Sumac, thick as people
on a crowded street,
redden suddenly at the tips.

Ferns in dark hollows of the forest
reveal their veins.

Bouquets of asters, purple and white,
offer themselves from the side of the road
to all the wounded passing by.


SAYING GRACE

Yellow Caterpillars chew day and night on Highway 29
to save an hour on trips across my state.

That asphalt gift to travelers costs dairy farmers big
in corners cut off fields claimed
stone by stone from glacier till, bound once again
by forces distant, cold, a mile high.

Yet farmers will not leave this place lest sacked  
by laws of eminent domain, or hail, or drought,
or a mad king father's razor whip,  
or the crush of prices below the cost
to send to cities such delicious ease.

As I race by at sunset late one wet July
woodlots rake spiked shadows
over fresh-mown fields where hay bales scatter
in the green like gold doubloons.

Each farm harbors a courtyard
where sacred cattle graze within,
butterflies minuet, ponies joust
in breeze perfumed with hay and sweet manure.
Waves of wildflowers break over the field's shore.

You farmers are the kings, we the shiftless wanderers
in our fast cars wondering at the eminent domain
in which you live.  When we say grace,   
it is you we praise, your fields so rich and gold
they burn our eyes the way a true king's crown   
compels heads down in rank obeisance.

You give us earth groomed easy
for our eyes, abundant on our plates.
In passing, belatedly, I give you thanks.



SPIDER CROSSING A MAP MADE IN 1714

Across OCEANUS ALANTICUS, then
The isthmus sprouting new place names like hair,
Then slowly into an empty MAR DEL ZUR,
You weave your way,

Staying North and six inches off the glass.
No bigger than the O in Oceanus,
You are as dedicated and ingenious
in conquering this New World

As any Portuguese or Spanish
Brigantine weaving its white wake
Toward the unknown world,
Eagerly devouring whatever it entraps.


AFFECTION FOR SPIDERS

Not the startling webmasters
centering their silent geometries.
Nor the weavers of the dew-dropped
handkerchiefs revealed on the grass at dawn.
Nor the lanky wolves prowling the night kitchen
too fast to be caught, too big to want to catch.

But the short, clownish, jumpy ones,
two of eight shiny black eyes
looking right up at you like Chinese sages,
full of whiskered confidence and wisdom.

You there on my thigh -- you know the secret
Of life!  We wave our arms back and forth across
this surprisingly small distance of understanding.



Your tree, your bird

So where is it,
your tree, your bird?
So when you sit
cross-legged, palms out,
they come.
When you sleep,
they brush all around
your bed.
When you wake,
there's a familiar feather
and a seed.


Meditation on a Vision of Ed Abbey's Soul

"Were I to believe in reincarnation, which I don't, for there is not one shred of evidence supporting it, I'd like to return as the humble turkey buzzard."  Ed Abbey

Five humble turkey buzzards slide from their roost
In a grove of tall eucalyptus,
glide down the slight slope of the valley floor
toward orchards of green glistening leaves,

Then rise in lazy spirals under dark-warmed wings.
Rise far, far higher toward the heavens than needed,
to dwell in the eternal curve and swell of the world
before streaming off toward small-boned lives.

Lives like yours, like mine, huddled under sturdy
roofs, as if we had no door, no other way to eat,
no need to soar out of sight of ourselves
into something so vast we nearly disappear.


ONE COYOTE CALLING

The sound traveled up the canyon
like a Hindu charmer's rope,
a persistent, pleading voice,
rare solo in the familiar chorus.

It entered the bedroom,
snaked into the quiet
between my wife and me
its rending note,
the fearful work required
to find more than food in darkness.

A star, perhaps, buried by the mist
that fills the valley tonight,
the necessary star that tells us
how to find our way back home.

We lay there, warm in cotton
under several quilts,
touching along our full lengths
after a month apart, and more,

Wondering too how we get back
home, learn again how to sing
through a long, starless night.



Odalisque lay on her side like
the mountains outside of Santa Fe.
The hair hidden beneath her arms was juniper,
her thatch (lazing in a canyon) pinyon.
Falling from her head, rays of sunlight.
From her friend's head, a mountain stream.


from ODALISQUE:

At night, the polar bears…
At night, the mountains…
In the black oil of night,
Odalisque sleeps oilesque.



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James P. Lenfestey — Publications & Writings