RÉNAVA: THE GRAVEYARD
“The tanks,” he said, pointing to the distant rolling hills,
“Came from over there, creaking.”
It was a beautiful fall day,
Crisp air, beaten blue sky, leaves afire.
We were in the small graveyard surrounded by the black wrought iron fence.
The cracked gravestones leaned, but were well-tended.
My wife translated her uncle’s story:
“Her brother” (he was speaking of his first wife)
“Fought against the Russians with the partisans.
They found his body, someone let her see it.
The Russians cut his heart out and crammed it in his mouth.”
Antanas wiped tears away with his farmer’s grimed fingers.
“She was never the same after that.
She could never get over it.”
I asked my wife what he meant and she said,
“His wife lost her mind and died young.”
We prayed, and the wind swirled
The leaves around us
In the graveyard in Rénava.
MY FATHER’S HANDS
My father’s hands, as they turned the steering
wheel, fascinated me; the thumb-
nail flattened, the almost hairless skin, the new ring
he wore that meant he was not at home.
Instead I saw him weekends, every other,
In Galveston, where he drove me down
The block to the convenience store in a blur
Of anguished mystery soft and white as bone.
TO WADE
You, pipe in hand, smile with attentive eyes,
This memory of you feels within me.
I can taste the apple cider and pies,
Our talks were like the summer’s one cool breeze
That swung the front porch swing—I laughed, befriended.
We worshipped God together—I believed—but God
Left me when I left you; I feel no tendered
Welcome, tremble when I think it was fraud.
Perhaps I have no heart to give One enthroned
Above—can a boy give what is a man’s?
When is a person real, not just plain loaned
To the expectations of moving hands?
So the search for a lost host continues,
As I think of you and God leaves just clues.
PROGRESS
When the time came to leave you now I know;
A winter chillness in the sun of spring
Entwined within the warmth, your words like snow
Dropped down, one and one, a numbing, cold sting.
Snow sharpened into slivers of curtained sleet.
Wave upon wave of silent-needle speech
Moistened with enigma melded—white heat
Stabbed my clumped earth, ran red with reach;
But so I learned to some one must be:
I became a bare cold street
A street paved against all intentions,
Blind or not, that gather like wet lead free
To suffocate inner barren regions.
Thus hardened, I watch sleet strafe the lamplight
Glisten in its glide down the glow of night.
CRAZY NORMAN IN THE AU BON PAIN
Crazy Norman’s mouth twitches, he walks in circles
round the café while “Bolero” weaves the air.
I wonder who he’s talking to, what pictures
blaze within, how long must he pace and dart blank
mirror eyes, repeat rhymes and phrases, clipped words:
“Out there! Taking care!” he barks. On stage alone.
People gulp their coffee, leave, he’s too alone
for them, or like me they stare at the circles
of paper cups listening for what his words
mean if they . . . isn’t it weird, how much pain air
can bear, yet content you sip the creamy blank-
ness of days until the day you live pictures?
I’m dreaming of those days we frame in pictures
when the blues and golds find us no more alone,
we love and hate in a world dappled, not blank,
not like the pure white cliffs of pure white circles
where you swim in the brown waves, gasping for air,
looking up, groping for the rocks, for the words
that will save from drowning as if just the words
could, when what throbs behind the eyes are pictures
inside Norman’s head, projector of yellow air
through which the reel of dreams crackles alone.
He pokes and peers, smacks his lips; eyes are circles
that should look out, but his look in, so awful blank.
Like Norman I’ve walked long through a world of blank;
that’s why I’m drawn to his profound foolish words.
I’ve staggered, thinking, “Progress,” then seen circles’
familiar scenery—you tell by the pictures
repeating themselves, you watch the movie alone
while the dust motes float like islands in the air.
Norman ’s still talking when I breathe the cold air
outside (but he’s silent behind the glass) the blank
blue sky surges up to whiteness; I alone
stand where I stand searching for the lonely words
that will describe what we live through, the pictures
that, watched, chain us down, or, sung, flow from circles.
With this air I breathe, I will chant my pictures
blue, gold, and all alone, I’ll spin out circles
to those who hear my words, I’ll fill heart’s blank.
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