Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

The Metaphysicians of South Jersey
Because in large cities the famous truths
already had been plumbed and debated,
the metaphysicians of South Jersey
lowered their gaze, just tried to be themselves.
They'd gather at coffee shops in the Vineland
and deserted shacks deep in the Pine Barrens.
Nothing they came up with mattered
so they were free to be eclectic, and as odd
as getting to the heart of things demanded.
They walked undisguised in the boardwalk.
At the Hamilton Mall they blended
with the bargain-hunters and the feckless.
Almost everything amazed them,
the last hour of a country fair,
blueberry fields covered with mist.
They sought the approximate weight of sadness,
its measure and coloration. But they liked
a good ball game too, well pitched, lots of zeros
on the score board. At night when they lay down,
exhausted and enthralled, their spouses knew
it was too soon to ask any hard questions.
Come breakfast, as always, the metaphysicians
would begin to list the many small things
they'd observed and thought, unable to stop talking
about this place and what a world it was.

- Stephen Dunn

[Larry Robinson]

Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics

A lamp so you can read the words on the tablet.
A hand to copy the sentences you find.
A hand for you to rest your head.

Feet to dance the gist of what you find.
A bird to scour your heart.
A bird to help you pronounce the sentences.

Breath to fan the fire's nest.
A kiln to test the choice.
A crown to keep underfoot.

Two eyes to see the one in one.
Three to see the two in one.
Seven to see the all in one.
A hand to cross out your name.

A donkey to carry your shit.
A monkey to filch change and food.
A brother to point the way.
A sister to redeem the refused.
A sister to ransom straw.
A sister to wake you with kisses
when you've fallen asleep at your opus.

- Li-Young Lee

[Larry Robinson]

The Green Flash

le rayon vert

And the sea’s skin heaves, saurian,
and the spikes of the agave bristle
like a tusked beast bowing to charge
tonight the full moon will soar floating
without any moral or simile
the wind will bend the longbows of the arching casuarinas
the lizard will still scuttle
and the sun will sink silently with a stake in its eye
bleeding behind the shrouding sail
of a skeletal schooner.
You can feel the earth cooling,
you can feel its myth cooling
and watch your own heart go out like the red throbbing dot
of a hospital machine, with a green flash
next to Pigeon Island.

- Derek Walcott

[Larry Robinson]

December Notes

The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks

The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,

Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew

Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out

Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.

The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail

Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.

- Nancy McCleery

[Larry Robinson]

Excerpt from Experiencing Death

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy

Faraway place
I’ve exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ’s birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I’m still alive
On Central Television News
my name’s changed to “arrested black hand”
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I lift up high up the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I’ve experienced death
so that “black hand” becomes a hero’s medal of honor

Even if I know
death’s a mysterious unknown
being alive, there’s no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I’m still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing


- Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo, a poet and literary critic, is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. China has forbidden him to travel to the award ceremony, which will be held on Friday in Oslo. This poem was translated by Jeffrey Yang from the Chinese.

[Larry Robinson]

Before The Flood


Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Lucky Life


Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking SS. Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.


Each year I go down to the island I add
one more year to the darkness;
and though I sit up with my dear friends
trying to separate the one year from the other,
this one from the last, that one from the former,
another from another,
after a while they all get lumped together,
the year we walked to Holgate,
the year our shoes got washed away,
the year it rained,
the year my tooth brought misery to us all.

This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled
the car onto the sand and looked for the key.
I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out
the sheets and separated the clothes into piles
and I knew it when we made our first rush onto
the beach and I knew it when we finally sat
on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands.


My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and I'm lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell,
by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus
I have to look for, the one with him slumped over
and lost in weariness or the one with him
vaguely guiding the way with a cross and globe in
one hand and a compass in the other.
My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street
sitting at the oak bar, listening to two
obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942,
and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert
with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humorless.


Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
- Gerald Stern

[Larry Robinson]

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky

- David Budbill
(from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press)

[Larry Robinson]

Salutation

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they are happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

- Ezra Pound

[Larry Robinson]

Going Wrong

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. "What can you know of my machinery!"
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: "You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go live
with rock and silence." The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. "You have lived all year without women."
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
"No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn." The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Stitching

at the Solstice


In and out
the bright needle goes --
into the fabric
through
and to the other side --
moving invisibly
on the far side,
hidden
like the vanished sun
in its occult passage
across another world
a world dark to us
because unseen.
Yet we now are the ones in the dark;
can we imagine others, those on the dark side,
emerging into light?

The Egyptians thought of the Sun
as descending
into the world of death
where Osiris lay,
and animating the dead world with its rays,
stitching the dismembered god
with lines of light.

As we stitch our lives,
the visible and the invisible
are linked together.
The moving needle threads our actions
into a familiar tapestry.
On the other side, unseen --
like the shaft of sunlight that pierces
the depths of the pyramid --
the threads
weave a pattern of their own,
unknowable
till time unfolds
and the fabric turns.

- Nina Mermey Klipp

[Larry Robinson]

Winter Solstice


Perhaps
for a
moment
the typewriters will
stop clicking,
the wheels stop
rolling
the computers desist
from computing,
and a hush will fall
over the city.

For an instant, in
the stillness,
the chiming of the
celestial spheres will be heard
as earth hangs
poised
in the crystalline
darkness, and then
gracefully
tilts.

Let there be a
season
when holiness is
heard, and
the splendor of
living is revealed.

Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here.

There are
inexplicable mysteries.

We are not
alone.

In the universe there
moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter
earth's axis
toward
love.

In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.

The cosmos enfolds
us.

We are caught in a
web of stars,
cradled in a swaying
embrace,
rocked by the holy
night,
babes of the
universe.

Let this be the
time
we wake to
life,
like spring wakes, in
the moment
of winter
solstice


- Rebecca Parker

[Larry Robinson]

Annunciation to the Shepherds


It's hard not to laugh.
What a picture it makes—
the dumbfounded shepherds
and the stricken sheep,
the cacophony of bleating
and the barking of sheepdogs
dashing and nipping
in a vain attempt at order,
and over it all the angels
trying to make their
shimmery voices heard.
“A who? Wrapped in what?”
the shepherds holler back.
“Where are we supposed to go?”
Poor guys. They wanted directions,
a purpose, some sense of how
the story might end.
And all they got,
all any of us ever get,
was the sound of angels,
somewhere beyond the din,
singing “Glory, Hosanna”
across the improbable night.

- Lynn Ungar

[Larry Robinson]

Toward the Winter Solstice


Although the roof is just a story high,

It dizzies me a little to look down.


I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights


And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;


A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook


Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine


The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs


Will accent the tree’s elegant design.




Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause


And call up commendations or critiques.


I make adjustments. Though a potpourri


Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,


We all are conscious of the time of year;


We all enjoy its colorful displays


And keep some festival that mitigates


The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.




Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,


But UPS vans now like magi make


Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves


Are gaily resurrected in their wake;


The desert lifts a full moon from the east


And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,


And valets at chic restaurants will soon


Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.




And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk


The fan palms scattered all across town stand


More calmly prominent, and this place seems


A vast oasis in the Holy Land.


This house might be a caravansary,


The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead


Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces


And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.




Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem


Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;


It’s comforting to look up from this roof


And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,


To recollect that in antiquity


The winter solstice fell in Capricorn


And that, in the Orion Nebula,


From swirling gas, new stars are being born.



- Timothy Steele

[Larry Robinson]

Eclipse

I knew what the solstice lunar eclipse
would look like.
No need to wake me up.

I had had a long day,
with another ahead
and from the newspaper article, I
could picture it perfectly:
a poets’s paradise,
namely, as they said, all the
sunrises and sunsets
of the world combined,
nothing less.

So.
I needed my sleep.
But my wife would
have none of it.
A good hour or two into the
sweetest of sleeps
she opened our bedroom door,
a quiet sound, yet sure to awaken.

"You must come see.
It is really something."
And she closed the door
to my arguments.

I dressed, said nothing,
sat as invited, on the porch chair she’d offered,
in the freezing December night,
and waited for the clouds to part
and show me what I expected:
a pale moon, fringed in pinkish orange,
in fact, rose petals of sunrises and sets.

It was just the opposite:
pale edges with a heart of rose-mango.
Unforgettable. For the next 84 years.
She returned to bed; I sat transfixed:

Life constantly disappoints.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

- A.R. Ammons

[Larry Robinson]

Voyage

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it—

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

The Unseen Lover

Somehow I guessed that this was going
to happen.
Something told me
this was a special night,
stars, angels, shepherds,
a time to be bookmarked
in history.

Perhaps I knew because
it had happened so often
before,
this pairing of the realms.
Zeus coming down on Leda,
the swan feathers presaging
the angels’ wings,
the heavenly choir surely
there somewhere in
the background.

And of course
there was Dionysus,
born when the Immortal One
ignited Semele to flame,
coming again with
each season’s turn,
bringing wine and poetry
to free us
from ourselves.

And Persephone, the maiden,
raped and carried away
to spend the dark months
with the nether King,
returned to her mother
in annual efflorescence,
yearly greening
of branch and bud,
field and farm.

Today they speak of aliens,
arriving in strange guises
to claim their earthly brides,
offspring compounded of dual
realms, strange amalgam
of disparate spheres.

What if we too
opened our bodies fully
to the formless Other,
made of our wombs
receptacles for light,
for promise,
for overwhelming love?
What if we allowed
the mysterium to enter
and possess?
Who might we then
become?
What worlds might
we beget?

- Dorothy Walters
December 21, 2010

[Larry Robinson]

Mountain Lion

Why should we be surprised to find
a mountain lion on a mountain?
That's where they live.
That’s why the name.
"Mountain" Lion.

Cites have their slickers.
The country has its bumpkins.
And as villages have their idiots,
mountains have their lions.

They are called mountain lions,
not valley lions or prairie lions.
Mountain Lions!

So in lion country on your mountain bike
you'd better be a mountain man
or a mountain woman
or a Mountain Lion is going to
eat your candy ass for lunch!


- Doug von Koss
San Francisco 2003

(Response to surprised off road
bicycle enthusiasts)

[Larry Robinson]

A New Year’s Blessing

Unhurried mornings, greeted with gratitude;
good work for the hand, the heart and the mind;
the smile of a friend, the laughter of children;
kind words from a neighbor, a home dry and warm.

Food on the table, with a place for the stranger;
a glimpse of the mystery behind every breath;
some time of ease in the arms of your lover;
then sleep with a prayer of thanks on your lips;

May all this and more be yours this year
and every year after to the end of your days.

-*Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Burning the Old Year


Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.


So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.


Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.


Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.



- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Rumi's Caravan is returning to Sebastopol for its twelfth season on Saturday, February 5, 2011.

You are invited to join us for a magical evening of poetry in the ecstatic tradition, featuring the works of Rumi, Hafiz, Khabir, Mirabai, Rilke and many others.

Presenters include Gwynn O'Gara, Doug von Koss, Kim Rosen, Bill Denham, Kay Crista, Barry Spector, Maya Spector, Shepherd Bliss, Carol Fitzgerald and Larry Robinson

Kim Atkinson, Cindy Albers and Chris Caswell will provide musical accompaniment.

Saturday, February 5th, 2011
Sebastopol Masonic Center
373 Main Street
7pm (doors open 6:30)

Tickets are $20 and include a delightful tasting of authentic Persian delicacies.


This event has sold out the past four years so you are encouraged to buy tickets in advance by calling or visiting

Many Rivers Books and Tea, 130 South Main St., Sebastopol - (707) 829-8871 or
The Rugs of Persia, 101 Montgomery Drive, Santa Rosa - (707) 576-9000

All proceeds go to benefit the Ceres Project and the Climate Protection Campaign

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you've broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.

- Jelalludin Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles



It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.


Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe if is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.


“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Bun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”


And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Hear the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying
My Woman is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”


There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with the headings like ‘Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusing inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.


Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.


And “The Days of Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends


How easy he had made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
my legs like his, and listen.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Names Of The Ancestors

We are moving backward in the granary of our ancestors' names.
When we speak them, wheat fields harvested three thousand years ago
sway again in winds gone on to other galaxies.
Somewhere on that track are all the hands that met mine in the night
and the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower.
The wisdom of sleepers forms a tradition along the arc of generations,
anointing the slippery head of the newborn rising from the sea
and the yellow skull of the corpse set out to dry in the desert.
Now we are touching his twenty layers of embroidered robes.

- Thomas R. Smith

[Larry Robinson]

Statues
1989

In Prague, or perhaps Budapest,
the heroes have fallen off their horses.
Here lies a general's profile
and here a helmet, there
a ferrous glove still holding the reins.
The horses, so long inert
under the heavy bodies,
are not used to wind and sun,
nor to the tenderness of their flanks
now that the boots are gone,
and their eyes, so long overcast
by bronze or stone, are slow
to take in the gray city,
the heavyset houses. Gradually
they start to move, surprised
by their new lightness. There's a scent
of rain in the air, and something clicks
inside their heads; it has to do
with green, with pasture. They step down
from their pedestals, unsteady as foals
beginning to walk. No one pays attention
to riderless horses walking
through city streets; these are
supernatural times. Near the edge of town,
where the sky expands, they trust themselves
to break into a run
and then drop out of sight
behind a bank of willows
whose streamers promise water

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

After reading "Statues" by Lisel Mueller


You asked what moves in me that yearns to break free.
I cannot name it, but it feels like . . .

A flame in two cupped hands, my body draped long in traveling clothes - setting out on a dark night.

A velvety curtain behind which the secrets of the universe are concealed.

My belly a great bowl scooped full of stars

And beauty, that beloved muse, sets every cell on fire and each hair a strand of golden light.

The secret garden filled with music and jewels from the Tales of the Arabian Nights my father gave me

Inanna in descent to her dark sister and Carol my beloved Ninshubur

A simple and ardent love of silence

The feeling that something completely remarkable is about to be revealed

Awareness of the miraculous in the mundane
loving ordinary moments, washing dishes, kindling a fire
tears of gratitude streaming

There are no ordinary moments
only I too tired or distracted to witness the miracle
my eyes frozen like a statue.

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Statues in the Park

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone bed,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
and murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.

Statues in the Park

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone bed,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
and murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

New Decade’s Eve

The First Nation Miwok people called this sacred land Eetawyomi—the hot place. They honored with dances and rituals the curative mineral water that springs from deep in the earth. For millennia, Harbin Hot Springs, as it is now known, was revered as a place of meditation and communication with the spirit realm. Today, Harbin thrives as a retreat for the urban-weary. The property offers miles of hiking trails and an eclectic program of workshops, healing arts, and three yoga classes each day.

child’s pose

the old man rests his forehead

on mother earth

On the last night of the first decade of the second millennium, I sat in Harbin’s library. Almost midnight, I wanted to stay awake. From the temple came the driving pulse of technotrancedance. I headed instead for the springs. It was literally cheek to jowl with 75–100 people in the warm pool. Single folks along the pool’s edge looked longingly toward the center where bathers enwrapped in group hugs gazed into each others’ eyes. Just before midnight, someone started counting “ten, nine, eight …”

new year’s eve

even strangers

kiss

A man who looked like Noah began chanting “Om” and soon everyone was Om-ing. As some finished, others started, the Om rising and relaxing seamlessly in waves that rode the steam into the frosty night air. The ceremonial Om lasted 20 minutes until everyone was enveloped in a cocoon of vibration. Satiated, I started walking back to my camper when I sensed what felt like the gentlest of rain. I couldn’t see much until a motion detector at the Dragon Gate entrance switched on a floodlight. I looked up:

January first

falling more softly than rain

snow





- andrew zarrillo

[Larry Robinson]

Recipe for Happiness in Khabarovsk or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand café in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Larry Robinson]

The Second Voyage

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw
The ruffled foreheads of the waves
Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed
The oar between their jaws and looked down
In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined
Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed
In fatal formation, and thought
If there was a single
Streak of decency in these waves now, they'd be ridged
Pocked and dented with the battering they've had,
And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,
Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one
With admiration; they'd notice us passing
And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these
Have less character than sheep and need more patience. I know what I'll do he said;
I'll park my ship in the crook of a long pier
(And I'll take you with me he said to the oar)
I'll face the rising ground and walk away
From tidal waters, up riverbeds
Where herons parcel out the miles of stream,
Over gaps in the hills, through warm
Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer
Bold enough to look me in the eye
With 'where are you off to with that long
Winnowing fan over your shoulder?'
There I will stand still
And I'll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post
And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back
And organise my house then.
But the profound
Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him;
He had only the oar to make them keep their distance;
The sea was still frying under the ship's side. He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains
Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares,
The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,
The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs
Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud,
Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark:
His face grew damp with tears that tasted
Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin