Poetry:
- The Girl in the Personnel Department
- Dementia, A Poem
- The Second One
- On God
- From a Single Dad Raising an Infant
- Autumn Drive
- Meeting Ellie
- My Favorite Universe
- Kathy T.
- Doctor Sam
- Goodbye
- Seascape
- Remembrance
- The Dream of Orpheus
- Eternity
- Thoughts Written in an Airplane
- Illusion
- Chicago
- Ellie
- Limerick for Patent Attorneys
- Life
- No Poems
- For Ilse
- Jean Sibelius
- For Laurence Owen, 1944-1961
- The Universe
The Girl in the Personnel Department
Take all your medical bills to her
Because she has such blue eyes
Because her smile will brighten the day
And she will remind you to take off for the holidays.
She will transcend lost love, without forgetting
She will fill the void, without erasing
She will raise the child, but leave the portrait on the wall
She will become the center of the universe.
And don't forget those blue eyes.
DEMENTIA, A POEM
Where has Ellie gone?
Just down the hall
and far away,
into my past
and her future.
I may visit her tomorrow
Or yesterday.
THE SECOND ONE
The first one was taken suddenly
There was no time to say goodbye
So I was silent and raised the child.
The second one is slipping away slowly
So I say I love you, I love you,
and the child is raising me.
ON GOD
We know there's a god.
How do we know?
We just do.
So praise him
(he's somewhat vain
and insecure).
We know there's a god because
How else would the Moslems have learned to behead Christians during the jihad?
And the Christians to burn Jews at the stake during the Inquisition?
And the Jews to kill ALL the Canaanites at Jericho?
How else would we have learned these things?
Not from our dry science textbooks and boring laboratories;
Not from the pedantic humanists,
With their total lack of spirituality.
So we do know there's a god.
Keep the faith.
FROM A SINGLE DAD RAISING AN INFANT
I will love you
I will change your diapers, while tickling your tummy
I will hold you to my chest while feeding you your bottle
I will sit you on my shoulders
I will take you everywhere I go
I will love you twice as much
I will find a woman who will share my love of you
Who will teach us both what colors match
And until then I will love you twice as much.
AUTUMN DRIVE
The road from Chicago to Detroit
passes a million lives
laughing working loving.
But from the car I see only trees
with red and gold leaves.
Another year gone,
laughing working loving.
MEETING ELLIE
Your voice
spoke music.
Your face
smiled sunrise.
Your eyes blinked
an invitation,
forbidden.
Released,
I embraced my life
and yours.
MY FAVORITE UNIVERSE
My favorite universe
in the entire multiverse
is the one in which she says hello Mr. Altman
and I notice the color of her eyes.
Would I trade it for the one in which I am a star third-baseman,
a millionaire stock trader,
or both?
Not after I noticed the color of her eyes.
Would I trade it for the one in which all the girls have such eyes?
No, I like the one in which she's the only one
whose eyes I notice.
KATHY T.
Dark eyes;
laughing at or with me?
Dark hair;
did not live to grey.
Never did or would be mine;
so why does death hurt so much?
DOCTOR SAM
Healed the sick.
Defended the Jews.
Told me he was dying,
With no tears.
Taught us how to live,
And how to die.
GOODBYE
I thought the sun
would not light any life
after hers.
But now I know
that it will still circle the earth
after its reasons are gone.
When I have turned my rage into sadness,
I must tell the children
that life can not be preserved;
only passed on.
SEASCAPE
The sails of yesterday's love
are hidden by this evening's fog,
which forgets the light;
and only the warships are remembered.
Yet sometimes I am searched out
for an instant
by that painful beacon:
a smile once shared.
REMEMBRANCE
The only memories I have
are of the things that never happened.
She is no longer here
to remind me of that other life,
in which we loved
or did not.
THE DREAM OF ORPHEUS
She is lost to sunlight now;
but sometimes slips, small and white,
into my private darkness.
Last night she spoke a word of comfort;
I was able to smile,
and make just the right reply.
But when I reached out,
the purple aura came between us
and left me with the ache of a poem in my belly.
I am unable to remember what I wanted to tell her.
It is best that the dead
do not allow us to dream of them too often.
In the morning, the living
search the silence of my eyes;
but their dewdrops have gone before the dawn.
ETERNITY
Now she will never change;
never forgive me;
never say goodbye.
She will never disturb the bedcovers of my life again,
nor suffer her measure of beauty
to sift grain by grain through the hourglass.
She will never be older than twenty-nine.
There is nothing we can do about death
except write poems.
THOUGHTS WRITTEN IN AN AIRPLANE
I see the small cubicles below.
In that concrete anthouse
two lovers hid,
then learned to hate,
and became victims.
One day the world killed her.
I survived, and bought a house in Utopia.
After a journey of nine years
And nine hundred miles
I return to the city
where her life began,
recalling clearly as pain,
and tracing the feeling upon this page.
The miles are discarded as dead skin;
but the years remain, a permanent scar
marked upon the still-living flesh,
sensitive to the touch of a recollection.
ILLUSION
Perhaps there was a time
when fabrics, blue and green, unfurled;
when their shape was not pressed
into polyhedrons;
and I could watch their colors unbound,
except by the gentle ringlets of the days
curling about, and returning again to the starting place,
dawn.
But those slim circles
strung together cylindrically
formed a tunnel leading inevitably
to now.
CHICAGO
The hog butcher is gone.
In his place stands a woman
dressed in colors by Renoir,
tower-tall,
highway-ribboned,
light-jeweled till dawn,
ready for the morning sun to spring out of the lake
and spread his reflection at her feet.
ELLIE
Street kid, child bride,
dancing into my life
with blue eyes:
why can't you be a real mother?
Street kid, child bride,
Toronto tough:
please don't steal anymore;
don't steal any more hearts.
LIMERICK FOR PATENT ATTORNEYS
An inventor who hailed from Elkhart
had ordinary skill in the art.
His claims were rejected
(and not resurrected)
as insufficiently smart.
LIFE
Is meet talk laugh love fight die.
NO POEMS
I have no tears.
A window opened,
a light entered,
darkness moved into a corner.
I have no tears.
I have no poems.
FOR ILSE
Sweet daughter of a dark time,
whose mother gave her up to save her;
To whom even the angels
dispensed food and tuition without love;
Whose hand I held at the university,
and of whom Amy Tan wrote tears.
Yet I did not save her,
nor learn the lesson she taught,
and now regret the impossible.
When the summer of life is over
we do not go back to school.
JEAN SIBELIUS
Leave for a moment
Bach's heights,
Mozart's smile,
and the Romantic song.
The oboe cries tears,
northern snows melt,
and sadness tastes so sweet.
FOR LAURENCE OWEN, 1944-1961
Child of ice and grace,
wide eyes of 16 summers,
hair fluttering with each turn,
flying, reaching for the prize,
like Icarus.
The promise broken,
we cry, who never knew you.
THE UNIVERSE
Space is expanding faster than light,
All the stars will be gone from view,
And who will hear the music of Bach?
There's a woman in my bed;
Her breasts are soft and round.