Rain of Naughts - 2015

Trains 

This heart was cracked
long ago
and ever since
trains
whistle, rumble through 

as if this chest
was a receiving forest
of pine-trees and wavering grass. 

And a smouldering sky
o’er glacial lake
dancing a glowing light,

that, too, is your chest, softly brushed
by the solace of lingering warmth.

This heart was broken
long ago.             

A train approaches.
The ground shudders.
You fall to your knees
in the flailing grass

and like a forest, let it pass
right through you…

 There are faces
on those trains.

Puskhin and Shakespeare, Mandelstam and I

 I too have communed in the statue
presence of Pushkin’s shade;
there was no one there to stop me
just the feeling that I should…

As the earth slowly turns
its sides to the sun
the soul must turn
its cracks to light 

if it yearns to be caught
in the rounding wake
of some great constancy, 

to live within hearing
of the dulcimer tone
that shudders the depths
of the earth like a bell
ringing a mending, doleful, sweet 

to feel the brush
of Gabriel’s wing, Shakespeare’s joy
rolling past your shoulder…

Wait, my dear boy, wait.
While you set the feasting table
the table is being set,
And as much as you want it, standing in line,
you never really wished to be
a member of People’s Will, served
out of turn… 

My whole world spins
on an access of faith
arms       open       wide;
fear and hope, the gnashing of teeth,
Osip in his time, I in mine.

Conviction 

To receive from life more assurance
than most are usually granted,
what is one to make of that? 

From where does devotion spring
when hardship falls
to ravage the human heart? 

How absorbingly difficult
when storm clouds flash
to believe we’re being cut
by clarity’s diamond edge.

Still the sweetest sound

Who gave to grass its kindness?
Made wisdom out of oak?
Who made the sun a potentate?
Odyseus, godly, tragic?
Who was it had the Word of God
bless the seven days?
Who cried out to the angels’ hierarchies,
beckoned one to earth?
Who was it proclaimed over us –
death shall have no dominion? 

Who granted life to Ophelia, Hamlet
and never let them die?
Who blanketed and upstart nation
with a single blade of grass?
Who was the spiral architect
wrought heaven out of hell?
Who swung, then shed, the bell tower hook
made for a comet’s way?

Who gave us all a fortress,
a secret place to dwell?
Who sent young soldiers off to war
with verse tucked in their pockets?
Who is it seeks out silence
to keep it here dumbfounded? 

To them I plug the headphones in,
the ones who make words sing.