Hey there, Mister Buffalo,
They say you’re mean, but I don’t know.
As far as I’m able to tell,
under the joylessness you’re really swell.
Your persona has been besmirched
by men who shot you from a perch,
and had to follow you, wounded, into the tall grass.
The gruff sailor said,
“No sail and she just floats all lazy like.
No rudder and she’s a missile to nowhere.”
I nodded.
“You see, you need strong sails AND a working rudder.”
I nodded, again.
He continued,
“You get that the sail is a metaphor for passion,
and that the rudder is a metaphor for rationality, right?”
I said,
“I thought you, Crusty Sea Captain, were a metaphor for my subconscious.”
Thru-hiking a sheep-cropped pasture,
I spied a shepherd in repose,
in the shadow of a boulder.
I asked, “Do you know which way it flows?”
“It flows? What flows? the creek below?”
“I know the creek must flow downhill.
I mean how I flow through the world,
or it through me — by force or will?”
“I know when I lie here it slows,
between the bleats and blowing winds,
and I wonder through shaded eyes
whether the world is still in spin?”
I nodded, wandering on, wondering whether the world would stop for the likes of me.
listless drift
metronomic mast sweeps
the sea’s mute tune
snapping flags
halyard and hook ting the pole
spastic anthem
creek burble
amid the cedars
stream unseen
cave echoes
nothing that moves by sight
avoids bumped head
empty bars
rarely known in nature
end robustly
The languid roll of the boat signaled loneliness — silently but steadily.
Was it the inseparable connection of wave and hull — each feeling that, despite the lack of distance between them, they would remain distinct?
Was it that there wasn’t another mast for miles, at least the twelve miles out to the horizon?
Was it the motion, purposeless and uniform, a lethargic fidget that signaled anxiousness without anticipation.
Oh! Cast off these khaki shackles!
Like Don Duck, pants raise my hackles.
I’d chuck my slacks in the river Styx,
show all Hades my bag of tricks.
No more this prison for my loins,
and hear these words that I enjoin:
DOWN WITH PANTS!
DOWN WITH PANTS!
DOWN WITH PANTS!
Radnóti wrote, “Walk On, Ye Doomed”
[Járkálj Csak, Halálraítélt!]
in 1936 —
Eight years before he was force marched to death by Nazis.
And I am left to wonder whether he was a prophet,
or whether the Poet’s obsession with death makes him seem prophetic.
Whether he was a prophet or not, he was true to his poem.
There’s at least 750 kilometers between the copper mines of Bor and the tiny northern Hungarian town where he was killed — a place closer to both Bratislava and Vienna than to Budapest.
Call it 500 miles on foot,
emaciated from cracking rock for copper to build the war-machinery of those trying to erase a people — his people.
They found a pocketful of poems on his person when he was exhumed.
If you can’t think of anything else to do in the act of slogging at gunpoint across two countries than to craft poems, you are not a poet, you are THE Poet.
Everyone has a darkness to navigate.
I chased my Kurtz into the river’s savage tracts —
steamboat long since left behind —
portaging to lands above the cataract ledge.
You’ve heard it said, “You are every character in your dream?”
That thought flickered into my awareness
just as I realized I felt as much Kurtz as Marlow.
My sole consolation was that my Kurtz was dying.
And since I felt that one man can’t die two deaths —
[wishful thoughts of legacy be damned]
I felt my Marlow would outlive my Kurtz.
But when Kurtz-of-Dreamland sucked his last breath,
he didn’t stick to script with “The Horror! The Horror!”
Instead, he said, “Box my bones up for the elephants.”
Which seemed as nice as remembering his fiancée’s name —
as far as I was concerned.
Its alien orange gleamed across a mid-winter forest.
The only thing — save shamrock green moss girding the base of trees — that begged attention in that silent, decaying woods.
Its globule nature desiccated into angularity,
adding to its alien claim,
and it shone with every orange a flame can throw.
The guide said you were edible,
but, seeing your flaming colors,
I could never convince myself that you wouldn’t taste of orange jelly enough to not spit you out on the ground.
Besides, I won’t say you’ve seen better days,
but you’ve seen less alien days.
The mind is architect of a slum town of grief.
Silent words, yet ceaseless calling.
I envy the simple way of a falling leaf.
No grasping, nor fear of falling.
If a thought could twist on the wind for its brief life —
not frantically seeking hold.
We would not live these dear lives strafed by strife.
We’d not find our dreams bought and sold,
or feel untimely turning old —
vigor sapped by a false form of cold.
And life would be all we had to live.
