Isaac's Wine

My father never heard the shepherd’s lute
arpeggios lifting over autumn nights
the way I’ve heard them, taken song with fruit
and drunk their depths and risen to their heights.
He never owned the music nor the grace
of freedom to explore the fertile lands
beyond the fields where labor wrapped its brace
around his soul and dulled his splendid hands.
He raged with hunger--sought the tender lamb,
knew well the hunter finds and slays the beast
but never grasped the inner force “I am”
except as One who sacrificed His least.
I am the least--and will not live in fear.
The shepherd's lute, oh Father, do you hear?

Bleak Mid-Winter

On Christmas Eve when I was ten, a sweet
explosion raged. My father threw a plum
through rusted kitchen screen. He stamped his feet
on chocolate squares. We children stood by dumb.
The clustered grapes, he gobbed and smashed against
the spattered walls. Hard candies hit like shot
gun blasts and gave eruption to his angst.
He grabbed and squeezed each orange, picked a spot--
unloaded yuletide cannon balls around
our derelict Christmas tree. His fury leapt.
His cursing filled the house with purple sound.
We children hid and watched while mother wept.
Then calm set in. Chagrin turned into sorrow.
We swept and cleaned, eyes upon tomorrow.

Homage to RF: A Prayer in Spring

With springtime comes recall of autumn's prayer:
May harvest nurture while the fields are dead.
May grace deflect the foolish things I've said.
May winter pass with foodstuffs still to spare.
Protect my loved ones; keep them in your care.
Now bring the gift of spring in flaming red,
a city under siege this flower bed,
flaring poppies blaze and paint the air.
Their fiery flush compels my prayer in spring:
Make all that's red my sign of sacred trust
that spirit, too, requires a careful plan—
make time to let the angry poet sing,
to praise the flower before it turns to dust,
and bless the air with gentlest breath of man.

On the Beat

Oh, lovely Rita, meter maid,
was tired of writing parking fines.
She wanted something better paid
like waiting under billboard signs
to watch for folks who break the rules
and take them to the local jail.
But first there were two training schools
and reams of printed forms to mail.
Matriculated with success,
she took her books and billy club
and learned to make suspects confess
by dripping water in a tub.
The constant dripping drove them mad.
They dreamt of being on the lam
as Rita noted on her pad,
“drip DRIP, therefore, iamb.”

Professor Scansion had advice
for meeting weekly quotas:
“Don’t waste your time just rolling dice
and sending out for sodas.
Look for sonnets; they’re always square
and vice will ever tempt the poet.
You’ll always find infractions there.
How do I know? Screw you, I just know it!”

Dark Matter

Dim mirror, counterfeit design to know
the vital spirit force of who we are,
face out, collect the light where I can’t go;
retrieve the brilliance riding waves from stars
no longer there but still in evidence
of some mysterious force or godly wink
whose teasing secret leaves me in suspense
and wondering what on earth my sense should think.
Good mirror work and mathematics found
a faith to move beyond the angel tale
my father read and wrestled to the ground
but could not beat, his testament too frail.
Now turn toward darkness heavier than all the stars;
forswear the lethal hold of ancient Mars.

Eight Lives from the City of Enchantment

I. Timothy Martin

Phillip parks near the diamond
in afternoon sun. Twin boys hop
out and run full speed to the field
where they straightaway
begin throwing strikes and balls
past imaginary batters while
waiting for the team to arrive.

***
Phillip takes Mary’s arm and helps
her from the car. She is bent with grief.
She asks again why the boy was taken.
“Accidents, Mary. There’s no why to it.”
“But, why Tim? Why not Justin?
He had so many ways
to make me cry. This would be
just one more.”

***
A deep chill settles over the playground
No children there to memorialize
other children, other days.
No sound but the winter wind.
Elsewhere, a brother’s life proceeds—
wearisome, shallow, grasping.


II. Raymond Edgerton

Raymond pecks at his keyboard
writing letters that will be ignored.
Carefully, he composes his argument
against today’s injustice that will pass for law
on Capitol Hill. He guesses it will get a glance
and a note: “Response 5 with full sig.”

***
Looking down the long barrel, sight centered,
elevation raised, Raymond squeezes the trigger.
He sees blood and knows he has scored.
He sees the hatted men in suits
running toward him. He knows he will
die soon. This is his legacy.
His most urgent agendum fulfilled,
he wants only rest.


***
Not even a footnote marks the act.
The object of his hatred
is of little significance
in the story of their times.
Two cogs in a sadistic
machine: history.



III. Janet Hilliard

Janet puts on an album of Mozart concerti
so her students will hear and maybe
notice what she listens to for pleasure.
Can they allow themselves to be so divergent?
Drink the joy of music as she has for so
many years? Or will they think it too far
beyond punk?

***
Instantly, she knows she has opened the door
to mayhem. He looks at her coldly and says,
“Elevator music to get me up and take you down.”
She parries with words, feckless words.
His violence is swift and overpowering.
Only his heavy breathing now.
The recorded sounds of the piano
cover his leaving.

***
In his cell, he thinks of her—
she is the only one he ever thinks about.
Something about her won’t let go—
her fending with words and music.
“Listen to the music,” she said.
Over and over as he went mad.
“Listen to the music!”
It won’t let go of him now—
or ever.


IV. Alice Kristenson

Alice reads intently from a novel and wonders
why the writer takes the reader through
all this unnecessary childhood terrain.
Were she the author, she would have been
direct and less self serving in the narrative.
The mass from her lower bowel
is gone now and reading soothes
the constant questions.

***
Thirteen years, a survivor.
Pride of her surgeon’s practice.
Now, Alice struggles to breathe,
to keep blood flowing, to squeeze
the hands of visitors who wish
to be elsewhere than standing over her.
Too tired to read, in the quiet night,
she recalls, again and again,
all that childhood terrain,
picking through it for clues, for meaning,
some evidence of love.

***
The county librarian proposes
naming the new library
the Alice Kristenson Library.
A wasted favor
to name a library after a patron.
Commissioners choose instead
to name it for a dead politician—
to some, a martyr,
to some, a philistine.
“Enjoy the irony, Alice.
It’s what we get
for living the way we do.”




V. Gaylon Jensen

Gaylon takes the field with eight
other boys. Fear of failure is all
he feels. Joy of sport has been
numbed. On Monday night, high fly
balls fell behind him after
he turned his back and ran desperately
toward the outfield fence—thrice.
His teacher used the word in class
when they talked about the game.
Now he hears it from
the dugout.

***
Traveling now in the company of scholars,
he still carries the overwhelming fear of failure.
Experimental results that will stagger the world
are just beyond his reach. Good theory deserves
cooperative data. Just for a while, until the
instrument is improved; the time is now.
The race is intense; a little tweak; a little fudge.
Then, a little guilt, depression, suicide.
His findings stand for thirty years.

***
The scholar who finds him out
leaves his reputation intact,
lets the new data overwhelm the old.
No need to punish the dead
or give comfort to the living
who prefer no ambiguity in
other people’s suicides.
Leave this one without the data
they crave.



VI. Jerome Ricardo

Jerome reads the editorials first,
front page next, then the sports,
and, finally, the comics.
In this way he orders his life:
opinion, fact, muscle and humor—
the four elements of politics. He wishes
he could fit the common mold.
Those who do seem happier and,
oddly, have more friends.

***
It occurs to him in college—
a minor adjustment:
muscle, opinion, rumor, malice.
No more need for fact or humor;
politics is bold and violent.
He moves ahead at a pace
his mother finds troublesome
only because he seems so adrift.
Then he steps in front
of an assassin’s bullet.

***
Curious they would name a library
for someone who had so little truck
with fact and humor. Another like him
approaches the building in darkness,
hammers an opening in the brick facade
that supports the night book drop,
douses the stacks with gasoline,
exits and throws in a match.
Thwarted: a new librarian,
new building, new books—
dangerous books
on evolutionary biology,
observational cosmology.
And a book against
all war.



VII. Gentry Davidson

Gentry is a man of God by profession.
He knows how common he is,
understands original sin, accepts that it
applies to clergy as well as to laity.
Still, his heart aches to be better than
the people in the pews. Taking money
for something means you should be
better at it. But, when your line of work
is altruistic virtue, it means you
must be worse. Cruel paradox.

***
Trapped inside this little box,
he moves ever toward
a righteous understanding of the
potential God provides through
His material blessings. Called to more
power, he moves to higher pulpits,
bigger flocks, more admiring
parishioners. The stroke that takes him
is just like the one that
took down Gilbert, the banker
who prayed loudly, gave little.

***
When he dies, his congregation
makes it clear: he was a saint.
His bishop had not known;
Father Davidson confessed
only his indiscretions.
Among the parishioners,
there is one with little to say—
either in praise or condemnation.
Quietly, his life proceeds.
Quietly.







VIII. Robert Fordice

Robby stops to smell the wisteria
on the way home from the five and dime.
Stillness and heat create aroma so intense
he will recall it fifty years later,
feel the hot pavement under his bare feet,
and see the heavy air shimmer in waves.

***

Profound doubt rules his years.
He achieves no greatness.
Commonplace and circumstance
bound his life of duty
and leave death’s quiet hand reaching
through the days, pressing toward
collapse of the countervailing poise
of pledge and passion.

***

Few attend his funeral.
Those who go
mourn the loss of a life
rare in its balance. Fewer understand
its fulcrum: reason.
Robert passes, keeping the neutrality
his devout friends disdain.
He neither asks nor offers
prayers of intercession.
He neither invites nor resists
death’s allure—
duty and desire,
terminally in balance.

Wildflowers

She sang and cast the coal black poppy seeds
on sterile soil where nothing prime had grown.
She risked the spring on ground where only weeds
had pushed their roots through cracks in barren stone.
A sudden gust cut through the autumn air;
the frisking wind brought scent of cooling rain.
It whispered in her ear, then touched her hair
and turned her windward like the weathervane.
She felt his lightning lift her loneliness
and heard his distant thunder touch her ear.
The rain, at last, supplied a light caress.
A thousand miles—and yet he seemed so near.
Her wildflower seeds would tame her rocky slope,
break faith with fate and seed the days with hope.

Winter Comes to South Texas

December’s clouds are pressing down;
a howling wind assails the plain.
It thunders in from north of town
propelling dagger drops of rain.

Fall’s lingering blackbirds yield the route
and tumble southward plunging fast
toward the bands where winter’s doubt
persists until December’s past.

My apprehension rises higher
then strikes a note of measured cheer
when hearing on a wind-strummed wire
the note it plays when winter’s here.

South Coast Autumn

Autumn doesn't seem as cool this year.
The summer heat outlasts November's length.
Threatening rain gives me flash flood fear.
The stillness of the air consumes my strength.

The pungent haze that filters shade from sun
invites its heat which penetrates to bone--
a Houston microwave that gets me done;
Thanksgiving birds here seldom cook alone.

Some cooler air is carried by a high
that pushes near but not quite near enough;
the thunder stops along the coast to die,
then backtracks north; the rain was just a bluff.

The wet south wind delivers sticky spray
that cools a bit, then coifs my hair like clay.

A Quiet Conversation with James Madison in Princeton Chapel on the Eve of War

They placed your image high above the chapel floor
in stained glass, as if to say that you were wrong,
at least in this one thing—some men are angels after all.

A few hundred yards from your chapel station
stands old Nassau Hall where the Congress met
and charged you to help design a constitution.

You knew that men, though touched with blessedness,
could not control their passions when commonweal
struggled to be born out of the womb of selfishness.

You knew that power would tug the will along
a path of self-destruction. You set your barricades
in place so power would be confronted yet in peace.

Your canny design is threatened now by smug
lust for empire. Fear is enlisted to invite
surrender to the call of cruel aggression.

Keep us safe, St. James. Hold us to the rule of law
that you designed to check the rotten impulses
of powerful men whose ache for righteousness,

so flawed, is bounded only by courageous acts
of ordinary souls who read and talk and write
of simple peace, compassion and daily sacrifice.

Our greater call commands us hold safe your
fragile memorial; let no self-inflicted war shatter
your bright window of light and self-control.

Fort Carson, 1969

Eight inch guns debauched the silent dawn.
Their thunder echoed off a distant ridge.
The Colorado foothills filled with snow
while young men learned the art of cannonade.
Correcting elevation, azimuth
and wind, a sweep of detonating shells
drew dotted lines of ruin across the hills
till one projectile crossed the target point
and gave concussive proof of marksmanship.
The team of boys felt surging pride in work
done well—a merit badge in field artillery
would lead to eagle rank before they drove
their cannons out across the distant Asian
fields, toward their final quiet frontier.

Frolic Leviathan

Frolic leviathan, dance on the deep.
Uncover your face; let us look in your eyes.
Reveal to us whether you laugh or you weep.
Democracy gives you such clever disguise.
We built you from stuff that we found on our shores
and trained you to take care of Nature’s best gift.
But now in your thrashing you’ve used up our stores.
You’ve smashed through our rudder and left us adrift.
What else must we give you to keep you at bay?
If your dance is an answer to terror and dread,
pray tell, is there beast that would hunt you as prey?
Would any fiend challenge the water you tread?
If you are laughing with triumphant pride,
we must break you and tame you to stay at our side.