Just the memory
of the crook
of your knee
is worth
an entire life
to me.
  - mce

Yesterday, the knockout girl
at the checkout counter -
who looked straight through me
as though I wasn't there -
handed me a Caffè Americano
instead of my ordered Latte.

I said nothing:
paid, took it and left.

After a certain age
you learn to expect what you get.
   ~mce

She only saw the duplicity
of men and how they treat
they treat their ***** as
both a compass and
a weapon of conquest
and scepters of power.

It didn't occur to her
that they might also
use them to please her
and her, of all the women
in the word) alone.

  ~mce

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the  light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Metempsychosis**

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off -
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

The Task** - Poem by Jane Hirshfield

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

Otherwise**

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Artistic Love Card 6**

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.

Consciousness rears its reptile head;
Medusa in the morning gloom.
You wake to iron silence,
a tourist in a rented room.
I have never feared death
but often been terrified of life.
Chaos theory is not a balm
when the unexpected fall begins,
the sudden plummet into strife.
Life says no so often and loudly
we begin to doubt the yes.
The performance begins anew;
the usher guides you to your seat.
The mortal day coiled like a viper
ready to strike and poison.
Wise souls move through the murk
one careful step at a time.
When you rise, check your weapons;
be careful where you place your feet.
   ~mce

Listen for the silences,
intervals between notes;
silence engenders song;
without it mere cacophony.

Poetry is no different:
what is not said
often says the most.
  ~mce

If you
are not jealous
of your freedom,
who will be?
  ~mce

American Sermon**

I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the ******* the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.

-from After Ikkyu

Not here and now but now and here.
If you don't know the difference
is a matter of life and death, get down
naked on bare knees in the snow
and study the ticking of your watch.

7 from Geo-Bestiary

O that girl, only young men
dare to look at her directly
while I manage the most side-long of glances:
olive-skinned with a Modigliani throat,
lustrous obsidian hair, the narrowest
of waists and high french bottom, ample
******* she tries to hide in a loose blouse.
Though Latino her profile is from a Babylonian
frieze and when she walks with her small white dog
with brown spots she fairly floats along,
looking neither left nor right, meeting no one's
glance as if beauty was a curse. In the grocery
store when I drew close her scent was jacaranda,
the tropical flower that makes no excuses.
The geezer's heart swells stupidly to the dampish
promise. I walk too often in the cold shadow
of the mountain wall up in the arroyo behind the house.
Empty pages are dry ice, numbing the hands and heart.
If I weep I do so in the shower so that no one,
not even I can tell. To see her is to feel
time's cold machete against my grizzled neck,
puzzled that again beauty has found her home in threat.

It wasn't until the sixth century that the Christians
decided animals weren't part of the kingdom of heaven.
Hoof, wing and paw can't put money in the collection plate.
These lunatic ****-brained fools excluded our beloved creatures.
Theologians and accountants, the same thing really,
join evangelists on television, shadowy as viruses.

Winter knows
when a man's pockets
are empty.

"To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime."

Marching**

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.

To Carthage then I came.*

Deep down,
who doesn't want
to **** a saint,
to penetrate
the mystery
of holiness,
to enter
the enigma
of eternity.

Pile the wood
high as you like.

Oh sweet
  and lonely Joan,
I will follow
  you into
    that fire.

    ~mce

I am a poet.

I love to say that
when smug oafs
ask what I do
and watch the look
of horror on their
faces, like they
just swallowed
the *** end of
a dead skunk,
maggots and all.

It's my job
to blurt out
the ugly truths
most folks won't
even think and try
to make them
beautiful,

to make flowers
blossom from the
***** of dead skunks.

Like a weather person,
I don't always succeed.

It's not a good job,
the pay is ******
and there are no benefits.

Sometimes, like April,
it can be a cruel job.

But it is a job
and it's my job.

Someone has to do it
so I keep on trying.

I am a poet.

   ~mce

To His Mistress Going to Bed**

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and shew  
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
    Licence my roving hands, and let them go,  
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
    Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s *****, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we  
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
    To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.

Despair and grief are buddies,
always hanging out together.
Grief is despair's wingman.
Together they always score.
Grief sets despair up.
Despair closes the deal.
Best best friends forever
at the club of how we feel.

TWO ENGLISH POEMS For A Woman

I.
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile –that lonely, mocking smile your mirror knows.

II.
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghost that living men have honoured in marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Discovering
that what you
were sure
was you last beer
is actually two.
- mce

Life twinkles
and vanishes
like fireflies
in the July night.

There really
is no past,
only what
we remember.

  ~mce

everyone thinks
they are unique

every trouble
and torment
theirs alone
to endure

until they open
a novel or
a newspaper
and find
their travails
already
experienced

suddenly, they feel
like they are
on some grand tour

just part of
a study group

with a tour guide
pointing out

the unknown
they didn't know
was known
that he knew

such a sudden
kick in
the ego's ***

  ~mce

Illness
Early in life,
     it's an
          interruption:

later in life,
     it's an
          omen.

Early and late
     the mortality worm
                    chews.

Early or late,
     it will have
          the last
                    bite.
  - mce

Anyone can
be a Hero
for five minutes;
it's minute six
that tells the tale.
  - mce

~for my students

Beginning a new semester
once again I encounter
bright, thoughtless faces
staring at me as if
I were a curious, irrelevant
antiquity from a museum
they don't wish to visit.
The earth is fresh to them
and they are unbruised,
for a little while yet,
by the unforgiving realities
that life must provide.
I shuffle papers and make
solemn pronouncements
about the beauty of learning.
They yawn and ******
the ubiquitous cell-phones
I have so cruelly
ordered turned off.
I no longer envy them
their youth or their future.
They remind me of pigeons
ready to be plucked.

I am tempted to tell them
the  necessary brutal truths:
half their marriages
will end in anger and divorce,
others will drag on in despair;
there is no such thing
as true love forever and ever;
the jobs they dream of will
mostly be empty and boring
and obsolete in short order;
the corporations and the usurers
have already captured the world;
that the earth is poisoned
and dying a slow, certain death;
how there are no more secrets
and the government may now legally
read their texts and emails,
listen to their conversations
and learn down to the last moan
even how and with whom
they make love;
that there will be more
than just rumors of war
and they will have to pay for them
in blood, loss and treasure;
that God is otherwise occupied
murdering children in the middle-east;
that we have utterly failed them.

But I don't, of course.
They wouldn't hear me if I tried.
******, weeping holocaust
that it has always been,
the world must be rediscovered
by every shiny, new generation.
Mentally wishing them luck,
I do my job, stick to the syllabus,
say a prayer for their possibilities,
turn it all over to them, smile,
and continue to pretend.
  - mce

It is only a piece of fruit.
Take its fuzz in your hand
and make a vertical slice.
Seek that rift with your
hot and eager mouth.
Engulf it. Probe it gently
with your tongue and enter it
like a lover. **** hard and
take its sweet juices into
your mouth and enjoy them
dripping down over your chin,
sensuous, sticky moisture.
Lap at it until it is empty
and you are exhausted, spent,
fluidly full and fulfilled
with its satisfying succus.
After all, it is only a peach.

  ~mce

Hardly, my friend.
The Dharma shrieks
a diamond radiance
from my heart.
I do not fear
the turning
of the wheel.
I revel in it.
I made this world;
creator and arbiter.
I control my destiny
by controlling my self.
I choose how to live,
where to live,
with whom to live.
I know what I need
and take it.
I make my desires
into my truths.
My karma is strong.
It is not my karma
to surrender, ever.
My other lives
roiled with war,
death and destruction,
but never surrender.
What to fear in this one?
Only fools fear death.
Death leads to the Bardo
and the Bardo leads
to another try
at conquering life.
I sit where I am
and I choose who I am.
My heart feels
the circle turn
and I exude its
diamond radiance
once again:
action in inaction;
order in chaos.
I make my freedom here
in the still spoke
of the spinning wheel
we call life.
Let the Universe
look after itself.
I have other worlds
to conquer.
   ~mce

Sitting Bull, He Dog, Red Cloud,
Chief Joseph, Crazy Horse, Geronimo.

Hunted nearly to extinction
like the buffalo that fed them.

These were gods among warriors;
next to them we are puny imitations.

So when is their Memorial Day?

Poems not written
remain forever frozen
in a glaze of ink,
lonely words floating
like icebergs in a
boreal sea of
unrealized possibilities.

You never know what you will find.
The eyeball of a cow. Weeping condoms.
Deserted televisions lacking flat screens,
no longer desirable, abandoned, forlorn.
A pair of torn, lacy,black *******
in an alley; must be a story there.
A cat with one eye and three legs,
devouring a vole. Scattered books awash.
A depressed, deflated hemorrhoid donut.
Soaked album of ruined wedding pictures.
Forever mute, broken, vinyl LPs.
Three shotgun shells but no shotgun.
Not a sign of the splattered victim.
Almost everything you can't imagine.
The devious flotsam and jetsam of life.
The ordinary stuff of nightmares and poems.
All the world's magnificent mysteries,
strewn like tears on streets and alleys,
waiting to be rediscovered, again,
like dangerous, lost New Worlds,
yours for the simple effort of walking.

In America, nichts neues. Death stalks street corners
like a lurking cassowary. Blood the National Color.
Random acts of madness practiced from ambush.
General lack of civility. Shout each other down.
The Other is out there being otherwise. Fear.
Arm yourselves! Disarm yourselves! Dead anyway.
Impenetrable, crystalline, indestructible ignorance.
Nothing to be done but hold on by sitting tight
until the next blasts of rage rend the night.

   ~mce

He took the dagger
from the dead hand
of a Marine Major
on the battlefield
of An Loc
so the tame *****
wouldn't steal it
like the thieving
cowards they were.
Kept it, used it,
smuggled it
back to the world,
has had it for 43 years
and now it sits
on his coffee table,
still talon sharp,
against the day
when he might need
to cut the world's throat.

Sometimes
I wake up
feeling lethal
after old war
nightmares.

To sooth myself
I slowly
sharpen
my K-Bar.

Weird, but
the motion
drives away
the toxic
memories.

Sometimes,
it takes a knife
to **** a dream.
   ~mce

“As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other”**
BY KENNETH PATCHEN

As we are so wonderfully done with each other  
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers  
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
       soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work  
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .  
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

GIC to HAR**

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

deep chill
of early morning

another
lost autumn
disappears

winter the
only promise

always kept

  ~mce

A Ballad For A Thin Man.

Understood backwards. Lived forward. Life.
Haunted by diverging others. Us but not. Wraiths.
Ghosts of what if? Who then? What might have been?
Leave room. Turn left. Lovely house, wife, retirement.
Leave same room. Turn right. Shack, loneliness, poverty.
Theorize games. Physik quanta. Slide down strings.
Into Wonderland, Oz, Middle-Earth. Narnia.
All the places that don’t exist and matter the most.
Where doors open up to impossible possibilities.
Fight your way through every day. Pit bull of potential.
Just do your work and be kind.* That is a separate peace.
We may be others in other universes, but here we are just us.
**** it up. Love your life. Do what you must. Soldier on.
Real realities can really hurt. Take it like a Man. Or Woman.
Be grateful for your trials. Trials are you. Struggle.
Mount the philosopher’s donkey backwards, advance.

What Do Women Want?**

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the *******
dress they bury me in.

In one frozen moment
I watched my friend's guts
erupt from his body
onto the deck
of our chopper.
Forty-three
years later,
it visits my dreams:
this image of death,
ineluctable
as death itself.
Wars end;
war never does.
- mce

"What is that noise?”
                      The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
                      Nothing again nothing.*

A blustery day. The wind drives
its chill through the cracks
in this old, groaning house.
It is the voice of the world
screeching: Let me in!
The same world I have struggled
so long to keep at a distance.
Both wind and world persist like poverty.
Seeking safety from everything outward,
I have tried to build castle walls
against a foreign, hostile world
in a little, shabby apartment.
Respite. Anonymity. Shelter from the storm.
Safe from the charms of money and women.
All effort in vain. It just can't be done.
No walls are thick enough
to quell the horrible screams
of this slowly collapsing century,
the sadly frigid remains of the dying day.
The undead bang on the shutters.
No cat fierce enough to fend off tomorrow.
A mind too weak to live in solitude.
A body that can't say no to desire.
Like a ghost of the future,
I am trapped by the tyranny of now,
listening to the wind beneath my door.

brighter than a thousand suns...*

Helicopters scud the night. Syllables penetrate deeply.
Mulch has no value. Fingers curled softly in sleep.
Style marks the spot. Weapons hidden beneath kilts.
Pinpoint errors. Know where you are. Charlie Parker got lost.
You're a little teapot. The cat ponders these things.
Glamour a kind of architecture. National Enquirer a house.
Her only idea disastrous. He entered from behind. Stealth.
Take it any way you want it. ****** distillations of poison.
Something longer perhaps? Squash blossoms lovely. Preferences.
Ferns are not intentional. He wants a mulligan. Sentences question.
Ahead engorged. The color purple. Glance. Not quite wet.
Humpty-Dumpty the primary archetype. Master Coder. Triple Helix.
   If this gum be stale: do not chew it;
   If you are a window: draw the blinds.
   Or writhe in  ******* of meaningful.
      Come along to Carthage and Burn.

  ~mce

I would  kiss you
under cherry blossoms,
pink petals drifting down
like parachutes of desire
covering us with beauty.

I would kiss you
in the rain, drenched to
the bones not noticing
the fat raindrops
kissing us both back.

I would kiss you
in the wildest woods
surrounded by rustling leaves
beneath the jealous eyes
of voyeuristic birds.

But I have no idea
when I will kiss you
or where or even what
will happen when I do.

Still, in my imagination
it will be the right time,
the right place and
the right circumstance.

And it will be exactly
like kissing lightening.
   ~mce

If I could kiss you on the lips,          
beneath the stars of deepest night    
I'd feel the dancing of your hips        
if I could kiss you on the lips          
possess your breath in small sweet sips  
until my heart with pleasure skips                                        
If I could kiss you on the lips          
beneath the stars of deepest night

old monk
cold room
early morning
tattered pillow
just sitting

no expectations
no plans
no thoughts
no monk
just sitting

a cat watches
knowing everything
and nothing

monk and cat
no cat   no monk

just sitting

just everything

~mce

by Kim Addonizio*

Even when you know what people are capable of,
even when you pride yourself on knowing,
on not evading history, or the news,
or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent
and relevant examples of human cruelty–even now
there are times it strikes you anew, as though
you’d spent your whole life believing that humanity
was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought,
like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will,
never chanted perversely, almost gleefully,
the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes–
solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short—
even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear
of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed
even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,
which you had thought no longer existed,
did, in fact, exist–that somewhere underneath your cynicism
you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,
irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid
that there is more to know, that one day you will know it.

World says, must;
I say, won't:
pain results.
Classic definition
of a ****-up.
  - mce