Here's a short video in which I discuss some of my recent work:
Monday, October 26, 2020
May 3, 1808 by Francisco Goya
May
3, 1808 by Francisco Goya
In his later years the Spanish
artist
worked from the land of the deaf,
a state that may not ease life
but often among the very great
finds its role in art, the mind
adrift from all save its visions.
Incensed by Napoleon’s invasion,
and drawing upon demons
he found in the depths of silence,
he painted the horrors of war
and its violence to our humanity
at a pitch unmatched until
Picasso.
Here, faces and bodies are posed
incredulous before the atrocities
of the French firing squad:
the Christ-like innocence
in the central figure, his arms
outstretched, as if on the cross,
joined by companions praying,
eyes and hands imploring mercy,
a pietà awaiting the arms of Mary—
all victims of a faceless monster,
the ordered ranks of legs and
rifles
formed into a symmetry of death,
opposing the chaos of the terrified
caught in the jaws of gross evil,
the suffering of the helpless
in the last moment before the
bullet.
Each Day
Each Day
Each morning it’s the same--
both of us are on watch--
did he or she get up? If yes,
all is good and we proceed,
for life is still our familiar:
we can relax once more
over coffee and puzzles,
wander through the morning
as the sun goes on its climb
until it’s time for lunch,
and when sandwiches end,
as the sun begins to slope
and we are both still here,
we decide what’s for dinner.
Second Prize Award, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2o2o
A Dog in Heaven
A Dog in Heaven
My wife wants to rejoin Maisie in heaven,
but I offer little encouragement--doubt is
a lifelong habit I’m not about to shake,
though both her tears and my old age
have softened the edges: I’m unsure
of anything anymore, let alone heaven,
and even less about the afterlife of dogs;
but she remembers walks along the bluffs,
the way that Scottie adored a picnic,
recalls her futile barking at deer,
the much-feared encounters with a skunk,
which, happily, never took place,
the sweet puppy smells the first night
that we brought her home to the cabin,
and that warm, furry presence sleeping
between our legs on cold January nights.
Jerrie talks about Maisie’s wagging tail,
her tireless, crazy love for tug of war,
how the dog seemed to relish travel,
its rewards of rest areas, motel rooms,
and old pals to greet at our destination;
and her fondest wish is to replay
all those moments, but she’d settle
for any future time she could share
with that small dog bouncing beside her;
she can describe what they would do
in the most careful details, no less real
than the days when she talked with Maisie,
and her yearning is so earnest, so tangible
that it assumes the mantle of reality--
the best-conceived of my realisms totters
before such fervor, and it is now clear
to me and all my rationality
that no philosophy can refute a dog.
Second Place Award, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020
Before I Go
Before I Go
Before I go, once again
I want to find a columbine
flourishing among the weeds
in some woe-begotten waste;
hear a bird I do not know,
whose song will make me shiver
like the first time I heard
a wood thrush off in the dusk;
walk around an old oak
beneath its generous branches,
and feel the loyalty of its years
as it grips the soil beneath;
stand under a winter night
with its blanket of stars
stretching from one side
of the world to the other;
and be so close to miracle
I feel the breath of eternity.
First Place Winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020
The Death of the Unknown Man
The Death of
the Unknown Man
“Johnstown police and the Cambria County
coroner are working to identify the body of a man in his 60s who was found
Friday inside a home in the Woodvale section of the city.”
--
News item from the Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pennsylvania), March 25,
2017
How fitting in
a town with a past,
but cursed with
a present tense
that does not
seem to equal a future,
that today a
man was found dead,
dead for at
least three months,
and no one had
noticed,
no family or
friend to miss him,
utterly alone
save for his pets,
sad little
corpses found near him,
his last
company on this earth,
all of them
gone on to some eternal;
bodies that
shared their love,
but were
memorable to no one,
neither a
neighbor nor the mail carrier,
not even a
grocery clerk
like the one
who looks for me every week.
In a world
which seems so joined,
we forget the
unconnected,
unmoored from
human warmth
in a place
unfurnished with kindness,
not even the
careless greeting
of those
passing on a sidewalk.
How little
comfort there is
in pondering
this man’s oblivion:
such an empty
peace it is
to be merely
removed from misery,
and so I keep
musing about a hope--
for a
good beyond the absence of evil,
a passing
dream, however faint,
that somehow in
the world of death
each of us will
be always near
the touch of a
hand that loves us.
First place winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020
Day for Night
Day for Night
I have been pondering day and night,
and it seems clear to me
that they are quite the opposite
of those images folklore has favored--
the day as repository of life,
the hopeful spirits of light and sun
while night is the dark country,
a stretch of gloom and death.
Consider the witness of the sun,
whose calendar rolls before our eyes,
and flowers that march to the clock:
they bloom, they shine, then fade.
The birds arrive, begin their songs,
deserting us after their season,
leaving us the silences of August
and the empty nests of November.
But the night contains eternity:
the cold beauty of forever in stars
on a late summer evening filled
with ageless planets sailing their orbs,
and holds the promise of dreams,
that blessed death until the dawn
when we wake again to live
enclosed in the fatal arms of time.
Grand Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020
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