Boyhood Inventory

 

Photo of Old Cigar Boxes from Pinterest

 

cigar box secrets
possessions with
powers of privacy
curious objects of
preadolescence
talisman childhood
artifacts taken as
innocent prisoners
of quiet discovery
culled from adventures
and escapades
brimming with fantasy

compass and whistle
flint arrowheads
penknife and snake
rattle fossils and
seashells a dragon
tooth world war two
carbine shell feathers
and rocks with some
eye-catching features
a dinosaur knuckle
a rabbit’s foot coins
from a buccaneer’s lair

all tucked in their
art-paneled vaults
among sneakers
and baseball gear
guarded by underbed
mists of incipient
unformed tomorrows
every possible future
just waits to emerge
from shadow to shape
that will someday
put all of these prized
secret treasures aside

 

 

From my book Bohemian Scents

Make Them Remember

Abstract Photo by Marsha Heiken

 

sing the sundown

a refrain for the ages

your sky forever

 

*********************

“Every poem an epitaph.” – TS Eliot

Man on Fire

“Hell Flowers” by Kazuya Akimoto

 

see me as I am
eyes won’t suffer
from the sight
red and raw
skin afire
the arson of age
burns from
inside the nerves
melting myelin
drips from old
photographs
cracked in the
creases that smile
through flames
I need no one to
pity my pictures
all men wear
a future the past
could not see
whether better
or worse time
adds parts to a man
and his personal
pain cannot ever
outlive him

see me as I am
not the man
I had been nor
the one you imagine
reach into my fire
touch the scars
where they blaze
mapping wounds
cruel inflicted by
weapons of mind
ugly beauty exists
in the flesh
of this world
don’t turn from it
don’t let the smoke
veil your vision
with tears
all fire like life
is ephemeral
give me a place
in your memory
cool and correct
of identity give
me that chance for
my truth to survive

 

 

From my books Ephemera and Legacies (vol. 2)

Summer Pond

Image from Richa Art Club

 

placid glimmerglass sheen
stretched canvas of forest and sky
but I can’t find my youth
in the diurnal scud of the clouds
flying faster and further
from halcyon days in the sun
cooled by frolicsome leaps
with my dog from the dock
diving into the depths of my future

now I sit here in invalid’s pose
on the bench that I built with
my pals sixty summers ago
propped and pained by the
memories clenched in my hands
with a flick of my least impaired
arthritic wrist I give sail to a
perfectly triple-skipped stone
breaking into a smile in excelsis

 

 

From my book Pieces of Wine

Vitrine

Antique English Vitrine c.1880

 

mementoes in a tiny museum

souvenirs of small moments

shiny stones fluted seashells

retained bits and baubles

quiet with personal histories

habits collected in childhood

displayed in their sentiments

carried by years into manhood

emotional artifacts telling brief

tales of diminutive journeys

now at prominent rest beneath

glass in the parlor available

handy to curious eyes seeking

insight from biograph markers

these temporal timeworn and

much caressed objects whose

conscious display reveals clues

to the heart of a taciturn man

 

 

From my book Ephemera

Scrapbook

 

Image from pinterest.com

 

 

arrange me with care
among mother’s gardenias
life leather-embossed

 

 

(originally posted November 2013)

Felo de Se

“Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth” by John Singer Sargent

 

who would drink
chokecherry wine
among brambles
astringent black
fruit of a vine
scratched by time
she would rather
sip memories
straight from the
cups belladonna
sets out under
shade of the night
deadly smooth
henbane nectar
without taste of
spiteful goodbyes

(originally posted December 2013)

Bohemian Scents

 

“Booksellers Along the Seine” by Edouard Leon Cortes

 

 

(The opening lines appeared in my earlier poem “Nosegays.” But they stuck in my mind and so I give them a fuller story here.)

 

 
cracked-leather mustiness
seeps from dry bindings
I rescued from tumbling
dust covered stacks
crowding bookseller stalls
hung from medieval quays
overlooking the Seine
from Rive Gauche where
sweet sleep is no proper
companion of night when
young poets old painters
and passionate lovers
perform their best work
in fin de siècle garrets
whose earthiness settles
in seams of stale smoke

revolution still sweats
in the mist stealing
over dry friable sills
caught in cracks of
dead candlewax clumps
lifeless flowers in
hammered tin vases
smell moldy beside
acrid turpentine cups
oily palettes of pigments
intended to breathe
life back into the colorless
stiffened thin stems
mean decades of meals
made of river fish
sautéed in garlic and wine
sour linens that hide
under beds with glazed
chamber pots masked by
dried sprigs of herbs
tacked onto footboards

journals of love stories
reeking with loss that
inspired sad scores of
unfinished novellas
discarded librettos
but poetry oh how much
poetry hangs in the
vapors of lampblack
from India inkpots and
long since dulled quills
that excite to a flare
nostrils savoring all
of the human condition
that tainted these attics
where once my new
purchased old books
lived their well-used
existence collecting
the heady aromas of life

 

 

(originally posted January 2014)

Holes

“Grief” by Vrindavan Das

empty spaces
in places where
laughter and life
never needed
much thought
blood and bone
disaffected
abandoned to deep
metaphysical wounds
of fierce absence

we miss them
the dead and the gone
voices vanished
the echoes that loved us
attenuate time
washed out images slip
from the eyes of the mind
fade from pages of
notional scrapbooks
unfinished relationships

sadness resigned with
reluctant acceptance
of loss in a rich blend
of memories forming
a tincture of grief
an emotional balm
made to infill the holes
left in souls that might
otherwise die
incomplete and alone

Atlas of Clouds

“Blue Sky” by Julia Swartz

gazing skyward
a lifetime of clouds
mapping shapes
of the places I’ve been
softly evident
privilege and pride
banked beside
hard and harrowing
circumstance
enclaves of childhood
youth middle age
and seniority fixed
within nation states
founded to foster
the phases of
living and learning
of loving and leaving
discrete in their purpose
inhabiting change
as I multiplied roles
tandem tenants of time

gazing skyward
a scud of locations
whose borderlines
backlit by sunlight
give sharpened relief to
their gleaming identities
unknown to any
two eyes but my own
an ethereal octavo
printed with cumulus
memories passing
beneath a vast virgin
untraveled blue region
of precious few places
however imagined but
not yet experienced
singing themselves
in a flutter of folio
endpages calling me
voiced in the whispers
of soft summer winds