ODE TO SADNESS

Sadness, black beetle
with seven shattered legs,
cobweb egg,
wounded rat,
carcass of dog:
you can't come in here.
Beat it.
Head south
with your umbrellas,
or return north
with your snake teeth.
A poet lives here
and you can't enter
by these doors.
My windows let in the air of the world,
the smell of new roses,
but they are closed to you.
Go ahead, beat
your bat wings;
I'll stomp upon the plumes
that fall from your cloak,
then scatter the pieces
of your corpse
to the four winds.
I'll break your neck for you,
sew up your eyes,
tailor your shroud
and bury you, Sadness, bury your corrosive bones
beneath the spring blossoms of an apple tree.
after Neruda

ODE TO CINNAMON

Brown dust with the taste of islands,
you awaken my dead tongue.
I see you arrayed
in Oriental robes, your long hair flowing.
We know you by smell, how you climb
into the mind by way of the nose.
You are the fine dust
thousand died for, trying to get you
home. Over the trade routes
your perfume hung like a cloud.
Cut and curled and quilled,
the pleasure of your oil
diffused throughout, you lie
upon a spice vendor's tray
in Malabar and Java,
under hot sun in Sri Lanka.

It is April, cinnamon season,
and your harvesters cut branches
and peel you away, their sharp knives
cutting bark. The finest cinnamon
cut from the younger branches.

You taste pungent
and aromatic, a fine blend
of sweetness and astringency.
You spice food, perfume
the bodies of women. With the tip
of my tongue I taste you,
know your dusty truth.
You unlock memory
with the fine hardness
of your fruit. You are fire
housed in a form, the burn
of desire, attendant satisfactions.
You were blown on a warm wind
filling the sails of treachery,
fostering dreams of Spice Islands
and new routes by which to reach them.
You could be smelled
from ten miles offshore.
Female, you set a whole world
in motion, brought ruin,
brought triumph, changed the flow
of time by dipping your small brown foot
in the moving river.

ODE TO JOY

Joy,
green plant on the windowsill,
small leaf recently born,
rackety elephant, dazzling coin:
now and then
you are a sudden delicate gust of wind
but always you abide
as permanent bread, perfect hope,
developed obligation.
In the past I've scorned you, Joy.
I couldn't help it, I took bad advice.
The moon led me along
some insubstantial roads;
the ancient poets lent me their eyeglasses
which placed a dark halo around everything,
a black crown above every flower
and a sad kiss
upon each lover's mouth.
Still, there is sufficient time;
allow me to repent.
I thought that I alone burned,
my heart a bramble bush of torment.
If my clothes were drenched by rain
I found myself in the dark purple district of grief.
I believed that if I shut the eyes of the rose
and touched thorns,
if I shared in all sorrows,
I somehow aided humankind.
But I was wrong
in every one of my assumptions
and today I call upon you, Joy.

For like the soil you are necessary,
like fire you sustain all hearths.
Like bread you are pure,
like a river you are sonorous,
and like the bee
you distribute pollen in full-flight.

Joy,
I was a sullen youth,
thought your long hair scandalous.
Ah, but it wasn't true,
as I discovered when, untied,
its cascade fell in torrents across my chest.

Today, Joy,
meeting here in the street,
far away from every book,
I want you to accompany me.
Let's go from house to house,
from town to town, province to province.
To the mountains we will go,
and to the cities;
to the forests we will go,
and to the mines.

With you, Joy, out there in the world!
And with my song,
with the half-open eye of a star,
and with the merriment of the ocean's spume.
I want to go out
and commune with everything, everyone,
because to them I truly owe my happiness.

It should surprise no one, then,
that I want to give to all people
the gifts of the earth,
because I have learned through struggle
that it is my earthly obligation to spread joy.
And I try to fulfill my destiny with my song.
after Neruda

ODE TO MASS TRANSIT

Like Whitman
I enjoy being one of a crowd;
too many loners
drive off the road in the middle of the night
and find grisly deaths.
The secret no one will tell you
is that all this individual mobility
is killing us by the thousands.
Don't expect the truth from Detroit.
Embrace mass transit, everyone.

ODE TO THE COMMON MAN

I remember him well, though two centuries
have passed since I saw him last.
He went on neither horseback nor by buggy
but always on foot,
not carrying weapons
but only a fishing-net
or an axe, a hammer or a spade
as he undid the distances.
He never fought with other men;
his struggle was with water or earth,
with wheat so he could have bread,
with trees so he could have wood;
he raised walls,
he opened doorways in walls,
and wrestled with the sea,
getting it to yield its fruits.

I knew him, and he haunts me.

The buggies fell to pieces,
war destroyed walls and doorways,
cities burned until they were ash,
all styles went out of fashion
and yet he persists,
he who seemed the most impermanent.

He came and went among the families;
he was my uncle, or a distant relative,
or maybe the one who left and never came home again
because he drowned, or was buried among strangers.
Perhaps he was killed by a machine, or a falling tree;
perhaps he was the coffin-maker
who stoically walked at the rear of the funeral
XXXXprocession.
No one knew his name, only his trade.
He was looked down upon by those
who never notice the ant, only the anthill.
When he no longer walked,
because the poor man had simply died,
no one noticed him missing--
already someone else walked in his place.
The feet of the other man were still his
as were the other's hands.
He went on
after it seemed he must have ended his days,
it was him all over again.
Once again he was there, digging the earth,
cutting cloth, but this time he wasn't wearing a shirt.
He was there but he wasn't there;
he had died and almost replaced himself.
Since he never had a plot in the cemetery,
a mausoleum, or his name chiselled
into the stone he sweated to cut,
no one ever knew when he arrived
and no one knew when he died.
When he could
he was born again, totally unnoticed.

There's no doubt it was him,
a man without an inheritance,
without cattle or a coat of arms;
nothing distinguished him.
To the rich he was as gray as clay,
or like untanned leather;
he was yellow in the wheatfields,
black down in the mines,
the color of stone in the castle,
the color of horses in the stable.
How could anyone see him
if he were inseparable from the elements,
earth, coal, or sea taking the form of a man?

And yet wherever he lived
things grew because he touched them;
he broke the hostile stones with his hands,
shaped them until, placed one by one,
they took on the forms of buildings;
with his hands he made bread,
filled the far distances with towns.
Because of his creating and multiplying
Spring could now walk through the town market
between bakeries and indigenous birds.

The father of first loaves was forgotten,
the one who cut and strained
opening paths, moving earth, forgotten.
When it was all built he no longer existed.
He departed for death, falling
like a stone into the river, and the waters
carried him down to death.

I, who knew him, saw his descent.
Then he existed only in what was left behind:
streets scarcely aware of him,
houses where he never lived and never would live.

And now I return to see him,
and each day I await him.
I see him in his coffin
and I see him resurrected.

He is there,
among the others who are his equals,
laboring.

I believe that the world must embrace this man,
must clothe and crown him.

Surely those who have made so many things
deserve the power of possession.
Those who have made the bread
should surely be allowed to eat!

Enough now of chained gray prisoners!
Enough of the pale missing ones!

Not one man more should live without freedom
XXXXand dignity,
not one woman more, for all merit
the fruits of the earth and sun.

I knew that man, and when I could--
when I had eyes in my head,
when I had a voice in my throat--
I searched him out among the dead, and told him,
squeezing an arm that was not yet dust,
"Everything will change, but you will go on living.
You set life on fire.
What you have made is yours."

So let no one trouble themselves
when, passing by, it seems that I'm alone and yet
XXXXnot alone,
for I am not alone and I speak for all.

Someone's heeding me and doesn't yet realize it;
but those I sing of and those who know I sing
continue being born, and will flood the world.

after Neruda

ANOTHER ODE TO THE POSSIBILITIES

I see you across the broad expanse of the FX lounge,
your hair blonde, your jeans black and tight,
a large silver ankh around your neck on a black ribbon
and I know that you are possible. I don't know
what thoughts you carry in your head, what hopes
you have for the evening, what desires
inhabit your heart, or even
what language you speak; I don't know
if I am a fly buzzing in your world
or the most beautiful man you have ever seen
but I know that you are possible. We could wind up
in bed together naked and on fire before the night
XXXXis through,
fall in love, or perhaps
I will never see you again, or buzz once
and be gone.

But you are possible, in a world
where probability has never troubled me much.
I don't care about calculating the odds,
don't care about the loaded dice
in the crapshoot of love. What I care about
is your beauty, the fact that I could live in it,
that I live in it forever
in this moment of longing for you.

You are possible
in a world where so many things seemingly aren't.
I'll never cure cancer, never climb Everest,
but I'll possibly undress you, touch and move you
deeply. I love the romance of this possibility,
this moment on the taut tightrope of desire
when wanting you begins to create a world
none can question, no one can harm.

SHORT ODE TO CAPPUCINNO

I like it best
the way it's served in Prague:
it is Viennese coffee
disguised as cappucinno, they even
put chocolate in it. One small cup
and my pulse is racing, I am walking
across the Charles Bridge talking to Spring,
or else back at my apartment
on Slezska, writing
a three-hour letter
to a friend by hand.

AN ODE ON FATE

Traffic is flowing by in the darkness,
dead men are reappearing,
I am paying the price for ten years of bad love
and perhaps every screech of the tires is fated.
What if there are actually gods up in the clouds
and they hate the things we do?
Whose daughter is Fate,
and why am I stuck with her phone number?
Every question I ask is essential
so that a later age may know us
and understand what we did not know,
which was just about everything.
The human quandary is searching for meaning,
trying to evade the latest back spasm.
Those lights in the sky
have been with us a long time now, stay on
even when we turn them off.
We are cartoons
that are drawn, flicker for a time,
and then are gone.

ODE TO SLEIGHT OF HAND

It's a warm sun that endures
the chill of a late November day,
it is kosmos reaching out its hand
to nightmares of chaos, attempting
to end them. We click the chain
on the lights and nothing happens; the clocks
having stopped again, we imagine
a better time, a smoother day.
We judo our emotions into believing--
like a child using a pencil sharpener
for the very first time. Isn't it amazing
how the world works
and doesn't work, how the Spanish
take siestas, and the English tourists
can't find stamps for their postcards anywhere?
It all begins and ends
with the blue of the sky.