Thanksgiving Dinner

THANKSGIVING DINNER

1. Cold Fruit Chorus
Cousin brain surgeon
deftly sections a grapefruit,
gobbles down each bite.

2. No Soup for Il Duce
Bundled up, they race
home, surprising even their
abandoned shadows.

3. Her Exquisite Beef Loman
“I wouldʼve dumped him!”
she tells the wind (right after
Death of a Salesman).

4. Before It Was Pie
A prizewinning rose
swayed wildly in that grinning
field of smug pumpkins.

5. Finnish Courtesan
Blue winter pauses
against unspeakable odds
then shoves right on in.

–M. Salomon

Image: Trophy Wife Holiday Dinner by Kevin McShane.

Lilies

Water Lily Pond & Weeping Willow (Monet, 1916-19)

LILIES

day was
things were simple
and the ideas
inhering in things
even simpler

day was
we’d already
memorized tomorrow
unintruded upon by the lilies
how faithfully we rehearsed
the coming day meaning it to be
nothing more than the full enacting
of our rote learning and nothing less

oh how day was
but for the flash of lilies
and now how suddenly
it is that day was

–M. Salomon

Advent of the 13th Sign

ADVENT OF THE 13th SIGN
On January 13^th 2011, Ozzy Osbourne’s
daily horoscope took a sudden turn:

This is your big day, truly your biggest yet.
That vague feeling you’ve always had–
that people have been ignoring you
(at least since 167 AD)–is suddenly affirmed
by a global burst of sub-cosmic recognition. The stars insist
this would be a perfect day for you to wear something
other than black, to court favor with people in really really high positions,
to gamble on adventure, to feed the serpents,
and to flirt with strangers. But you must take great care,
at all costs, to avoid accountants, firearms and transfats.

What a frigging ruckus.  Well, I suppose it’s not every day the astrologers
add a sign to the zodiac.  And this revision has implications.
Two and a half millennia of celestial symmetry now irrevocably
ruptured.  Suddenly, one star sign matches everything or nothing.
Is that sign mine?  The operators at e-Harmony are standing by
to take your calls all night long.  And, oh yes, they are bothered.

OK, I’ll be the first to admit that, like Ozzy,
I too admire reality.  Even so, I just can’t help feeling
that the advent of the 13^th sign is just one more thing
bigger than ourselves. Just another looming otherly thing—
like big government, like grizzly moms, like Goldman Sachs,
like Glenn Beck, Wikileaks and nymphomaniacs–
merely the latest in a series of big-assed little things sent here to afflict us,
to inhabit us with no higher purpose than to Ophiuchus.

–M. Salomon

arpeggio, by Will’s open grave

Cousin Will

arpeggio, by Will’s open grave
With love for his mother, his father, his sister, his brother

under gray clouds, the winds rouse and threaten
to make good on the promise of rain the ritual
shovel trades hands from one to the next
and the shoveled pebbles pelt the lid
of Will’s sunken pine box
each pocking an echo of
certain determination
to move away from
this from this in
no certain
direction
from

this

we are small
only our dreams are big
we dream to follow what already
has followed us forever we reach to touch
that which again again and again what forever
moves away to a place just beyond our grasping

we are small easily we bend
under the burden of our dreams
we linger and only too soon we remember
that at the precise hour we desire it most meaning voids meaning

move away they say we are small
and diminished by dreams
slowly we move we are
small move away
they say

we are small and slowly only late do we remember that
a given name is sufficient cause for a taken name
that perhaps they’re right that doing our best
may yet turn out to be just enough

to not yield
to forgive even ourselves
to survive even this
unhealed

M. Salomon, 12 September 2010

History

Barfüsserkirche, Erfurt

HISTORY

Will history note that at noon of the ninth day
of the ninth month, an old man hijacked
a tour bus? The tour guide was just speaking
about the gothic Barefooter Church, “Unused
since,” he was saying when the old man
screamed—My school was there. There,
behind the church! The driver shook his head,
“No, sir. No school there.” But the old man persisted
Keep straight to the end, then left, you’ll see!
and the driver surrendered, moved the bus
past the church, left down an alley, wedged
the ten-wheeled behemoth alongside a plain
square building. Iron fenced. On the fence,
an historical plaque: “Once site of the Barefooter
School.” The old man shouted I remembered!
“Shall we go inside now Mister?” Certainly not.
Now we must eat. So, the behemoth backed away.
And that thinning history of children at play,
their laughter still hissing gothic through
the unseen walls of an unused church.

–M. Salomon

The Angler

THE ANGLER

Let the old shadows make room for the new!
The sun angles toward the jagged snow caps
where old shadows make room for the new,

and the angler pauses to gather his wraps,
and to gaze at the gizzard shad huddled
just below the stem-river stones. Perhaps

their hard darkening reprieve has muddled
some latter day prospects for the gazer
above them. Around him the shadows–scuttled

by dusk–scowl and flee. Still, the angler
lingers a bit longer, to savor his view
of slowly fading fish, to remember

all the ancient lures he’d used to subdue
all the ancient schools. Even then, he scarcely knew
how the old shadows make room for the new.

M. Salomon

One Fall Night

One Fall Night

Now that we’ve run the edge of a perfect circle,
we become recurrence.  From within its own absence,
the wind has picked up now—how sudden the advance
of this scheming season: doors shudder against the winds,
fields already lay bare but for those unharvested remains
still tendrilled to ideals of rotund abundance.

Once, we too were tethered to a timeless abundance,
an encompassing now which ruled our tightly drawn circle.
No movement beyond that present—nothing remained
from a yesterday, or for a tomorrow.  Time’s absence
removed us from the grief and hope that now wind
themselves tighter and tighter with each hour’s advance.

Not yet free, could we have known in advance
just how our first unthinking grasp of the abundance
would instigate time?   And evening.  And morning.  The four winds
carried us far from that primordial circle.
We drifted—evening, morning—and sculpted new absence
in our own image.  Then, discarding the remains,

we fled.  Never to return.  For us, all that remained
was rootlessness. Never to advance
beyond our love of loving.   We made absence
our god, and we lamented our emptied abundance.
And now, every circle is a vicious circle.
And now, autumn’s hour is again. Grinning winds

gorge themselves on barren fields, and other winds
still wait in the hills to claim their share of our remains.
We are safe.  Safe, we move within our warm circles,
bolstered and fortified against the winds’ advance,
repeating ourselves and others, feigning abundance—
this too shall pass, we are safe now, you know, absence

makes the heart grow there but for the grace of absence—
repeating, cowering within our wind-
struck shelters, we lean and summon abundance
back from autumn’s ambush, but find that nothing remains
after yet another thousand years’ advance
and again we run the edge of a perfect circle.

And abundance is last night’s grapes. Still chilled, they remain
in the bowl by the window, fending off dawn’s advance.
You, I, and our absence.  One fall night.  Encircled.

M. Salomon

photo: the dance of the leaves when the autumn winds blow by Joseph Brauer

senbazuru (千羽鶴)

SENBAZURU

The name given to
one thousand cranes

        –glides into the meadow
        by the boreal lake,
        unencumbered
        by illness, or by cure–

and the wish to name
just one more crane.

M. Salomon

tricycle form–”…it is all one can do to remember…”

It is all one can do to remember
the dark warmth that was immortality,
so much colder now.  Abandoned forever
 
for this coil of möbius memory
that turns and twists away from the plane 
and the sharp pull of flat reality,

turning and twisting to ever sustain
some urgent momentum to recover
delirious paths away from the pain 

of the broken gods underfoot, after
the fall, after the immortality
that is all one can do to remember.

M. Salomon

Photo–Wasteland by duesentrieb

le Canal Rideau (en hiver)

LE CANAL RIDEAU (EN HIVER)
for Robin (4 February 1998 )

skaters with lanterns
spinning spinning
peeling back the lightless plush
flashing by in bending orbits
and sliq-slaq urish hush
widely casting whirled-up chunks
of shaken firmament

abandoning the pretense
of primordial intent

Happy 21st birthday Robz!

“Mystery Object Found in Supernova’s Heart”

 

MYSTERY OBJECT FOUND IN SUPERNOVA’S HEART
(After an item in the YAHOO Science News)

At first glance, the object looked like the cold
densely packed stellar corpse one expects
to see inside a bimillenial supernova.
But the X-rays revealed an unprecedented enigma:
this object is far older than the heart it inhabits.

Tonight, under winter skies,
I tally all the things that have yet to come,
against the hard count of things gone,
doggedly tilting toward balance,
and thanking the stars their indulgence.

And it seems that I’ve always had the time
to become a substance older than myself.

–M. Salomon

Photo: NASA-Star-Supernova by SmartDoc

“On a Bridge Over the Tobol River”

ON A BRIDGE OVER THE TOBOL RIVER
For Maxim, on his 5th “gotcha day”

We chose you that day.  On an arched
bridge we played our game, selecting
our steps, gliding like ballerinas
this way and that, eluding
the animal waste and other
realities that littered our path.

You can always return to that day,
to the serpentine Tobol currents
rushing under and away, hustling 
to an unseen room where you were born.
Return to skies blackening with the smoke 
of a thousand blazing heaps of remnant crops,
and the mocking arcs of a million fleeing magpies.
Return to those razored horizons, the distant stands
of white birches, gone gold with autumn,
upright in the distance like candles,
beckoning with the lure of such things
that burn without being consumed.
And, beyond the trees─the persistent steppes,
invisible except for the unearthly
chill of their delivered winds.

How those winds marked us that day
for no more and no less than we were─
humans playing god on a bridge. 

You can always return to that day,
but know that we trembled as we played.
Not because there is no such god
but because there is no such game.

–M. Salomon

“wildereness”

the caravan is come
the caravan is gone

now the darkness empties
the evening of our vague weeping

worming into the undertow
into the purpled flesh

of learned loneliness
bending forward toward

the pledge of another dawn
when again the caravan

will return and sere lips
will part to utter once again

abba     abba     not knowing
how else to begin

–M. Salomon

Photo credit: IMG_4084 by le jeune étranger

The Law of Faces

Identi-kit Portrait: Composite #9 by Randi Trinka, 1984
© All rights reserved

THE LAW OF FACES

In the commerce of faces,
one law: the image fades
inward from its edges.
The end of the image
is eyes.

Willy-nilly strangers
begin, they transact a gaze
and are bound by its terms,
the border between them
negotiates down
to the thinnest filament
that would withstand

trespass. The end
is eyes.

Let us begin again.
Our terms already set,
let us now together tend
to the one task left.

Invent me.

–M. Salomon