Antipodes
You’ll never know me
As my heart knows the stars
(Chastened by remoteness beyond imagining)
As my hunger feeds the hunger of the sea
(Crashing, crashing so pointlessly)
Nor see the emptiness I quarry
Within the chambers of my solitude
Just as I have never breached
The ramparts of your discipline
Taken time to know the beauty in the order
That you struggle for
Nor understood the courses
That you spin in your uncertainty
The vacuum that you rail against is the emptiness I covet
Still,
Still we breakfast every morning – tea out in the garden
And brush upon our purposes and talk about the children
In an endless front of courtesy
Courtesy, masking Passion, its antipode
That smashes every hobble, cracks every shackle,
Slips every tether, topples every pedestal.
We remain, unbound, circling the antipodes
(Embracing the antipodes)
Of Love.
Haikus
Hawk in the palm trees
as night thickens the forest
and brings out the rats.
The master was so still
awake, asleep, or dead
we couldn’t tell
Crack crack mattock in earth
Don Esteban must be working
In the corn field.
The wind last night
Rose petals in the mud.
Headland
He has overslept
the dawn so still with fog
that even the birds don’t seem to notice
the encroachment of light.
The track dissolves in grainy white
before it reaches the dunes
but slowly reveals itself
as one moves
between love and loneliness
unable to distinguish between them
even by touch.
Waves muffle along the shore
white spit white spit.
Long-legged birds from the lagoon
work the novelty of calm surf
attentive to everything.
Thorny dune grass nips at his ankles.
How to reconcile longing with longing?
Even live without either?
A headland looms to the south
then is lost behind a fold of mist.
Stepping carefully along the track
pulling his parka about his ears
he heads home for tea and porridge.
In the meantime
Two sticks in the mud
will eventually become trees
and provide relief from the sun
but in the meantime
I can usually find it
under one eave or another.
Speaking of which,
there are fewer than there should be
because only half of the house is roofed,
the south end with the kitchen.
A financial problem that will eventually be resolved
but in the meantime
I am quite comfortable
sleeping on a cot in the pantry.
The financial difficulties being
that I was downsized
in an effort that looked more
like weeding out the aged and infirm.
Funds apparently are forthcoming
but in the meantime
beans and rice taste surprisingly good
with a pinch of salt.
Speaking of the infirm,
the malady that drew attention
continues to grind its course
and I melt away like a snowman
come spring
but in the meantime
I enjoy my gaunt angularity
feeling like a kite some days.
The engines of my existence,
desire and expectation,
surge before me,
drawing me always away,
trailing behind these moments,
pearls of dew upon a leaf,
that are my life
and exist only
in the meantime.
Betrayal
You said, “That’s what I get for fucking fat girls,”
with the certainty it would never get back to me
and it didn’t for twenty-five years.
But it was that same male presumption
that would have made you the easy mark
I was accused of taking advantage of
the unspoken assumption that it’s the woman’s
role to guard against pregnancy
when really it is our nature to long for it.
And so you garnered the sympathy of friends
the bemused respect of elders
with your chauvinistic shuffle to the altar
your pale stuttered vows and beaded brow
as you renounced your obvious destiny of ease
and pleasure and undertook instead the toil of matrimony
as did I your plump happy wife somehow unaware
of your misfortune and willing to forgive the error
on the loose tongues of others. But now
I have to ask who was the injured party
you whose socks I darned smile I cherished
child I raised plate I filled and refilled
mouth I kissed pillow plumped
or I
whose quiet homely love would never be returned?
Impermanence
I couldn’t believe it
when she pulled chopsticks out of her purse
and handed the waiter her cutlery.
And this was after she’d spent some twenty minutes
reading the menu and asking
if she could have half portions of this appetizer
or anchovies in the house salad
and whether the mushrooms in the soup
were fresh and if so how fresh.
I had informed her in the car
of the chef’s famous penchant
for picking his own mushrooms daily
in the defunct orchards near my house
this being how the chef and I had met
and why we were driving all this way
for a very expensive meal.
But none of this dampened my friend’s peculiarities,
like relishing her soup directly from the bowl
or eating her salad with her fingers
while her chopsticks lay uselessly at ease
looking for all the world like skis languishing outside a chalet.
But she had lived long enough to have known the farmer
who had built the collapsing barn we’d passed on our way
and which I’d pointed out to her
saying how disappointed I was in humanity
that we could leave such a wonderful structure to rot
and that the decay had surely begun with a few shingles blown from the roof
that the lazy owner had not bothered to replace.
Between slurps of soup and fistfuls of lettuce
and before she’d ordered all the scraps from her plates and mine
tossed together into a takeout carton which I learned later
she had not actually consumed herself
but had fed to the strays in her neighborhood
she got a bit wistful about old Nils the farmer
who had planted the orchard that had long gone to the chainsaw and plow
and how she and her brother had helped build that barn
and how happy young Nils had been
the day he’d walked old Bessie into its cool fecundity
amid the damp aromas of new mown hay and cedar siding.
And she declared that that was enough happiness for a barn.
That it had nothing more to give than the pleasure of its construction
and those first proud years of utility.
That there is nothing slovenly in decay
rather beauty
and it serves as a reminder
of our own impermanence and that of our works.
And who was I to call some unknown person lazy for a few shingles?
How many shingles had I in my day not replaced?
She declared that the sight of that decrepit barn
each year nearer the horizon
put more pleasure into her heart
than the best cooked soup of the freshest mushrooms
or a five minute orgasm on a Sunday afternoon.
When the busboy came to take the glasses
she told him to leave the half consumed bottle of wine
that she’d be taking that with her
but upon being assured by the waiter that this was simply not done
we settled back into our chairs
even though the restaurant lights were now out
and the staff was in the driveway in their coats
and we clinked our glasses to old Nils and his barn
to beauty and decrepitude
and to the dawn which likewise would surely come.