Pomes – Older and Younger
John Thomas Ahearn
Published by Opening Chapter at Smashwords
Copyright John Thomas Ahearn 2010
http://wordcarving.blogspot.com/
ISBN 9781904958130
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#######
The Laugh
Insomniac stars dimly glim,
sand on creased, sweltering sheets.
That wet wool against the skin
is only air, only heat.
Little moves in the dull hum
of window units, only a fleet
delirium of moths, numbed
under the sodium vapor lights
to the bats’ methodical ad libitum.
The odd car, sealed tight
on a machined bubble of May,
vents mephitic fahrenheit.
These are the hydrocarbon days,
this is life’s toxic ooze;
now we while our time away
with G and T and BTUs,
to damp the spinal xylophone’s
abominable bugaloos.
Laughter splashes cobblestone,
ripples out to gently rock
the huge inhuman black alone.
###
The Wheel
At the foot of our basement stairs
A spoked wheel leans on a box,
its perfect symmetry of pairs
a pure illusion, paradox.
The eye rights it, the way the heart
restores its lost and broken objects,
trues the skewed, rusty parts
to pure, unearthly polish, reflects
gold the brass of vanished keys,
beyond price the fountain pens
forgotten in lost libraries,
perfected in nostalgia’s cloudy lens.
Eyes shine too in the mind.
In corridors of complicated sleep
they probe the shadows unresigned
to what we had, but couldn’t keep.
Ageless in a labyrinth of grace,
they search the old familiar ground
for spokes to fit the vacant spaces,
end their quiet clamor to be found.
###
Cacophony
The grackles came this spring.
Teeming beaks and patience,
they crowed a soffit slat,
colonized the attic,
filled the lofty silence
with a colloquy of wings.
Pandemonium.
Rats the size of dogs
in a slick imitation
of birdy pursuits and evasions,
quietless dialogues
of epithalamium.
In the night of the second day
they found the autoharp’s
forgotten hiding place,
unhinged the mildewed case,
mixed their flats and sharps
as the dampers fell away.
It’s a constant concert now.
The virtuosi queue
to charm the company,
feathering delicately
the strings above new,
crooing tremolos,
and for their artistry
receive a racket of spikes
pulled from rusty beams,
chalk on slate, scream
of worn out brakes.
Enough, apparently.
A sulphur candle sends
them somewhere else to let
their psittacosis fall.
Now we listen at the walls,
probe this novel quiet
that sings as it descends.
###
Rain After Drought
For almost two years
the sky stared back at us blank,
sent one thin rattle of snow
across the skeletal reservoirs.
We thought it was the end, the Big One,
the firestorm of prophesy
pouring from the cloudless zenith
to perfect creation. We waited.
We watched the corn stunt and burn.
Then we woke from dreams of fire
to dreams of grace, to blessed rain.
We set our faces to it, drank,
sent up besotted alleluias
as the world went overnight
impossibly green again, alive.
The rooftree rang with praise,
rang with antiphons pealed
from all the high choirs of the sky.
I hear no alleluias now:
just the unrelenting anthem
of the rain, just the ceaseless
riffle and tick against the glass,
the fluent patter of demented eaves.
I dreamt last night a wooden zoo
sailed out with creatures two by two
for the siren shoals of Ararat.
Will this blessing never pass?
###
1Ashes, Ashes
Ashes sift from spacious skies,
blacker snow than ever fell,
leave a drift of fear and lies
where freedom had its citadel.
The toxic powder covers all,
mountain, prairie, farm and town,
torturers and listeners crawl
to kneel before an evil clown.
Everything we thought was best,
all we fondly thought we were,
has now been coolly laid to rest
with our dishonored ancestors.
###
Reading People
They smile out at us, those who’ve made the grade,
proud but humbled by the simple truth,
pedigrees established, dues paid,
the multiple traumas of each hideous youth
survived and surmounted, inherited measly beans
now become groves of bearing fruitwood,
winners, who went for it, who reaped by means
of tireless lottery stubs their Peoplehood:
they lie in waiting rooms to be adored.
People. Too special to ignore.
But what have we to do with smiles like these,
we who cringe when the dentist calls our name,
who cling to the gimcrack biographies
suddenly struck by the odds they overcame?
What shall we call ourselves, we who choose
lives unsuitable for even brief reviews
in simple language smudged on limp slick,
accounts which, even spiced, would be
too bland for even the aching and the sick?
If these are People, what form of life are we?
###
Lawns
My neighbor’s lawn’s a stern rebuke to mine.
Not merely greener: relentlessly so,
and plush, a velvet monoculture, refined
to a purity too uniform to mow.
It came on a truck a couple of months ago.
It’s Euclid’s snooker table over there.
Still, he rides his snorting Toro from its pen
three dawns a week, to skirt my tangled tare
with blades, defoliants, clouds of nitrogen.
Two cycles done, he goes around again.
I get to watch him as I sip my juice:
each glance across a thin, explicit wince
because my dandelions offer no excuse,
cling to life with a flawless impudence
that mocks the horrors staged beyond the fence.
He knows his undertaking’s bound to fail.
There’s more than disenchantment in his eye:
I think he knows the creature must prevail
that hardly deigns to quiver as he powers by,
but sends its infant millions to his yard to die.
###
Because
In Eden nothing went amiss;
they didn’t have a use for gray,
just a chain of perfect days,
an unremitting happiness
to visit on the primal pair,
who lacked for nothing; all was there
to simply pick, hanging low,
all the loaded branches bowed
to an earth that rioted with life,
and all was plenty, all was ease,
and Adam and his bony wife
were happy aborigines.
For a time. (If time could be
where nothing happened, nothing changed,
where nothing could be rearranged
by order of His Majesty…)
But soon, dreaming of her dreams
inspired Eve to coin the scream;
Adam asked her what it was:
“Because, Addy; just because.”
Then, leaving Adam at his chapel,
Eve got hungry for an apple,
decided she should go to college,
tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.
The Old Man was steamed, of course;
He stormed up on His highest horse
to cast them out. Adam prayed.
Eve was skipping all the way.
###
The Lovers
In Mantua a busy building crew
unearthed another Neolithic grave,
which in itself is surely nothing new,
and this was like most others, save
that this one was inhabited by two.
Two who must have loved each other, by
the look of them together; they embrace--
their bones--like living people where they lie,
her slender fingers cradling his face,
his arm around her in a long goodbye.
Posed thus, they lie in state, our own,
youths, dead before their teeth were worn,
dead, but not by stick and not by stone,
whom ancient spirits thought it right to mourn
with the lovely interweaving of their bones.
Whether sacrificed or dead by chance,
they never thought to see the sky again,
could never ken their present circumstance,
but we see in them a talisman,
the dancers folded to become the dance.
###
Birdsong
Filigreed partiti greet
the sunbeams, appealingly antique:
speedy, secretive Vivaldis
key the trees with piccoli,
sweep the eaves with tutti suites
that leave easy sheeted sleepers’
dreams discreetly incomplete.
One weary steeple creeper,
keeper of a peevish three,
piqued by the ceaseless beseeching
peekaboo of her greedy trio
for eked feasts of meaty beetle
or sweet beaks of feeder seed,
cheats for the merest cheeky beat
in her careening, keen career,
wreaks her feces on the screen.
###
Birthdays
Birthdays come to get us all,
an equity which seems unfair
enough to warrant alcohol,
but let’s not part with any hair:
youth’s no earthly paradise,
and life’s not a flight of stairs.
It’s always youth for sacrifice,
to stuff with misbegotten lore;
for youth’s tuition, youth’s the price,
birthdays make us wise, if sore;
if knotty heads undo no walls,
they recognize an open door.
Birthdays come to get us all;
take your vengeance at the mall.
###
Bubbles
In the end, his mind wasn’t right,
if it ever was. It was clear,
as he put his jeweled soap to flight
from the city’s summer parks and piers
that he was no longer there
with the rest of us, that he was one
with the iridescent membranous air
his wire wands stole from the sun,
the huge, oscillating spheres
in which a hundred others milled,
the tetrahedra stacked in tiers
until the twisted columns spilled
their remnant droplets to his feet.
He was perennial, a fixture,
his nest of wands, pans, discreet
tip jar, his secret mixtures
jugged, marked with painted runes,
but he imperceptibly became
as sheer as his diaphanous balloons.
We didn’t even know his name,
still less where he might live, or how,
what kind of life his small and few
contributions would allow.
He charmed us, that was all we knew;
we were blinded by his art.
An ephemeral phenomenon,
he drew the music of his heart
in films of air. Then he was gone.
###
Ages
There have been Dark ages before,
desolate, evil times when humanity
seemed in full retreat, when death
held sway, brought the bethels
plague, superstition, vanity,
greed, starvation, and incessant war.
Once they’re Ages, we can call
them Dark, or Space, or any name
we please, if only to disguise
how little differs otherwise,
how much the ages stay the same;
the Ice melts slowly, if at all.
There’s precious little really New
about our Gilded, Digital day,
when Wonders have become routine;
in the Glacial hush of sleek Machines
we scrape along in the usual way,
sharp Stone, tight shoe.
We haggle with the universe,
despite our Faith in the Iron rule
that none of our overwhelming questions
will ever give the faintest suggestion
of having disturbed a molecule.
We Moderns are nothing if not perverse.
Through the rooms we come and go,
talking of “Wolfy,” with a “V,”
our Anxiety fully guaranteed
in megahertz at Enlightenment speed.
We’ve all seen what there is to see,
we’ve all seen the Video.
An Age of Miracles is past
when miracles are commonplace:
surely a new perspective is at hand.
Surely we’ll learn to decipher the face
in which our own chronicles are cast,
our own hour come round at last.
###
Captives
How they flutter
in the brain’s
quaint chambers,
those we loved
before we knew
love for more
than that casual,
affable torment:
as though not
a day had passed,
luminous, ambered,
butterflies
stuck in the brittling
pith of the mind.
###
Carnival
We don’t exactly get rid of them,
our old, unserviceable deities:
they come around time and again,
vagrants, mostly, in local cloth,
blurred, unrecognized familiars
huddled at the safety rail
to watch the plump, tailored children
ride the carousel. We’d see,
if we thought to look, something
covetous, implacable,
but friendly, too, or maybe more
than friendly. Something like love.
They do adore us as we whirl,
sitting our splendid wooden horses
with omnipotent aplomb,
rapt in the hymns of Calliope.
###
1Luna
Now and then the moon decides
(with due attention to the tides)
to have a bit of sport with those
realists among us who suppose
themselves immune to influence
by lifeless sintered basalt spheres
whose blue, reflected radiance
has borne our booted engineers.
How else do we explain
the beady-eyed empiricist
out walking in the freezing rain
to greet her in her veil of mist,
imploring Luna with the same
endlessly repeated name,
his love, his soul’s one desire,
his only answer frozen fire?
Luna’s cruel; she is just;
the one face she poses true,
so we, in cracked and cratered dust,
may limn ourselves. Me. You.
###
Small Talk
The conversation that is love
goes on, haphazard, hit or miss,
undisturbed by questions of
noesis or parenthesis.
Strolling solo, nowhere town,
I hear you praise the open space,
a clear, cerebral, almost-sound,
quite nonchalant, a commonplace.
I hadn’t questioned in our time
how you’d inhabited my brain;
how the mind I thought was mine
was an equivocal terrain.
Our arguments, if quieter now,
go on as ever: nothing goes
unchallenged; nothing’s disallowed.
As ever, thorns adorn the rose.
Thirty years, and twelve apart,
and still your voice informs my sleep,
still schools my autumn heart
in what we forfeit, what we keep.
###
Caveat
At the shrine
tourists stand
in patient files, inching
through catacombs to view
the effigies, the holy relics.
Above one narrow gallery
a secular intrusion glistens:
BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS.
The faithful see their sign,
pat their wallets,
press on reassured.
But in the passageway, observant
of the self-searching pilgrims,
stands the dip, smiling,
the paint still wet on his fingers.
###
Merry Go Round
I
have a
dream in which
I wake up, throw
back the covers, step
into a hot shower,
shave, skip breakfast, go to work,
then wake to find myself still in
bed about to throw back the covers
and step into a hot shower, shave, skip
breakfast and go to work, only to wake,
blink my eyes, find it all there to go
through again, hoping this time it’s
real, get up again, shower,
shave, skip breakfast, never
dreaming I’m asleep
but always half
expecting
to wake
up.