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A Letter Home

 A Letter Home
 for Kenneth Palmer, organist
 
Today dawn came over the French
 Baroque garden with the dreary birds'
 Relentless chatter in the shrubs.
 They drenched the armless mermaid
 in their bathing, cracked
 The skin of ice that wrinkled fast the face
 Of water stealing stars from space,
 And stirred the pool into a thousand mirrors
 Struck with gold.
  
 A month ago the elms were flames
 Burning among the pines.  
 The wind now hints
 Of sleet and snow; the arrowed chapel dove
 Appoints north to lord the air
 While prints of summer leaves are 
   pressed like yellow gloves.
 (Five fingers spread a moist caress on stone,
 Now nailed by slivers of frozen sun.)
  
 But even spring is bitter in another
 Country, on the other side of winter.
 On the gentle slope outside the window
 A cup of shade held last year's leaves.  
 On the forest's edge
 New blooms scattered beneath the jackdaws
 Storming the fields and woods;
 I must go home.
  
 Each day I bend into the crowded street
 And twist and turn the crooked way to church.
 In overcoat I mount the bench and search
 For Bach
 With groping hands and far flung feet,
 Until both Bach and I are out of wind
 To fill the pipes.  And still behind my mind,
 Though every atom is involved (a whole man
 Wants it so), though truth is at my fingertips,
 The host of diehard queries linger
 Hushed and tense: and always blazing
 Green and blue, Saint George has neither won nor lost
 The stained glass war of good and evil.
  
 I came here for answers and found
 None; the cobblestones beneath my feet
 Whisper questions; voices on the wind
 Inquire in susurration at the window.
 The mermaid shushed by snow, my Venus
 Headless in the courtyard – these, 
   all heavy footnotes
 Starred to my attention,  tell me all 
   I have learned: 
To fail in loving is the great defeat.

Metz
Winter 1963

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Portent

_
by now
I have learned
that all things portend
but then
when we fought each other down
by day and made it up
by night

i did not know

the sloop sailed
hard by the ochre cliffs
the waves slapping like wet sheets
on the stony shore
a gull shrieked
riding our spill

from the falcon’s nest
a feathered missile hurtled
air to air
spur and talon demolished
the gliding wings

now
it is an omen.

Deya, 1980’s

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A Quiet Evening at Home

I have just stoked up the wood burning Jotul,
 and just in case we are inspired to song,
 put on the heater in the music room.
 By my wing-back
 is the copy of Great Jones Street
 cover curling from the damp
 bookmark in place.
 I have just cooked turkey in mustard
 with old-fashioned mashed potatoes, 
loose leaves of lettuce on a serving plate.
 We eat the leaves the way you might eat bread
 alternating with the main dishes
 to refresh your taste buds.
  
 Normally I don't cook,
 but S was obsessively ripping up plants
 by the roots,
 with a pitchfork,
 clearing the way for timber men
 who come next week
 and fell the huge dead almond.
 As usual, once the plants are out of the earth,
 S is in anguish
 until there roots are once more snugly tamped
 into soil in some new nook of the garden.
 We have the only jetset irises on the island.
Their lag is six months,
 but I suspect a new variety
 is in the making, an iris genetically evolved
 to thrive
 on displacement.
  
 Actually, given the world we live in,
 where homelessness is not only from war and acts
of God,
 where even our village of two hundred fifty souls
 has a man living in the treehouse
 built by kids, who offered it
 when they noticed he was sleeping under a porch
 by the parking lot – living in such a world
 I started to say, it's no wonder
 that all nature
 is becoming extremely transient.
 Not only do species die,
 billions of new creatures are born,
 most of them viruses
 threatening the human race.
 It's the world fighting back.
 All the animal minds are calling on their brothers,
 the primordial forces of the earth,
 the volcanoes, the very geological plates,
 the winds, the sea,
 and, in the heat of Africa, another microbe
 was just sent on its trajectory
 toward the total destruction of venal man.
  
 Now it's time for a couple of tokes of female dope,
 if there is any.
 Searching this cupboard and that close,
 she comes up with a jar
 of just the right thin,
 except the flowers from 1991 have mildewed
 to a damp mass of funky green
 fuzzed up at the edges with white mold.
 Another jar says female, no year,
 but turns out to be okay.
 Now comes the hard part.
 What to do the euphoria?
 Read a little?
 Look a Schubert?
 Put a few words down?

Deya c. 2000

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Paper de Música

This is a bookmark. The front had a love poem in Spanish by Argentinian poet Mechi Alvarellos, followed by Patrick’s translation.

On the back was a note that read: “JP — I thought you should be the one to throw these away. I have many letters from 1960’s on — you want them?”

As you can tell from the collection of stuff I’m sharing on this web site, the answer was yes.

Paper de Música (bookmark)
Note to JP


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A Storm in Izmir

 The sky behind the bluff catches fire and burns
 Down the clouds, spreads to the peaks
 Above the bay; the wind changes and turns
 The waves into dolphins racing to break
 The headland toward the open sea.
 The squall breaks over us, not from sky or hill,
 But out of black crashing ocean spilled
 Over sprits and masts of the fishing fleet,
 Water grapples mooring posts and clambers
 Paylines, spuming into the streets.
 The dwindling wick of sun is pinched,
 Fury reels keening on the pitchblende wind that roils
 Among the palms, fronds flicking verdant fire,
 Savage swords in the caverned dark.

Izmir, 1963

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Think of It Like This

 Think of it like this:  
 
We stand in line, waiting our turn
 with Destiny,
 always more or less aware
 that even Mr Nobody
 enjoys a flash, before checking out:
 That life was mine.
 Some lift off
 like Fred Astaire
 doing a Peter Max rainbow;
 a few burn like meteors,
 never reaching the earth;
 Mozart fiddled
 in billions of brains.
 Meanwhile we advance;
 fate a sculptor who chips a little here,
 a little there,
 until gradually we appear
 or should I say I appear
 in case you don't agree with we,
 from the void.
 But to get down to now:
 inside the translucent door
 voices of thirsty men and women
 ride the arpeggios of the harp
 like so many hives of bees
 on the wind,
 flap their chins
 like donkeys,
 braying bravely in the face of it all
 while the guitarist's fingers fly
 loose like a wing
 playing songs all know by heart:
 I am, I am
 You are, you are
 He is, they are,
 I was, you will,
 he did, she will never,
 I know, you know, we know,
 forgive,
 forget...
 To the swirl of egos in the room
 we add our two:
 the guitarist does not know
 all the chords.
 All quit their jabber, though swiftly
 our inert mood is grasped
 the hives buzz again.
 What fools they think we are
 to sit and stare,
 our laughter the last resort of silence,
 while we contemplate the truth:
 all alone, we orbit - the moon shining,
 the sun waiting below the earth,
 the sea sighing,
 the wind crying to come in
 and we sing:
 I love, we love,
 and then of course
 they love.
 Harp and guitar, the wood sings:
 O how we yearn
 for the instant order
 of song.

Málaga 1991

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February Pruning

The first oxygen goes to feed the fire
that flames in the heart of us;
that flares our gaze out beyond
the near business of day to day.

Like the bonfire
which begins its own round grave,
the center goes first into coals,
then cinders, then smoking dust,
a crater ringed by useless fuel.

Burn from the outside in,
let the flesh go first and leave
nothing bur spirit to ignite
your glowing soul to supernova
        o glorious cosmos!
before the last collapse into that darkness
from which all light is born.

Deya 1994

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Con los Ojos Cerrados

Con los ojos cerrados
te veo.  
Con ellos abiertos,  
te miro.  
Con las manos cerradas,  
te hablo.  
Con ellas abiertas, 
te palpo.  
Con la boca cerrada, 
te hablo. 
Con ella abierta, 
te beso.  
Te escucho y  
suspiro,  
respiro y
te inhalo.  
Con los cinco sentidos,  
TE AMO.

Luz Adriana Rojo Estrada

(Found in Patrick’s files, dated 12 Sep 2013)