How Many Roads

Poems

… must a man walk down?

Phrases for the moment:

  1. … and don’t fall so madly in love with the night that you lose your way! (Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice)
  2. I always play Russian Roulette in my head; it’s seventeen black and twenty-nine red (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Tom Waits)
  3. For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see / but the good man will at once also beautiful be. (Fragment 50, Sappho)
  4. La lune était sereine et jourait sur les flots. (“Clair de lune,” Victor Hugo)
  5. Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi. (“Nevermore,” Paul Verlaine)
  6. You’d never know it, but buddy, I’m a kind of poet, and I got a lot of things to say (Johnny Mercer/Frank Sinatra)

————

There was a boy once – his name I have forgotten by now, but it was a good Christian name, I do recall – and this is his story, or some shadow of it. I never did meet him in the flesh, for his story came to me through the whisperings of an acquaintance, but I feel him as strongly set down in my consciousness as any one of my lost loves or childhood friends. If I can do him some small justice in the telling of his story, my heart will be fulfilled, though I must confess that my doubts are severe, for I do not know how any hand, let alone one as weak as my own, can ever be quite lovely enough.

————

Scat! scat! the people flee
a robber at the corner store!
he pulls a gun and waves a sack
(the flighted ones: alack! alack!)
the counter-boy whose nerves are frayed
strikes the tin, a scare parade :
NO SALE NO SALE oh sell the lot!
a robber come to swipe the pot
of copper coins and bottletops :
the radio is buzzing bops
out static FM waves :
sing the blues boy sing the blues . . .
the world broke in dancing shoes :
the churchyard bells are ringing four
the robber walking out the door.

————

The sound of the nighttime alleyway cat is giving her pause, the woman so fat and so gray in the heat of the narrow gray place, beneath the sky, the black-bat sky.

Oh, what if I perish, I’ll die! thinks the woman, I’ll die and I’ll sigh – oh, dying and sighing are scarcely a fate to live or lie by tonight.

The cat moves as a shadow, quick and light, and the woman so gray is crying for fright – above, the stars are rocks in the sky: they might fall upon me! they might, oh, they might!

————

You have not remembered to remember me all this time,
but in your forgetting, my recollection grows all the clearer.

————

I was glad to hear your name in passing on the busy street;
while I walked, the leaves blew to the melodious sound!

————

Bells in the field
Ringing out the yield
Heigh-ho fi-fo
Fum fum fum

O hear the bells bells bells
Fear the bells bells bells
Heigh-ho fi-fo
Fum fum fum

————

Little one, you’ll soon be fine
I’m gonna give this heart of mine
To cure your fears, now wipe your tears
I say, you’ll soon be fine

————

“How was your evening yesterday?”
“Very lousy, as usual.”

————

Mirabel buttoned the top button of her woolen coat and stepped lightly out the door into the falling snow. It was the coldest day of the year and not many people would be about, but the solitude of the occasion was precisely the thing that stirred Mirabel’s heart. She wended down the white road and when a bird flew overhead against the thin grey sky, she would stop, wave a mitten at him, and then continue on her way. The road had a narrow path for walking, for the snow had not fallen too thick through the night, and the narrowness of the path contrasted with the wideness of the sky, but yet they ran parallel, the road and the sky, one always looking at the other and continuing on, on, on.

Mirabel was not aware of the passing of time, only of the heaviness or lightness of her feet, and so long as her boots could carry her one step after another with no pang to the heel, she would proceed with her walking. She did not think any thoughts in particular, but when she passed by a flagpole, she sang a song of her country; and when she passed by a nest in a tree, she sang of a bluebird; and when she passed by a mailbox, she sang of a faraway friend; and so on and so forth in this way. She had a pretty little soprano voice, clear and straight in the winter air. If she did not know the words, she hummed, and her humming was even prettier than her singing, for the sound came from deeper down, and it buzzed with the joy of saying something without ever parting the lips.

————

After giving his heart,
He wanders by the pond
And throws a stone:
Look how it sinks to the depths –
If I stepped, I would fall still faster!

————

Gentle night
Empty swallow’s nest
I gaze long and sigh

————

On the small bank
A girl is smelling flowers
One by one

Poems from the Japanese

Poems

Influenced by the writing of Japanese tanka.

Noble man,
will you move kindly
to the right?
You have been standing
over top of my heart

————

Nighttime wind
coming to this house –
I questioned
however did it
grow so cold inside?

————

Oh no!
The neighbor cat
is running
and they haven’t the breath
to catch him again

————

At evening-time
the blossoms smelling sweet
you bow down
then do a dance for joy –
some people whisper as you pass

————

To my friend –
the days of speaking past,
we hold our tongues
but in my sleeping
I dream we talk for hours

————

Fearful that
love would be fading,
you took a brush
and painted all the rooms
yellow, so yellow!

————

I thought to
pray for your mother
who ails
because you have not
written home a word.

————

For you
I lighted many
pretty lamps,
I hoped the glow
would halt the need for talk.

————

Little one,
for you I will move
the mountains
so that you will sleep
peacefully in bed.

Sweeping the Floor

Poems

If there is nothing in the breaking of a heart
What are the pieces on this dirty floor?
The broom is made of soggy wood and cannot serve this place.
Besides the wind is blowing cold, the window’s gone,
Not even the birds will sing.
There is grief on the face of everything.
A throat if it could would swallow it down
But there must be room for air
And the only thing you want
Is a voice to shake the stillness of your night.

Writer’s Block

Journal & Essays

How can I have writer’s block if I don’t even approach the writing? Maybe I have just been avoiding the attempt in avoidance of the threatened ghost of just such an affliction. Well, I may as well ride it out by biding my time through the illness. Rilke says you must be patient; as your own doctor, you must be patient, and sometimes there is not more than this that you can do. I am trying to incline myself to the philosophy that we must abide and even pursue that which is difficult (as Rilke counsels); thus I am tapping my old ways on the shoulder – in my old ways, I sidestep the things that make me tight in the throat and addled in the mind – and asking them to please move aside. I have some responsibility, I think, to do something more with this life than sleep and sigh it away; though there yet remains a place for both these things – it is just that they cannot be the only tenants of the house. They are not too rich, and it is better to split the rent more ways than two.

Lonely People

Short Fiction & Prose

“Life’s so different than it is in your dreams.” -Tom Waits

When the morning began the boy was outside the window sitting on the bus stop bench looking straight ahead at the hedge on the opposite side of the street with straight back and no hat on his head. It was springtime and the crocuses were popping from the earth but the boy looked only at the hedge and there were no crocuses there, only unmoving predictable green shrubbery. The bus drove up at a quarter-past seven and stopped before the boy, who stood pleasantly and mounted the steps of the bus. There was no one else aboard apart from the driver when he walked down the brown aisle to a brown and peeling seat two from the back and sat politely down. The bus driver was a woman with curly gray hair coming from under her police-blue hat and she was moderately plump and wore a blue button jacket to disguise it. The boy liked her rather well and had given her a nod as he stepped on the bus because she reminded him of himself for they were two lonely people who rode the bus and this is how they recalled their days, by watching the hedges pass by.

————

If you have no more happiness to take from life,
then you have got your despair, and that is after all something.

————

The traffic light turns and there is not a word spoken, not a thing that catches the passing notice of well-dressed people gliding by. Lucy squats on the corner of the street, shaking a tin can, but there is nothing inside, and no one will know her name. We call her by name, it is true, but this is merely in the telling of the story, and the telling is a distant thing, removed from the reality, of course. She has got a mass of mousy hair tangled in a knot and it must not have been brushed in months. But it is no matter, for she is an invisible thing, and splitting hairs when the affair is already small – pinch upon pinch – approaches impossibility.

If she was pretty once, you would not know it now. Her skin is grown sallow and her cheeks are grown lean, and she may as well board with Mr. Sprat. Her eyes, brilliant before, are dim and all ringed with purple, for though she spends the days asleep, the sleep is not easy and there is no pillow for her head. In the darkness she weeps for hours on end and the window lets in a constant chill.

When she was leaving home, she left a note nicely writ in cursive ink. It was only half a sheet of paper, neatly cut along the bottom, and the words were plainer than most she had ever used. She wrote:

I have loved too much and it is going to be the death of me. I will not fill up the house with sighs – there is already a draft and it is better that I should not make a sound. I will miss you. Good-bye. I do love you all.

Your own
LUCY

That was all, and she was gone. The family closed all the windows when they noticed a chill setting in.

————

BOY: If I can give you a piece of advice, it’s not to put all your eggs in one basket. The basketmakers are striking, and the scabs, they do a shoddy job. And once you’ve seen the real thing, doggone it, you know there isn’t a substitute’ll ever do.

Portrait of a Girl

Short Fiction & Prose

The girl in the corner sat perfectly still and balanced a breath on the curve of her lip. She did not or could not care that the place was positively brimming with people, many of them expiring sighs and shifting their weight from leg to leg because there were no seats to take, and though the fact of the matter was very plain – the girl was the size of a bird and her table was unusually grand – she did not show the slightest indication that she was thinking of making room. Her skin was fair, more or less the color of skimmed milk, that is to say, white with some thinness about it, and there was some translucence, too, making you recall a girl from a story who walked nightgowned in convalescence for a year or more. Now you noticed the girl in the corner had long hair, hanging straight and brown, and it was neither thick nor thin, but something uncertainly in the middle, though the individual strands were fine like silk; and she wore a black headband, simple and slim, not pushed too far toward the crown of her head, instead sitting inconspicuously above a row of very straight bangs. She had exceedingly green eyes and the white surrounding the green was exceedingly clear and together they were bright and round and when they looked out at you, you were struck dumb and thought to yourself that there was a beautiful girl, but you couldn’t say how you thought she was beautiful exactly, because she was so like a bird, and everything that touched her was vague and mute and on the point of flying away.

Back to Top