POEM: "Freedom without order does not exist"

Freedom Without Order Does Not Exist


Hell is hands without feet
Order, order, I want to order

Freedom is there taking a nap
Lord it all went hell for leather

Fools the same as you and me
Hell is balls without a band

A sunset for once the autistic see
5 years since you were translated

Some jungle shit but wait a bit
The monkeys, they all come down.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

POEM: "1-2-3 Roswell"

1-2-3 Roswell
                           
                              for Felix Baumgartner


I don’t really know you
or the variety of ways
any of us can fall falling
or really any more than
that thing about the angels
up by the recurve of earth
forgetting this quiet abyss
in a speed of dark descent
just there seconds ago boom
telling so small from above
blue sky clouds white cells
long field watching your step
balloon helmet pressure suit
one of the other ends of a long day
faced with a blank of possibility
like going into the snowy night.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "You Don't Hear a Silent Invocation"

You Don't Hear a Silent Invocation 

I.  Midnight

Sinkhole cave-in water
in flame gas darkness
between wall and hope
the railway incidental
maybe an angel guard
two flags a red & blue
a quick decision then
I raise a glass tonight
to the invisible good
two minutes before
the mud month ends
on this water snake year
most grateful I imagine
things that didn't happen.


II.  3 A.M.

Yet the world works
the winds slamming
midnight ruckus
on protuberant tins
sheets and awnings
howling whistling
the winds are gusting
they speak so swirly
words that sound like
causative derivative
ad hominem inter alia
verum casus fortuitus
the hope & shit of sorrows
the bang of everything
not nailed down.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Katie Peterson Poem

Denying Everything


Because it is a pearly evening
I am sitting in the window reading
a book I have read before.
Branches emphasize
their heft and sway over their shadows.
Some kind of extra firmament,
an ear over the earth’s ear,
extra, as language is to prayer.
Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye
inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to
when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt
you get more vista and less twist
of road, and then you’re looking
at a valley you named yourself
and irrigated yourself,
full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts
of rock, sage, at last a harvest—
a desert that belongs to you–

The trick to renunciation is starting now.
The secret of detachment
is having already given up,
a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost,
the human need for a body to fill in
all your body’s deficiencies, those clefts and dents
already given up, the narrative of a life
completely altered in the retrospect
that knowledge brings and so discredited
the point of memory utterly lost.
That piece of land has always been
suitable for a house. That nest has never
been ready for eight baby birds
who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch
and home and scared themselves
completely and remarkably away.

Do you hear that? It’s the wind
negotiating the spine of one leaf
it cannot decide whether to raise
a fragment of an inch.
Duncan writes as a reader
struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle
at certain unmistakable times
with what’s furtive and most right.
When people marry they finish their names.
I am still listening for mine
to begin. My spine
wants a bicycle to order its work, a red
bicycle, a hill into a heart
of a city that holds something I want.

The pattern of the air around that leaf
is like someone tracing my ribcage
with his index finger
and then walking away.
Who can blame us for wanting other worlds,
but shall we take them,
or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear
more like a mouth
that bites the air and turns it into blood?

A voice in the next room goes to sleep.
Sleep moves in the branches of the oak
become a rootless mass
unsung by skeleton or name or height.
My friend who says
she does not believe in Paradise
believes in rest: I believe that,
or more likely I like to think of her,
the way she held my name in her small mouth,
as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone
who on a night like this
would reach towards my ribcage
and trace it delicately and walk away.


(2013)

POEM: "Winter Tourism In Ningxia"

Winter Tourism in Ningxia


Today I believe we’re all on the road to Heaven
Toward the cold blue mountains of Helan Shan
And me in the steam of three fragrant beauties

Our taxi driver’s nervous about this conversation
He’s claiming the horizon is always straight ahead
And we can never presume what we should not see

Still, we keep our own private counsels warm
Since it is 20 below in the sun with our hats on
Under the old great shadows of these quiet peaks

The trees are heavy beside a silent frozen river
Petroglyphs possibly ascribing the valley rocks
(I wonder whether I should describe this ice)

Love, I see the gracious Earth-Mother around us
Her fertile and ferocious aspect observing the Tao
While I climb the rocks and I remember how I’m still here

Yesterday among the 1000-year-old Xia beehive tombs
When you say you once clambered atop the steepest one
I see my own last fall, I contend that your own wasn’t possible

Fang pao, hen hao shua – moonlit Gunpowder Night
From the hotel window with our guns aimed at the sky walls
We salute those infant stars for this love and this New Year

Later then I think of my old battles on the faces of cliffs
Finally these narrow Chinese beds and your hot body
Fighting for the gentle certainties of our brief lives.


© 2004/2015 Rob Schackne

PHOTO: Hine, "Construction Worker At The Empire State Building, 1931" / POEM: "Our Man Is Long Dead"

Lewis Wickes Hine, Construction worker at the Empire State Building, 1931

Our Man Is Long Dead


Our man is long dead, but not
by his own hand or carelessness
just the ordinary accretion of time
and the unnatural play of events
we'll only guess at. Our own lives
which seem such a solid fantasy
remind us what to shy away from
avoid the heights, rabid dogs, people
who act too strange, bad jobs, the shakes
unsafe food, poisoned air, the dangers
we must not embrace -- we are smart
we know our long list very well.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Jynne Dilling Martin Poem

"What Endures And What Does Not?"


Soon this ship will be crushed in a polar storm; below deck,
pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica are read aloud,

shredded and used to light pipes. A century later
the preservationist draining antique food tins

sneaks a taste of raspberry jam. That night he’ll dream
he digs out a tomb on a glacier filled with bay leaves

still fragrant and green. The emperor penguin egg
tucked warm in the explorer’s pocket is delivered intact

to the receptionist desk at the Royal Geographic Society;
the robbery victim nestles a stone between his feet

and rocks back and forth at the bottom of the world.
Enough seal blubber can keep a single lamp burning

for a thousand years; enough knowledge exists to fill
twenty thousand encyclopedia pages. Lost friends

return to us in dreams, but come morning we can’t recall
what they wanted. Snakes, Snell’s law, Snowblind

curl up into hazy tobacco smoke. The amphipods
in test tubes begin to faint from next century’s

simulated heat; falling leaves fill the air of our dreams.
The biologist drills a hole in the sea snail’s shell

and slides a miniature stethoscope inside, listens
for the heartbeat: it’s beating, still beating, still beating.

(2013)

PHOTO: Roman Signer, "House with Rockets" (1981) Photo Emil Grubenmann / POEM: "House With Rockets"

House With Rockets


Time obviates
time cannot tell
moves like a finger
now at 12 noon
I am 2 days before
wondering if ever 
she'll stay the night
tomorrow is asking
if the moon is full 
sitting in the corner
thousand conversations 
for years like a stove
rattles into a window
house with rockets.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Joseph Brodsky Poem

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which somtimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It's clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.


(2001)

POEM: "Greetings from Shanghai"

Greetings from Shanghai

                                               for Ron Slate


It seems we all write different stuff
That is, we process mostly the same
Stuff, but we process it differently—
Let’s start this again…for le mot juste
I’ll give up food, sleep, a warm body
Lying sleeping but willing next to me
Money, health, my comfort, husbandry
Probably some other startling things
Like liberation from craving or wisdom
Or what passes today for modern sanity
I wouldn’t kill for it (I don’t think so)
Although given my human track record
Some people might disagree with that
About this need to make sense of a life
After long darkness the light flooding in—
When we fool ourselves that we’re surprised
By all the justice, forbearance, and peace.

                                                  
© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Chris Mansell Poem

The Hands Of Adonis


(i)

He smooths his hands along
her body and softly speaks
her name, Kristina, Kristina-mou.
She likes it even though it’s
not her own, ordinary, name.
She asks him to say in Greek:
If butterflies could speak,
they would speak Greek
and, when he says it, it sounds like
his mouth is stuffed with wings.

Tell me about the eagle, she says and
he tells her, again, in Greek, about the eagle
falling from the sky, his pain, his pleasure.
She tries to wrap her mind around
the sounds she cannot understand.

She knows the eagle is him.
When he holds her and whispers
these sounds in her ears she could stay
forever suspended in these wisps of words.

His English is perfect. He knows
the deep inflections of Bloke,
the subtle declensions of Don’t
Hurt Me, the various dialects of
Come Here, Come Close and
Stay Away. She struggles
with this language. His first
language, he tells her, is touch.
His hands are broad and strong;
his skin so smooth she thinks
he and she are newborn.
He speaks with his fingers. He takes
her body, humming with
whatever was near. She is too
overstrung, he says. She thinks
too much, he says. She disagrees
and talks at length about it.

He is clever, but his first language
is touch and he’s unwilling to speak.
In the end he will use words to say
Come, let me show you I love you.
And he does; he holds her close,
folds her in. She knows then
those strong arms, those strong
shoulders could harm her if he chose.
She thought that he and she were equals
but he could kill her with a blow. He
grasps her neck and she knows
this is touch at quarter strength.
They’ll part, but there’s a rift
they’ll fight to keep. A pain worth having.

Already she remembers being lost
in his body, smooth and strong.
He doesn’t know he is water,
she stone. He runs his hands over her body,
knots his fingers in her hair, kisses
her throat. On the last day and night,
she loves him to grief, each last touch,
each last kiss makes the air clamorous.
She knows what words
he will say: It’s okay. It’s done, but
his hands say otherwise, say,
Keep me, love me, and she can’t stay.

These words make paradise
impossible. She has grown used
to love, Adonis is not enough—
some crevice of heart-talk is unexplained.


(ii)

Adonis will watch her go. He will
stand on the kerb and watch her
leave him one last time. This is
what happens with women. You
love them, even secretly, and they go.
No matter how many times he said
it wouldn’t happen, that he didn’t care,
no matter how hard he tried to choose,
he came out losing. They leave you
standing in the damned cold June wind.
It should be spring and nearly summer.
He should be standing on an island
somewhere north. There should be light,
but it’s his turn, somehow, to be locked
in the dark. He’s controlled and beautiful
and his mind is a fist. There is nothing left
but to do what has to be done. This is not
the life he had imagined. One day he’ll get
out. One day. He is counting
the days until he doesn’t know
what. Until he is not himself: father, lover,
son. Kristina told him the future’s now
and then pissed off. Some future.
Some now and when he walks upstairs
the apartment is emptier than before.
He turns the music up and gets out
the golf gear. He laces his shoes
and sees that he is crying and tells himself
it’s the cold that makes him sniffle like a girl.
The universe is clanging; the gods
and their daughters are slamming doors.

(2013)

A Bruce Bond Poem

The Delta

If you are going there by foot, prepare
to get wet. You are not you anymore.

You are a girl standing in a pool
of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.

There are laws of heaven and those of place
and those who see the sky in the water,

angels in ashes that are the delta’s now.
They say if you sweep the trash from your house

after dark, you sweep away your luck.
If you are going by foot, bring a stick,

a third leg, and honor the great disorder,
the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.

Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can,
knowing there is a little water in things

you take for granted, a little charity
and squalor for the smallest forms of life.

Voodoo was always mostly charity.
People forget. If you shake a tablecloth

outside at night, someone in your family
dies. There are laws we make thinking

it was us who made them. We are not us.
We are a floodplain by the Mississippi

that once poured slaves upriver to the fields.
We are a hurricane in the making.

We could use a magus who knows something
about suffering, who knows a delta’s needs.

We understand if you want a widow
to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes.

He is not himself anyway and walks
barefoot across a landscape that has no north.

Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog,
a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind,

a girl with a stick, who is more at home,
being homeless, than you will ever be.


(2013)

A Kazim Ali Poem (1)

Prayer

Prayer


Denuded and abandoned I recite
but what do I want

To rise again from the ocean
or be buried alive in the surge and sleep

To be a fearsome range in a single body
or to wind my unity down into depth

Missing in action, ghost-like
bobbing in the distance

Singing psalms to terrify myself
into deciding:

So long liberation

My time in the world was
only a gesture

My body a lonely
stranger

an ache
I never knew

(2013)

POEM: "One to Nothing Else"

One to Nothing Else


Round the corner the beat pyramid
The boys are hiding in a field of reeds
Whispering about the slavers and the whips

At the nearest village get some clothes
Blend in and learn their bloody language
(They say this they say other foolish things)

Well we’re fit says one look the muscles
Gruel once a day another shakes his head
Spilled our hearts out they didn't pay us

Diminuated by servitude gone by sunset
Then early to rise the shouting and sticks
Bloody pyramids stuck up like dominoes

Never kiss your dear old mother again
Had a picture of her when she was my age
Tattooed on my back I remember how it hurt

Avoid al-Mokattam that valley of bones
A snake will put a fast end to your moaning
Stay out of the villages better head for the hills

It's rabbits you can't catch just dust
Blocks and sledges and ropes I hate it
Captured years ago can't stop shaking.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Là-bas Bleu"

Là-bas Bleu


Across the fields 
come the goatherds
shouting about some
new way of reading
the Bible, the Qu'ran 
the Book Of The Dead
their willingness to call
one length of desire
the concentrated picture
and they who will not
turn a difficult page
who will screw their 
faces at fiendish words
(maybe these same words)
want to sit me down 
but time (and pain) 
isn't a poet's problem
everything is the problem
why just last week when
I put the question to them
they laughed and laughed 
they gave me more wine
they screamed at me it's
only the wind at the window
look out for fuckin' eagles
but watch your own feet.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Selah"

Selah

An unlucky jump wasn't to blame

there was hope of getting back over
an insert with no supply line except
imagine braids with no central column

her hair beautiful body with no head

nothing there for as long as you could

walk over the silly weeks on the frontier

dry sky the wet ground the vibrations

remembering I finally found the head

how close it almost made me tired.

© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Bruce Weigl Poem

Song Of Napalm

                                             for my wife


After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding, 
We stood in the doorway watching horses
Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
Our vision altered by the distance
So I thought I saw a mist
Kicked up around their hooves when they faded
Like cut-out horses
Away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light, more
Scarlet; beyond the pasture
Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
But you said they were only branches.

Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses. I believed
They swung finally away from me...

But still the branches are wire
And thunder is the pounding mortar,
Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her.

So I can keep on living,
So I can stay here beside you,
I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings
Beat inside her until she rises
Above the stinking jungle and her pain
Eases, and your pain, and mine.

But the lie swings back again.
The lie works only as long as it takes to speak
And the girl runs only as far
As the napalm allows
Until her burning tendons and crackling
Muscles draw her up
into that final position

Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing
Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes
And not your good love and not the rain-swept air
And not the jungle green
Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.


(1988)

POEM: "A Pale Blue Dress"

A Pale Blue Dress

I can't believe that I thought I knew

she was smart, as smart as I pictured her

putting the shining wash on a white line

watering the plants, sprinkling the chickens

in a pale blue dress with no underwear --

come to bed at night with only a sexy moan.

OK. Erase that likeness. She was plenty smart.

Proud house plants wilted under the stress

and the chickens all one day fled for the trees.

The underwear was wrapped three times around.

OK. She was smart enough to hide her feelings.

She sprinkled me enough that I climbed away

while I believed she was smart. OK. Not that.

I believed I was smart to know when a blue dress

looks like it should come off it sometimes doesn't.

Hiding my feelings about that makes me smart.

Scotch that. It makes me almost smart enough

to read a pale blue dress, so well, so well.

© 2010 Rob Schackne

An Adrienne Rich Poem

Stepping Backward

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers--
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers--
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature's one I want to memorize--
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.

(1951)