Last Rites
a poem for Richard O’Prey
The rocky wastes of Connemara
Possess a beauty all their own,
Treeless expanses with whispering grass,
random heaps of scattered stones.
When my lungs have ceased to breathe
And my body returned to dust,
Spread my ashes in Connemara
After the day has turned to dusk,
And when the dusk has turned to night,
Look up at the myriads overhead;
Then seek the warmth of a convivial pub
And raise your cup to the countless dead.
As when an old film jumps in the projector,
You will be wading a dun hallway, rounding
A newel . . .
Richard Wilbur : “Walking to Sleep”
1
The tick tock clanging of a mail slot
is followed by a thud. At this ungodly hour?
A typewriter-written invitation lies at your feet.
The Insomniac’s Ball. Wednesday morning, one to five,
entertainment provided by Stan Kenton’s Big Band
reproduced mono on hi-fi. Regrets Only.
How do they know that you are one of them,
whoever they are? How do they know that at three a.m.
you tend to be tapping out trochees on a headboard?
2
The building isn’t as nice as you’d hoped. You rise to the third floor
caged in an elevator, the only passenger. The hall’s
somewhat seedy, the carpet worn, its roses faded.
You have been given the coded knock. The first six notes of the 2nd movement
of Beethoven’s Ninth. KNOCK knock, KNOCK knock, KNOCK knock.
The creaking door opening sounds like Bela Lugosi’s coffin
as your eyes adjust to a mazelike apartment, crowded but eerily quiet.
The Stan Kenton LP is scratched, the other guests preoccupied,
unfriendly, drifting through the rented rooms.
3
You peek through a door down the hall
and meet the stare of your dead grandfather,
the one whose room you used to tiptoe past,
a medicinal darkness reeking
of the Great Depression. As you escape, his memories
trail you like a shadow down the hall darkening
the passing stream of old folks, great aunts and former teachers,
rouged and wrinkled, mumbling to themselves,
some in bedroom slippers, others in stilettos.
4
The library’s quite impressive. A ladder runs along a rail
to reach the volumes way over your head: a textbook
in Sanskrit on Chinese mathematics you must master
to pass that class you’ve completely forgotten about!
a course you need for graduation!
You climb to the top reaching, but then look down
dizzyingly into a snakepit, concentric circles
spiraling with antlike companions from your youth,
descending, swirling, like bloody water down a drain . . .
5
There is a shrine for your departed lovers. On display
the beds where you once slept preserve the imprint of bodies.
Perhaps a long golden hair lies on the dented pillow,
but you’re not allowed to go beyond the red velvet ropes.
Where are they now – you wonder – what are they doing,
are they even alive, were they ever alive? You’re so
sleepy anything seems possible –
slants of light, cathedral tunes, leaden feet, riveted lips.
Couples waltz by mouthing one-two-three; one-two-three; one-two-three.
6
The oncoming day stretches out like a desert,
like the Bataan Death March, like life plus forty.
Thoughts of daytime responsibilities start to ricochet like billiard balls
without transition cold sheets, institutional whiteness, the ICU –
physicians and nurses whispering about your condition:
BEEP beep, BEEP beep, BEEP beep . . .
You ride the rented hearse of sleep home
to twisted sheets, to creeping light, to the bedside’s time bomb’s
tick tock tick tock tick
Here’s a kickass poem by a friend of mine, Jason Chambers, a cat who every morning clambers out of bed in the dark to encounter the dawn in a marsh or on a beach or some other natural setting unsullied by humankind. Afterwards, he posts a photo on Facebook, an appropriate quote from his wide reading, and usually a link to a song he deems appropriate. Once the plague is done, you can catch him at the Pour House when it hosts one of its poetry readings.
A poem by Jason Chambers, read by Wesley Moore
In the first month of this year
I saw a thing as pure and true as any
but did not then know what it meant.
I stood behind the Kings on the deck,
and though I could not see it,
Liz knew without looking that
Brian’s head hung for a
moment just a little too heavy,
his shoulders had dropped, just so,
wounded by the world in
some invisible way.
She reached her arm up and
around him to squeeze for a
moment one shoulder, just so,
and let her head fall on the other.
Four months later our neighbors
up the creek shoot day and night
at paper silhouettes on which they
can never quite find their fear.
The report hangs over the water
like a foretaste of despair,
and we are all the time being
urged to temper our hopes,
to be realistic, and practical.
But I have met enough dogs,
low, shimmying, tail-waggers,
squirming back-layers, and
all manner of face-lickers, to
know there is no upper limit
to bliss, and the line between
heaven and earth was never there,
and I ignore their advice.
Finally it is clear why God,
however perfect, chose not
to exist alone for even
one whole second.
Listen: everywhere musicians
sit in empty rooms yet play
and sing to thousands.
And my friend is for the first time
planting every inch of his farm,
the low field, the far field,
even the wet field.
He says, I’m going right up
to the house.
Whatever else happens,
we will all eat.
When Liz let go, they both stood
up straight, taller than before,
determined as only those
deeply in love can be.
We start from a place of joy,
and quiet astonishment.
We do not end anywhere.
We do not end at all.
Now is the barefoot season.
It cannot be taken away.
Jason and me, Caroline Tigner Moore’s sunglasses, and a couple of All Day IPAs
P Alvatos
Glad I was when I reached the other bank,
a love of freedom rarely felt.
Man to be poor, man to be prodigal,
the half-man searching for an ever-fleeing other half,
and the countryside not caring,
a shadow of cloud on the stream.
A cento, sometimes referred to as a “collage poem,” consists of lines from other poems cut out and reassembled.
Poems sampled Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Michael Field’s “O Eros of the mountains, of the earth,” AK Ramanujan’s, “Elements of Composition,” Philip Larkin’s “MCMVI,” Yeats’s “Easter 1916”
Note: Michael Field was the pseudonym of Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, pictured below.
Catullus put the vehicle in gear
backing up out of our space.
“We’re getting on out of here,
going to another place,”
to witness gluttony and avarice,”
similar sins that we can easily trace
“back to bad-old-fashioned self-centeredness,
the mother lode of all evil.” The whirr
on the screen of the soulless rutting couples’ nakedness
receded in the rearview mirror
as we drove down hell’s rutted road,
the end of my journey seeming no nearer
than it had centuries ago.
We crossed a wooden bridge
beneath which glowed
a cloud of phosphorescent midges
biting and stinging a mass of obesity,
pulsing like amoebae in garbage.
“Here’s where the greedy spend eternity —
Trimalchio, Thackery, Ponzi, Imelda Marcos —
no longer possessing individuality,
“now nothing but an indistinguishable bolus
of inextinguishable desire,
a very different type of lust,
burning toxic like a dumpster fire.”
How much longer, I wondered,
would I be turning, turning in this narrowing gyre?
Dressing for the Funeral
“On the shoulders of time, ever growing old.”
Bob Kaufman
The sun is rising in the misty east
outside the widow’s bedroom window.
Her undergarments have been stepped in and strapped on,
black dress zipped.
NPR, like any other morning,
sympathetic voices trying to swallow concern.
One last latching, the pearl necklace,
a birthday gift, her fortieth, come and gone.
Vincent Valdez, “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!,
Pay Per View Presents Clash of the Cults
boxcars, boxcars, boxcars, Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
I say let’s have a Bernie Bro
Trump Troop Arena Brawl,
Brought to you by Ben and Jerry’s and Chick-fil-A.
Let’s go all out, cheerleaders for sure.
Elizabeth Bruenig in a nun’s habit for Bernie,
Rashida Tlaib in a diaphanous burka booing.
The Bros chanting,
“Go, Bernie, Go.
Do the Trotsky like Madame Blavatsky.”
On the other side,
Sarah Huckabee, Sarah Huckabee, Sarah Huckabee,
Lindsey in a 50s collegiate letter sweater
Shouting through a megaphone,
“Gimme an M, gimme an A, gimme a G . . .
The five Republican SCOTUS appointees should referee.
Clarence “Coke Can” Thomas with a whistle around his neck,
Dangling beneath his assortment of chins,
Bret Kavanaugh, eyes blinking, lips pursed,
Emitting tiny Ivy League farts
With hints of peppermint schnapps.
Oh, my brothers and sisters,
What shall we call this extravaganza?
Clash of the Cults?
Dunno.
Just an idea.
Awfully awkward to be called a gawky geek,
Indiscrete, dontcha think? Blessed are the meek,
For they will inherit the national debt, all wet,
losers, unlike Richard Dawkins, though I bet
The medial squawking awk in his surname
Comes from the Old Norse öfug. It’s a shame
To have part of your name mean wrong way,
And that’s about all I got to say.
Note: Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. The word — which is ascribed to an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture — has since been reappropriated by the internet, with Grumpy Cat, Socially-Awkward Penguin and Overly-Attached Girlfriend spreading virally, leaping from IP address to IP address (and brain to brain) via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. From Wired.
Richard Dawkins
Once upon a time,
and a very good time it was,
God walked in the garden shooting the breeze
with Adam and Eve.
In the cool of the day he walked
with them in the garden.
Eve and Adam were naked,
and I suspect he was, too –
he’d have to be —
it would have been too awkward otherwise.
We have no record as to what they talked about –
the symphony of birdsong,
the perfume of the never fading flowers,
the always perfectly ripe fruit hanging like ornaments in the golden light?
That was before the fratricide
and the subsequent drowning of the puppies and kittens
followed by the sad days of fruit rottened and raptors shrieking,
the reeking carcasses bloating.
Knowledge, begetting, circumcision, covenants, sacrifices, oracles, famines, plagues, deserts, laws, kings, concubines, wars . . .
Much later, according to the Hebrew arrangement of scrolls, God spoke his last words to man, addressed to Job, regarding the awesomeness of whales.
Photo credit: Caroline Tinger Moore
A Series of Subtractions
If you make the mistake of living too long,
old age can seem like as a series of subtractions.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry.
That romping pup you chose a flashbulb pop ago,
today, a husk headed to the vet to be put down.
Like the one before that and the one before that.
Jack, Sally, Bessie, Saisy, Ruskin, Milo,
Completing their abbreviated seven stages
right before your clear . . . fogging . . . rheumy eyes.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry.
And the musicians and authors you’ve loved
seem to be dropping like dragonflies.
Foster Wallace, Zevon, Petty,
Toni Morrison, Prince, Winehouse, Reed,
Kaput, no longer cranking them out,
Deaf to the doo-da-doo-a-doohs of the colored girls.
And who in the hell are these movie stars
in the paper celebrating birthdays today?
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry.
Quit your whining, boomer, time’s a-wasting,
beneath a mountain of books you haven’t read.
No use crying over spilt water bowls,
inevitability.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry.
You Do Hoodoo 
