The Constancy of Blood

March 26 2019

The vein in his temple

was a coiled spring.

It throbbed with his flashing eyes

pumped as his jaw clenched.

Like a pressure gauge

it rose with his brain;

the agitation, the fire, the focus.

Before his hair receded, it had been hard to see,

but now, it rivets my gaze.

It seems only a matter of time

before the vein lets go,

its dilated wall

weakening,

a lifetime of wear

taking its toll.

How contingent we are

on the strength of attachment

between adjacent cells,

the thin cement containing us

a sudden single break.
On the constancy of blood,
its peak systolic thrust
the fire-hose rupture. 

More and more

I've been noticing the veins

in this age of rage and bluster;

the call-out culture

of the self-righteously pure.

And the tightly wound veins

in all our greying heads

like markers of mortality.

They are the inconspicuous fly

added to a portrait

as a small memento mori,

a caution of our common fate

a call to keep us humble.

I watch him at rest;

the clouded whites

of his rheumy eyes,

the tiny broken veins

in sun-ravaged skin,

the mottled red

of a turkey-wattled neck.

The angry vessel slackening,

and its kettle-drum pulse

slowing to the gentle brush

of soft melodic jazz.

Holding Up

March 13 2019

All one can hope

is that in the fullness of time
it will be said
his work holds up well.

So, is this too much to ask?

Unlike this driveway, cleared to the bone

that will soon fill up once more;

asphalt, glistening black

against the virgin snow.

Unlike this garden, dormant since fall

that will need the work of spring,

the weeding, re-seeding

repletion of soil.

Its forgotten carrots

left to rot

returning to the earth,

last year's kale, caught by frost

and left for fattening deer.

Unlike the routine chores

that are either doing or done

or waiting to be,

then need doing once more.

How the kitchen sink needs emptying

the rumpled beds made whole,

garbage bins go out-and-in

my well-trimmed beard re-grows.

So much of our days

spent holding our own;

running in place

as the world circles beneath us

and circles again,

regular as clockwork.

But will the words I wrote decades ago

hold up over time?

Or will I cringe

     . . . wish I could re-write

              . . . disown my younger self?

The consolation is

a poem is never really finished.

Is not even mine,

once I send it out into the world

and relinquish control.

If I learn this poem by heart

will it, too, grow old;

like me

its memory faltering

and a little lost?

As if memorization

could insure posterity.

As if the world

were not oblivious

to the ramblings of an old man.

To the words he long ago wrote

that even he forgot.

An Easy Winter

and a Hard Spring

March 13 2019

In a cruel March

under grey skies

cold rain saturates the snow.

I contemplate the long drudgery

of the coming thaw,

and can only imagine

firm footing, in place of mud,

green grass

and languorous sun.

When I recall that sudden blizzard

that interrupted fall

as I'd just begun to rake.

And how that heavy quilt of leaves

must have made a thick insulating layer

for the mice to over-winter,

a fine refuge

of subdued light and airy warmth

beneath those feet of snow.

Mice, in their cozy cushioned lairs

letting down their guard.

Mice, darting along the network of trails

which spring always uncovers,

dead brown grass

worn down

into tiny tufted furrows.

The way a mouse pauses,

sprinting nimbly, then stopping to sniff.

How its body quivers

as its heart races,

listening

for ever-present threats.

Fattening pups and fussy mothers

frail matriarchs and countless cousins

nibbling, excreting

mounting their mates.

How many generations

since that first sudden snow,

heedless of cats and birds and clever traps

in the leaf-litter, and dormant grass

out of sight and mind?

It's been a brutal winter,

but because I let the raking go

they have found a pleasant home.

Yet now

in the season of renewal and rebirth

they will find themselves exposed,

cold and wet and easy prey;

an exodus of frantic mice

as the snow melts

and frost penetrates the ground.

Armageddon, if mice had religion.

The law of zero sums

if they were inclined to philosophy.

But I see the cycle of life

and nature's harsh calculus.

That an easy winter

can be followed by a hard spring.

That the leaves might be left

but they still need raking,

heavy with wet

and cold as ice.

And whatever remains of home,

along with the sodden bodies

of dead mice

so small I hardly notice.

The Unknown Unknowns

March 7 2019

How to explain colour to a blind man

who was born into blackness.

To a world confined

to sound and smell

the length of an out-stretched arm.

To a singular sense of self,

the space his body occupies

when everything else

is surface.

To bruised shins, booby-trapped rooms,

the feel of skin

the schmeck of food.

To a beautiful face, in the mind's eye,

the brush of her lips

a sunset sky.

Or should I say absence, instead of blackness.

Because black is still a colour,

and if not a colour, then the lack of light

which means you must, at least, have seen light

to understand it.

Like a fish knows nothing of water,

until ripped from its place

into the thin air and dazzling sun

of the alien planet above.

Like an expanding universe

from constant earth,

where solid ground

is the same today

as it will be tomorrow

and we age too slowly to notice.

Physicists have no problem with this,

who say it's not that the universe is ballooning

into unoccupied space

but rather that space itself

is getting larger;

the distance separating things

the time it takes.

There is no intuition

by which one could make sense of this.

It is red

to a man who has no notion of light.

No concept of shadow and depth, colour and shade,

of black and white

degrees of grey.

Yet who moves about in space

navigating obstacles, comprehending shape.

Who reads by touch

and hears in 3 dimensions,

can smell fear's rancid funk.

I can only surmise

that I, also, am blind,

to inaccessible spectra

and wavelengths I don't even know I don't.

What a fine exercise in humility,

admitting my ignorance

the limits of the senses

how much is unknowable.

How I am blinded by the light

hallucinate in darkness.

How I see, but do not look

hear, but fail to listen.

Touch, but do not feel,

eat too greedily to savour.

And take in shallow breaths

heedless of smell.

In a press conference, former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld famously said this: because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. ... But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. He was ridiculed as a master of disinformation, misdirection, and obfuscation; and in the context of the Bush Administration's rationalizing the invasion of Iraq, this was a legitimate characterization.

But, of course, what he says is perfectly true, and actually a philosophically insightful observation into the nature of reality and the epistemological method. To admit that there are things “we don't know we don't know” takes a certain intellectual humility. This is the same discipline of mind that acknowledges that seeing isn't always believing, and that our understanding of reality is not only highly subjective, but also very possibly incomplete.

A very useful analogy to all this is the one in the poem: that just as a congenitally blind person cannot comprehend colour, there are probably things in the universe our minds are utterly unequipped to even conceive. Trying to imagine a blind person contending with colour is a useful exercise in the theory of mind. The theory of mind, at its most rudimentary, is the understanding that others perceive things differently than we do; and in a more sophisticated sense, is the attempt to understand and even inhabit another's subjective experience. So try imagining what the absence of vision is like. Or for a more demanding task, try imagining a blind person's struggle to conceive of colour. Or for an even more challenging task, try imagining your own struggle to convey to him the sensation of red. When there is no basis for understanding, no common language or shared experience, we are both left utterly in the dark: our realities unknowable, our minds impregnable, our interior lives a black box.

Goodness

March 5 2019

The driveway remained unshovelled.

There was something beautiful

about its unbroken surface,

carved by the stiff north wind

that tunnelled between the houses.

Like the smoothly flowing curves

of a finely finished sculpture

you feel compelled to touch.

The soft gradations

of moon-shadow and light.

The stillness

of undisturbed snow,

as if time could be held motionless

in this permanent cold.

But also something

that would offend the neighbourhood,

its pride of ownership

affection for order

impulse to conform.

The bourgeois sensibility

that keeps the grass trimmed

and retrieves the empty garbage bins

before the sun has set.

Where we believe in industriousness

and the virtue of work,

that neatness

is close to Godliness

and timely completion a test.

Straight lines, vertical banks

evenly angled turns,

fully cleared

so the dark asphalt shows.

This is how man carves out his space

from the chaos of winter

and tries to keep nature at bay.

And also how goodness

resurrects itself

from the daily news of cruelty and death

the incessant crush of event.

When circumstance called me away

for reasons I'd rather not say

and I returned to find it shovelled.

And found another sort of beauty

in that nicely manicured space;

in a cold relentless winter

an act of neighbourliness

for which no credit was ever claimed.

We nod politely

while often not knowing their names.

Recognize the dogs

who belong to each of us,

pay our taxes

give to trick-or-treaters.

But persist in turning up our noses

at cookie-cutter houses

and suburban cul-de-sacs,

fondly recalling

a vaguely bohemian past

and aspirations of greatness

we long ago let lapse.

Never imagining

it might be those same bourgeois values

that in the end 
turn out to save us.

Here's a link to the article that inspired this poem: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/telling-reactions-tales-amy-klobuchars-rage/584104/.

Except for the most wonkish political junkie, this will probably be meaningless to anyone who reads it later than the first few month of 2019 (who is Amy Klobuchar, and what were the Kananaugh hearings?!!).

Aside from absolutely loving Caitlin Flanagan's writing (“Irish Alzheimer’s (in which you forget everything but the grudges)” especially!), this is the paragraph that immediately propelled me up out of my easy chair and to the laptop.

When people speak derisively about “Minnesota nice,” it’s because they don’t understand the people and the place. It’s not niceness; it’s a form of radical politeness combined with an unshakeable and largely unexamined sense of obligation to one another. Klobuchar knew her family would survive the divorce when she trudged home from a friend’s house the morning after getting the bad news and saw her mother up and dressed and shoveling the driveway. In Minnesota, a shoveled driveway is both a winter necessity and an unmistakable sign to the community: We are okay in this house. If she had been too broken to do it, someone on that block would have surely done it for her. That, too, would have been an unmistakable sign: We won’t let you go under.

This was one of those poems that pretty much flowed from my keyboard as if taking dictation. Which not only tends to happen with the best poems, but which is an incredibly pleasurable feeling, one that keeps pulling one back to writing like that first heroin high pulls addicts back to try to regain that never reproducible first-ever narcotic rush.

Big Golden Sultanas

March 3 2019

When I was young

I would pick-out the raisins, one-by-one;

nose wrinkled, eye narrowed,

dissecting raisin bread

of its squooshy contaminants.

I think fastidiousness comes naturally

at that tender age,

when the tongue is not yet jaded

and the bitters taste more bitter

and big golden sultanas

are squishily suspect.

When a powerful sense of purity

orders our lives.

When we find constancy reassuring,

and seek-out fixed boundaries

to explain the world;

like the moat of gravy

walled-off by mashed potatoes,

peas and carrots

not permitted to touch.

I did not know, when I was young

that raisins were descended from grapes

prunes the progeny of plums.

But was put off by both;

concentrated food, in a wrinkled container

that was unlike other fruit

and came from who-knows-where.

That seemed more the stuff of old people,

with their liver-spotted hands

and oddly medicinal smell.

But if I closed my eyes

raisin toast was irresistible,

its crisp caramelized surface

buttered gold,

soft centre

sweet and moist.

And as I am now old myself

I have less regard for purity,

more tolerance

for the ambiguous and complex.

Because I have learned from evolution

that diversity confers resilience.

And because taste has taught me

that difference is salt,

a pinch

improving almost every dish.

That sweetness complements bitter,

and who wouldn't wish

to be the hot habanero

in a pot of slow-cooked stew.

Fresh grapes

in their deep purple skins

are turgid, juicy, perishable;

like fleeting youth, soon past their prime.

While dark brown raisins

are durable and wizened and dry.

Each deeply wrinkled exterior

as unique as each of us.

Such pleasing resistance

soft and firm, at once.

The concentrated sweetness

and hints of early wine

that can only come

in the fullness of time.