Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Friday Poem: "Elegy for Two Friends Who Died One Night Rowing off Brighton Beach"

Elegy for Two Friends Who Died One Night Rowing off Brighton Beach

I am on the beach
Beyond my eye’s reach
They are drowning
In the grave Atlantic

One lurch and salmon-like
They climb toward death
Or twist perhaps like
Toothpicks in the drain
Or from their heaving boat
Drop doll-like into darkness

Or not dead  sucked into a bottle
Embracing blindly on a wave
To hurtle full throttle
Upon the astonished shore
And rise surprised at all
The dreamy faces
Leaning close to read
The message in the glass

**********************

Sixteen is neither soon nor late
To take the measure of one’s fate
It is a time like any other
For virgin to have death as lover

The ocean coughed them up like phlegm
And spread the seaweed that was them
Upon another resting place
Where stood no kind familiar face

Brave boys who walked the ocean floor
Year over year I mourn you more
And wait upon the Brighton sand
To see your rowboat greet the land

                      Coda

Words will not serve to heal the heart
Nor will Death cringe because of art
Here lies no lesson to retail
Our disquisitions doomed to fail

ca.4/94, 12/8/94, 3/15/98, 12/20, 12/25-26/99,1/4, 1/20/00, 1/24-1/26/00, 2/21-2/24/00, 4/24/00, 3/31/06

Copyright 1994, 2006 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Ebbets Field"

Ebbets Field

(for Samuel)

When I was not yet a teen
I’d ride the elevated line
Downtown from Sheepshead Bay
To doubleheaders
At old Ebbets Field
Where Brooklyn used to be

The night before
I’d prepare my cucumber
And American cheese sandwiches
Then sleep nervous and expectant
Some days the morning brought rain
And I sat soaked in sadness

But there were sunny days
Aglow and cozy in the upper deck
Floating fervent with the crowd
My sandwiches warm and sweet
Rich and juicy as life
And time but the space between pitches

5/26-6/4/05

Copyright 2005 by Maurice Leiter.

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "I Must Learn"

I Must Learn

I must learn new words
And new ways to say them
Raise myself above myself
To gaze down sagely

I must be done with dignity
I must be wrong at last
I must give quarter
And let the past pass

I must educate myself
To love the hypocrites
I must when wrestling angels
Let them pin me flat

I must concede the battle
Commence to build the peace
I must not harbor grievances
Nor will I brood or grieve

I must liberate myself
From petty pissy things
I must perfect my piety
Also I must grow wings

4/24-4/26/98, 8/28-9/2/99, 9/14-9/18/99, 5/19-5/22/00

Copyright 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "The Chosen"

The Chosen

I am on line at the choosing
Rehearsing what I will say
Clutching my flimsy resume
Desperate to be accepted

I approach the admission table
A rank of judges behind it
I wither under their solemn stare
What am I doing here

I offer my folder to one
Who passes it right then left
Some snicker others look bored
I feel discovered laid bare

So you would be a chosen one
Have you been hungry or oppressed
Have you ever been close to death
Faced by injustice what did you risk

Ever been tortured made to recant
Have you done anything to rein evil in
Again and again my answer was no
And I knew that I could not win

Your papers say only you feel for them
For that you expect us to let you in
A general laughter accompanied this
I shrank and wished it would end

The spokesman returned my papers to me
And signaled for me to move on
Come back when they’ve killed you
He said then perhaps we will see

late ’95, 2/2/96, 2/5-2/9/98, 5/13/98, 7/5/98

Copyright 1996, 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "As It Was"

As It Was

The liberal lady’s voice dropped to a whisper
As she spoke words she thought controversial
Why whisper I said in a voice seemly but loud
You are not the only American against this war
(A woman passing turned toward me and smiled)
The lady seemed embarrassed  I often feel alone
You are not I answered you are among the majority
Let your voice be heard and others will join you
She looked away I hope you’re right she whispered

3/9-3/11/06

Copyright 2006 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "The Ballerina Has No Sex"

The Ballerina Has No Sex

The ballerina has no sex
She is the color of the brushstroke
On the canvas of the dance
She is the dance’s every instrument
She is both calculus and chance

She is the body possible
The form that follows art
Her pause is movement’s memory
Her motion is its sound
Where she stops the center
The spot she leaves the void

She is the music’s measure
Her silence is its core
She whirls it flows with pleasure
She trembles and it falls
She bends her sloping torso low
Extends a languid curling arm
And with a pointed satin toe
Brings coherence to the whole

She it is we cannot know
We who think we watch a show

8/31/95-1/1/96, 2/6/98, 9/7/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Brecht You Would Understand"

Brecht You Would Understand

Brecht you would understand
Why I cannot forgive your country

It is only a little longer
Until the living memories will pass
When the unforgiven will forget
What they were presumed to have done
Their place will be another place
The old grey faces will be gone
And those who watch will scratch and doubt

And you mother
Who did not preach the cause
You would not have minded
Minded very much
That I not forgive my country
Knowing what has been said

Children whose flame is clean and bright
I tell you what you will not like
I would bear witness to all this
But I am witness only to myself
I have not suffered I confess
Have worn the emblems of well-being
In the safety of ordinary threats
My life like a long flirtation
Full of benign diversion

For me especially no forgiveness

The kitchen walls are white
The white floor gleams like a dinner plate
White guilt upon white walls
And on the stove
The pot is black
The kettle black

See what we are

7/6-7/8/95

Copyright 1995 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Missing Person"

Missing Person

At tax time I discharge my obligation
To whatever grateful nation
Is inclined to let me be

Myself I arouse no interest
My correspondents are computers
That sense an affinity

My calls are all wrong numbers
For a stranger named Maurice
Who’s not at all like me

Yesterday I returned from traveling
(But where could I have been)
My mailbox moldy my phone at liberty

If only that dog would stop barking
I’d be able to write in peace
My subject anonymity

After a while I’ll phone somebody
To find out who I am
I wonder who I’ll be

In America a lonely man
Can always report himself missing
It’s what they mean by free

3/16-4/29/95, 7/19/96, 5/28/97, 6/10/98

Copyright 1995, 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Death Confronted"

Death Confronted

As a courtesy I confront Death
In person trying to explain
My determination not to die
As you may imagine it is impossible
To engage in dialogue with Death
For as often as one personifies it
Death remains an ineffable abstraction
At best a bit of nomenclature

Nevertheless I proceed as if Death existed
But I do so without deference
I am firm I am indignant
I even threaten a bit
Knowing it will make no difference
Nor do I actually give reasons
(It is Death that owes us reasons)
In any case any list of objections
Would quickly embrace the maudlin
Say only I’ve put Death on notice

Death of course does not hear me
Death is deaf
In any case it is busy elsewhere
Everywhere for that matter
Sucking up multitudes
Emptying whole villages
Spiriting (sic) away the drowned
Prowling in hospitals alleys prisons
In fields where fat Generals
Build plump earthy mounds
It sweeps away a newborn
(There I  become maudlin)
The feeble the precious the worthless
Philanthropists I understand (but poets?)

Bursting with cadavers
Death insatiable bulimic
Knows nothing of my whining
My execration of mortality
My idiotic intention
To obstinately decline

I go on railing
Defending this life
Cloaked in my armor of anger
Grinding the stubborn marrow
Of each newborn tomorrow
As if it were an afterlife

12/16-12/19/00

Copyright 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "120 Year-Old Woman Now Famous"

120 Year-old Woman Now Famous

An article I’ve read
describes the ‘oldest old’
eighty-five and up
our fastest-growing group
measured in per cent

It seems that aging’s curve of pain
levels off and settles back
once we’ve avoided being slain
by the darkling middle-late
sixth and seventh decades of our wait

Nothing in the story
illuminates their state
their views on loving
their epiphanies their arts
but much on Medicare all parts

What we are offered are not dreams
but a table of diseases
a graph of when they strike
a map of when we’re certain
to be dying or the like

In the floodlight of decline
a mere ten years into fame
the world’s oldest person
with nothing on her mind
is content to bide her time

I think of Schubert
who was hardly here
and of Faure’s bright Trio
rising out of pain

6/11-7/11/95, 1/28/96, 1/27/06

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Lessons of History"

    Lessons of History

It was thirty or forty years ago
But I still remember the day he spoke
This president of a giant company
And arrogant because of it
What’s good for General Motors
he boasted is good for America

In a legislative inquiry
He had been caught red-handed
Trying to destroy the reputation
Of a young man who challenged his company
At the time it seemed an historic moment
And the young man’s career rocketed
Later we realized nothing had changed

But imagine my feelings this morning
When I read an article in the Times
About powerful men in Russia
Now that capitalism has been installed

A media mogul stuffed with money
Puffed with the same pride as that other
Pronounced that business embraced everything
And here he’s quoted what’s good for business
He said is also good for Russia

Have we not met this barbarian before
Who remembers only what flatters
Small consolation for the Russian people
Innocent of what’s in store for them

3/19-3/29/97, 5/11/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Bukhara"

Bukhara

Follow the silk road unwinding
To a place of plentiful surprises
Where no one inquires or surmises
In which language you’re declining

Here the click of abacus arises
Near gowns impersonating Madras
Oh do not dare to ask the address
Just don a costume join the fracas

Does it really matter in this riot
If words emerge cacaphonous or tonic
When the world’s rush is supersonic
Only the catatonic long for quiet

Why even Khan’s famous deadly Tower
Dips camellike respecting tourist power
And all that fall amid the crying
Are mere daguerreotypes of dying

The jade rivers overflow tricolored
With cologne to lave on startled lovers
And throat-singers breathlessly catarrhal
Celebrate this life without a moral

Come morning we awaken darkly chastened
And vowing an end to lamentation
Flee to Tashkent or perhaps Bukhara
On bristles of laughter harsh as horror

10/23-12/16/96, 1/31/98
(based on Michael Mewshaw’s 10/26/96
NYTimes travel piece)

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Let Nothing In But Art"

Let Nothing In But Art

Let nothing in but art

Ignore the temporal
Daily doings atrophy
The muscle of purpose

Rather than grapple flee
Dart like the doe
Dodge like the eel

Defy encumbrance
Nothing bought is something freed
Density hardens the spirit

Abandon enumeration
Numbers gather like mourners
Records make caskets of our days

Shut the door to dreams

4/94-1/21/95, 2/10/98, 3/15, 3/30/98, 5/27/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "It Is Madness"

It Is Madness

It is madness   No one watches over us
We will moulder like the rest of nature
Lonely forever and forever mortal

Is it not enough to test the mettle
Of the weeping soul enough to make us
Hide in love’s dungeon or wed the fat lies
Of money while deaf to subjugation

Still it brings relief from worship’s magnet
From the sacramental metaphors of death
And we are freed from the dreary bondage
Of incarceration by tomorrow

No longer obliged to make provision
For a transmigration to another place
Descending instead to a certain end

Yes it is madness to be sane at last

9/14-9/30/98, 10/17-18/98    

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Magdalena"

Magdalena

Bending at the hip
she wipes the toilet seat
Then on her knees
Washes out the bowl
I wonder at her speed
Her gait her stride
The breeding in it
Her knuckling into dirt
Without a word
Her equanimity
whatever task I make

She tells me of Chile
“My country” as she says
And of a family
That works the earth
To whom she sends
A share of what she earns
I’ve come to know
Her vicissitudes
Her dreams her ways
Her pleasure in her boy
Who goes to Fordham Prep
The man who did not
Treat  her right
Whom she left behind
The seven days she spends
Pursuing bread

At Christmas I gesture
Out of obligation
Yet striving to be kind
And give a gift of cash

Then pausing weigh a thought
And reaching to a bookshelf
I bring Neruda forth
And offer it to her

She takes it to her breast
Her smile improves the light
“This is my Christmas” she says

It makes a fool’s heart leap

5/21-7/11/95, 6/l8/96, 1/26/98, 5/12/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "In the Examining Room"

In the Examining Room

The Minister of Health
is down the hall
in a room like this
(except for me)
I swing my legs
from my table perch
as omens rich
with immanence
infiltrate my mind

Voices soak
through wallboard dikes
the problems are not nice
ailing terms
their crowded names
recalcitrant to tact
but no one breaks
the protocol of fact
with passion torn from need

An old woman
smaller than her life
tows slowly by
on walker stilts
her passage past
my doorway lens
a paraphrase of
Zeno’s paradox
her days made brief
by space not time

Obituary calm
from room to room
despair elation
side by side
their vigil played
for Certainty
who’s hard to find
even Death
is dressed in doubt

Some moments more
a word a sign
the crumpled fear
that goes unsaid
this way the living
that the dead

And when I’m done
and sent along
they’ll change
the paper sheet
on which I sat
and that will be
the end of me
the end of that

10/25/94

Copyright 1994 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "I Have Served My Country"

I Have Served My Country

I have served my country daily in the faithfulness of folly
Weighed the hard choices which I was careful not to make
Offering my willing cowardice in the face of public nonsense
Layering abstinence and sarcasm in its wake

Surreptitiously declining to honor rituals of polity
Vagrant on Election Day generally in disregard of fealty
Harboring the conviction that all our rules are rancid
And even at the risk of sadness keeping sour truth at hand

The times that I was harmless although few are thorough
The days I overslept and hardly meddled so many
And many times I cleaned my  plate gaily gladly
Thankful for the luxury of being left alone

Out of complexity of principle I turn my back on beggars
And although somewhat ambivalent sneer aloud at money
Nor have I permitted piety to trespass on my thinking
But have listened to the sermonizers with mind averted

And tolerate dull statesmen those most pernicious poseurs
Dreaming like every condemned man to secretly outlive them
All in all I’ve led a blameless life if life you’d call it
And am ready if they need me to hide where they’ll not find me

9/11-9/13, 9/24, 12/5/98, 5/20, 12/19-20, 12/24-12/26/99

Copyright 1999 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday poem: "I Am Knocking"

I Am Knocking

I am knocking on doors
soliciting knowledge
how elegant English
greets me in silence

I am dancing with words
amazed at my power
wonder of language
I speak only nonsense

I am probing the depths
my limits to fathom
magical voice says
no bottom to bottom

I am wearing a suit
not to be noticed
blessing of charity
anyway naked

I am staying inside
prisoner of conscience
kindly my neighbors
board up the door

I am facing the mirror
to see who I am
munificent fortune
cancels the light

8/24-11/12/96

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Becalmed"

Becalmed

Night descends on whining knees
The reckless children roam below
Fearless as ants though less purposeful
Prolonging their giddy play in
An epiphany of youth and death

A purple wine upon the shallow hills
Historic Hudson nuzzling by the land
Becalmed in Tarrytown as I too am
Seeking music’s absolution for my silence
Bach’s thirty variations on a smile
My sole companions in retreat
I know my life is incomplete

Elsewhere when I choose to listen
The wounded howl the hungry moan
In tongues I dare not understand
I feel their plight but not their grief
Instead guilt nestles close at hand
I call it my inheritance
Here in my safe encampment
Powerless and exempt

What would it take to fire my blood
Now slow as doubt and coursing cold
How might I raise refusal to an art
And learn to cast denial out

But here the blinds are neatly shut
And I in fictive consolations bound
Nightly dally with my electric slut
Who strokes my twitching conscience

I have heard the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Music for an age of discontent
Which spends its failing hours
Divining what the god of evil meant
I fear it is beyond my ken
Not how my last days are bent

Oh old young now then
Sad happy women men
Whom I must touch before I die
No music can redeem me

1/6-7/9/95, 12/15-12/16/95, 4/8/98, 6/11/98, 7/12/98, 8/9-8/10/98, 6/23/00

Copyright 1995, 1998, 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Instant Lottery"

Instant Lottery

To begin the day’s long squander
She visits the lottery counter
And buys a moment’s wonder
Scratching the candied colors
Her instant gloss of loss

Perhaps another hour
There’ll be manna as nirvana
But now the dark clouds glower
And cloak this fading flower
In longing’s hungry power

Oh tomorrow tomorrow
Lift the pennies of her sorrow
From the clutter of her brow
And shower her with brightness
Deliver her from now

9/28-12/30/97, 1/14/98            

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Had I Only"

Had I Only

Lacking languages I stumble
in the darkness of translation
finding satisfaction second-hand

Here is Cavafy soft-spoken subtle
speaking free of affectation
or so it seems in this translation
said to be exemplary by many

But the curtain of my ignorance
keeps me from truly knowing him
nor is his work the sole example

When I can I read their words
en face glean what shreds I’m able
but surely this mongrel apprehension
will affect the way I think
about my native English
and eccentrically alter my expression

Have I not joked with mordant humor
that my poetry reads as if translated
from one of those selfsame languages
that will not let me in

Once I thought if I were given
my life to undertake again
I’d spend my second chance pursuing
those women known this time only
in the pale fantasy of admiration

But what would I say to them
and honestly what would it matter
to me whose cravings are Cavafy’s Greek
Vallejo’s Spanish the German of Celan
Tsvetayeva’s Russian Pessoa’s Portuguese
Bengali of Tagore Czech of Seifert

For as much as I have desired women
I desire more to seduce the languages of those
who touched me through translation’s rustling veil

Too late I see my life’s great error

3/l9-3/28/97

Copyright 1997 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Halloween"

             Halloween

These small ones’ parrotings defy decoding
Is it trick or treat they chime
Or other dark forebodings

Such papered ghosts and lacquered bones
Sporting masks in trendy tones
Leave Celts and Christians fuddling

Each portal rent expands their baggy bloat
They bunch in doorways chastely lit
As tightly smiling faces weary for repose

Greet the thinly timorous
Tolerate the giddy bold
And lay upon them munchy offerings

Ask not the moment’s meaning
Do not probe the source
The minions rove the shrubby lawns

Agape at take and give
Their phalanx gobbling grove on grove
Our goodly children in the drove

A faithful night to banish grief
To harvest fantasy’s relief
From labors lost and spent belief

Bemused madness keeps us well
We watch the dead extend their spell
With flesh of nougat juice of caramel

10/15-10/31/95, 1/28, 3/6/96

Copyright 1996 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Centuries of Lexicographers"

       Centuries of Lexicographers

Centuries of lexicographers
Burrowers compulsives
Eavesdroppers drudges
Root-diggers foragers of
Utterance and script

Unacknowledged invisible
Ordinary perhaps in other ways
But you have scaled the anatomy
Of language   its shy nerves
Frail capillaries obscure tissues

So that this morning
In search of meaning or suggestion
I may rummage in my OED
Discovering through opportunity
Intentions bursting from my words

Lexicographers Johnsonian or mad
What harrowing tillage without you
Absent your ardor for order and nuance
The kindling of your midwife’s vigil
This appanage of the gossamer of art

9/2-9/7/00, 10/9/05
Copyright 2000, 2005 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Days Like This"

                                 Days Like This

Days like this I wait for inspiration clearing my mind of calculation
    of desire of ambition especially fleeing from numbers/ I practice patience
I think good thoughts of things that seem to matter and I frown steadily on the
    trivial which cowers in a closet
I think of my tiny grandson who is himself inspired who speaks only enough
    to marshal action/ I envy him his economy of language his  authority over a
    world of giants
I think of my grown sons who are polar on the compass and of the mysterious
    architecture of  becoming that bifurcates my nature into theirs yet preserves
    the authenticity of all of us/ I think of it in wonder
I think of my ‘found’ children into whose garden I have stumbled of the nest
    in which I imagine them waiting to be fed and when I do not think of them
    as birds I think of them as flowers
I think of stolid summer all around us women’s bodies lightly covered infants
    naked in pools of shining water and of their mothers shepherding their
    harvest of lambs/  I think of expectation
I think of the weight of longing of its faces and voices/ of those longings
    doomed to failure of longings out of the wishfulness of sorrow of the 
    longings I  will bury with my name the longings that will tick in me forever
I think of women neutrally with quiet pleasure as befits my twilight legacy
    and of their beauty even in imperfection of their permanence in the heart’s
    treasure and especially of those who were willing to grant me shelter
I think of loneliness and I hope it thinks of me/ lonely since the first parting
    partings which have multiplied to many
I think of poets beneath an alphabet of burdens soaking in a river of memories
    I admire the clamor they raise in the face of death and silence I think of
    Vallejo Valery Cavafy I think of all the others
Days like this I wish I were touching someone’s hand or lips or supple waist
    I wish I had not joined my character and its fate I wish I had been another
    unaffected by this uncertain fire/ less riven less guilty less ashamed
Dense days like this under the inexorable hum of air conditioners/ sheltered
    from the pestilence of heat my soul abandons my body and I forget I am a
    simple man/ days like this I wait for joy to ask me in for events to turn my
    way for the words to be found to inject consolation into my frame and allow
    me some abatement
I think of this I think of more thinking through my long tunnel of recollection
    and thinking through my full firmament of deeds and while thinking I write
    these words waiting to be emancipated or enslaved writing perhaps from
    loss of nerve or from exhausted patience I write these words without the
    gloss of inspiration from some vestigial reserve of dumb determination
    I write these words hoping to be heard
   
6/25-6/30/98 

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Forgotten Not"

Forgotten Not

Street whose image I unlock
Bat from kidnapped household mop
Its dangling hairpiece neatly lopped
Rubber ball with heart of kangaroo
Pink as birth and always true
Borrowed glove that served for two
Old vacant lot that had no name
And all the boys who running came
Their voices ringing round the block
That held our private hall of fame

I want them back I have no shame
I want to see my curve unfurl
Caress the sculpted sewer top
Elude that naked dancing mop
And curl with triumphant pop
Into that friendly magic slot
That grinning squats behind the plate

I want to feel my body brace
And bend its endless store of grace
Into the wind before my face
And watch it send that ball of flame
To scald the sky and win the game

I want another crack at fate
To shake the sign that means too late
To shun the catcalls of the crowd
And arbiters of what’s allowed

That nameless space still holds my spot
My hand still wears that faithful glove
And days I warm its skin with love
And nights I trot that empty lot

Forgotten not forgotten not

5/3-5/28/95

Copyright 1995 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Man's Hand"

Man’s Hand

Before turning away
                                 sometimes I stare
at limbless beggars
with their crayoned cardboard signs

Down on my Luck

Luck                   or
dread design of
a world made by men

Follow this life
back to its beginnings
whom shall we find
what beast disclose
who ravages the crib

Man’s work
man’s hand in all things

7/31/94-2/24/95, 6/29/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Reprinted with permission

Friday Poem: "Cars"

Cars

I, in my poor Beetle—80,000 miles run—
Wait at the East Flatbush red light
In drizzle and dusk.
Before me
Black limousine of Cadillac renown
License plate—a lucid “State Assembly 3.”

It is the most shiny car
Much importantly smooth.
It gleams upon me, upon the street—
Very opulent aura its—

Sir, you are the public servant,
I, the public.
How be it thus
That you embrace
The grace of riches,
I the austere wheels?

Ride we a riddle?

Copyright 2001 by Maurice Leiter (originally written in the 1970s)

Reprinted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Audience"

Audience

The soul is a fiction
The body soon will be
And all of remembrance
Is sorrow’s invention

Existence betrays us
Before we begin
Our lives premonition
Of void and negation

This to my grandson
Lying chin to chin
Who listens intently
Then grins his toothless grin

4/17-4/19, 7/12/97, 7/5/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Reprinted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Belated Poem for My Birthday"

Belated Poem for My Birthday

                 1

Though life is short
I continue to have birthdays
(Pardon please this vain defiance)

My children are now the age of my dreams
My grandchildren defy gravity

The lives I have assisted into being
Do not belong to me

The irretrievable is unforgiving
But memory remains fragrant nevertheless
Keeping lost pleasure fresh

What I no longer possess I can spare
I will learn to spare what remains

The future a narrowing pavement
The past an endless twine
Each night my last my only

Two lives for each of us
The one perceived by others
The other one you know
Which do you call your own
Which face the mirror in your hand

Evil is always prosaic
Truth is made precious by lies

                   2

Now on the cusp of my ultimate deprivation
Death ready to bear witness
I assemble my armies of words

I take credit for nothing
I thrive on the natural
Hypocrisy of my race

I am the inhabitant of echoes
My conversation a halo round a wound
I beat the bushes for my youth
Stolen while I napped

Speak to me from among the living
From a childhood grown thin and faint
Let me hear its whiny plaint
Across my Bay’s long nave
Where the smooth-faced sailors played
And innocence awash in sunlight
Thought wit brave

I have been a knave

The rest has been repentance

4/24/00, 5/19-5/23/00
Copyright 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Reprinted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Auschwitz Sonata"

Auschwitz Sonata

There a star
Now a random cloud
Night splays its coward’s
Sheet of black
Across the boneyard stack
And path of good bone made

We mime our marche funebre
Above the fissured nave
Brow of mother seed of lover
Furrows in the shade

And we go on
And we are brave

6/l6-6/22/95

Copyright 1995 by Maurice Leiter

Reprinted with permission.

Friday Poem: "In Memory of Randolph Bourne"

In Memory of Randolph Bourne

                               I
When I read, “War is the health of the State,”
I did not realize he had summarized our history.

This morning his bent body hovers still
His crisp mind the wing of his wound.

Beyond the sunlight that his candor casts
The insatiable the over-confident rise ranting.

Now nothing left but war--peace’s chance past—
“War no more” buried by the traumatic moment.

The chilly State chokes the reveries of infants,
A shocked system bans their nascent dreams.

                              II
Unaware my grandson pronounces his sweet
Intention to be a scientist and study dinosaurs.

Samuel, new dinosaurs await you.
They rumble in the bushes as you rest,

They clog the alleys with political deceit,
Bloated by the helium of arrogance.

These Goths in suits abound graceless
Prowling the Disneyland of tampered truth.

                              III
How shall we bear those born-again to terror
And revenge, borne as we are by Bourne’s
Dark curse upon our brooding landscape?

I am unsafe.
My dozing shelter vibrates like the Earth’s dense plates:
I watch the illitocracy of Power commence fresh graves.

11/30-12/02, 12/17, 12/22-12/25/01, 1/1, 1/10-12/02

Copyright 2002 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Chance"

Chance

Astonished by everything I read even crap
Amazed by the mathematics of diversity
And the accidents which language in perversity
Condemns to utterance beneath my ailing pen
Leaving  me the most uneloquent of men

Still the logos of chance inspires me
What chance that you and I as strangers
Will in a lifetime write the same poem or
That on one day all poems will be the same
Words layout punctuation such as it is

Better what is the chance on one day
Of l80 identical letters to the New Yorker
Being opened by drones peripheral to the hive
Each seeing the same poem many times over
As if although unintended some conspiracy

(Oh not another sheltered poem on poverty
Or one that feigns a labored true confession
Not some simple academic’s moral lesson
Or the giddy prance of post-modern obfuscation
Nor some diagram of heaven gilded by elation)

Say it is accepted even as a lark
A flight of poets sharing recognition
Splitting the fee granting the rights
Noting publication in their precious vitae
Reprinting later in a chapbook by them all

But do not let the lawyers near them
That class of souls of matching mintage
Who’ll carbon-date each scribble’s vintage
So they may litigate first authorship forever
Each brief  no doubt the same as every other


3/l-3/5/95, 6/9-6/l0/96, 12/30/97, l/l4/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Silence"

   Silence

Akhmatova’s silence
Burning her words
Tsvetayeva’s silent rope
The silence of poets
And those not poets
Wherever black crepe is hung

The silence of being
Heavy beyond hearing
The silence of mirrors
And walls without doors
The silence within silence
That hurries past knowing

Celan silent in the Seine
Lorca’s silent blood
Vallejo’s silence sobbing
Trakl’s silent flow
Beethoven’s silent moat
The silence drowning words

And the hypocrite silence
Of the bourgeois
Who genuflects in silence
To idols of silent dust
A silence so amazing
Even silent when he speaks

The coward’s riskless silence
Silent as held breath
The silence of backs turning
Complicity’s silence burning
And the silence of the traitors
Who slew the silent dead

And the huddled silent boxes
In suburbs soft as bread
As silent as the ashes
That fill the silent air
And silent acquiescence
As silent as forgetting

10/30/96, 2/9-2/14/97, 2/8/98, 5/27/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "Certainty"

   Certainty

Not what I tell
But what I’m told
And the faith I posit
The trust I deed the source

And if another time
When thought was young
The map an artist’s
The sea a well

The sky a ceiling
The earth a platter
And storm a semaphore
Beyond decipher

See then my certainty
My confidence my science
And my glib alliance
With mystery and lore

Am I not lucky now
Knowing so much more
Certain of what’s waiting
Behind tomorrow’s door

But what if it’s a garden
And serpents like before

2/12-3/13/97, l/18/98, 7/12/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poems: "Eleemosynary Theme," "Atrocities," "Mythology," "Query from Sir Francis," "They Said"

(As it happens, there were many apt ones available for the occasion.  All are posted with permission.)

Eleemosynary Theme

To save a life
What meaning in the phrase

If but a whim to pass the days
A far-off thought hardly brave

Yet others do for us
And others strive

While we sequestered
Merely thrive

Observe the naked
As they burn

Provide some clothing
Or an urn

Seek consolation in the shade
Afraid afraid afraid afraid

Copyright 1995 by Maurice Leiter

=================================

Atrocities

“Raging tempo….Wild….
Beauty of tone secondary”
(a movement notation in
Hindemith’s Solo Viola
Sonata-Op 25 #l l922)

Atrocities unfolding
in Sunday’s Times
browsed at breakfast
late in July
my walls intact
water ready at the tap
silence broken only by pets
pavement unbroken where people pass

I crunch my Grape Nuts
to Hindemith riffs
the viola massaging
my abstract fear

Tonight a film
on prosthetic devices
shows an armless Croatian
not twenty-one
patiently learning
the prosthete’s trade
courtesy of a hand grenade
it’s meant to uplift us
to see him so brave
I deem it correct to doubt

I write    my hand steady
then head for the john
where I piss exactly
guiding the stream
flush matter-of-factly
soap my hands clean
scratch my scalp deftly
continue my scheme

(If I walked out
on the streets of Sarajevo
would anyone care
if mortar or fragment
parted my hair
would they report it
or look for me there)

Here in my outpost
on top of the world
my dinner digested
I breath the cool air
away from the raging
safe from the wild
I try to imagine
their fate as my share

I cannot imagine
their fate as my share

7/23-7/25/95, 1/26/98
Copyright 1995, 1998 by Maurice Leiter

=================================

Friday Poem: "The Children"

     The Children

Their arms enfolded him
Their faces opened wide
They drank him with their eyes
He smothered in their trust

No no he pleaded
You must not think of love
Here see my heart’s ashes
My spirit’s moat of dust

But they did not listen
Nor falter in their thrust
Hugged instead his sorrow
And cried you must you must

6/10-6/19/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Friday Poem: "Best of Times"

Best of Times

These being the best of times I speak to you as spoilsport 
 
Though the day is bright I bring you shadows and harbingers
   
In prosperity’s face I flaunt tatters and castaways

In our finest hour the sun grinning I recommend sorrow
   
I recommend dreams more tormenting than insomnia
   
I recommend guilt anxiety premonitions dread

These I put before you claiming no originality

For truthfully all that I offer you already have

5/9-5/12/00

Copyright 2000 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Friday Poem: "We Know the News"

     We Know the News

We know the news
It is not necessary to publish it
We know that humans are beasts
Up close or at a distance
Face to face or faceless

We carry this knowledge most of our days
Sometimes it bends us
Sometimes it drives men mad
Sometimes it gives pleasure
For we are after all beasts

Children do not know this at once
The unfortunate are early learners
We can see it gnarl them
Gnaw their souls’ virginity
Annul the memory of joy

No one will take responsibility for this
Always others are blamed
Some too remote to contemplate
Some already dead
Some not even real

None of those about whom we are certain
Are among those named
Nor can there be any demand for justice
For even the blamers are not blameless
We might as well seek punishment for ourselves

5/30-6/12/05
Copyright 2005 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.