DM
153
Phil Carriere
Poetry
On a Park Bench at Fifty
The colors laughed at my birth,
the baleful blues, slow burning browns,
haughty blacks and quickened yellows,
the splashing encompassing reds
and in between were the monotones of birth and death.
I wandered hearing symphonies of light
before I turned and walked back –
took lessons from the elves and olives,
birches bending and bear baiting.
It was a windless surfing down tall tumbling waves.
It’s hard to ignore the crusted dishes
in the blood spotted sink,
the squirrels last bit of flesh clinging to the street,
the bird’s eggs splattered in the drive.
These designs of broken promises abound
and it is hard to hear so much singing.
Voices, like time, just move away
forever lost, forever just a hint of living.
In the mind so much lost remains,
and children do not feed the seedlings
planted with care along the way.
The battered man on the empty bench
watches the innocence curl into a ball
hiding, always hiding, from elimination.
Ode to a Human Condition
You look so comfortable
your coffin in repose:
See the face relaxed
the arms flung into a cross –
are you hearing Elysian songs?
Or stand at heaven’s gate
assured of entrance by your works
so earthly in your grace?
Are you anxious to achieve
comfort in your place?
I know that green in growing
you shook the world
and warred at serious pace
with all who challenged
and all who, with innocence,
watched your oh so human race.
I know that time was not relaxed
and comfort not your style
but some unfathomable goal
that now you have achieved.
There is no challenge on your head
no furled brow of dread,
but I am not so sure that I
wouldn’t rather walk alive
in those very chains of desire.
Nebraska Alfalfa
He was lost in the alfalfa
being cut, wired, swung
into the back of an ancient
but knowledgeable red ford truck.
The heat baked into the day;
the sweat drizzled, ran, splashed
like sharp wire
into his eyes.
The three kept it up till dusk;
until they couldn’t see well enough;
until their hearts were too wired
to push on.
The truck too was exhausted.
And if it rained the crop was lost.
And the gamble on tomorrow
a crushing way to live.
The Teacher
He would crouch or fly,
his arms carving into the dead still air,
trying to bring history and mysticism
and most words concise and clear
to the i-pad eyes of his students
And he would feel guilty with each grade
because that wasn’t what it was about
at all –
but condemned to climb that hill
feel that chain
to appease the gods
he would
Thousands had experienced the embarrassment
of his honesty
had seen the well so black and deep where he would
stand and sometimes weep
causing some unease and a few tweets
And a few thought something ancient about him
and some remembered later
and some never experienced a thing
and at the end of the semester
he would sit in his back yard
listening to the wind bring time
back to the world
and knew he would try again.
Sounds of the Self
(Morocco 1952)
I will fly now to the desert,
the land that wrapped me
In myself,
home to Hadush and Mohammed
who loved me as a planted twig,
who opened the dunes of my soul
and proclaimed me
in the Moroccan nights
honoring me with their living
and sustaining me in the dying
and the desperate.
I am journeying to my beginning
unafraid of the morning
when the light will fall
on the end.
Phil Carriere writes from South Carolina. (No relation; his people are from Canada, ours east of Wien.)