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.)