Respite
All the wine has now gone flat
and the carpet’s crusted with candle wax
the fireplace is burning its last warm light:
we finally poisoned the captain tonight.
All the rolls went stale and hard
the meat’s now tough, even the lard
but it was worth it still to make the meal:
tomorrow is all we want to steal.
We’ll dream our dreams as we sleep in
and welcome our own decisions again.
Have a beer at noon and dance till late
then fix the new captain’s breakfast plate.
Pact
Back in a high school where I knew no one
and nothing of protocol in my first year,
we went over Spanish grammar in first period
with Señor DiBernardo, former gold-medalist
with the Argentinian national soccer team.
You’d ask him, “Did you play with Pelé?”
And he’d respond, “No—
Pelé played with me.” One day,
going over homework on familiar phrases,
he said the correct answer to number nine--
“every day”—was “todos los días,” or
all of the days. I raised my hand.
“Sí?” He called to the kid in the back
with big ears and crooked teeth,
shorts stopping too high above the knee.
“Wouldn’t ‘cada día’ work?” I asked. “Each day?”
He grimaced and looked at the ceiling,
bottom lip almost pulling up over
his shiny brown skull. “It works,
but isn’t heard often. Don’t use it.”
So through three years of
undergraduate classes on a language
I still can’t hear, I said “todos los días:”
everyday. Once, too long after,
I read a poem by Pablo Neruda
(an undergraduate writing professor once
told me she learned Spanish translating him)
called “Alianza.” “Pact.” In the Spanish version,
on the left-hand page,
he says this: “únicamente voz,
únicamente desnuda
cada día”
translated on the right-hand page as
“nothing but voice,
nothing but naked
everyday.”
Fourteen
Fourteen lines is all you need,
fourteen lines to harrow the seed,
to ride the sun and beckon the dusk,
to pick the corn and shuck the husk.
Fourteen sits on the ivory tongue’s throne;
it promises daybreak and gnaws the bone.
Fourteen keeps beats on a bear-bladder drum
and softens your heart while drinking the rum.
For fourteen is an officer ticketing teens,
a bored beauty queen who prays and cleans;
fourteen is a cage with an unlocked door,
steps for the mamba on the waiting room floor.
But while, with feeling, numbers are no god,
you have to be even before you are odd.
The Turkey Poem
We needed a propane exchange.
He’s grilling one. All night he was
trying to decide whether to brine them.
Outside, his slippers crunch leaves
on the deck. Leaves cover the lawn, tangling in grass
that stiffens in this morning after first snow,
the sun an empty halo, light without heat.
Every year, the Lions parade embarrassing expectations
before a national audience. Still, we cram
on couches, thigh to thigh, laughing and yelling,
plastic forks picking through
colorful paper plate jungles
volcanoes erupting buttery lava
melted cheese avalanching over potatoes
warm hills and pillowy clouds of stuffing
stuffing warmth between broccoli branches
and inside lush salad gardens,
insulating sticky mostaccioli logs
creeping up mashed mountains.
At the two-minute warning,
I’m waiting for someone to flip the channel,
briefly pause the scene by
accidentally finding a commercial selling sponsorship
of third-world children a half-world away
under the same sun, flies on their eyelids.
Instead, we watch the network advertisers
sell sedans, Friday specials, financial advisers,
lights and carols and phones,
things we don’t care to want, things mom will sell
tomorrow at five in the morning
not long after the last beer was laughed
deep into the night.
Thanks Dad. I don’t know if you brined them,
or even what that is, but I don’t care.
It’s so juicy, and so tender,
and just so warm.
The Core
How many grass blades
you could never know
soft stubble inhaling waste
breath in a bubble of gases
carpet comforting soles
We are history
hamster wheel snapshot
a book being written
stories wide as tree rings
a chapter for each layer of decay
down to the core of the Earth.
Almost Alive
The talons grip the branch
like framing nails biting a board,
better for the balance of the hawk
spanning its brown wings wide
as its razor beak, open, thirsty,
ready to crush the bones of a door mouse
that may creep across the wooden floor
in view of the perfect marble eyes
always on the brink of impulse, always
just about to thrash those wings,
to perpetuate the food chain
by diving down from the branch
mounted above the plaque on the wall.
Philip Larkin’s 115th Dream
You’ll fuck them up, those kids of yours,
You may not mean to, but you will.
You’ll give them all those rotten chores,
And leave them with the casket bill.
But you were fucked up in your turn
By folks who knew not what to do.
Who half the time yelled so you’d learn,
And half because they had no clue.
The greatest gift we pass is time;
It widens like a pelvic bone.
Don’t waste a second in your prime,
And tell your kids to have their own.
(Original here)
Blueprint for a Mind
A wad of fresh gravel
gripped in singularity
worked, smoothed,
crushed to a core
denser than diamond:
a rounded rock, one side blunt,
smooth as a cloud,
clasped in the hand
with weighty comfort
and the other an edge
the width of nothing
shears steel like paper.
Thrown into brick,
it embeds in its own indent.
Kicked from a hill,
it slows its own roll.
On balanced terrain
storms arouse only swivels.
It kickstands on the crust
or sits softly in the mud
pressing back on the planet
in gravitational equilibrium.
I Dreamt I Saw the Future
I dreamt I saw the future
cupped in these two hands,
like a soft baby chick,
a maze of rubber bands.
The connections were elastic
between people and events
unimagined in daydreams
like invisible circus tents.
Far down the tunnel
of a blurry telescope,
viscous mental projections
through the wine of hope,
was every past day burning
like laser beams of light
refracted through today
projected far from sight,
to days of work and birth,
of fewer question marks,
days not full of searching
but counting all the sparks,
a time when all the lands
are calmly seeded and harrowed
to bloom into the confidence
the sun will rise tomorrow.
I dreamt I saw the future
cupped in these two hands
and held tighter when it leaked out
like soft hourglass sand.
Aria
Eyes detect brightness, even on
first day’s dawn. From there,
tomorrow is a shower
gone dry yesterday for some.
Feel your warmth. Always a beat,
a moist tongue, a full world.
What day but the conscious day,
what breath but the one in lung.
All the wine has now gone flat
and the carpet’s crusted with candle wax
the fireplace is burning its last warm light:
we finally poisoned the captain tonight.
All the rolls went stale and hard
the meat’s now tough, even the lard
but it was worth it still to make the meal:
tomorrow is all we want to steal.
We’ll dream our dreams as we sleep in
and welcome our own decisions again.
Have a beer at noon and dance till late
then fix the new captain’s breakfast plate.
Pact
Back in a high school where I knew no one
and nothing of protocol in my first year,
we went over Spanish grammar in first period
with Señor DiBernardo, former gold-medalist
with the Argentinian national soccer team.
You’d ask him, “Did you play with Pelé?”
And he’d respond, “No—
Pelé played with me.” One day,
going over homework on familiar phrases,
he said the correct answer to number nine--
“every day”—was “todos los días,” or
all of the days. I raised my hand.
“Sí?” He called to the kid in the back
with big ears and crooked teeth,
shorts stopping too high above the knee.
“Wouldn’t ‘cada día’ work?” I asked. “Each day?”
He grimaced and looked at the ceiling,
bottom lip almost pulling up over
his shiny brown skull. “It works,
but isn’t heard often. Don’t use it.”
So through three years of
undergraduate classes on a language
I still can’t hear, I said “todos los días:”
everyday. Once, too long after,
I read a poem by Pablo Neruda
(an undergraduate writing professor once
told me she learned Spanish translating him)
called “Alianza.” “Pact.” In the Spanish version,
on the left-hand page,
he says this: “únicamente voz,
únicamente desnuda
cada día”
translated on the right-hand page as
“nothing but voice,
nothing but naked
everyday.”
Fourteen
Fourteen lines is all you need,
fourteen lines to harrow the seed,
to ride the sun and beckon the dusk,
to pick the corn and shuck the husk.
Fourteen sits on the ivory tongue’s throne;
it promises daybreak and gnaws the bone.
Fourteen keeps beats on a bear-bladder drum
and softens your heart while drinking the rum.
For fourteen is an officer ticketing teens,
a bored beauty queen who prays and cleans;
fourteen is a cage with an unlocked door,
steps for the mamba on the waiting room floor.
But while, with feeling, numbers are no god,
you have to be even before you are odd.
The Turkey Poem
We needed a propane exchange.
He’s grilling one. All night he was
trying to decide whether to brine them.
Outside, his slippers crunch leaves
on the deck. Leaves cover the lawn, tangling in grass
that stiffens in this morning after first snow,
the sun an empty halo, light without heat.
Every year, the Lions parade embarrassing expectations
before a national audience. Still, we cram
on couches, thigh to thigh, laughing and yelling,
plastic forks picking through
colorful paper plate jungles
volcanoes erupting buttery lava
melted cheese avalanching over potatoes
warm hills and pillowy clouds of stuffing
stuffing warmth between broccoli branches
and inside lush salad gardens,
insulating sticky mostaccioli logs
creeping up mashed mountains.
At the two-minute warning,
I’m waiting for someone to flip the channel,
briefly pause the scene by
accidentally finding a commercial selling sponsorship
of third-world children a half-world away
under the same sun, flies on their eyelids.
Instead, we watch the network advertisers
sell sedans, Friday specials, financial advisers,
lights and carols and phones,
things we don’t care to want, things mom will sell
tomorrow at five in the morning
not long after the last beer was laughed
deep into the night.
Thanks Dad. I don’t know if you brined them,
or even what that is, but I don’t care.
It’s so juicy, and so tender,
and just so warm.
The Core
How many grass blades
you could never know
soft stubble inhaling waste
breath in a bubble of gases
carpet comforting soles
We are history
hamster wheel snapshot
a book being written
stories wide as tree rings
a chapter for each layer of decay
down to the core of the Earth.
Almost Alive
The talons grip the branch
like framing nails biting a board,
better for the balance of the hawk
spanning its brown wings wide
as its razor beak, open, thirsty,
ready to crush the bones of a door mouse
that may creep across the wooden floor
in view of the perfect marble eyes
always on the brink of impulse, always
just about to thrash those wings,
to perpetuate the food chain
by diving down from the branch
mounted above the plaque on the wall.
Philip Larkin’s 115th Dream
You’ll fuck them up, those kids of yours,
You may not mean to, but you will.
You’ll give them all those rotten chores,
And leave them with the casket bill.
But you were fucked up in your turn
By folks who knew not what to do.
Who half the time yelled so you’d learn,
And half because they had no clue.
The greatest gift we pass is time;
It widens like a pelvic bone.
Don’t waste a second in your prime,
And tell your kids to have their own.
(Original here)
Blueprint for a Mind
A wad of fresh gravel
gripped in singularity
worked, smoothed,
crushed to a core
denser than diamond:
a rounded rock, one side blunt,
smooth as a cloud,
clasped in the hand
with weighty comfort
and the other an edge
the width of nothing
shears steel like paper.
Thrown into brick,
it embeds in its own indent.
Kicked from a hill,
it slows its own roll.
On balanced terrain
storms arouse only swivels.
It kickstands on the crust
or sits softly in the mud
pressing back on the planet
in gravitational equilibrium.
I Dreamt I Saw the Future
I dreamt I saw the future
cupped in these two hands,
like a soft baby chick,
a maze of rubber bands.
The connections were elastic
between people and events
unimagined in daydreams
like invisible circus tents.
Far down the tunnel
of a blurry telescope,
viscous mental projections
through the wine of hope,
was every past day burning
like laser beams of light
refracted through today
projected far from sight,
to days of work and birth,
of fewer question marks,
days not full of searching
but counting all the sparks,
a time when all the lands
are calmly seeded and harrowed
to bloom into the confidence
the sun will rise tomorrow.
I dreamt I saw the future
cupped in these two hands
and held tighter when it leaked out
like soft hourglass sand.
Aria
Eyes detect brightness, even on
first day’s dawn. From there,
tomorrow is a shower
gone dry yesterday for some.
Feel your warmth. Always a beat,
a moist tongue, a full world.
What day but the conscious day,
what breath but the one in lung.
All work on this website © 2004-2016 Derek Lazarski. All rights reserved.