My Desire .com



Dreams are not

as beautiful

[pic]

arthur dobrin

© 2010

Contents

My Desire

Volunteers

Next Door

Voices Upon the Wall

Houdini’s Grave

Long Island History

My Brother’s Accordion in a Crocodile Case

Kismet

Through You Like Stars

Aunts and Uncles

Montana Convent

Water Trees

Brooklyn Botanic

Questions for Menke

Center of the Heart

Affirmation

What I Know

Dreams Are Not as Beautiful

Newborn

Inheritance

In the Mouth of Rainbows

Angel of Suburbia

So Many Possibilities

My Desire

On a cold spring day,

When the wet tames the wild

And cherry blossoms are here but not you,

Your absence defines all that is.

My desire the daffodils and yours

Daisies you dream forth

From sodden ground you plough,

Until I leave and flowers go on

Growing in fields you have sown.

Volunteers

Nearly nothing grows

Planned in the garden,

No straight lines or rows,

Only occult rationality reasoned

From soil, sun, and shadow.

Scallions, lemon balm, and basil

Volunteer themselves as you do

Year after year in early autumn

By the wild ivy more beautiful

For the hidden colors of autumn.

Next Door

Our neighbor plants the earth

As if this were Iowa.

Her husband of nearly fifty years

Grumbles about his receding lawn

Gobbled by tomatoes and autumn flowers.

They eat food that tastes of soil,

Look at each other with dimming eyes,

And their hands warm for they are fire

And they are music and their house overflows

Like an apple tree in autumn.

Voices Upon the Wall

Waking early to walk downstairs

I hear the cellist on the wall

And voices singing to her bow.

When I neared adolescence on the city street,

This house was born on a blacksmith’s shed

And potatoes grew on the nearby plains.

Waking early to walk downstairs

When my family is still asleep,

I listen to the chorus of those

I’ve never met, the neighbors from before.

I touch the walls they once touched,

Walk the floor they walked before.

As for me, what will I leave?

Who will hear

My voice upon the wall?

I’ve often thought of homesteads,

A house of many generations,

Gravestones near a maple tree.

It’s not possible to be buried in my garden.

Someone will have to pack my bones

To take with them as they go.

We are the ones who won’t stay still,

The generation without memory or guilt.

I wonder which is the greater burden:

To live in a land of ancestors

In time counted by trees

Or in a house where waking

Early to walk downstairs

The voices are all unknown.

Westbury

No trace of Indian lives

Can be found among the houses,

Not an arrow has been uncovered

Even while digging for suburbia.

Of course there are no headstones

But neither are there tools nor bones

Worthy of consideration.

Many crossed the broad water,

Fished the salty seas,

Trapped small game

in the woods north of here.

What did they know about

The greatest plains east of the Mississippi?

If they crossed this country,

They took their traces with them,

Holding their lives in their quivers,

Packing their shadows as they went.

On this earth we grow berries and asparagus;

Now beans and grapes grow full.

Massapequa, look for me in my dreams.

Tell me the secret of this forbidden place.

Houdini’s Grave

Knowing Houdini slept

A bicycle ride away

On a cemetery ridge

Beside a winding road—

A divide between this life and that—

I searched in a maze of marble

Mausoleums and tombstones

Touched by the hand of God.

Looking for a sign,

The earth I saw remained

Undisturbed by resurrection,

A promise yet fulfilled.

Certain now the dead stay still

And even magicians have limits

I pedaled home to sleep

And dreamed of falling chains.

Long Island History

Bargain and barter

Knowing the price paid is swindle—

Ghost ship and dwarf pine

Seastrand and mall,

House and highway.

Stuff the head with spice,

Scrape the scales,

Slit the stomach and prepare:

Potato and pumpkin

Apple and peach,

Oyster and duck.

This splendid island

Long gone.

My Brother’s Accordion in a Crocodile Case

Open it.

And a world

Bellows out—

On a cobblestone street in Queens,

Iorio’s workshop thick with glue,

Reeds, white keys, black buttons,

A floor covered in wood shavings.

Lessons in an Old World apartment

Beside a riverside drive,

A room as strange as Viennese cafes,

Tango studios in Argentina.

A monkey is in the case,

An attraction in a sour bar,

Songs sung under sparking

And rattling rails.

Kismet

Early in the morning

The house by the sea

We walk to the swale where beach

Grass and bayberry lay

On a hidden slope and look

At ourselves from the outside in.

No emptiness but the sky fastened

There at Manhattan and Montauk in mist,

Herring gulls above and we walk alone,

Place ourselves like chalk,

Later find a nearer place

Where a bather is closer by.

We gather our inhibitions

And spread them across the sand.

Everything breathes green and still

As our winter dreams are put by.

We look at ourselves from the inside out,

Walk to the water warm and free.

When we look back with

Clear and innocent eyes:

Joy in our passion drunk upon water,

Little smiles and midday sleep.

In those moments a garland of small pleasures.

Without measure that was the place to be.

Through You Like Stars

When I begin to speak

Like this silence crushes my throat—

Fallen from nowhere through your womb

From the beginning it is a matter of discipline—

Before I was we were attached

And since have grown alone—

Your heart is more full of me

Than mine is of you—

It flows away like water downward

Never upward like sap feeding trees —

I come back to where I started

Through you like star and fish—

My mother who art

In heaven is your name.

Aunts and Uncles

Strange that one and her son

In a shoebox room,

Twin beds pressed together.

One uncle’s face sand smooth,

His feline marriage counted

On a calendar’s page.

Another greets me from deserts,

Talks of men on the moon

Until his brain is burned clean.

Fay, aptly named, the youngest,

Possessed by a foreign tribe

In woods where timeless children played.

Silence falls like stones in a pond.

Around our dinner plates they ripple

As against a distant shore.

Montana Convent

A storm of frozen stars

Swirls across the plains

My beard cakes with ice

Women work

Mercy in a broken world

Silent hearts of red

A cross above the bed

I’m under Christ's feet

Asleep

My ancestors tremble

At my dumb courage

A lonely night

I dream of straps and boxes

Fringed shawls and candles

Snow soaked in blood

Tonight there are no boots

No accusations of deicide

No attempt at conversion

Only coffee and conversation

At the breakfast table

Sister, brother in a winter room

Water Trees

Who will remember

To water trees

Or plant apples

And plums in autumn?

Forests care for themselves

But gardens and orchards—

Who will care for them

As we slide through earth

Lighter than blue doves

And flying more splendid

Than jungle birds of paradise?

Brooklyn Botanic

We stop

Talking

And

Are lost

For words.

There, old friend—

A motionless heron,

A torii in a pond,

And cherry blossoms

Falling

Falling

And

Floating

On water.

Questions for Menke

Singer of the Milky Way,

Poet of potatoes,

Child of trampled streets

Pig sweet in Michaleshik—

We weave our souls,

Sip sweet wine

At my meatless table.

Tell me: Did Grandpa know

Horses’ hooves thick

With pillagers’ mud

In his burning village

Called Novaradok?

Where did they go,

Those who didn’t run

From swords and boots

But lived for another day?

Tell them they are not alone.

My hand, your brother’s,

Your mother’s mouth we touch.

And the smell of you on the pillow.

Center of the Heart

Some things are so beautiful

To hold them is to bring

The sun to the center of the heart

These things on the tongue

Of the pages I hold

These things in the eye

Of the spinning earth.

These things once said

Are again and again

Persimmon, rose, and cinnabar.

Some things are so beautiful

To hold them is to die.

Affirmation

Out of the infinite dark

I’ve stumbled a billion

Billion years in waiting,

Honey and oak, cotton and wind,

Scarlet dust and dung am I.

My eyes are winter wheat,

My hands woven linen.

The sky combs my chestnut hair.

I lean against all others,

Raddle my blood on a rainbow loom,

Scatter seeds like stars, for children,

Mice, horses that fly in my dreams.

Life, never could I imagine such as you,

Summer slowing to autumn and summer again,

Leaves burning brighter than crystal

Mulching fields of sleeping berries.

Life—“Sister,” a Russian called you—

Overflowing I build in the nest

Of my heart for nightwalkers

In the dark.

What I Know

Such skills I have:

Clipping heavy rams’ hooves,

Pruning thin limbs of coffee trees.

I can ride subways in several cities,

Speak a language and a half,

Tease scholarly words out of hiding.

My tongue can find its way in your darkness

Sweetened with baby’s breath and cocoa,

Softened by decades in tandem,

Chastened by our children sleeping

Their separate lives.

Dreams Are Not As Beautiful

How many times?

Who can remember?

Callow first from college

Until your belly swelled.

Nine years later a stone

House on a green hill.

The silence of safaris,

Lavender sky and savannah.

Yours the elephants,

Mine the giraffe.

The buzz of mosquitoes,

The flight of butterflies.

Our names: Moraa, Osoro,

Nyakundi, Kwamboka.

Theirs: Ongesa, Maranga,

Pereira, Singh.

The places: Africa, Kenya,

Kisii, Tabaka.

Dreams are not

As beautiful.

To return and return:

This our hearts.

Newborn

In my hands

My newborn son

His hair still stiff with

The rubyjuice of birth.

I hold the break of day

And in my hands

Generations waiting.

Inheritance

This you inherit:

The gold of Africa’s sun

Bathing a boma of straw,

Gospel singing to close the sores—

And your other part

Chosen to keep the Word

In two thousand years of wandering.

This is yours,

You who came to us

The color of fawn,

African girl,

Daughter of Jerusalem.

In the Mouth of Rainbows

A thousand hands

made you

A thousand nights

of dust

A thousand lips

made you

A thousand caresses

in forgotten places

In nights deeper

than indigo

In days longer

than seas

And here you are

under one quilt

Returning each star

to its proper place

Returning each lip

to the mouth of rainbows

Angel of Suburbia

O stars

Beyond all counting,

Galaxies beyond all seeing,

Dust of the world’s four winds:

The grass now greener than green,

Apples more scented than hayflower,

Our hearts flow over

More full than the Nile,

Ganges, Neman, Hudson,

Angel of suburbia,

You dreaming yet of paradise,

We holding it here,

You.

So Many Possibilities

Bent over you whispering

Wanting to know why

Approaching nine moons

You rush your becoming

Flesh out of water

We ask you—

Son, brother, cousin,

Grandson—

How so many possibilities

Can be contained in so little.

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