First 3 Poems

Fallen

I have traveled

on a thousand roads

and on one road

I have traveled,

to hear the voices’ calling,

wound like bits of string

and stones and the soul’s desire.

I have watched the birds

and I was told

that rain is consequence.

May it fall softly

on the children’s game.

And I have known

the roaring waves

that brought Agammemnon
to weep for the end of glory.

And I have known

a mother’s care

that sweeps a suicide

with aging hands.

I have traveled

on a thousand roads

and on one road

I have traveled,

to hear the voices’ calling,

wound like heaven from exile

and to a soul’s satisfaction

fallen from the wings of desire.





(Ex)colere, exercere, studere

Cast in a glimpse,

bronze angles,

cry for us –

what was tempered

from the dust;

we were not,

our eyes were not,

all that did not belong to us.

Gathered, they gathered

the wheat, the moonlight,

the word spoke,

primaevus,

the young, was a drab shawl

and marked the man, Abel’s brother

for what crime he didst commit.

And Hesse, in doubt,

called to an older friend,

and called not.

And was no sermon

and Pilate was not there,

the students

and Pound’s beard,

but a stubble.

And envy spoke not,

silent, Academicus,

and spoke of it all,

and was not of shame.

And I awoke, seeing the birds around me,

burdenless, and the mountain was not,

and was not survival,

and the beholder stared upon the perceived

like a child with his mouth open,

and the birds around me,

turned not their eyes.

And drank, they drank coffee

in the room, furnished with old oak,

and the book, covered with dust,

and on the shelf,

a bust of Caesar,

soggy with whining.

  

The Bridge

The hum of summer,

arched brow of the transparent bridge,

half-finished to heaven;

I learn again

what I know of knowledge,

leaning against the mystery.

I find it open,

this door to the desert

from the myths.

It’s not the water

smoking in the east,

the sun is not a thing like this,

an idea that drinks itself

from the borders.

Calm like a Moorish song,

I watch an old dance.

The flowers growing up,

the sky with clouds flowing

at a faster pace than I.

The bridge is my road –

two musics, of land and of sky

mount a horse that left me

on my way from the forest.

And I must play

on the strings of night

the sorrow of the land

to clear the air

of a laugh that wounds

a million stars.

The bridge is where a stranger

once stumbled upon himself

in the music of the stranger

and learned again

what he knew of knowledge

on which a mystery now leans.                 

 * “There is no name for us, when the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger”

- Mahmoud Darwish