Late Flowers
By Christopher Bernard
Only now have they started to fade.
They had just begun to open
the afternoon I bought them
right before your birthday:
white lilies, red carnations,
clematis that clings to the eaves,
small pink roses,
little daisies,
against a deep green backdrop
of shadowy ferns and leaves.
Over the days that followed
they blossomed like a flourish
from a garden on your little table
in your lovely room
bright and warm and gentle,
the windows opening to the bay
and the northern reach of sunlight
gathering the day.
They opened like young loving,
they opened like the spring,
they opened like your smile
at the sweetness of all beauty:
a simple and artless bouquet.
Only now do they begin
to fade. Who could have known
they opened only for one
who would no longer see them,
in a room where you, in sleep,
the afternoon that followed
the day that you were born
(or so it seems, to the living),
fading long before the flowers,
were gone even as they flowered
beautiful as the day?
For K.
Christopher Bernard’s latest book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, has received a stellar review from Kirkus and will be included as a May feature (Best Indie Books of the Month).
The Socialist’s Garden of Verses
By Christopher Bernard
is not of poems made
alone. In man and woman
are hearts of earth and water
where roots of roses tangle
with carrot, yam, potato,
the veins of peach and apple
and the red sweet plump tomato,
the fruits of earth from which all
humanity is made:
faith and hope and charity,
and love of truth and kindness,
belief in good and beauty:
these are the pleasing verses
from which is made the garden
of hope you will engender
after you have closed
this book and put it away.
The dragonfly awaits you,
the beetle, ant, and butterfly,
the sun is high over the garden,
the fragrant grasses call to you.
Our work is just beginning,
the earth and sky are waiting.
Take my singing with you
out into the day.
_____
Christopher Bernard is founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
“The Socialist’s Garden of Verses” comes from the collection of the same name, which will be published in December 2020 through Regent Press.
I have given my children the kindest gift I could possibly have found for them: the warm security of nonexistence. They will never suffer from disappointment, discouragement, frustration, from failed hope and betrayed love, from the brutality of humanity and the indifference of nature, from the cruel gods of reality. And they will never do evil in their turn—and now we know, without the faintest doubt, that the human species is the most evil of all species—indeed, it is the species through which evil came into the world.
My children, however, will never do the evil they would have been unable to resist had they lived. They will never lie or cheat, steal or offend, wound or kill. The world will not be destroyed from the satisfying of their appetites. No animal will be killed to satisfy one of their whims. No human being’s life will destroyed to satisfy their desire for revenge. They will not leave behind them a path of waste and destruction. They will not grow old or bitter. They will not see the destruction of much they have admired and loved. They will not see their friends and family die, and yet have to live on. They will not live fearing poverty, shame, failure, being found out. They will not fear old age, senility, death. They will not die.
I see their eyes glimmer in the shadows. Are they glimmering from tears? I cannot tell, and they are silent. Perhaps they are tears of sorrow, perhaps they are tears of gratefulness. Or perhaps they are my tears, as I reach my hand out toward them, half regretting my life’s single virtuous deed. But then, parents can be unforgivably selfish.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s next book, a collection of poems called The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in the fall of 2020.
Inside the Locket Is the Face That Loves You
By Christopher Bernard
They started appearing here and there in the city
a few years ago.
Now there are many more.
Like ghosts made of candles in glass
and posies of daisies, peonies, poppies,
the height of a child’s knee.
Some cover half a sidewalk
like scattered baskets of roses
and flicker and stare with a dozen flames in the night,
but most are small, no wider than a bended knee.
Sometimes they include a photo, a drawing,
of the person who died there—
a young black man, an old black woman—
or only a scrawled name.
“We miss you, Darryl!”
“Jimmy: Luv U 4 Eva!”
You can almost hear Jimmy laugh
reading that,
or see Darryl’s cool eyes.
I stop at a woman’s:
among the few flowers and three lit candles
there is a small lace handkerchief,
kept from being blown away
by a heart-shaped locket on a thin chain.
Pedestrians in masks hurry uneasily by.
The traffic passes without incident.
A shred of cloud disperses into thin air.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s latest book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.
The Hammer and the Dance
The hammer and the dance
in this atlas of the world,
in the season of pandemic,
like two stanchions on a court;
between, a tightening line
like the imaginary line
on the cartographer’s expedient chart,
on one side, the dutiful girls,
on the other, boys in masks;
around them hung a wall of distance
that surrounds them like a fort;
at their feet, forgotten tasks.
And the hammer beats the time
for the young ones as they dance.
What of the future? What of the past?
What of the present? You may well ask.
There was something to be done
now forever left undone.
Where there once appeared a mask,
now a flawed map hides its face
in a hand scarred by this place;
now there is a face of ash.
And the hammer beats the time
for the young ones as they dance.
Deep inside the twisting globe
opens up a burning robe.
And tonight the silence hurls
into darkness its moot sign
like a banner never furled,
like the alchemist’s alembic
charred with his defeated gold,
like the future’s gathering dark
and the iron in the heart.
And the hammer beats the time
for the young ones as they dance.
Spiritus
When you see it, you will know.
The shaky camera, the kneeling
men in midnight blue:
they look at first as though
they are praying, pious
as three altar boys,
caught in an innocuous crime, perhaps
stealing holy wafers or consecrated wine.
But they are not.
The shaking camera stops,
and you hold in your breath,
like clutching at a hand,
not quite believing that you see
what it is you think you see.
Underneath their knees,
in the brutal sun,
a dark form. And a voice from the feed:
"I can't breathe, I can't
breathe! I can't breathe! I
can't breathe!" For four minutes and
forty-six seconds,
as the altar boys pray
in the shouting glare.
Then it stops. The video
stops. The voice stops. The praying
stops. The breathing
stops And you breathe,
too late. But you seethe, you seethe.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.
Myself, I prefer a city with no one in it, or, if not exactly no one, only a few.
It’s like being in an enormous sculpture garden, immense minimalist slabs of glass and concrete throwing shadows dark as poetry across streets grown modest with stillness and opening trustingly as a child’s hand. The few people there look less grotesque when teased out of the crowd – the way a solitary farmer turning his field, a pair of friends or lovers, a daydreaming hiker, seen in a summer countryscape between bays of woods and folds of pastureland and field, under an ingenuously immense sky make the dignity of humankind, its vulnerable nobility, palpable, and not the poorly spun joke it seems so often in a city hysterical, delirious, and crammed.
No: our monuments, our things, the traces of care in the woodwork, the shadow of a mind molded from a sun – tools and toys and trinkets, engines and edifices, the shape of a hand on a prehistoric cave wall, a flute played shyly on a Sunday morning – make me less ashamed of being human.
I wander the empty city like a hunter in a wilderness, except that I have found the object of my hunt, and hold it close inside my coat, where I can feel its heart beating, and its warmth, and its wings.
*****
The Coyotes of North Beach
Sunset, spring: a strange wailing rises from the gorge under our house cautiously balanced on a cliff edge as on a knife above a valley where coyotes are gathering. Strange indeed for a city (our neighborhood, part declivity, part escarpment, is strange enough for any city). But maybe not strange for a city largely emptied from a malady emptying much of the world – and giving meaning to the "pan" in panache, panama, pancake, panjandrum, Panglossion, Pandragon, pandemic – and so giving way to wilderness seeping back into the streets, crows appraising the roof tops, mountain sheep strolling about in Wales, curious spiders measuring bus shelters with their delicate silks, coyotes gathering at cross streets and dancing in the glimmering streetlights as they flicker on in the dusk and making their coyote-like noisings, as sweet as they are uncanny, in the city's deepening twilight.
Why are they wailing so? Is it from fear, or loneliness, or need for love?
How did the coyotes know that they are speaking for us?
*
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
It is spring and the
flowers are blossoming everywhere.
Silence passes over
the streets
(the sole sound in the
neighborhoods,
the operatic bel canto
of an endless mockingbird)
like the ripples from
a stone that falls
into a neglected pond.
They expand
slowly over the
besieged city
dark and cool at the
bottom of the sky:
over the clumps of
office towers,
the chasmed streets,
the glistening rails,
the darkened restaurants
and bars,
the wordless cafes,
the tidy, disappointed
sidewalks,
the hush of missing
crowds,
the intersections of
empty crosses,
the stillness of the
churches
where the bells ring
above empty naves,
storefronts closed
behind their shields
of plywood painted
gray,
white, black, as if to
say,
“We are at war, our
ships are gray,
our will is black, our
hopes are white,”
until they splash the
hospitals
and there break
with desperation,
grief and fear,
and the stone that is
held against fear,
skill, courage, will,
the hard
love of a determined
yet frightened intent,
arrayed against an
insidious invasion
riding the air like
gossamer,
defending as with ax
and pike
or mangy hides of a
long-dead age
and howls of
execration and rage,
the pierced wall of
the modern town,
what now appalls the
world.
Just yesterday, before
the stone
fell, life, it was so
much simpler . . .
That will be the future’s myth.
Of course it will be a
lie.
Life was never
simpler.
Man against man, and
against woman, was the rule,
commanded by genes,
natural selection,
and our bizarre yet
entirely human mix
of the irrational and the
arrogant.
The world was, as
usual, at war
with its
silver-stained reflection in the glass.
Humankind was proving
a gorgeous catastrophe
for life
on a planet the size
of a pebble
slung from a
slingshot. We were the crown
virus enthroned in the
breath of the world.
And now, in a cruelly
fair reverse,
the crown virus has
laid siege
to human monumentality
and mortified its
pride. The skies
are clear of plane and
smog, the clouds
and birds alone
inhabit it,
the plains have only
farmers cross them,
the mountains do not
burn, the woods
are quiet with the
stuttering of squirrels,
the tangled skein of
interstates
is silent except for
insouciant semis
running drink and food
to the locked down.
The night is black as
ink
strewn with glittering
points
we had almost
forgotten.
The air, transparent
for miles
as glass, stands fresh
as morning.
Greenland freezes a
film of water
back into ice. The
corals
hold their limestone
like a breath
beneath a glassy sea.
The city is filled
with singing
and archipelagoes of
blossoming flowers.
Birds, knowing nothing
but the leaning sun’s
ecliptic
and the burnished
weathering of the wind,
migrate in their
clouds northward,
choiring.
The flowers proclaim
that beauty
will always triumph
everywhere.
“We must love one another or die,” said the poet.
Then changed his mind
to the obvious fact:
“We must love one
another and die.”
But this thought undermined
his poem.
And so he scrubbed the
line, almost
tossed away the poem.
How
we live makes the
change beyond
where we bow out of
the light;
our choices made, our
acts, our words –
these make our meaning
and our truth,
our good, our evil:
the stones dropped in
a pool,
ripples shivering
outward
in growing circles of
effect
into infinity,
the moment into
eternity,
beyond our little
lives more or less forever.
Must we die for the
world to live?
This is the question
with the forced reply.
If we say to that word
“no,”
we are not free from
what we know.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
What
is greatness – moral, intellectual, artistic? It has a musty, old-fashioned
sound, and is not exactly a fashionable idea just now, with our cultural
hysterias against “elitism” of any kind, or perhaps ever was in a democratic
culture with its sweet, egalitarian shibboleths. Nevertheless, the idea of
greatness, saintliness, genius – of a superiority one cannot ignore but only
acknowledge with humility and gratitude and admiration, even, in supreme cases,
awe – periodically returns, because, like “truth” or “goodness,” it is a value
that, however we may pretend we can do without it, at a certain point we discover
that we can’t without collapsing into moral incoherence: nihilism,
demoralization and despair.
In
my own experience, artistic greatness, in particular, is partly discernible by
the fact that the subject is more powerful, more beautiful, more astonishing or
impressive than I remember it: that painting, this poem, this dance company,
that book is more than I assimilated or knew; in some sense is permanently
beyond me. It reminds me of what is often meant by “transcendent experience” – “artistic
greatness” seems to mean a direct, sensuous experience of transcendence,
piercing through the fog of distracted daily living in concentrated brilliance
– and thus is an absolute value and not a category of relative merit.
I
was provoked to these thoughts partly by the arrival in Berkeley over a recent
weekend (and thanks to Cal Performances) of one of the country’s pre-eminent
dance companies, a company that has, in the past, shown itself capable of
reaching such heights with sometimes intimidating ease – the Joffrey Ballet,
based in Chicago and not nearly a regular enough a visitor to the Bay Area and
the finely tuned dance audiences we have here. And the company was indeed
better than I remembered.
The
Joffrey, originally under Robert Joffrey, then Gerald Arpino, and now Ashley
Wheater, has mastered a lithe and muscular style of dancing that was on full
display throughout a cast in which all of its member are presented as principals.
Stephanie
Martinez’s “Bliss!”, which followed, set to Dumbarton Oaks, a richer and
more complex piece of Stravinsky’s, was a good deal of a looser, less
self-conscious affair, spinning between beefcake machismo and winsome
femininity, with strong contributions, again, by Iwai and Kawazawa and by Jonathan
Dole, and with an almost hilarious riff on muscularity by a stunning Derrick
Agnoletti.
If
the performance had ended, or peaked, there, at the first intermission, I would
have had an interesting afternoon, with some moments to savor and much to have
enjoyed. But I wouldn’t have been prepared for what followed.
What
followed? “Beyond the Shore” followed. But wait: this is a work, choreographed
by Nicholas Blanc (long a staple at the San Francisco Ballet) and
co-commissioned by Cal Performances, and so having a special relationship with
the Bay Area. The dance is set to a thundering, highly theatrical score by
Mason Bates (perhaps best known here for his work, a few years back, with the
San Francisco Symphony), “The B-Sides,” originally commissioned by the
Symphony. Blanc describes his dance as about “exploration as a metaphor for
human nature,” which is certainly a good thought to hang on to as we are thrust
into a series of dance adventures, one for each section of the music, as
thrilling, compelling and complex as I hope to find in this or any other dance season,
climaxing in a profoundly astonishing and deeply moving pas de deux by Victoria Jaiani and Dylan
Guttierez that took me to places dance has not taken me in a very long time
indeed, in a section called “Gemini in the Solar Wind.” This was inspired by
(and for once, the word is just, for this was in the deepest sense an
inspiration) the famous 1960s Gemini spacewalk, recordings of the NASA
communications from the walk being cleverly, and oddly movingly, incorporated
into the music. The dance was a haunting and vivifying experience, demanding
much of the entire company, which met the challenge with limber and dramatic
success.
After
being vaulted into outer space by “Beyond the Shore,” we put on the razz and came
back to earth in the concluding, dance, “The Times Are Racing,” by Justin Peck,
a choreographer I have had mixed feelings about till now but this time was completely
won over. A sneaker dance if there ever was one, this work starts in a
throbbing mob cluster of bodies exploding into a swirling disco-thon to a jammy
score from Dan Deacon (moving from ironic, to joyous, to hopeful, to joyous, to
ironic, from his hit album America) with an array of young dancers who
seemed like they’d jettisoned ten years from the assertive maturity of the
Blanc, and dressed up, or down, in sports punk togs from Humberto Leon of
Opening Ceremony, splashed with defiance – “Fight,” “Rebel,” “Change,” “Obey,”
and of course “Defy” – and knocking them flat with a trip-hop stew of dance
styles I soon gave up counting. Starting at a race, it only got faster, wilder,
crazier, though whittled down at moments to knock-’em-out solos, especially
from Edson Barbosa, that knocked out the audience too, till, speeding by like
it would never stop, the dance spun out to succeeding heights of crazy, then
spun back in on itself, whooshing back into its cluster like a deblossoming
flower before collapsing in total exhaustion.
What
a dance. What a performance. What a company.
____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
