Poem 1:
In Memory of Donald Vruwink (Senior)
Your almanac was always breathing.
The heart’s imaginary twin
Will die. “We’ll all be lovely then,”
You’d say. My bones are done, done reading
The soil. A clever fever’s scribbling
Its high opinion of the moon
On it. We’ll all be lovely, then
We’ll banish imitation’s sibling.
The death of plethora seems tawdry
When thunder darts the dirt with thin
Flashes. We’ll all be lovely, then
Tornados will be riding shotty.
Poem 2:
In Memory of Sol Sheff
Words are like eyes; we often fail
To see a thing until it’s said.
Each poem’s a mental pyramid
That stands because of memory’s pull.
The rough perfection of a gull
You stewarded in Jacksonville.
And in Milwaukee, there’s a thrill
That stands because of memory’s pull.
The sun’s ushabti may console
An Army corporal on the beach
At dawn. You gave a crippled speech
That stands because of memory’s pull.
Poem 3:
In Honor of Louis Pasteur
“The picturesqueness of human thought may console us for its imperfection.”
– George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Nobody honestly reports
On the beliefs of others. Wolves
Explain what alchemy involves
To beakers blackened by beaux arts.
You said that men who run from warts
Are like a bear that runs from fish.
And logic’s like a petri dish
To beakers blackened by beaux arts.
Your era loved what love distorts…
One cannot trust the naked eye
Which craves the novel modesty
Of beakers blackened by beaux arts.
Poem 4:
Blackguarding Merles
You mock a dahlia’s faith in rain
And March’s hieratic pain
In Wotan’s one good eye. I show
The only serious dog I know
The absence of a final task.
(His bark becomes so plateresque.)
Jocasta’s hardship melts the snow…
The only serious dog I know
Is on precocious wisdom’s trail.
Your apperception tugs his tail.
For Tiresias, you set aglow
The only serious dog I know.
Poem 5:
Schtupping Philosophy
After Mark Strand
“If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.”
– Diogenes the Cynic, on public masturbation
“Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête.”
– Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Fear pats the propaganda on
Each head. Hate rubs the belly of
Hypocrisy. There’s Puppy-Love,
Schtupping Philosophy again.
“O, History, you’re not strapped for time,”
She moans while strapping me in wings.
Her drunken master drily sings:
“Schtupping Philosophy turns wine
To dust!” When we extremes do meet
In bed, what’s born reveals our chains
And all but holy sweetness feigns.
Schtupping Philosophy, one ought
To pause one’s speech, but not one’s thought.
Play Water Music, let all see
The truth’s invisibility.
Schtupping Philosophy brings out
Third eyes. This post-renewal age
Can’t fathom seasons. Anger warps
Each blossom, buzzing does each corpse…
Schtupping Philosophy onstage,
I feel the sunlight’s bearded breath.
The earth lets go of hardness. This
Gets harder moonlight, as does Bliss
Schtupping Philosophy to death.
Poem 6:
Ode on My Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah (an Acrostic)
“If faith is the sail on a relationship, one with a broken faith is a hardship. What do you build a new sail with when your faith is broken? Hardiness. Jacob is hardy… Hardiness is not the same as hardness. The ‘i’ in hardiness is a reaching hand; hardiness strives, it reaches through hardness.” – Madeleine Sheff, from her d’var Torah
Do not too aggressively light upon
Adulthood, nor too agreeably go
Usurp its tumultuous limits. Snow
Greets every shoeless shaliach whose crown,
Humility, isn’t the brownest brown.
Take Laban, who wears mankind’s to-and-fro
Every season, and his deceptive chatter
Richly to the bottom of Jacob’s ladder.
Of intellectual hatred, we’ve Yeats
For removing any gray gratitude
(Tantamount to cemetery gates):
Haunted by it, your life’s just a bladder
Emptied at the bottom of Jacob’s ladder.
Comedy’s cruelty makes men brood.
Oh, even tragedy must look away.
Muteness sympathizes with nature’s food;
Made wingless in wine glass novels by day,
All of it runs full speed from decay.
Normal Saturdays are mad as a hatter
Dimmed by the shadow of Jacob’s ladder.
May the chuppah embrace each ah! bright ray
Eternal nature absorbs from your frame.
Nouns have more beauty than verbs; don’t name
This place Terra Terribilis then shatter
Seraphs at the bottom of Jacob’s ladder.
