With A Heart Like That
With A Heart Like That
poems
Don Thompson
You care for people and animals, O Lord.
How precious is your unfailing love, O God.
-Psalms 36:6-7
After the Fall
Camel: I envy the owl, who is all in one place and not scattered to the far corners of himself like I am, not hung together so loosely; who grasps a thing without plodding to an infinite distance and arriving nowhere particular; who can turn his head and see behind as far as he sees before. How I envy you, Owl.
Owl: I envy the butterfly, whose flight is not like a scream, nor like a smooth stone flung from a sling to kill a mouse rather than Goliath; who has no necessity, who goes where he will and knows the secret of a touch that does not draw blood. How I envy you, Butterfly.
Butterfly: I envy the pineapple, who is not made of dust held together by mere joy, who does not depend on shimmering hues that fade so soon; who above all has substance, who is solid and sits upon a rump; who is hard enough to hold off the love that tears a wing, the fascination that pins flight to black velvet; who knows what it’s like to have hand grenades name their children after him. How I envy you, Pineapple.
Pineapple: I envy the camel, who has the nerve to ignore green, who can go without water and not shrivel; who can chew and spit, who can put his foot down on nothing but the sand of all things and be sustained; who is above all a soft lankiness and a good rich stink upon the earth, never squeezed dry for the sake of someone’s breakfast. How I envy you, Camel.
Chipper
We have buried our bird Chipper
who served God so well,
so briefly, with a chirrup
and one bright obsidian eye
to greet us:
needle point of insight,
sinless, which pricked
obtuse human balloons;
who tapped with his beak
sending telegrams to angels,
for birds know
all the heavenly ciphers;
who was precious stone--
sapphire translated into
the sibilant dialect of feathers
and writ small;
who would rest in a hand,
harmless and patient;
who slept easily, perched
high above the dreams that hurt us
until he fell--his life
shattering silently,
no more than a knick-knack
in this world, but to us
a meteor among sparrows,
or a blue tear
we will trust our God to keep
forever in His bottle.
Grace
Codicil and subclause, addendum,
precept upon precept,
the law makes its case against us.
There’s nowhere to hide--
not in a foxhole, under a yarmulke,
or deep in Freud’s beard--
and no mercy,
for the law is the law is the law.
Our vows waffle; offerings
smolder and stink among old tires,
worse than Gehenna.
We have nothing the law wants.
But sin is no easier.
We expect honey and get ants
that leave us like dead bees--
hollow, thin as cellophane.
What can we do? Caught
between bloodless sin
and hard, dry righteousness,
let’s give up. Plead guilty.
Then grace can come to us,
rising like water from a rock.
But where the law rules,
even the rain is carved in stone.
Crow
Stand small. Always insist on
the short end of the stick.
Take one; put two back.
And get used to the taste of crow.
Plums
The dull boy behind the lawnmower
splattering the plums
that have fallen from branches
dragged down by their own burden
is me. Every summer
I eat a few and complain:
too soft, too tart--too something.
I let most of them rot.
A humdrum husband, I bore my wife,
ignore my children, and yawn
banking my paycheck.
Worse, I despise my old dreams.
Someone at work left a bag
of ripe plums in the break room.
They were all gone by five o'clock.
Forgive me, Lord.
Rilke
When untamed angels came to you
bearing baskets of words
for the winepress,
they promised you a vintage
more intoxicating than mere life--
than wife, daughter, lovers
who poured themselves out
hoping to sip from your cup.
You had friends, facilitators
who’d pick up the tab
after an Orphic binge
had left you with a hangover,
reeling across Europe
frantic for solitude among roses
and old furniture. How long
did you think you could live like that?
There’s no free lunch, no secret
ecstasy, no elegy without loss.
Every death kills someone.
You should have known
those angels would be back,
empty-handed and hungry
for your marrow,
thirsty for your thin, white blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)
Tiger
Consider the tiger, zoo-bred,
that knows nothing else
and yet paces her cage, crazy
for the pungent green freedom
she can’t even imagine.
It’s easy to think we’re like that,
spirit locked tight in flesh--
except with us
it’s the cage that can’t keep still
and grinds, twists, pops rivets,
while the tiger inside purrs,
curled up in God’s lap.
Prayer
Nutrasweet hour of prayer,
my peace--my chemical peace
with a bad aftertaste,
I want more,
more than bitesize meditations
or leftovers
of cold, greasy need.
Give me something to chew on:
meat sizzling on a spit
and black bread thick as a brick;
give me wine and tears, Lord,
and wild honey from the comb!
Sitting With Clifford
Because I’ve come without limping
to this gray season,
much too late to impress anyone,
I’m not embarrassed to baby-talk
an overweight golden retriever
as we sit here together,
both of us warm and well-fed,
my book open on his back.
While the night slips down
toward freezing, and fog
sets its ambush
against my next morning commute,
and elsewhere in the house
domesticity churns and clatters,
I tell him he’s a good boy,
which is true. He is.
And for a few moments,
so much peace infuses me
that I might be scratching the flop ear
of an an
gel unaware.
Talk Show
Dante was afraid of the dark.
In our time, it’s too much light
that seems frightening.
Sin scintillates: no shadows
and no shame in our game.
Unrepentant, we confess
fifteen minutes on a talk show.
What would Dante think?
Would the poet who faced Hell
turn his back on us,
disgusted by
our shrill, whiny candor?
Daibutsu of Todaiji
You will have no rival
in stone. Next to you, the Sphinx
is a soft, shabby has-been.
Who is Ozymandias?
Those masks blasted from the cliffs
of Mt. Rushmore, mere photo-ops,
have nothing to tell us.
No comment. They stare
over our heads, preoccupied,
looking for something they lost
in the tall grass of the prairies
a hundred years ago.
But you’ve found everything
ever lost, hid it all again
under the Bo tree,
and let us go on looking
while you sit there, Buddha,
innocently still, and so huge
not even the Christ of Corcovado
could get his arms around you.
Blind, now that the paint
has flaked from your eyes,
you lift one hand: to bless us
or to feel your way?
Wolves
A few wolves on the street
watch us. Only a sneer
shows us their fangs,
stained and prematurely blunt.
We’re not even worth a growl.
Obsessed with any grass
more or less green,
we bleat and rush by--
and never discern
through our dim, ruminant haze,
the sheep in wolves’ clothing
waiting for a Shepherd.
Memo to Villon
Illicit brother, black sheep
fetid with Paris muck,
scarecrow stuffed with dungeon straw,
tonsured knife fighter,
lovesick poet with a slit lip,
scarred like Al Capone,
sweet-talking con, whoremonger
and true believer,
did wine kill you? Or VD?
Did you finally hang
at Montfaucon, Orleans, or Meung,
nothing but spoiled meat
sticking to a rickety ladder of bones?
And did you climb,
by faith, saved by grace alone,
from the gibbet to heaven?
I sit fidgeting in church,
ashamed to be bored by such niceness
(but bored--and ashamed)
and think of you.
If you sidled in this morning,
any streetwise usher
worth his blazer and name badge
would keep an eye on you.
That smirk you could never wipe off
would give you away--
and how you would heft the basket
guessing the take within a few cents.
But here no one values your offering
of a poem jotted down
on the back of a pawn ticket
and given freely--like the widow’s mite.
Francois Villon
(c. 1431-1463)
Chinook
Everything is loosening,
finally. The snarls
in my shoelaces and in my life
will all come untangled
if I just do nothing.
I must learn to sag and slump,
permit the taut muscles in my neck
to go slack. Lord,
I’ve been like this far too long:
a crazed Chinook struggling
upstream in the wrong river.
I’m ready to give up.
All the way down to the sea,
unsinkable, I’ll ride
Your peace through the white water,
thoughtless as a stick.
And I promise not to complain
about losing my grip.
Sometimes letting go
is the only way to hold on.
Soon
I keep looking up, expecting
the north star to flicker
and go out. Soon
the litmus moon will turn red.
Do roots suffer from wanderlust?
Even boulders among the hills
seem poised to leap.
How high? How far?
And how soon?
I fidget through the days,
feeling for the first time
an unsuspected migratory instinct.
Song
They sing me; I jingle.
I’ve become their brimstone ditty,
top ten, throbbing on
every boom box in Hell.
They hiss; they puff their cheeks:
it’s not a night breeze
clacking the blinds.
They whistle me while they work.
But I’m still silent, tongue-tied--
a shrug in a wrinkled shirt
and not a man.
O Lord, give me back my voice!
Let me torture them with psalms
until they howl
and run scared to their pit
and stuff their ears with ashes.
Come tune my harp again
to its own oddball, unheard-of key.
You’re my strength and my song.
I will sing You!
Dog Day
Bailey Blue, good morning--
so far. The sun has not risen
for either of us
and the moon has nowhere else to go.
Sit with me, stranger,
grand-dog left here for now
(and maybe later)
by a daughter with a stray heart.
Lift your mellow, unknowing eyes
and unload on me
all your loneliness and impatience;
let me scratch you where I itch.
This back yard is enough,
California-diverse
with dry evergreens around the pool,
apples rotting beneath palm trees,
and you: purebred Dalmatian
named for Irish liqueur and a mutt
your mistress can’t remember
except for her loss.
I’m a mutt myself, not much
of a dad or grandfather;
but I’ll take you in for now,
comfort you, and let you be
all the black and white
should-have-beens I’ve shredded
pasted back together
to make something like love.
Hyakutake, Mandelstam, God