Deus ex Machina

Lightly, lightly, every nightly,
till the cows come home.
Now blow the horn, let oboes
mourn, give the dog a bone.

Farcical's my breakfast food,
nonsense is my tool,
yet every night I pray there be
no twittering in my town
that tells me I'm a fool.

The moon-moon is round, sir,
so's our bloody globe,
yet you act square, forsaken:
put off your priestly robe.

See the children in the sand
at home as we should be.
Dig-dig, splish-splash,
at home awash with glee.

The nighthawk hunts
at evening tide,
you watch the evening news.
The skunk is drunk in the compost pile,
but still you sob the blues.

Click your teeth together,
listen as you can.
Shut up, be very quiet:
fat pops in the hot pan.
No more, no less, than this, sir:
hawk knows his every feather.
You too could try it, try it,
and give heed to the weather.



Where Earth Sets the Table, There's Always Plenty to Eat

Raindrops on the windowpane seem permanent
balls of light. Imagine the narcissi as a yellow cry
from a pot set on a rock the glacier dumped and forgot.
You can leave the sixty-foot black cherry trees alone.
Sentinels at the edge of a field, they don't need you,
they're on post, standing high with their filigree crowns.
The sky, ignorant and gray, the sky that knows everything,
allows one patch of sunlight to peep through and remind
the clouds they're moving.



Purda

Each time I set my foot down
the floor spins. Each time I say
I'm here I'm somewhere else.
It's not that the sun's sick but
something is, the light so pale
and wan, things of the day
in purda. In light like this
our wars are fought on my back porch
children screaming, bankers
at God's work. Sunlight
fumigates, but faded lets
the grizzlies in, all bloodiness
and greed. Teach me to abide
the filtering clouds, to wear
as favorite worn-out night
clothes dreams of love
and peace, so shabby now
that once were bright.



What Stavros Sees

Stavros sees our friendship stark
against those famous spaces
where no star is. His mantra
is Andromada passing
through the Milky way,
without a star disturbed.
He finds things hard
to read, even Budapest,
where red flowers
pour from window pots.

One winter in Beijing, he huddled
inside his zipped-up hooded parka
staring at concrete walls, and floors
and ceiling, just as the Mao-blued
other hungry diners did. "We sat
in the dark like that, cold,
looking at nothing except sometimes
at each other. They sat blowing
on their hands in kerosene light
until a bundled girl came out
with chaffing dishes for each table,
which she lit. Then she brought
meat in pieces and scallions we
dipped into boiling water
and later drank the soup.

Stavros wonders, "Is there
a China or did I just make it up?
Then birazei, macht's nichts.
the real is always gauded
freaky stuff we patch together,
like what happened to
your underwear in the pitch black drawer.

On Athos, late, wolves already howling,
Stavros says, he heard mule bells
that led him down to the monastery,
that had been hiding as it hid
for 600 years, just past an easy ridge.

Stavros smokes too much
and picks his teeth at table.
On Athos, he drank from
small cans of condensed milk
he'd packed from home and sucked
on like a baby.

As for me, I'm sitting in the cold,
picking my nose and telling lies.



Late Capitalism

I got the last box off the shelf but it was empty.
No mouse-holes or tell-tale top torn open,
just the sealed box, empty when I shook it.

At the meat counter, more of the same:
feathers for chickens, and for swine
the slop that fed them.

I thought, depilatory I thought
old men shrinking in their bones.
April past, then the summer gone.

Meteors stop for lunch, the wheel
grinds to a stop. Here and there,
like detritus, a man hammering,

a young girl singing down the street.
Above, storm clouds scudding north,
the bewildered jet stream strayed

from its path, sunshine pale and lethal.
You are watched by 78 eyes
that love you after their nature.

You are a blind and frightened mouth
that believes what it is told and eats
what it is given. Babylon, give us

back our open sky and constellations,
our fiery courses, our bloom in language
that opens and closes like a rose.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Poetry

Bert Stern

Born in Buffalo in 1930, Bert Stern is retired Milligan Professor of English at Wabash College and Chief Editor of Hilton Publishing. At present, he teaches in Changing Lives Through Literature, a program for people on probation, and, with his wife, Tam Lin Neville, co-edits Off the Grid Press, which publishes collections for poets over sixty. Stern's poems have been published in journals including Poetry, Hunger Mountain, The American Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and New Letters, among others, and in a number of anthologies, including Anthology of American Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. His chapbook, Silk/The Ragpicker's Grandson, was published by Red Dust in 1998. Steerage, a new collection, was published by Ibbetson Street Press in the summer of 2009 and chosen for the "Must Read" list by the Massachusetts Book Award judges.