The Knight of Wands

~
for Raf Mauro

On a sound stage in Burbank
an actor, lines in pocket, ponders
precisely how high to raise the brow
to fetch a comic puzzlement. The blocks
are toed, the brow is raised, the take is cut.

Through
the metaphysical conceit of television
there is a viewer in Charleston
and one in Poland, years later—who will
use the brow to tame a scolding wife,
who gives him vitamins, and forbids him
the second childhood he will reach
anyway, limping, failing, gasping, smiling.

An actor gambols out of bed,
and past his wife,
and wanders up the street,
and down the steps
to his second childhood:
his community garden.
He makes his entrance briskly, past
heads of adoring lettuce, and
the ceaseless ovation of an artichoke.

The sun is his follow spot.
Here he cultivates his rules
and his mint, and his bitter herbs,
and here he rehearses his private script:

"As ever, I put things out for all the world to see,
and water them, and care for them,
and let them take their chances."
~

The Nine of Swords

~
All of it comes down; the philistines
took the lady's chamber; they
broke the moon with American junk,

they snapped Excaliber
like a popsickle stick, crushed Nothung
like a cupcake. Lose the cutlass, lose
the weapon, lose the war.

This is our dark night.
The coughs and sins, the sunken eyes
the battles of an ancient age,
the indignity of fear; they all

side with the snideness
that crushes our sad lungs,
we blink our electronic
wish for help
to anyone left whole.
~

Two

JM, LS @ FIDM with student work, 10.6.09
...
A quiet, quiet day. Subdued and busy at home. Now we're settling into a dinner with John Dory and preparing it Veracruzano style.

A few friends today did call to recall what we recall: that October 4 two years ago, Lynn had her surgery and diagnosis. She continues to test well since chemo ended in spring of last year, and all we can do to commemorate passing milestones is to celebrate survival and to allow time to pass.

ONE YEAR AGO: A WOMAN, A CREATOR
...

The Six of Cups

~
Their families, known for weepy speeches,
took short sleep with wristwatches on;
they tersely folded dough; now, the glitter

of Aeneas, shining on the new land
like a minute of coffee, awes them all;
they sour over the athletes who won the games

and the sisters who lost their names, their frozen
vessels, their cracked kraters,
their little fissures of age

worn thin around the eyes;
worn brittly in the library;
worn like Lisbon statuary--

Everything says look forward, angel,
everything but your family, humankind;
all the dreams and all the boats

all your poems and all your buttercups,
everything a nostalgia; not a weepy one,
a nostaglia for a future that is full.
~

The Ace of Swords

~
Coward, do you know the truth?
The truth is neither here nor there.
The truth is in the heavy air.

You said the truth was plasma, like a flame
That briefly flickered in your youth,
That flame has forged the sword; now, live the truth.
~

The Magician

JM, Sunset on Sunset, Echo Park, 7.20.09


The Magician

I knew it would be easier—this
Life here in the clouds—I knew

I could open the sunroof
And let jacaranda blooms fall through—I knew

I could catch the purple rain
And put it in the armrest—I knew

I would change the Sunset lane
And open the moonroof to the dawn—I knew

I would say Nothing and she would
Say Nothing and I knew

My life of pain but not my life
Would end. I divined

The past: madness, sorcery, depression, coins,
Illness, the painting, a map, desire. I declined

To waive the wand and dust the past, for here
In the future perfect, in the clouds, I do need

Nothing,

I need Nothing, I need Nothing,
I need Nothing, I need Nothing

I know you will have gone—you, my goddess and
My despot for so long—I know you will

Have gone to ruin when I am toying with
your Nothing in joy and sailing clouds.
~

Two more

~
Two more poems of mine that originally appeared here earlier this year---The Hanged Man and The Knight of Swords---now also appear in this month's issue of Yareah.

The Hanged Man, the Tarot card that also appears in The Waste Land, draws on some images from the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound; most notably his noting the birds on telephone wires as similar to musical notes on a staff, but also from the figure of Pound himself, strapped and tortured in an iron cage after the fall of fascism in Italy.

I am working on a cycle of poems this year based on some cards in the Tarot deck.

The Queen of Swords

~
I saw you working once
at Théâtre Odéon.
You are from a time
When honesty had two edges.

You distinguished sin from crime.
Pride, envy, lust, greed,
Wrath, sloth, and my gluttony
For pain—all were nothing to you.

In your emerald taffeta dress,
You won the Furies over—I was redeemed—
Then you tiptoed across the island sand,
Masked for a ballroom dance.
~

lepidoptera

JM, A swarm of white moths, 5.6.09

Both orchids blooming for the third time in nineteen months. Note the promising shoot for fall blooming on the one on the right.

Stationery

JM, Old World, 4.24.09

Rather than trivialize the longer efforts, I will be sending out my more artful, more labored, more favored correspondence on stationery going forward.