Contents
Margins of error
Out of time
When every map has crumbled
The flash that gave us shadow
Sanding the slick glacier trails
A shivering kiss
Last night I tried to see the world
I cannot drink enough!
Two gone
No reason can retard a pounding
heart
In the summer of '64
Green scars
A true compassion leaves a space
Works nights
This is a thin memory
Trapped beneath the tangled web
Wooden walls
Learning the trick of breathing
To sleep in D minor
To confine the flaming dance
The moon splits with a tender blade
Moments, minutes, dear
Brothers, may I touch you?
I want to touch you when I go
Home
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Margins of Error
Eye-level with the snails
Nostrils a hair away from the March mud
Stained where the bloodroot lifts her blooms
Above the last stubborn patch of crusted snow
I stare with tight breath at the slimy track
Of a salamander warmed finally to motion
By the sun rising higher and higher
On the pivot of equinox.
I smell what the tiny springtail smells.
I feel the spreading fungus,
The working of the worms.
From this point of view I question
The safety factors, the margins of error,
The redundancies, the multiple escape sequences,
The infinite contingencies
We strain to anticipate.
I want the fire of the stars in my eyes but
I want also milk for every child.
I want to solve the simple problems first.
When Every Map Has Crumbled
Imagine the long, dead silence
Beyond the farthest echoes of our first voice,
Beyond the lines that ripple tempting at the edge of vision,
Think of it!
Hold tightly in your memory that gleaming spear we threw,
It slips through flat, black oceans, surfaceless,
Without a wind to stir the waves;
This water has not stormed
Since stars themselves were born.
Why send children and their violins
On such a journey?
Voyager, daughter of our narrow, finest dreams,
Lift up your voice!
Lift up your voice,
We told you.
Flash your brittle lantern
On and off and on again
Till only sparks remain,
And say your sad farewells
To points of hard and icy light.
No human hand can ever soothe your cheek
Or braid your hair again.
Our sorry ears will cease to hear your songs.
Sing on though, sing on
When every view is strange,
When every map has crumbled.
Shout your simple shepherd's throat
Until it dries and swells.
Then drink and rest and
Sing out loud again the songs of earth.
Play our thirsty music on and on.
We send breath and tears and promise
To our neighbors, to our first friends.
Not every sun is quiet,
Not every planet gray and dead.
Stretch out for other melodies,
For harbor, shore, and peace.
The Flash That Gave Us Shadow
Through the gray shroud flies a spear,
A heat that burns into the cloudy mist
A tunnelled passage for the day's brief light,
An opening that fades so quickly back
To the featureless fog we cannot remember
The sun's minute.
The flash that gave us shadow and relief
Dissipates into spray without color.
Where is a dawn that will not come
In hues of lead and steel?
Where is a dusk that will not dim
And leave us in the iron and ashes of the night?
A cold sky insulates our dark furnace.
Our stones have long forgotten their red ancestors.
Out Of Time
Far down in this planet's hot cellar
In a windless cavern carved in darkness
By steaming salty water
Black eyes stare at piles of bones
All sound whispers into cathedral silence
"No way out
This is the end of the dream."
In this secret prison
A tiny throat struggles
Scratching velvet air no god can hear
No god can move the atoms that drift without wisdom
Carelessly into this hyperbolic gaze
Immense ruthless eyes black
Without knowledge without needs.
These eyes have a mouth
And when the mouth speaks
It cracks the skin of continents
It shakes the walls around the sky
Spilling terror from the stars
Drowning worlds like ours in filthy light.
Outside all this
You lean against a tree
You are ignorant and temporary
Your ear itches under a fly
Buzzing past with no more reason
Than the grass pushing up your feet
Pushing you out of time.
Set your watch
Brain-dead villain by default
It chatters guilt in seven languages.
Sanding The Slick Glacier Trails
Our cities rise and fall on plutonic platforms
Once subducted slowly into the planet's maw
Red and plastic with the mucous of rocks
Melted and remade.
Who can judge the building of a mountain,
The naming of a street?
Who can rank the razing of a house,
The dry, conquering laugh of the desert?
Look at these small moments
Straining the winch of history
Sanding the slick glacier trails
We slide our lives on
With gritty details.
What here is of consequence?
What here is of lasting concern?
Our species spouts and bubbles in a small pond.
We do not reach the real ocean
With our tiny dreams.
We cannot hear the grinding of the galaxies.
Last Night I Tried To See The World
Last night I tried to see the world
Through your eyes.
I sought a different view.
I climbed inside your head,
Thinking that a different mirror might
Straighten out the lines, correct the colors,
Rejuvenate my stubby crayons.
I worked your mouth and tugged your ears
With fingers long and strange, not mine.
I bent your knees and stroked your hair.
I couldn't get it right.
But once I pulled your eyelids up
(A major trick you might have shared)
A symphony of sights poured in:
Cat lights through odd lenses,
Dreams of owls,
Last night's moon feast,
Gold, gleaming hoods on bulky champions
Splashing down new seacoasts to serene sanctuary.
Here before your unglassed gates
Unlocked without the slyest key
I smelled the gel that glued my brain
And let it go, dissolving,
Swallowed by dry ground.
I stood trembling on your mind's edge.
Gazing through your smoky channels
I studied mountains, books, and bees,
Matched your blood speed with salty currents
Surging unregarded in my own veins.
I cataloged your colors, spread them thin
Through liquid, mental prisms.
Red bright red and what a green!
But blue I never found.
And blue I wanted most of all.
Down the back of your eye ran something like blue,
And desperately grasping it I lost all shades but gray.
Please!
Preserve my light, my memory of blue.
I turn dim circles.
I waltz on darkened ice.
I Cannot Drink Enough!
Your laughter splashes on my face
Laden with beginnings,
A spring waterfall of new tumbling promises
Fresh with sun-scrubbed air.
I cannot drink enough!
Exhilarated by this tender bath
I stretch and bask in the warm beam of your casual smile.
No fire, no furnace heats like this.
You find and melt the ice that populates my aching bones.
Your strong hands soothe my wretched fingers,
Break the dusty crust that fouls my joints
And drags my morning walk across hard, bumpy shadows.
Your shirt billows, dances through my sad smoke,
Cleansing tedious grime from musty channels long unused,
Opening windows in stale rooms.
A Shivering Kiss
His naked feet in the sweaty glue of dreams
Strain to move in foggy pain,
Stretch to scratch dull messages
On ancient, cloudy glass, the cold floor.
His voice would bring down
The roofs of his dreams in small pieces,
Could it rattle chains, draw blood sketches,
Sing in more than bird song,
Roar past hoarse coughing,
Quivering lips.
He cried for her once, like a child,
Please, bawling, please!
Not suspecting she would steal his voice.
Projecting red lives on peeling paper,
On drip-dry sheets,
They milked swollen memories,
Shared a shivering kiss.
Who can he tell but his walls?
He has no dog,
No open windows,
No one to meet at midnight.
His raincoat hangs alone and dry,
Cracking in a stuffy closet,
Bending hangers in suspended agony.
Two Gone
Two gone,
Sliding into the third year
You find the sky still out of reach,
But closer than it was
When last the northern oak
Shook down her ruby crown
(You do not count this clock's tick.
You know the seasons only by their shadows).
Your mirror looks the same.
The goal you set your arrow fast for, though,
Has changed.
Your new life turns and sparkles in your eyes,
Fresh, nervous,
Dancer on the first evening when you know you dance
Like the snow, like the slow planets.
You launch your thoughts on broad wings,
On hydrogen flame, on thin sails of light.
You've grown fit now for different skies
More distant than the dreams you wrap around yourself,
Around your simple cottage.
Seal your ship tight, fair captain.
Pledge your crew to that one star
Gleaming in the night.
In The Summer Of '64
A red '58 Karmann Ghia twenty years ago
Rocked in the drive-in dark
Not from frantic fondling or raucous antics
Clowned on the town by silly, squeaking kids.
No, that car filled and bounced with questions
Raised to the summer sky by a trio
Just learning to ask the difference
Between want and need.
We each wanted each other, wanted another,
Needed most of all that night itself,
That time away from rules and schools
And short answers
In the summer of '64.
We had our relief, ourselves in the darkness,
We had our philosophy of seventeen years
Out in the open like young lions
Realizing for the first time
The source of the hot blood, the juicy bones,
Facing for the first time
For the rest of our lives
The open plain, the sprinting prey.
We had our hard day's night.
Dan, Jane, Tom.
Two blond heads and a red.
In the summer of '64.
Outside, a late, bright moon of sodium
Lights the dim path
Back to that hard night
When we prayed to each other,
Two blond heads and a red,
That peace be more than just a word.
Already in the summer of '64
We didn't want the war.
Green Scars
Your love's warm razor
Slides hissing into moist caverns, my core
(My liver, my lungs)
Dark and steaming red at first,
A surprising fire,
But cooling as a storm quickly cools the air.
From everywhere horizons shrink and press
My shoulders, my life.
I weep like a rock weeps.
Your leopard's teeth
Leave dead, green stains in my skin.
No bath can undo them.
Staggering into a scream,
I never scream.
You know that, you know that.
Cords in my gut spin,
Snakes persuaded by your dagger
To dance unnatural steps.
My cave ends in sobs, in darkness,
And water drips from somewhere
On my distant hair.
I've lost the edges of my hands,
Painted rough with green scars,
And you go out, laughing, healthy.
I smell green walls and death.
This reeking stain I cannot scrub.
There is no green
There is no light
No Reason Can Retard A Pounding Heart
What logic lurks in silent smiles
That no one sees but two?
What sense is there in careful touch
That leaves no mark but warmth
And fading, soft sensation?
What dialectic governs glances
Stolen through a crowd for later admiration?
What thesis guides the nudge, the squeeze,
The soft caress that feeds and needs affection?
None.
No syllogism guides the wind that drifts
From spirits likely matched and marked for mated paths.
No reason can retard a pounding heart
Or stifle happy syllables
Raised like prize roses by intimate companions.
A True Compassion Leaves A Space
It's hard to loose a loved one,
Leave wings adored unclipped and free
To climb the sky and find perhaps
Another perch, another bed
Where she might soak the glow of moonlight,
Nap in shade of other valleys, other trees.
But love confined distorts,
Like flowerpot a mighty oak,
Like cage a chimpanzee;
A true compassion leaves a space
Unfenced and wide with roads unnumbered,
Paths unmarked,
And easy docks on every shore.
Air passes out as well as in
Through open windows,
Yet I keep them so,
Though vacuum crush my ribs,
Long pressure of her absence
Bruise, bleed my aching chest, my empty arms.
May I seem confused?
My house is empty.
Westward falls the sinking sun
Where lovers turn for last, inspiring light
Before they hide in secret, hollow trees.
Westward strain my eyes,
Depleted, unfed, hunting through open windows
Her backlit form before the night.
This Is A Thin Memory
My cold trumpet grows slowly warm
Its crystalline light turns gradually gold
It wraps molten metal in my hands
As the first hard tones fade in the hallways
As the first sharp fanfare gives grudging way
To a mellow voice my dismal throat cannot claim,
As the high plateaus of sunlit melody
Come into view after a difficult climb
Of rocky sharps, icy flats, and stiff lips.
This is a thin memory.
I miss the smell of wet brass,
Of valve oil dripping on a leather case,
Of aging, curling, yellow sheets of music.
In those days I thought I could speak
Through my trumpet
With the fierce, fiery intensity
Of a midnight winter sky.
I miss my horn.
Trapped Beneath The Tangled Web
Who could have guessed
The trail would be so slick
So quick to the bottom?
Who could have known
The path would be so short
So easy to the end?
Who could have said
The walk would be so brief
So rare as the few warm hours
Of October?
Who could have warned
Of the hard conclusion coming
So soon so soon?
The sun crawls at a low angle
Into the cold months.
Our breath slowly congeals
Trapped beneath the tangled web
Of winter.
We settle uneasy in the icy knowledge
We will not climb again
To bare-legged days of gold and green.
Works Nights
My aunt sent him
To sell me religion
At a mountain camp
For a price.
He wanted to explain all this
In my living room,
On my couch,
Face to face and friendly-like.
"My wife's asleep,
Works nights"
Was all it took to send him back
To his home planet
With his books, his briefcase,
His four-wheel drive.
No one in his world
Works nights.
He'll tell them of the alien he met
And the narrow escape.
Wooden Walls
With the wisdom of children we want
A stick of hickory.
We want wooden walls.
We want to sit on maple chairs,
To dine on oaken tables,
To sleep on beds of beech.
We link our wet and fragile lives
To our planet's roots
With woody fiber.
We scrape our drawings on stones,
But we hope to survive the cold future
In the warm memories of the strongest trees.
To Sleep In D Minor
In the turbulent sweep of night
Through the whistling, dusty channels
Of a sleeping brain
A flare erupts
At the odd frequency of sixty hertz
To torture the helpless dream,
To singe the defenseless retina
So trustingly accommodated
To the black blanket of a long rest.
What is awake?
What is the twisting of voices
Under the thin, airy skin of this round rock?
What is the whirling and staining of souls
On the mad circuits of a blue planet
Swinging in mindless synchrony
Against the cold, dead dust of space?
Who can hope for better than
To sleep in D minor,
To wake in A-flat?
To Confine The Flaming Dance
To restrain all but the intelligible,
To confine the flaming dance,
The burning quiver of passion,
To the fingertips, to the delicate face,
To the bow, to the reed, to the brass cup,
To the fragile voice;
To hold the deep rage,
The wild joy, the fierce love,
The cold anger, the smothering despair,
The gleaming hope,
And cast it in the shape of song
Is our human music,
Our meeting with those who went before us,
Our message to the years ahead.
Learning The Trick Of Breathing
How often we change our names, our days,
Our circumstances.
How often we smile and cringe at the mirror,
At the blurring of history
In our salty, squinting gaze.
During the dim rituals of funerals
We wonder at the weight of the years
In the shaking arms of our weeping friends.
We want answers to our questions but
We don't want we never wanted
To go to school.
We grimace at calendars, at clocks.
Avoiding the future
We sit
Rock men in broth to our knees
Bathed in the ions of genesis
Learning the trick of breathing.
The Moon Splits With A Tender Blade
The moon splits with a tender blade
The difficult darkness at winter's end,
That icy wrap that chokes and squeezes new life
In such a hateful, frigid grasp.
We shiver in the cold light.
Can we stand long in this dim glare,
In the dead face of the future
(What they told us was the future)?
Can we fill again and again our lungs
With the air we drain and deplete with our false plans?
We had our say at the edge of the day.
Our voices could not stop the rushing of the night.
We stand bleeding in the white light.
Brothers, May I Touch You?
Brothers, may I touch you?
You sad standing here
At the source of the black river
Presses on the stings of my own memories.
I would join you in your sullen meal,
And briefly break the silence of your mourning.
I know the taste of your suffering.
We have disdained the easy liquor of forgetfulness
And are numbed instead by grief;
Sunlight now stabs at our once bright eyes.
We feel the jagged saw.
Life drips unhappy through our torn hands.
Let our common tears temper our wild hearts,
Or let us die, too.
I Want To Touch You When I Go
He died at home
He died at home
Strange solace for a hybrid man
Who never stayed in bed for long
Or wandered far from friendly arms,
Who worked his life away
With fumes and chemicals and such
That shield our daily fingertips
From thorns and unkind edges,
Pushing back a cold-toothed world,
A little bit.
So many times he came home with his smells
And made his wife and daughter laugh with wrinkled nose,
But did not die.
I guess I'd like to die at home.
I want to be outside though,
The usual trees about me,
My feet on sympathetic soil,
Your cooling hand on my hand.
I want to touch you when I go.
Moments, Minutes, Dear
At four o'clock in August
In the dry lands of the north
Everything is hard with edges.
Sunlight's darts invade us,
Stabbing at our scratchy seats
Where we rest uneasy, baking in faded shadow;
Our thoughts roam to greener, cooler months.
This heat too golden adds blades to logic,
Fixes thoughts in tight perspective.
What use are plans or charts of future tracks
When wisdom crumbles in fragments of old paper?
We pick our way among threads
Too intricate to forecast.
Each hour casts new fibers,
New filaments in our path.
Days away, still hot,
Gulls rest their ankles in green seas where
Whales ride the backs of sun-smoked waves,
Falling like houses to the west,
Widening the singing of their endless day.
The gray whale lives for the next crest,
The next trough, the next deep dive,
Drifts with the tide's rhythm,
The swell, the roll,
She lifts her flukes and disappears
In smooth circles of quiet water.
We do not admit in our heat,
As the whales do not admit in their cool oceans,
Our possible extinction.
We are such brief beasts.
We ignore the frantic motion
At the corners of our eyes.
Our breath endures;
Call that a lifetime safe from rust.
Moments, minutes, dear,
Are what we really have,
Not years.
Tom Vernier
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