Born with the prospect of personal liberty,
the democratic republic hung itself
with the mantle of Abraham Lincoln –
that was
Sold to Thurmond (SC), by Goldwater (AZ),
to weave bigotry into the American tapestry
with golden threads of willful ignorance.
Dave Read
Which is the White Man –
the Arab or the Jew,
the Orangeman or the Provo?
Martin Luther King’s dream of inclusion in the grand monochrome
potluck supper of liberty will not be startled awake by the caterwaul
of social scientists,* who deem theory to be reality, or vice versa,
and who dunk their poems in polemic acid,
and who fear comity can mean only the loss
of their coveted sinecures of contention.
Dave Read
*Science, absent empirical truth, is creative writing.
Nobody
is hurt more
by segregation
than everybody whose
heads and hearts lack
knowledge of and esteem for:
Louis Armstrong,
Big Mama Thornton,
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Willy Mays,
Maya Angelou,
Sonny Rollins,
Toni Morrison,
Paul Robeson,
Duke Ellington,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
W.E.B.DuBois,
Rep.John Lewis, R.I.P.,
Aretha Franklin,
John Lee Hooker,
…
Dave Read
But for peonies or daffodils perhaps,
leave the stone etched with the name of your dead
alone to cast shadows over grass day after day –
And keep a little flag handy to wave at the parade,
or to poke in the eye of politicians who spill blood
as if they only were spending money.
Dave Read
The real one, the Mount Rushmore of the good American mind,
which does not trespass lands of the Sioux,
Beams bright with the likeness of good John Lewis,
the likes of whom America has no right to expect to see again,
Whom Americans fail to emulate at their peril.
Godspeed John Lewis, good rest is your’s; good trouble, our’s.
– Dave Read
From time to time
Father nature pipes in
With an update, or to ground
Us for the weekend, or longer,
To effect the weight of things.
Our resilience becomes crucial –
We find drive we forgot about
And split the day between
Awake and shaken to the core.
Dave Read
We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.
After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.
Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.
Dave Read
decades the dawdler, small d dilettante,
big a amateur, master of half a dozen useful/tasty things,
and an even-tempered brooder, to boot!
upon attaining seventy years, the chore is to unpack
cabinets and closets and to scan or riffle scores and scores
of notebooks, lest something worthwhile be lost.
the gift of seventy is humility enough to invoke alchemy,
which can hie the compression of these leaves beyond
the ink black stage straight to the bright and shiny.
Dave Read
a.
It is November, not October
when we’re apt to recall the story of leaves
in the northeast, when after wind, sun,
and rain have taken leaves off trees, onto
lawns and sidewalks, into nooks and gutters,
that metaphor becomes manifest, maple leafs
die to make the medium of growth, a season of
drawn drapes announces another spring greening.
e.
Once you fall into a pile of leaves
like a convention of yellow, brown,
and ecru people selling securities
to buoy your rise among siblings,
peers, and early-to-die parents while
still in school, not stillborn, still – yet, as
eternal to a schoolboy as flame to a candle alight.
i.
Intense fracas echoes along the corridors of recollection,
the ringing endorsement one September day, with a short stack
of records, re-configured phonograph, six pack of beer, pack of smokes;
in retrospect, in the rearview mirror as distant as fifty years, the same damn
music rings true today as it did during the days of rage, the days that each dawned
with enough latent potency to blow the lid off the joint, to expose all theology as phony
in the repercussion of one platonic bomb, on homecoming day, when oak trees
like sentinels in the urban forest where burnished leaves mirrored irrelevant allusions.
o.
Leaves are enough to make an ungrown boy dawdle, leaves that have fallen from a panoply of trees, skinny ribbed leaves from three story tall elm trees in the decades before they’d be felled because of dutch elm disease, pushed by soft winds to form tiny hills where stone walls ringing the front yards of old homes met the dark grey slate paving stones kids skipped along, pedaled plump-tired bicycle across, and occasionally skinned a bare knee upon. maple, beech, and cottonwood trees too added leaves to shoe rustle. while aflame in their trees, young eyes were drawn elsewhere, never attracted by abstract notions of “going out in a blaze of glory,” youth mainly a metaphor-free zone, thank god!
u.
willow trees get kids’ attention because they weep; it is their inability to project anything like the haughty self-assurance of a child’s mother or father, who, when truly saddened (whether or not for the inevitability of cold, awful death) don’t get even a little teary-eyed, but suck it up and put on a happy face that doesn’t fool anyone, and when fall rolls around, the weeping willow tree seems to have the sense to come in out of the rain, and disdains the foliage spectrum, recognizing the futility of decidual decadence.
Dave Read
“Vowels of bright desire” is a phrase I found in something Donald Hall wrote; I’ll cite it properly when I find it again!
Some few hours before a sloe-black sky would feel the prick of the crescent moon, she called my attention to the far ridge, where a blue mist rose over the leafless wood.
For a moment, we discussed the source: smoke? reflection of an unseen pond? but we couldn’t muster the energy – we didn’t amount to enough to care to know.
We had gotten nowhere in no time at all. A luckier couple, much less lovers, would have made up a story out of the blue, delighted by the emergence of Spring, at last.
All we could do was bounce memories off one another, carefully cut and pasted for the telling:
I noted where I first saw a scarlet tanager, but not the girl who was with me then, whose areolae were paler than scarlet; and she pointed to the bench by the pond, smiling in silence at the memory of what went down her last time there.
Ten days into April, some months since our first date, we parted.
It was the year we fined God for keeping Winter out past its due date, back in the library of the mind.
– Dave Read