Nowhere
…Poems
Don Thompson
Retro
Here is my desk: as solid and flat
As Earth was before we warped it,
And like the earth, littered with debris.
Toss it when you’ve seen the last of me.
Outside, the fried sun has gone down
On Western Civ… the end (again),
A rerun of our last collapse
And once more, the Apocalypse.
Chaos is in, nihilist thrills,
And quick fix emotional spills;
But not commonplace thought, the plod
From A to B and on to God.
I sit here while the light lingers
And count syllables on my fingers,
Making time at the end of time
To wait on recalcitrant rhyme—
Retro, out of the loop, and wrong.
This is not my Weltanshauung.
This Is August
Listen to the trees applaud in late summer—
Approbation, yes, but there’s dread in it
Like hardness in the veins of leaves not quite
Supple, although still green. Greener than ever.
In spring, their thoughts barely out of the bud,
The trees wouldn’t worry if they knew how.
Redolence of Eros is all they know,
And sap rising, and roots sinking in mud.
But none of that persists into autumn.
Urge and trepidation both lose their edge
When the leaves let go. They fall, holding no grudge,
And turn the thin, brittle gold of wisdom.
This is August. We have a lot to learn
Before we pile the leaves: before we burn.
Santa Ana
Out of the wind, the toothless wind,
Sour and hot,
Comes the voice that comes from no mind
To blow your thoughts
Away: A mad, synaptic fright
Like the beak of an owl
Scraping the blackboard of the night.
This is the howl
That opens its mouth wide to be fed
With what you know,
That traps you between the quick and the dead
And won’t let go.
Listen To Me
How long have I spoken a dead language
And not noticed the blank gazes, the yawns,
The grins that go along with cluelessness,
Nor felt a drowsy hand turn me like a page
Covered with crabbed, indecipherable runes?
The more we know, we know each other less.
On The Bubble
I. MRI
As the slow drift of galactic dust
Settles around your thoughts, we see
In this intracranial planetarium
An end to cherished mystery.
So this is real. Can we adjust?
How can a see-through skull keep its decorum?
Or is it all just smoke and ash?
And there—right there!—a blackened coin
Without a date, minted in the Realm of Fear?
May it be a worthless token,
And may the docs bank all the cash
While we have life to burn this time next year.
II. Options
One doc is flippant, one is blunt;
The one in worn sneakers defers
To the one in high-dollar loafers
Scuffed by a diagnostic punt.
Now it’s gizmo and techno-stunt
And docs talk odds rather than cures.
Old school medical boldness blurs
Into hesitance. Ubi sunt?
III. Insiders
You lie face up, careful not to move,
The huge, humming eye in its groove
Taking you in from thigh to brain.
The cath slithers from vein to vein.
Out of the loop, an old husband,
I hold my own unskillful hand
And wait, trying hard not to doubt
The men who know you inside out.
IV. Web
Sleep disheveled your honey hair
And I saw gray—
Not much, but not as rare
As yesterday:
A web spun by tiny arachnids,
Perhaps the spawn
Of the black egg behind your eyelids….
What’s to be done?
Nothing. The docs say let it lie.
A silken thread
Is all our lives ever hang by
Until we’re dead.
V. Prognosis
The fear, to call it by name, like wind
Waking me from tentative sleep
I’d give almost anything to keep,
Is this: That you’ll be gone, my friend.
It could just as easily be true
That I’d be blown away instead
And you, lying awake in our bed,
Would have the wind to listen to.
Though soon enough one of us will
Go first where both must go from here,
A fact it does no good to fear,
For now, at least, the wind is still.
Years Later
No, you can’t put blossoms back on the trees
After wind or an unexpected freeze,
No more than love survives bluster and chill
Intact. Feelings are easy enough to kill.
Even if all goes well, love soon scatters
Its own petals for what really matters,
Clenches its roots in the dirt and knuckles down
To the hard work of fruit for which it was sown
Piedras Blancas
1.
Even elephant seals start small
As pink thumbs in the womb, born black
On a white sheet of sea gulls that shriek,
Feasting on afterbirth. Like slack
And fat, overstuffed milk sausage,
Weaned in a moon without regret
And left here to do what they will,
They have nothing to do. Not yet.
2.
The pups lie still among their dead—
Smothered by careless bulls, egoists
With pink combat scars and the teeth
To rip chunks out of tourists
Who climb over the fence to take
Snapshots of Rubenesque harems
Or gross, anomalous noses
That thunk warning like wooden drums.
3.
Since life at sea begins in dreams,
They sleep. Look at them flip the sand,
Pelagic non-swimmers until
They wake hungry and understand,
Haul down to the surf and launch themselves
Into excess, absurd in scale.
Gluttons for loneliness, they go
Farther, deeper than any whale.
In the Grove
1.
The nut harvest is harbinger to winter cold.
It’s not cold yet. But on this warm morning,
Dust is drifting like fog across the road,
Stirred by a loutish, beetle-jawed machine.
Shouldn’t September be less obsessive,
The crop gathered in instead of taken
By force majeure? Sunlight drips through a sieve,
A sad, muscatel kind of sweetness in it,
Which is, in fact, the taste autumn should have.
This is mayhem, a market driven fit.
I’d rather glean. I like frost in the groves,
The glint, my breath clouding, peace and quiet,
And a few nuts to search for under the leaves.
2
It’s dawn. There’s less sizzle left in the sun
Now that hurried, brutal harvest is done.
But light still reaches us. Almost enough.
The stripped trees have been given some time off
To stand soaking their roots in dark water
From which the mist rises, hinting of winter.
Their leaves, though half brittle and covered with dust,
Remain stubbornly green beneath. Almost.
Out Here
1.
The white farmer in a white pick-up
Eats dust on the bank of a dry ditch.
His wife lives like the idle rich
On loans taken out on the crop.
The prices drop.
The sun rises. Unable to see
Through glare and a smear of smashed insect,
He drives much too fast by instinct—
But farms with an ag-science degree
From Cal Poly.
He loves it here with dirt in his hair,
His hands in the dirt he calls his own.
His wife dreams of moving to town,
But makes do with a new Jaguar
Every year.
2.
Unchanged (and undocumented),
Their work with hoes Neolithic,
The women form a silent clique,
Each with a bright scarf on her head,
And not unfed.
Their men, with cash and beer on ice,
Like low-tech engineers for hire,
Could raise the dead with baling wire.
The boss listens to their advice,
Vaguely precise.
Their own pick-ups aren’t white, of course,
But waxed, the wheels glittering chrome.
They send most of their money home
(After the Saturday night fracas)
To Zacatecas.
Sepia
Maybe the past was black and white.
Children sometimes think so. Although
Grown up, subtler in self-deceit,
We understand that long ago
Things were the same as they are now—
Except that the world was sepia.
It’s true that old photos, somehow
Predisposed to melancholia,
Seem suffused with a film of rust
As if colors not only fade
In time, as they obviously must,
But all turn one unfortunate shade
Of brown.
For us, this is the picture:
Faces much too accustomed to grief,
Or bored, for which there was no cure,
A hard man and his haunted wife.
Notice the tear stains near the edge,
The gold leaf that flakes from the frame
In which time has held them like a grudge
Until no one remembers their name.
Horse Drawn Hearse at Bodie
It’s just that it’s so small, almost a toy,
As if death reduces us to scale.
Or used to. Nothing embellishes the black
On black paint that somehow never faded
To gray: One fact, at least, without nuance.
Inside behind the imperfect glass, the coffin,
A plain, unplaned wooden box with a lid
Made to be nailed down tight with absolutes,
Is much too cramped to hold our self-esteem.
How could the dead, so well-fed by legend,
Even fit? I’d doubt if I hadn’t seen
Museum manikins of bird women
Dressed up in real feathers and brittle lace,
Of men in wrinkled suits, thin as weasels
And twice as mean. Humorless, blunt and hard,
Their icy eyes burn in the old photos.
But two ponies would’ve been enough to pull
Any of them to the boneyard on the hill.
We’d need the draft horses and a freight wagon
To haul us where the wind endlessly blows
And tombstones lean away from each other.
I should go up and read a few epitaphs.
An easy climb. Nevertheless, I’ll pass.
It’s cold. My feet hurt and now it’s snowing,
A few, scattered flakes that vanish as they fall.
Six Epitaphs
And here lies Peace, resting at last,
No longer sought after, harassed.
Now that our need can’t fray its nerves,
It knows the peace that Peace deserves.
**
Nothing but dirt is buried here
Where things are not what they appear.
No unambiguous bones or rocks:
This is the grave of Paradox.
**
Trendy wanted only the new.
He let fatal ennui accrue,
Languished, and would not be consoled,
For all the remedies were old.
**
He thought such fire would never die:
Ashes to ashes did not apply.
Now in a jar, less than half filled,
Lies Lust, unstirred and unfulfilled.
**
Here lies Peevish, a cosmic joke,
wound up so tight he had a stroke
That laid him out flat on satin
Wearing a fake mortician’s grin.
**
The grass uncut, watered if it rains,
The stone blank except for the stains
Left by Love when it comes to kneel
And weep for what it used to feel.
Cemetery at Cambria
The caretaker must be passé
To flag every vet
With fresh colors, although the grass
Is dry and faded out—
And so is Old Glory by the gate,
But not tattered, not yet,
Like the MIA/POW
Generic black silhouette.
I feel at home here. In this place,
My outdated mindset
Somehow has come alive again.
Finally, somewhere I fit.
No rules. Anything goes for graves
As odd as they can get,
A pure libertarian panache
That overwhelms regret
With huge plastic flowers, spinners,
Every sort of trinket,
As if bad taste were the evidence
That grace needs no merit.
Funny how hard it is to leave.
The obsolete quiet,
The dusty lucid afternoon
Sliding down to sunset,
In no hurry, the stubborn light
With which the pines are lit,
All remind us of what we know:
Never, never forget..
Tule Fog
Winter came here to die and did.
Listen: its final breath
Adrift out in the fallow field
Whispers a shibboleth
We can’t pronounce. In our dialect,
There is always a lisp
That true speakers of silence detect.
Unlike the fog, a wisp
The weak sun so soon erases,
You have gone to a light,
My friends, in which your lost faces
Will never fade. Not quite.
Widow
She sips coffee from bone china,
The cup blessed with a hairline crack
And by the hand-rubbed patina
That makes heirlooms of bric-a-brac…
And love. Not what we say or do,
A text much too complex to gloss,
But the sheen of years gives it value.
That will endure. The rest is loss.
Coffee
Caffeine under the surface
Like fire in mud
Infuses the blood:
This is the artifice
Of beans ground and then brewed.
The taste, a complex
Alkaloid mix
Of bitterness imbued
With hope, dissolves all doubt
From tepid dreams
And the flimsy schemes
We’re so unsure about.
One cup ignites the mind:
Coffee is spoor
To the predator
Our courage hides behind.
Gone
The light is like translucent smoke. Silence.
The birds are up, but have nothing to say
To me—at least not yet. Maybe never.
My brain in its kiln bakes like a lump of clay,
Slowly, slowly, heated by a slight fever
Of disquieting dreams that make no sense.
In sleep like this, there is no recompense.
And the thoughts I wake up with (in disarray,
Insubstantial, a glaze, merely clever)
Are not likely to let me get away
To where the past will stay put forever—
Gone—and no one can trace its provenance.
Eviction Notice
Deadbeat thought, forced from my skull,
Where—where will you go?
Back home to Mom and Pop Gloom,
To a filthy bungalow
With walls and worn furniture stained
By bad choices, regret,
Malevolence, and hurt feelings
They can’t forget—not yet;
With yellow newspapers of the past,
Smelling of cat pee,
Stacked up below a stitched sampler:
Welcome to our misery.
Go there. They have to take you in.
I won’t rent to a thought
That writes bad checks on closed accounts
And fills my mind with doubt.
Dream
There is a dream—so comforting
We want to go to sleep again.
The phone does or it doesn’t ring
With bad news from out of town;
Outside the storm uproots the oak
Or dies down to a listless rain
That falls then rises dry as smoke.
Either way the dream, unimpressed,
Insists consciousness is a joke.
Whether we wake up cursed or blessed,
To sunlit leaves, wreckage, or grief,
The dream calls us to sleep and rest.
Nothing else can give us relief.
These Three
I. Faith
1.
Because faith is a dry river
Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t flow.
Lay a stick in the sandy bed,
Somewhere between now and never,
and it will move an inch or so….
Of course, by then, we’ll all be dead.
2.
And yet our faith will outlive us.
Like sand settled in thin layers
By flood or ice—even windblown
Dust and debris that seems worthless—
It builds on the deep faith of others
Mountains of sedimentary stone.
II. Hope
Now the penultimate wind weakens,
An exhalation only the leaves
Can feel—and then only the most sensitive,
Those with the thinnest skins.
Is this the last last chance? Is it?
Will clouds fall to the ground, and hope,
If neither have the wind to hold them up?
Will we fall, too, and quit?
No. For here is the final wind
Which, although it lies motionless,
Has been lifted gently by the wild grass
And passed from hand to han
III. Charity
What will remain, after the last excuse
Has been skinned alive and the sinewy meat
Boiled until it’s soft enough to eat,
The core, the bare bone of being, is this:
Possession is illusion, gain is deceit,
The greedy heart holds a fistful of loss
Unless it has a death grip on caritas,
without which we live and die incomplete.
Here In February
1.
The clouds are hard to listen to.
Who could ever learn to translate
That gray accent, thick as slate,
Into idiomatic blue?
Below, the nut trees in their dreams
Mutter a burnt umber patois—
Nihilists who deny the thaw
And say nothing is what it seems.
2.
That was just a week ago.
And now there is a green rumor
Spreading among weeds, a murmur
Of yes in the groves instead of no.
Another week, interregnum,
And then comes the uproar of pink.
We will not be able to think
For the noisy white of almond blossom.
Nowhere
Because not much rain arrives here
And that scattered and mostly dust,
We’ve learned to adjust;
No one native expects the clouds,
If they appear,
To be more than empty shrouds.
The wind, such as it is, languishes
In slow circles, too weak to lift
A finger to sift
Through scraps of scratch paper for thoughts
Or mere wishes
We wished (sort of) but never got.
Minimalists when it comes to need,
We get by with next to nothing
And never cling:
We hold emptiness in our hands,
At peace and freed
From the lust common to other lands.
We do exist, and you’ll find us—
When you’re truly sick-of-it-all,
Back-to-the-wall,
When push has finally come to shove—
In your atlas
Under Nowhere, the Middle of.
Acknowlegements
Some of these poems first appeared in The Bathyshperic Review, Contemporary Rhyme,
Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lyric, Mobius, Nebo,
NeoVictorian/Cochlea, North Dakota Quarterly, Penwood Review, Raintown Review,
and Snowy Egret.