JUDY GARLAND BLUES

Painted Lady

2010-04-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

I.

There was something tender my first and most perverse girlfriend—
Handsome, sweet but never angelic schoolgirl Carmen!—
Wrote to me half a year after she'd moved away. She’d always
Been unstable, unpredictable, taunting, daunting, and alluring,
But none of that could disclose the author of this message.

On a magazine photo of that ugly yet beautiful Dylan Thomas,
She mysteriously scribbled, "This is you!"
With initials appended which at first I could not discern.
Also a scrap of art paper with no intended decoration that I recall
Except that hand-lettering I later came to know as hers which read:

I love you.
I have always loved you.
I will always love you.

I'd never heard such talk—
I was only a high school student—
Such romance and passion were still so thin and new!
I felt so light and soaring, uplifted as by a butterfly’s wings!

Behind my door at home I cried with joy and confusion
Because the narrow world seemed suddenly so wide!
Our relationship of attitudes, aches, and separations soon ensued
And rushed us forward almost drunkenly—!

I with my fussy weekend boxes of Benson & Hedges,
My new ascot, the fury new in me to touch her,
To grasp her, to play and never let her go!
(How little did I know that grasping was as far as I would go!)

She with her demi beatnik unsense of style and offbeat grace—
Those black skirts and practical shoes and wondrous sweaters!
Her impulsive knowing embraces and awkward virginal rebuffs!
(Emotions out of control as new to her as they were to me.)

We started happily with so much certitude that year,
Yet parted in disarray before the next,
Dismayed by each other’s platitudes and her sudden case of mono.
“Called kissing sickness,” she smiled, not as a joke—
“It’s too contagious to keep kissing,” she insisted.

I said I wouldn’t mind and tried another fondle.
She grimaced, “Don’t be foolish.”
One weekend soon made it clear she wanted other things
When she preferred a girlfriend’s beach house to my visit—
I threw a fit, of course; she slammed the door in my face.

I drove in angry circles from here to near Galveston all day,
Mick Jagger singing “Paint It Black” on every station,
Getting louder and louder to drown me out.
I fell past darkness into a fugue of funk without her
And after that I didn’t care I flunked my senior year.

II.

I saw her once again a few years later—
In another life, it seemed—
At a run-down Austin mansion
I lived in with seven others.
I discovered her on the sunroof when I returned one night.

I was chagrinned she’d spent the hours waiting for me
In conversation with my most annoying friend.
With all the curiosity of an insect collector,
She’d come to investigate what kind of bug I'd become
And disclose to all indifferently how she herself had emerged.

“Do you like to fuck?” she asked as if to annoy me.
“Would you like to find out?” I snapped.
We smiled half-heartedly and made no move;
Whether with too much tenderness or too little,
We still couldn’t guess or feel each other’s groove.

By her expression and easy demeanor at departure,
I could infer that she was pleased with herself and with her visit,
But was it her or was it me who felt we’d failed
To find the mirror image of that butterfly?

After that, at last,
She was nearly something Past,
No more than an evocation, a trace,
A touch of pentimento underneath,

And I could once again
Paint these memories of her as I wished,
Presuming I cared to remember
Either as a butterfly or a moth!

III.

Decades later a TV documentary
Presented a woman named Carmen so briefly,
She was almost no more than a flutter of wings in flight,
As attractive as any painted lady, with wings or without;

I could see she’d come through the metamorphosis
Of her bad times, heartaches, and blues—but was she the one?
I could neither confirm nor deny her in that fully adult stage,
Not her face or voice or pains, nor wing pattern, eyespots, or veins!

Pages on the Internet
Seemed to pin her down in a small Texas town
I’d passed through once, even photographed—
But I didn’t go back. I simply ceased my search.
But why? Was it really her or not?

Did I foresee or fear that if I found her,
She’d smile and think me foolish once again?
I swore then that I’d let that dream forever lie.
Such romance and passion now are old and out of fashion, but
Not dead—just hid beneath old coats of paint, except what I recall.

rcs.

Current draft: 4/27/2010
Created on 3/29/2010 5:19 PM

1. Painted Lady is a fairly common type of butterfly with five prominent white spots in an upper quadrant of the wings..
2. Pentimento—the revealing of a painting or part of a painting that has been covered over by later painting, or the covered painting itself. In either case, it is usually presumed the artist “repented” and altered all or part of the design.

THE CROSSHAIRS OF LOVE

2010-03-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

I could tell that young man of yours,
But never impress him at all,
How unconcerned I too used to be
About saying Fuck It, I’ll make my own rules.

How self-satisfied I’ve always been
About saying it,
Always thinking
That I’d catch up later if I had to.

Having a lot of intelligent yet aberrant attitude
Hasn’t actually worked out all that great in the end—
I mean, here, where I am, that’s maybe just a rabbit hole,
But seems rather close to the end.

Young people are too self-absorbed, of course,
To listen to such drivel as this very much—
They think they’re different, and that older people are duds.
Maybe it’s just me—they sound like the same jerk I was—

But I’d hate to be in the position
Of trying to talk to a stone
When I’ve already gone down myself,
With nothing but stones for buoyancy.

Every generation has to differ
From the last, I guess—
Like all this addle-pated nonsense now
About what kind of sex isn’t sex.

Odd, but it’s all been sex to me,
Though it now keeps getting odder
As some exaggerate the difference,
Some split a mighty fine hair.

Sodomy’s sodomy,
Whether you tell or care,
Self-abuse is what it appears,
Just something to do in your underwear,

And true love is always true love,
However unknown or suspect.
What’s worse, this slow deterioration of all that’s perfect or fair
Is always encroaching, always there.

The college education that young man of yours
Rejects so competently, rings a distant bell in me.
My own rejection bleeds from me these days
Almost like drops of blood—Christ, what was I thinking?

College wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, I see now,
For the usual piddling, wearing reasons—
Like less labor expended in the long run
When you’re tired to death of the run,
And more money with which to pad even this padded cell.

Once you’re down and out and bent a bit from all these years
Of saying the same old thing, it might be easier to say
From a crappy desk chair
Than from behind some service counter or out in the field.

In truth, it’s almost impossible
To say these days. Or unsay.
At some point, it begins: you can’t catch up
With the world again until it ends.

Now with feet getting hard to lift, it all starts to go adrift,
The seeming passing of the gift—
All these organs and ornaments of flesh in distress
Now sag, flag, and drag toward a new address
Where one’s balance goes finely askew.

Money keeps naked poverty at bay,
But what can it really buy?
What can it say?
What if no more than this:

Whatever balm or anesthetizing agents
There are these days
For all the gaping vicissitudes of Love and
Whatever else remains—

Whether it be love delayed or love decayed,
Perverted love or devoured love
Or a mother’s mad devoted love—
Or for all the multifaceted forms of bruised perversity
That a society obsessed with diversity can provide.

For me intellect and art
Never took a back seat
To the bazaar or the bizarre,
But oh how one comes to dread the commonplace—

Arthritis, and lost circulation and teeth.
Straining knees and back and eyes,
This cold disorder and defect.
The decline and ill repine of sex

Or just finding out
That death’s not such an easy out
As one’s younger, tougher, callow self
Used to expect.

Your young man wouldn’t want to know it about me—
After all, who am I? But what about himself?
What happens when you can’t get started is one thing.
What happens when your malady can’t get stopped?

It occurs to me in a panic
Like some crazy concept of hell
That Time is waiting and may not stop—
How would we know, when none before us ever tell?

It’s like that stupid battery bunny on TV—
A toy that just keeps going and going,
Even if everyone has now walked away
And the bunny keeps doing its flip for no one.

Everything always ends up being about me, you’ll agree,
Yet one can’t plainly say it, explain it, or defend it.
So let that young man listen till he drops, still I cannot tell,
Not now, or not in time, perhaps not ever,
At least not until it stops.

rcs.

7th draft: 3/14/2010
6th draft: 11/23/03

©2003 Ronald C. Southern

HURRICANE COAST

2010-03-13T17:30:00.000-08:00

(Escape From Disaster)

The storms that move us move in fast
From wild-way waters formed in waves
That blast the shore to rags,
Rush in from oceans wracked with ruin and rage,
Where winds are born and Gods die torn,

Building all at once from vague
Small hummings in our heads to a
Dynamo of numbing sound aswirl
Around our horses’ tossing heads,

Moving the quiet to desperation
And the sullen to feelings of dread.

Do you not feel it coming, moving from
The east, the southeast, and southwest?
Moving like a mountain to the prophet,
A mountain all of air all aswirl?

Here it comes, it’s coming, blowing
The spray from sea to shore to sea again,
Raging and heaving and twisting
The rail and the house and the town.

All: all about will be wrested out from
The root and the base and the ground;
All: all will be sighing for the wreck
To be wreaked on the land.

Now hear how the horses are breathing,
Feel how they’re missing the beat;
It’s time to be turning and going,
Down through the churchyard and street.

Fly past the doctors, the lawyers, the hearse,
Run down the children who cling to their nurse,
Trample the clerics who cry, but cry too late,
Who look above and ask for what He waits—

But the wind all awhirl
Whips their cassocks in their faces,
The whip of the wind in its swirl
Tears the fabrics from their laces,

And we are up and going, we are up and gone,
We ride them down like cattle and in a moment
We are gone, out through the gates at morning,
Out through the gates at dawn.

On to the castle, the castle!
On to the dark inland keep!
Out of the sweep of the carnage,
Out from the harbor to nightfall,
Nine fell men hard-ride.

We come to the drawbridge and cross it,
But the door is closed and held;
Twelve men are felled before us
As the storm comes up from behind.

Put seven horses in stable,
Give seven horses their hay;
Two fell in the blood-spray of battle,
But these must have their hay.

Set seven places at table,
Give seven men their feast;
Two fell in the doorway behind us,
Trod down by the fall of their beasts.

“Drink! Come drink, my fellows,
and quarrel no more till the morrow—“
but quarrel is the watchword
this night of souls at sorrow.

Now five lie dead upon the floor,
That hurt nor wound will take no more
(their fathers’ ghosts soft-sighing,
hard hearts unlearned, still vying).

“Fight no more,” the last man with me cries,
“Rise up and heed the air!
What makes this aimless din a-ringing
Atop the spiral stair?”

Now up, now up, and

Here we stand on the pinnacle,
Here we stand by the bell,
Gazing from the wind-torn top of the spire
To the eye of the whirl of the storm…

And here it comes, it’s coming!
Shaking the basement and casements and stair—
God’s fist of air hard shakes us,
Foundations shift and forsake us.

Go back down, go quickly,
Take the stairway now in haste!
The smooth-stoned steps of our fathers
Are trembling and quaking in place.

Oh, hurry now, I beg you,
I dread the wresting hand;
The sound of our Father’s strength in fury
Is both wreck and wreak of the ruin of the land.

Quick, make way, I tell you!
I tell you, save yourself!
Christ, give way, move quickly!
I’ll trample your breath to blood-spray,
I mean to save myself!

Dear God, we’re on the ground,
Dear God, we do believe!
But now I look around me,
I’m the only one around.

The dust, the dust is risen from
The bell-wrung riven tower lying all aruin all around;
All mixed with rain and blood in spatters
As I bend alone in horror before the power and the sound.

I cannot see or hear or feel,
For the earth is hung in dimness,
And my lungs are filled with mud and gore,
And the air I breathe’s a whirlwind
Blowing the blood-spray through me in a roar
From shore to sea to shore.

All: all about is wrested out from
The root and the base and the ground.
All: all is sighing for the wreck
That is wreaked on the land.

rcs.

3rd draft: 3/13/2010
2nd draft: 2/25/2003 7:17 PM
©1981 Ronald C. Southern

Dog and Pony Dream

2010-03-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

(Happy Birthday To Me)

We may start with some
Far-fetched heroic vision or shining sculpture,
A kingly sword stuck into a stone perhaps,
But the images are only sparkling ice that momentarily ennoble
Some facile dirty-faced kid’s frosted birthday cake—

It gleams and melts, it cuts both ways
For both the artist and his art—
First too sharp and then too cold,
First cutting you, then cutting me,
Whatever it happens that we don’t like
Will happen on this day.

Now traces and shards of steel and ice we’ve known so long
Find too many candles on the cake for such a kid,
I confess; they heat and melt both the pretty icing and the ice,
And something hasty, lightning-fast, shoots across our wiring
And phases out these networks of neurons and nerves
That used to let us feel this celebration,
But now explodes and leaves an awful mess.

And so we deftly watch ourselves—
As cold or bleak as Lazarus,
Coming from the grave or going there—
Get rubbed clean of cake and drink, then dusted off
By some sweet Genie from the past grown harsh and thin.
What’s that lady doing here at all, I ask—
I said it’s my birthday!

More, I wonder if such a lapsed old pony trick or doggie fix
As I imagine would even work these days?
It would be a wonder
If one of those old queens of dead certainty
Should return with her guns drawn to the scene of the crime,
Alive with angst and able to anger me still,
Wearing skirts of unwed circumstance
In shades of unfettered royal blue and rust.

It’s many myths and mists since they’ve been gone.
No one to speak of or none I can recall
Ever came round asking about those mysterious souls
Or telling the last of their tale, if there is one,
To this bent and ragged rhymist.

It’s as if they are dead
And have always been dead.
Maybe I suspected otherwise at times—
I did hear secondhand rumors once—
But I’ve kept that opinion to myself.
What’s the point of showing everyone
The proof that I’m crazy like they said
Or that I’m crazier than they are?

rcs.

Current draft: 3/8/2010
Created on 12/22/2009 7:46 PM

Blew Away

2010-01-18T17:57:00.000-08:00

Frankly I don't see any more
What would be so bad
If I turned awry to the world one day
And it all just blew away.
Darling, would you pull the trigger
Or would you cover me?

You Catskill girls, you blew your kisses to me,
And I flew away like some balloon that’s been released.
We were all the same specks of color in the sky,
An all-adoring audience looking to and from the heavens.
I was unstable, yet still somehow you tethered me to earth.
You were so democratic and free while the best of us
Were listless fools wasting time on useless chatter.
We feigned surprise when you took the next cloud out.

I still recall your girlish names and cant, and wonder
Which you kept and which you can’t. You never were
Too slim, and it’s rumored you became a woman
Full blown beneath the babble of the dance,
A married one, as we’d expect, who took responsibility
At the same time that you continued to let it drop.

I guess you couldn’t help but let yourself float about.
No matter how your learnings progressed.
You were still a butterfly, after all.
Maybe it was after that pained young man in D.C.
Went down through the upstairs window in a trance
Before you got it straight.

Could you come back again and not find fault?
Could I? Even if we each took the veil too often
And disapproved of one another and disappeared,
Surely I couldn’t refuse you any more,
Any more than you could recuse yourself.

Wouldn’t all of us just be right back at it,
Cruel sardonic kids again without excuse.
We are older now and doubt far more,
Can’t take the same abuse again, or won’t, yet
We still must find out truth and beauty where we can.

And though I may accuse you all
In every vicious affidavit of the heart
And in every demon silence heard
From the towers of the bleeding homeland
To the middle of anemic America,
We are not strong and this is not the heartland any more.

Maybe you’re a grandma and see your beauty there or
Maybe you’re as sick and stuck as I am, thinking
How love’s pubescent power went south, went sour—
How long ago love went, yet never quite reached zero!
I miss you every day and every night, however it displeases,
But it doesn’t make much sense, it doesn’t make me better.

I see you in the seasons’ signs and all the sighs and stages.
It’s the glue in all the fameless moments in between.
I weep now every hour for our nameless legion’s swollen feet
And for the old taboos and ghosts that linger on,
And for these creaks and croaks that echo far inside us,
And yet—I make no sound or sign of tears for you
Beyond an occasional savage blitz of poetry like this…

What difference would it make
If I could cry or make you cry in turn?
It would not signal clarity at this or any age—
We’d still be nearly strangers, just bumping
Into shadows whether live or on the page.
It wasn’t always plain to me,
The marriage of true minds
Would first require true minds.

“Has she had much love?” I am asked in a dream.
Not enough, I deem—or is that me projecting
Once again instead of seeing? What does it matter
When what I think cannot infuse her image or my own,
Or bring about any love or action or any
Sweet concoction or magic potion
Of any precise and stalwart merit
That man alone can name or make?
“Love is always Duty!” Fidelity asserts.
Love is hard, I answer back.

Time creeps up.
Time might do for us
Or it might do worse,
Or it might do us in for a lark—
It always seems to be trying too hard—
But it’s had a great success, precious Catskill, in trying me.

There are no proven statements,
There are no ways around. This pain—
The heavy heart and head and heel—ends always as a strain
On unhygienic parts—maybe we can ignore it, maybe not.
This body is, by definition, a transient thing that is in decay
And must be healed. Our doctors and our dreams both tell us so.

Even so, with every breath and denial and defiance of God,
We’re always bending down on now disproven ground.
We no longer purport that we can improve this drama,
Either by church or club or school,
But wear those same old colors, collars, styles, and hats,
While life goes on without awards until it stops.

Was it more than grounds for divorce when we fell out
Or just the usual yeasty grief and tremors?
Now all the cautions I espied in a lady's see-through blouse
Tell what about the startled trembling in a hand that darts away?
Now who has been most wounded—you or me?
I chose to be invisible, chasing named and nameless gods
Through the latchless house and out the back screen door.
In many ways—in memory I judge—
I was often nearly non-existent.

Even if it's only you or me who may remark
That it’s our last good nerve I stand upon—
I remember all your cleverness, Catskill girl,
All your curves and laughs, but can't recall your name.
I made one up for you, as if you’re alive
On the edge of your seat with me
Or in the center of goodbye.

But few return here except in fantasy.
They abstain, after they grieved, after the grave,
They won’t return and I won’t leave,
Not here where I'll always be in laughter or in pain
And where I wear so much makeup for the staged event
And so little heart on my extended sleeve.

I don’t suppose it’s well known
That I miss you every day and every night,
And all of hazard’s moments in between—
It’s where I weep now, when I can,
Every mote of every hour
With no sound or sign of tears.
What's left to explicate or explain?

What if all of it is really not-so-good and not-so-bad,
Just equally cold and hot in another tepid teapot?
Old friends drop in by mail sharing little information,
But showing photos of their children
And their pets, which it’s well known I lack,
And they advise me or imply that I am more than lost.

There has been no perfect piece of art for me—
Though what would I not have given for it!
Reality went by so hurriedly, the rest just followed through.
It would never have been seen.
Is life like that—no nearer than our dreams?

Those dreams as shapely as a seashell’s whorl
And dizzying as the seagull’s flight or light as some surfer’s
Swift and brief delight, but nothing more. These days
We calmly tuck our wrinkles in like old shirttails.
So, was beauty just a Trick in which we all conspired?

What would it matter any more
If the tilt of a lady's hips could roll the stone away
Or the hint of her sandalwood scent affirm it all again
Or the lilt of some intemperate voice in a crowded room
Be recognized at once and start to wind
My old chronometer too tight for the resurrection?
Could we re-compute every sanction and consent
We’ve kept dangling from our pocket or our purse?

Right here, and now, is where each lonely kingdom's thrall
Cried out for proof and begged to see
How these imperfect purple loyalties and thrones
And faded blue denim pants we’ve sat upon so long
Fell down like broken bones and rags and burned to ash at once
As the soul itself shriveled like parchment amid such nakedness
And it all just blew away.

rcs.
Original draft: January 24, 2008
Current draft: January 18, 2010
A Polemic On Regret And Resentment
(A Scattering Of Leaves In A Dusty Wind)

THE FIRST AND LAST DESIRE

2009-10-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Oh God

this burning in the quick:
the cold heat of passion
too logically displayed:

the sullen issue: these clouds
about to burst with storm
from a heaven in the void:

this distant voice: my only child: heedlessly
weeps in long discursive rhyme: stamping its feet in fits
and starts: rending the tissue of time.

The mother whose artless tongue
our speech together made inarticulate
as a song unsung: or peal

of splendid grief that's rung
as clearly as a bell: but
does not translate: does not tell.

Bright sunlight shining on distasteful sheets: the
stain of something torn from us in seminal, sleepless
searching: the soft worn pillows of careless embrace:

in pain the open palm extended:
timid voices swollen with the seed and scent
of futurity and yearning and all our brave intent:

this rush of blood in the braincells of guilt and shame:
ennui and fear born in the innocence of tears: the
sharp wet spear of resplendent hope: buried to the hilt.

Damp eyes more lovely than the
treasure of our most ardent dreams:
where flesh and flesh dispel the dream:

weeping, sad and loving, through our panic:
for we do not Know: and in the endless
sea our eyes desire, but not to only see.

Our clumsy swimming in this wet
eternal tide: groping slowly through
the distance: across this mire of pride:

and so as such our fingers touch and limbs entwine
as one: blonde on blonde beset by, spun by,
entangled in: this always-done, this tireless locked desire.

Oh God

this loss and gain: our lives at best
or worst remain disordered or immersed
in this expiring fire:

the white flesh of our fractious hope:
(Dark hearts forever lost and found at last!):
the endless ardor of this pain:

but all our knowledge of the whining in
the science of the blood is measured in
the silence of the soft dying fall.

This: only this then, after all: this cool
burning fire in the flow of time: the stubborn
yearning of the child: the father's foreign grasp:

this world we bear in pain, born too early
in some other mind: these sad children whom we
clasp: the dim despair unwinding as we wane.

and in the heart of circumstance an eye that
can but see: the whirl of evidence that fails to
mesh: as dream conspires with dream against our flesh.

the sight, the plight, the pout: these pallid
arms glide in and out of wrinkled purple sheets:
in our climactic and unmeaning search for—cigarettes!

all in all, a scene too mild to lift
this pall or break it's grip on
these persistent motions that we make:

the look of horror on this face that licks my
flesh: these hands that seek to form my features
to receive: so serious, yet so fatuous, a kiss!

the calm abstraction of a whore who
knows who came to whom: but with such
an unknowing eye: like my own stupid pride.

And yes: oh yes: this loss laid out upon the bier of touch:
these are my coins upon the bed: my thrill upon my lips:
here my brazen tongue lies: there my sheathless sword:

the coitus of knowing's first and last desire: with
such great heart we leap into the fire, but clutch
these dreams we hoard so hard we come together untoward.

rcs.

4th draft: 10/23/09
©1985 Ronald C. Southern

BEAUTIFUL DIANA

2007-11-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

You could make yourself cry about anything, I guess,
The more that time and circumstance progress—
I mean myself, not you.
Still, why should I be sad tonight?
These thirty years later,
I’m sure you would be vividly alive
If only, Death be damned, you were alive
And not the dead who failed to navigate
That icy northern street, Diana, where you bled
And we didn’t know to cry. It’s so long ago.

You were my high-school girlfriend’s best friend since youth
And later her giddy college roommate—
Just two more headlong girls their first fast year away from home.
You looked straight through me when I advised you all
To close your bedroom blinds, even on the second floor,
When you undressed at night.
“No one below can see!” you laughed, squinting out at me through
Granny glasses that almost hid your wild unwary eyes.

No one took my advice back then and not much more
Of it in all the time and distance traveled since.
I dated you once, a silly date where nothing happened
Except in me: a tight-wound soaring and a sigh
That made no outward mark or sound—
We never even kissed.
Later, my girlfriend—your girlfriend!—made up with me and it
Was then a great relief all round, that unaccomplished kiss!

We were friends after that—not the best of friends, perhaps,
But now and then, far and near, still friends.
Once, when I took some psychedelic drug, I thought
You were a witch or at least that you looked the part!
I didn’t mean to let it show, but still I was unnerved.
“We all have some form of discomfort with reality,”
My girlfriend Jeanne consoled (and passed another funny cigarette),
"For whether we get High or Low, it peeks back in at us!”

Once when I hadn’t seen you for six months or so
And I arrived full-force in my new long-haired guise
Of hungry, proud, and poor,
You served a generous supper and shook with laughter till midnight,
Especially when you’d found I’d taken up
That silly sixties hippie habit
Of blurting out, “Far out!”
Multiple times in a single conversation.

Perhaps because I said it with my familiar tone of flippancy,
You chose to find my idiocy delightful to the Nth degree
And your fresh freckled face—those contradictory features,
A schoolgirl’s upturned nose, an old-maid teacher’s pursed-up mouth—
Became as vivid as your long red hair!
At last you had to take your glasses off to wipe your eyes
And I thought, just in that moment, I’d never seen before
A woman wearing or needing so little makeup.
It was such Beauty!

But that moment, like the others, soon was lost.
Such beauty passed, yet I survived
To be this wretched, bowed, and crooked self.
Time now makes all these views of you seem true at once—
Except your death.
Can there be no relief at all for those of us not yet released?
Jeanne said she waited for that spectral visit
You promised each other in seventh grade, but the messages
That came to her only came in dreams and to me not at all…
Why is there not some way to recall You instead of memory?
Christ, how I’d love to see you vivid once again!

I was sick of you when you died, hating you almost
For dating that Delaware con-man
Who spoke such manly gibberish.
Was that Engineering-Speak or Business Ghoul
Or just plain Northern Geek?
It’s funny that I don’t remember any more than that,
That his was not the language of Romance that you deserved.

Poor old Romance! It’s suffered so
These thirty years run by
With nothing left now I adore.
It’s disappeared into thin air
Like some bad joke,
Like all those coffin nails and joints we smoked,
Like my old youthful certainties,
Like these new tears for you will do…

You deserved better than this weakness you would have found in me,
But better too than that insensate educated fool you wed,
And certainly better than this hard-closed door
That you stepped through too soon,
That even I at last deplored…
That closure’s lasted now so long that I’ve been ashamed of my anger
Longer than I was angry, longer than I loved you—
God, longer now than you were alive!

Now that’s a knot in time
(Or is it in my stomach or in my head?)
I may never manage to untie.
But why should I be sad tonight?
All Time’s the same to you, dear ghost; it’s always kind—

But just as Jeanne and Adam’s now-grown children
Or my gray-peppered beard give proof I’m growing old,
So your remembered youth and beauty make me feel vain and false tonight,
Here where my moment’s joy and love and beauty have long been lost.

rcs.

9th draft: 11/18/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

The Rueful Heart

2007-04-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

You can grope all night for the one true rose
or swoon alone for free without embrace—
what moves the heart to heartbreak
will always make the petals close.

You can flee, you can hide between the beats of heartbeat,
you can turn bright eyes aside from love's dark fate—
but what can move the rueful heart
When you neither love nor hate?

Who can you trust, which way turn, when
dreams like dizzy rockets cross and crash,
flinging you down to earth so stark
amid a churn of char and spark?

(What turned lightning's stroke
to pale blue smoke at dusk
may yet turn love to dust
that blows away and leaves an empty husk.)

Here now you see how rivers
running fast and slow divert and dry.
Hear now these lovers running down cry "Time!"
when shadows veined with red run wild and stain the eye.
What For, they cry, this flash
and spark and manly flutter?
For What this smooth and supple
marbled flesh of womankind?

The old, the young: embrace, disclose;
desire the flesh, the flame, the rose;
Your dreams, your flesh: aspire, perspire—
but every year it takes more pain to reach the fire.

What then? What's wrong? If time
that held your heart enthralled so long
holds no hope but this at last,
this vexing gall at all that's past,

if waste that chewed itself to numbness
lives but to taste this morbid tongue again,
if haste that chased it's tail to madness
now flings and flays and flails itself again,

then hearts that rue such motion
Here now must still these throes.
Now lovers running down cry, "Time!"
Which only makes the petals close.

rcs.

4th draft: 12/06/03
©1986 Ronald C. Southern

Mary's Child

2007-04-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

There must have been
Some days when she forgot,
When the child was only a child—
Not that epiphanal flash sprung forth
Like an arrow from the bow of God,
But only a plodding child
With an affinity for dirt.

She must have stood
Some days in the doorway
Concerned with his mortal hurts,
Watching with a mother's eye
As his naked feet went pounding,
Sounding with a child's quick beat,
Through hard and narrow earthbound streets.

There must have been
Those days when she forgot,
But soon she would remember
And know it every day
That each passing day he became
More and more like an arrow
Returning to the heart of God.

rcs.

4th draft: 08/12/01
©1980 Ronald C. Southern

I Might Like

2007-04-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

"I might like all of my lovers to come back for a visit,
I've always thought that would be a lot of fun.
Still, I might be mistaken--I sure wouldn't
Want them all to get together for a chat."

rcs.
2nd draft: 04/08/07
©2005 Ronald C. Southern

Ardebil 1828

2007-03-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

"They've got a fine library in Ardebil, I am told,"
Grinned the portly Russian prince, taking another pinch of snuff.
He was sitting slouched and florid
In his silver-handled carriage outside the city walls.

"There's swarthy throats to cut in there,"
He said gruffly, studying his well-groomed fingernails,
"And bright gold coins to liberate from greasy hands
And swarms of pear-shaped Persian virgins you can spear!"

"They've got everything it takes to satisfy our needs!"
Smirked his officers, nodding their agreement.
"There's plenty for the kind of man who risks his life
For blood and bloody gold and bleeding frizzy-headed foreign sluts
Plus bounty for the kind old men who let us die for what they want.
We're glad to rape and loot, but they can shove those foreign books!"

"If all goes well, which so far it has not, my murdered child,"
Wept a poet of Iran at his daughter's muddy unmarked grave,
"Maybe those learned books they stole will make them wise at last
Or else they'll hesitate, perhaps be reaching up for one when
The next band of armored monkeys fling down feces from the trees!
Then all those sorry Russian throats and nuts will be uncouthly cut!"

"That's what we have to look forward to,"
Sighed the crimson-faced historian
As he closed the green morocco book.
"Someone always yearns to kill you just to prove
That he can be more civilized than you!"

"When the final monkey gets here, Father,"
Gaily mocked the surly scholar's open-hearted daughter,
"And if he doesn't wipe out the whole wide universe at once,
Will we then have peace at last?
And will we send back all these books?"

rcs.

Current draft: 03/20/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

Albatross

2007-02-22T19:51:00.000-08:00

“You do not suffer close enough,” is what the distant voices said,
“and all your talk of this and more is becoming less and less.
Self-centered though we are at heart, survivors of war and peace,
small shrewdness is required to know the next victim of the feast.

“If you were here or we were there,
your suffering would impact us more, of course,
but that is neither here nor there.
You live at distances both real and surreal--willfully
disconnected, disastrously alone, tragically but safely apart.

“You must, we fear, suffer more or less as we do
or as others who are near and nearer to our hearts.
Justice demands that recognition, yes, but little more,
and less and less of that as these frayed threads
of time and separation gather toward an end.
That some break and others bend seems to surprise you even yet.

“So is that sad? Oh, yes, what else?
We sit in carefully bordered rooms each evening,
pining for what is lost in you and in ourselves,
pitying our surrender to surfeit or starvation,
nestled in exclusive harbors, where some ships leave and some arrive,
in sporadic dread of who goes next. No one wins, but some survive.

“We know you do not suffer gladly
the fools we are and must be to succeed,
but that's the levy, old mariner, of failures of your own,
divergent from ours, not worse perhaps, but dour freight,
resembling more an anchor than anything that floats.

“And you, at your safe distance,
press clamorously a slow cold measure of protest
against the hammer's heated claims upon your heart,
that pulsation of anger, compulsion, and frustration,
a churning churlish stain which makes uncertain
whether you or those you buffet will be next.

“You are one of us still, we know, but what we know
to love in you seems always masked behind that manic stance.
Your decades-long dance of desperation, old mariner,
by now elicits small panic in these ageing wedding guests.

“And is that sad? Well, yes, close enough, but still
you must desist this remorseless clanging in our ears.
We feel as much, if not the same, as you,
marking boundaries as you do, pursuant to our pain.”

rcs.
4th draft: 08/09/01
©1995 Ronald C. Southern

Texas Crude (Fischer's Tune)

2007-02-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

He went away on a ship a long time ago,
Slipping away quietly out of the noisy harbor,
Sailing with regrets-to-come and no-fanfare
Out of the inland port.

The city behind him disappeared in haze
As the ship moved slowly through the channel to the sea,
And the last things that he saw, perhaps were the tall black
Towers and the storage tanks choked with Texas crude.

We said goodbye,
We said farewell,
And being young we could not know
The changeful nature of all we felt and said.

He sailed back home to Germany
And for a while we wrote, exchanging views
Of Zappa, Beatles, books, and style.
But soon we ceased; we were young, and cold, and true,
And never knew the changeful nature of such views.

"Well, damn him," I thought,
"If he can't write back!"
And at the other end?
Who knows,
Perhaps he thought the same?

He went away on a ship,
Sailing home to a life of his own,
And nature took her own course
And kept us well apart.

I left home shortly after,
In search of a life of my own;
Ten years' time took me everywhere
That I could think to go,
Then brought me here—back home again—
Where, like some better poet said, I finally had to go.

So here I am in port again near the channel to the sea,
And I sometimes see a ship sail past the towers
And the tanks, and I wonder what it's like to see
The last, the very last, of all this Texas crude.

rcs.

5th draft: 02/14/07
©1980 Ronald C. Southern

For David, Who Died By Drowning

2007-02-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

(Dead 30 Years Now)

Who goes down for the first time
Goes down with you in mind;
Each is responsible for each,
The links between us
Destroy, create, and teach.

Who goes down in water
Comes back,
Comes back on mourning's tide;
What ties the dream to earth
Is life and death and joy and birth.

Who goes down for the third time
Comes back as spark, as flame.
Now he who comes to mind
Needs no more a name; his name
(Be given or taken), his name is vain.

We come to term as flesh,
We come to term and wait;
Not one, not some, but all: all die.
And we who have not fallen
Can but remember, weep, remember...

rcs.

4th draft: 05/07/05
©1977 Ronald C. Southern

Like Antigone

2007-02-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

Like Antigone, I have been buried here alive,
perhaps for the same kind of dismal daunting reasons
(those bounden days-of-evil blinding reasons),
except of course I found I had
no brother to bury or to kill
or to glorify or be killed by,

but wrestled with myself alone as if I were perchance
my own Polynices or Eteocles1
in some sordid fratricidal jest
or jeering ingrown deadly-soft incest.
Such dreamt excess is not quite death, I know,
except that the extremes imposed require
so much of me that nothing else gets done.

I've done my absurd best so far, that's certain,
in leering violation of my itching awkward self,
veering wildly like some wayward waylaid ship
encircling while at anchor who-the-hell-knows-what,
but surely nothing more in sum than clumsy circles,
a scratch at night performed by four bored fingers and a thumb.

I have been buried long and deep,
gone numb as if asleep inside this winding fate,
like Daddy's Girl interred in earth and pride and hate,
and have not seen the light of day this clear and fine
in waking dreams or years of nights—see how it plays and shines!
How dare I feel it might unbind these rigid lines of destiny, and yet
How dare I not? I can but look and see it Gone, and yet I dream
I could find my way above and seize wild-hearted chance again!

rcs.

10th draft: 11/18/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

[Notes: Polynices and Eteocles, sons of Oedipus, killed each other in battle. Eteocles had broken their agreement about governing Thebes alternately. Their sister Antigone defied her uncle Creon and performed the funeral rites for Polynices. Creon then buried her alive in the family tomb, where she hung herself.]

A Woman Leaned Over My Corpse

2007-02-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

A woman leaned over my corpse
While it was blinking back the tears
And she pointed her knife at that disease
And strutted her stuff without making a move
And blood went everywhere.

She sang an artful lied and sorted out with ease
Every shortcoming and every sordid part of me
While time and the light of day ran wild through my muted veins
And the girl in me was piqued and those seductive hips began to move
And everything began to leak...

rcs.

4th draft: 11/19/03
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

Nurse Corday

2007-02-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

At the costume ball
A well-constructed Frenchman dressed for his bath
Was feeling fey and very down at heart.
When he saw a lady come in with a confident air and a nice round pair,
He felt himself stirring the water and sank toward the drain with a sigh.

When he asked for her name and she replied
That she answered to "Nurse Corday",
He knew that she'd come to alleviate his pain
And said he might do a double back flip in the nude
Or kiss her, using plenty of tongue.

"You'd better not do either!" Charlotte said,
"'Cause I'll cut off whatever you got!"
He'd been pressing himself crudely against her
As any wet Frenchman might do when a lady's almost in his bath, but now
He backpedaled fast and covered himself and thought about the guillotine.

He assured her that he liked her very much,
And that he didn't want to be rude,
But he'd always thought she was gay.
Then she stabbed him through the armpit with a fork
And held him there like a brisket while she used a knife on his heart.

rcs.

4th draft: 03/18/04
©Ronald C. Southern

In The Dark

2007-02-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

Now you've traveled along alone so far,
no heartfelt human voice to hear except your own
or else some dim recall caught briefly on the march
where some spoke soft and some with starch,
forestalling for a time this dogged trouble with your heart.

The cops, the doctors, must have known or sensed
some awful bloody offness in the memories you've made
of voices that cry behind you in past tense
or whisper faintly from inside—
how must they have despised all that your speech must hide!

You speak to no one in the end,
hearing women's voices weakly in your head
that used to spark the hardness even of your self-brazed heart.
You've traveled alone a long time now and far,
no semblance of a voice beside you in the dark,
unless you count the chaos, and the chaos seldom counts.

Count the stars instead, so far away, apart,
and what a long way now would it not go
toward being home at last
if only someone in the dark had said—but what? Said what?
Time is so far along and all except your art is at heart's end
at last, where all that human voices ever said is soon forgot.

rcs.

8th draft: 09/27/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

Dear Emily Dickinson

2007-02-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Was Emily an ugly girl or did she have bad skin?
Was she flat instead of curved? Was she far too slim?
Were there too many splendid belles come out
Those cold New England antebellum years
And she remained—because a little plain?
It makes me sick that tough-sweet spirit had to grope among
Such stiff-necked pious dullards for fifty-six notched years.

Did she fail to learn the dance? Did she make the boys feel dim?
Did she love—just once—too much, then not again—
Or did she always love exactly what she loved—
But in her dreams and books?
Why couldn't she be happy? Why couldn't she be wed?
Why does her photo draw me in as if I think that
Somewhere she's alive and I should hurry up and write
And tell her—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I wasn't there for you!

Dear Emily, my dear—maybe I'm just sleepy this Monday 2 A.M.
Maybe I've gone crazy that I would weep for you.
You've been dead—though you live here still—
More than a hundred years
And I've only been about half-here for this tired fifty-two.
I'm near the age now when you died and I must say I've felt
That treadmill in my brain, that maelstrom in my dreams,
And wonder which did you—
Did you fail to cling or did you just let go?

rcs.

8th draft: 02/21/03
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

Another photo purported to be Emily.

The Old Woman's Estate

2007-02-02T14:24:00.001-08:00

One shady afternoon not long after she'd passed,
The caretaker tidied up the careless things
That laid about the dusty house.
He felt bereft and curiously breathless, embalmed almost,
In the dry deathless residue that curious spinster sculptress left.

Nothing she'd left behind was his, or could be,
Except his vagrant thoughts,
As he recalled beneath her favorite white oak tree
How like a leaf she'd shake beneath the covers on stormy nights.

Behind the house, he stepped into
The artist's still over-crowded studio—
Inactive now, but still the source of all the dust—and thought,
"Love has a thousand foolish faces in the aftermath of life.
Her life is gone now, yet only life is left.

Of her, there is only her young/old gaze staring out
(From years of photographs, I mean)
Above that sweet and poisoned mouth
That would so seldom laugh—
The stern and somber specter of my soft and secret wife."

current draft: 02/02/07
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

Conversation Piece

2007-01-28T19:56:00.000-08:00

(Saturday Perversions)

There she was again, his new friend whom he barely ever saw,
disheveled but enchanting in shoulder-length gray-golden hair.
She wore that Saturday a crushed-velour green blouse atop a
wrinkled brown-suede mini-skirt she'd owned a bit too long.

On her right shoulder reposed a wide-winged dragonfly-brooch
with Griffin's claws and lovely human female face and breasts—
“A cheap and vulgar replica of an Art Nouveau Lalique!”
she'd laughed lightly earlier that day. He'd shrugged and smiled.
He knew his English Lit; he did not know Lalique.

They'd both been taking far too long to drink a cup of coffee each
in that dim-lit roach-infested faculty lounge downstairs.
Was it the coffee-colored stains and bugs
or the buzz and flicker of fluorescent lights
or his own loud knocking knees and nerves
that finally drove them back to work?

Half-hidden but upright behind her old oak desk that night,
she sat at ease, her bare and bouncy fanning feet
dancing to some happy unheard jazzy beat,
so trim, so leggy, so proud of it, and seeming very pleased!
Was she waiting just for him like that? No, she always sat that way.

She was dawdling in her office in the History Department,
looking pleased as any well-fed gray catbird might look
who'd found a round and rapt canary all aflutter
right there amid her usual shifting clutter—

all her red-inked scattered papers and splayed laid-open books
and bite-marked apple cores. He glanced aside
and took a breath because he felt her mocking eyes
had landed right on him. He sucked his stomach in.

He made a show of spotting something odd or out of place,
then stopped outside her door and, standing on one leg, leaned in.
“You need to clean that cobwebbed cow skull out
with a high-pressure hose!” he grinned, pointing to her
newly-acquired but musty relic of the old wild desert west.
He'd recognized it instantly as the perfect conversation piece.

“Why, do you have one I can use?” she laughed.
“This college campus is full of them,” he told her,
meaning it pragmatically—but hearing how
uproariously she laughed, he saw the joke.

“I need a high-pressure hose, huh?” she smirked.
“I used to have one myself,” he said,
“but I've gotten a little too old for it now.”
(Now why, he winced, did he say that?)

“That's too bad, I guess. But how does one do that?
How does it feel, I mean? Oh, God, I can't believe I asked you that!”
“It's all right,” he shrugged. “All right for you to ask, I mean.
IT hasn't felt quite right for about two years, I guess.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked. Her question sounded serious,
but her face still looked amused.
“Not exactly.”
“What, exactly?”

“Well, it just feels less!” he squirmed. “It takes
a great deal of real and imaginary stimulation,
not to get its attention precisely, but just to feel
some sensation that is precise instead of general!”

“What can you do about it?”
“Suffer. Or go to doctors and let them make me suffer.
“I've been waiting for a woman again, really,
to see if she would also make me suffer.”

“That long?”
He stared at the sightless cow skull and nodded.
“Women always make you suffer,” she kidded gently.
“Yeah, I know. You're doing it now.”
“I don't mean to.”
“Women never do.”

“And men?”
“Men always mean to make women suffer,”
he volunteered. “As far as I've been able to tell.”

“Is that true?” He was surprised to hear her ask.
“They're getting back at their mothers, perhaps.
And, of course, I guess you know men think that it's more
difficult for them to make women suffer than—”

“Really?” she interrupted. He'd never heard her sound so cold.
Her face, he thought, had clouded up as if she now had doubts
concerning not only his moral legitimacy,
but his entire liberal-arts education!
“But only in that purest sense!” he hastily added.

“What sense is that?” she stared. “You've got me losing track.”
He was losing more than that. He wiped his palm across his brow
and wondered why with every passing year every square inch
of his skin except for his high forehead got drier and drier.

“After they're married a while,” he persevered, “men hardly
seem to suffer about women at all; they tune them out, I think.
I meant it in the sense of love-in-bloom, of lovers
who are still new to love and to one another's ways.
I think I mean that men, just barely, but do,
know how stupid they are at this kind of game.
You know, while everyone's still doing all
that nervous parrying and lame ballet?

“Like we do?” she laughed, the light returning to her face.
“Are you trying to make me suffer more?” he beamed back.
“Not at all!” she grinned. That was when he licked his lips.
“I think you'd best be careful, though,” she said,
“about too much fencing and ballet!”

“Like too much horseplay, you think?” he grinned.
“All in good spirits until one day
the balance isn't right
and the play becomes a fight?”

Quietly her leather-covered chair rolled back and swiveled left—
was she showing off her underwire-uplifted breasts
or giving him the softer view of her slightly crooked nose
or was she staring into space or at that damn dead steer again?
Just then, her short brown skirt rode up her legs
and showed their come-here length and shape!

Thus, when her eyes found his again, she fixed and pinned him.
“In this sense,” she said, “the party game that we've begun
now becomes—a what? A love affair? A sex appeal?
A system of rewards and punishments that's fair? Who cares?!”

He looked at her with some distress as if he'd hoped she would.
“I like to think I care,” he sighed.
“You can have a spanking now,” she teased,
“or you can wait and fidget until you're tense enough to ask!”

“I thought—” he'd just begun when, vaguely like a spider, on long
slim legs she rose, went round, and then on silent feet moved in.
“Why don't I close the door?” she rasped.
“There. Now you can turn and face it.
Just close your eyes; don't think about your feelings or that lost
high-pressure hose and we'll just let that unwashed cow skull watch!”

“Let me think about it first!” he stalled.
“Oh, please, don't think!” she cried impatiently
and kicked his heels apart.

“I so often don't know what to do at first,”
he panted with his eyes completely closed,
“but I think you'll find that, given time,
I'm good at making things up!”

“I've noticed that!” she grinned and nibbled at his ear,
“but now you're here, don't talk so much!”
She shrewdly brushed the front of her skirt
against the back of his pants.

She reached around in front of him
while he stood still and stiff
and thought about how the door
was probably still unlocked.

rcs.

12th draft: 08/27/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

A Young Man's Convictions

2004-10-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

Allowing of course that there
Is no act that has an end,
How can I hope in time and space
To only love you while I can?

How can our hope or care be broken off
When none can yet declare
This is the point at which
This moment Now begins?

How convincingly
Can I describe the eyes' conviction
When what I see is lost inside unfolding worlds
Of how I wish the world to be?

If I should take anything which you have shown,
Attempt by my most human effort to extrapolate that vision—
I swear I would produce no more than
My impression of what you truly are.

If I could take the motion of the gesture
By which you keep me in my place
In constant time and changing space,
Attempt to tear the coursing mystery into atomic composition—
I do not think I could translate that to your taste.

No matter my provocation,
No matter your response,
The answer and the problem set
Conceal the complex truth
Behind our simple act.

Upon reaction each reaction pends;
How seldom do our motions
Move to make us something that is new;
Now everything I once assumed,
I twice assume is wrong!

Ronald C. Souhern
5th draft: 10/12/04
©1970 Ronald C. Southern

2004-09-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

"My darling Cleo, you smell so sweet!" I sighed.
The same, of course, if said of me, could only sound absurd,
At least to me, and she perhaps would not much more
Care to hear it said of her, whether loudly now
Or whispered in her short red hair as I did then.

Maybe it wasn't anything very true.
It was, after all, only perfume out of a bottle
That had a fancy pink glass stopper she could use
To caress into her skin the endless scent she sought—

That funky fetching female hint
Based on flowers and ripened fruits
And the greasy musk of a small male deer.
Perhaps there was some alluring odor in it,
Even so, that was her very own.

Such sweetness from inside seemed mostly to infuse
Those five old-fashioned fuzzy pastel sweaters
She wore in random order through the week.
She let me brush my hand against one once—
The one time that we kissed—
Beneath her wine-splashed unsashed dryclean-only coat

And I pretended that I felt the warmth alone
And not the buoyant weight of her intriguing matron's curves!
Then Cleo blushed, and sniffed and hugged herself, and, tipsy, winked,
"Such fine angora is always warm and snug like this,
But isn't it a sissy ending for a gamy goat...?"

That lazy scent would cling to anything. I smell it now.
Once I found it lingering in the lining of
A leather watchband she'd hardly ever worn.
Always it suffused the deep-red woolen watch cap she liked,
When home, to throw across the room without a passing glance.

The more time passed since her divorce
that first long year or so,
the plumper she seemed to get, but she still looked good
and triggered my arousal more by far, I guess,
than she with her sweet sense would ever want to know.

I think we never had much of a chance,
that my goat-stained desire to make her care,
to make her prance,
was bound to make our glands
Go blind and bland like this—
I wanted to consume her! She could not even kiss!

Maybe I'd have gotten further with her
if I'd schemed (yes!) even more,
if I could have simply stripped her complications down
to just that juicy scent
And dipped her dimple-deep in light sweet olive oil

And then myself in her
and rolled her plump new curves around
against my roundy own
as if we were two plum tomatoes, wet and ripe,
atop a bed of breadcrumbs adorning caesar salad!

I guess you think that sounds absurd.
She'd think so, too, I thought.
My feeling, though, is I still wish
she had let that gorgeous bright red hair of hers grow long
and let me ache for her in whispers just that much more!

rcs.

Current draft (12th): 02/09/03
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

Gary Gilmore Blues

2004-08-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

Criminals are the great existentialists now;
We cheer them on to life, but they go for the glory.
Death gives them identity; they even turn into artists
In their last golden moments of captivity.

We don’t understand it
And thus abhor it,
But the fact probably is, this dying’s
The first right thing they’ve ever done.

rcs.

2nd draft: 02/08/03
©1981 Ronald C. Southern

Horse Latitudes

2004-07-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

Though it is true that high and wide above these ships
that smell of salt and earthy damp and slight dry-rot,
eagles soar and mate while sea gulls sail and call
as if to tell some yet-unfathomed fate,

though through the tangled rope and cloth
a feather falls and something true aloft turns false below,
here where this craft, becalmed and yet deranged,
lets drowning horses churn the glassy sea to froth,

though in the seascape's mist my dreams completely shift
and my careening mind storms back to land to find
I can but shake my lifted fist
against the pounding of the waves...

Still, in that sinking moment, comes an
unexpected rise, a flight as full
and swift and bright as seabirds' glinting vanes
of gold and gray and white. Now, once again,

I find my heart attendant to your sorrow
and for a moment unentailed by gathered furls,
cloud-white and high and wide yet windless sails,
I still have eyes to see you as before.

Now though adrift I stand ashore and view
old visions drawn out anew in this reflecting glass.
Between those always-closed old wooden blinds you opened our first
date, the small compulsions of my house and heartbreak gravitate--

stale scents of nicotine and ash, black coffee rings
and cans of Coke, pale sugar ants and salty crumbs--
slight things, I guess, largely unseen, yet how they marred
and mar the white wood shelf above my hearth.

Now in memory or in fact I stand still,
too close again, before the mirror hung above
this cold white mantle and heart's dark fire--face to face,
the same as then, as when you said I'd gone too far,

as when you pled that you would suffocate
if I kept pressing my demands
or that we might explode if I could not just love you
and not hate your husband's plain bright wedding band.

And for a while, that worked. Still, all my heart protests
that what it is I love in you
I wish to plainly see, and wish to fold
all fantasies complex into a simple scheme.

If with insistent words
or with a brave compassion
I could dare this growing mist
which makes me your displeasure,

if from my bold and quelling hateful stare
you could tell that
part of me would gladly die
to keep your heart my treasure,

if I could clutch
hell's phantoms by their throats,
make them dance
and cease to prance and gloat,

if all the things I love to say came true--how one
can love and not possess, for one--but, no, not me.
Confess: grim truth is what is true;
the rest is jagged jest, on land or out at sea...

For truth or dare, that seabird breeze could not become
a gossamer of warm air uplifting me with ease.
No flight enlivens or relieves this flagging flesh I bear,
not till the final horse's plight and the last feather's fall.

Still, though I sank and swam, and swim and sink here yet,
and though so brief (those bright reliefs!)
I think myself a better man that you and some
fair few have loved me so, absurd and errant as I am.

So, yes, it's me you see out there,
a sailor all at sea, one of those
jerry-built, jimmied, jangled lives astray,
as aimless as jetsam at ebb tide,

a muddled mariner amidships who strives
to soar, yet always goes over the side,
a churning hoof, a lifted fist,
that strains against and to the waves

till in the frothing sea
I sink and swim no more
and drown.

rcs.

15th draft: 07/28/04
©1976 Ronald C. Southern

Horse Latitudes: Plural noun. Either of two belts of latitudes located over the oceans at about 30° to 35° north and south, having high barometric pressure, calms, and light, changeable winds. Etymology: Possibly from Spanish golfo de las yeguas, mares' sea. Reports that horses often needed to be thrown overboard, to lighten the load when no wind was present, in order to move the vessels on the water may be apocryphal.

The Shyest Hand

2004-07-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

My children in the churchyard
Are singing as the bells have rung,
Hoping as myself has sung
While reaching out of time
For the kindness of your hand.

My children on the city streets
Are dreaming as the sun has shone,
Starving as my heart has pined
While reaching out of bounds
For any place at all to stand.

My children on the greensward
Are growing as the trees have grown,
Soaring as my soul has flown
While reaching for the shyest hand
That I shall ever know.

My children on the plains of tears
Are cringing as the brave have fears,
Climbing as my heart has height
While groping with these vaneless wings
To gain your chaste embrace.

My children near the forest-dream
Are dying as the phoenix dies,
Shining as my eyes have wept
While catching at the warmest sun
My dawn has ever seen.

My children by this sun-lit shore
Are kneeling as the saints have prayed,
Knelling as heart's bells have rung
While reaching healing home at last,
My hand within your grasp.

rcs.

3rd draft: 02/07/03
©1967 Ronald C. Southern

Old Millennium Dancing Shoes

2004-06-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

(Saint Joan and Guinevere)

Don't let it be misunderstood
what it is to be alone with an overwhelming mood,
to be untaken once again, a savage wallflower at the waltz,
waiting for a chance to see eternity, not me, improve its stance—
but, how, dear distant Guinevere—how can I say that?

It is so seldom understood
why that which is chosen is most difficult in all the world,
why human hearts confused by doubts become enclosed by walls—
why did they not break out or dare to ask
that lonely brave young Joan of Arc to dance?

Don't try to tell it now to any woman or any man,
don't even try to understand, how this reality of lies
surrounds us like a phantom's spell too subtle to undo.
Love's pirouettes in new soft shoes are all as real, World News avows,
as this old-dancing-shoe world-weariness will allow.

If you think cold sober reason can defend us from such dizzy views,
attend with me this still interior spinning room,
recline with me and shine those coal-black eyes I love this way
till gloom comes up the sheets like flames and clings to me
like smoke and stings your lids and leaves your lips quite parched...

How many dazed and daunted fools here, Gwen,
have seen the undisguised device or tool
of endless time reveal itself
and stood their ground before it?
How many voices strangled in the middle of—

Whose given word unbroken will have the strength to cry aloud
when silent tears have drowned us in our pride, yet left us dry?
There's such a world of difference now between
Saint Joan's unfaded passion and what is left of mine.
Christ, be my new religion, Gwen, the wine on which I choke!

Well, why not laugh? Am I another priest or clerk
whose soul records this wide and syncopated concatenation of lies?
A cipher whose unsteady slate chalks up the works and warps
of clumsy possibilities, of cockeyed evolution? Who dances
minuets in mud-boots at the ball and mars the parquet floor?

Time again, time that's hung with festive variation,
time in fluid movement through the seasons,
through space arranged just-so for no apparent reason,
while celibates with beards hang fire in dominoes and masks,
limp puppets on taut strings with only one thing left to do...

When time and space put on their ballet shoes and spin,
whatever keeps us cheek-to-cheek will do for us, we grin,
within the raveled convolutions of this costume ball gone bad—
but, still, that which is constant amid our own inconstancy
in part becomes our God. So, can you imagine the paradox I'm in?

The puppet-master moves the puppet,
but man is moved by nothing, or, like that damned Cauchon,
by nothing but momentum and inertia,
forgetting every heedless, dark, and broken heart that watched
the clean white hem of Joan's unarmored muslin smock begin to burn,

while time moved forth, at first slowly, lately fast,
it never stops or pauses, but glides like wind through grass
beyond the reach of love's embrace and far beyond recall
as season follows fallow season disguised as Guinevere
and we invent new reasons to turn away from grace.

Despite it all, I am a worldly man—
neither hedonists nor ascetics have ever made
much sense to me; in truth or maya, both will bleed.
So, turning, I stumble one little step further
and pray that one step is what leads to another...

Alone again with an overwhelming mood,
I dream of Joan of Arc's undying, aching, fiery soul
and love's expiring old soft-shoe for Gwen
as if such strength and sweetness could be true,
as if I ever knew that dance—but how can I say that?

rcs.

Note: Pierre Cauchon

Pierre Cauchon (kosho), 1371-1442, Bishop of Beauvais, Joan of Arc's tireless persecutor; the primary judge in her 1431 trial. He felt that her refusal to wear women's clothing was by itself proof of her disobedience to the church and of her heresy. At the same time, neither he nor any other official said or did anything to protect her when her brief effort to comply resulted in the English military guards being demonstrative about their sexual interest in her. In short, they attacked her, though she and God fought them off. Unfortunately, she and God did not have the same success with Cauchon's conduct of the trial.

Joan's "rehabilitation" trial took place in 1456. She was canonized in 1920.

10th draft: 06/26/04
©1975 Ronald C. Southern

Goddamn These Wounded Birds

2004-06-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

(Poem For A Martha I Can't Recall)

Listen, oh listen,
Listen to this wayward wind that blows
Cool and calm through noisy streets,
Between the voices, between the choices,

Our palms outstretched, upraised,
The evening sun in glory,
Indifferent to our praise.

These many faces you contain,
Hold back or offer to my
Too-eager gaze,

I want to, yes,
I want to, no,
I want to shake these youthful dreams and say,
"Give up these tears or tell me why!"

I'd nibble your ears
And whisper, whisper—
Oh, but not for love—
Or do I mean, for Love Alone?

What man will dream his life away
And only speak to phrase or frame his own defense?
He is closed up in a fortress that is safe but dark.
Safe. But Dark.

But listen, listen,
Listen to this wind that gently blows
Calm and cool through cluttered streets,

Our palms outstretched, upraised,
The evening sun in glory
Indifferent to our praise…

rcs.

4th draft: 06/23/04
©1974 Ronald C. Southern

I Know Such Beauty Still

2004-06-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

For someone who has accumulated so little,
I seem to have a lot of little things,
Whether preserved or accidentally kept
Or tucked away or spilling out like boys at play—
It’s odd just which things in the world will stay.

I run across them now and then,
Pictures and small decorations,
Oddments of different kinds,
Dusty things, dull or waxed or dingy things,

Leftover pieces and parts,
Black metal music machines and softish dreams,
Early technologies and quasi-arts
I can barely call the names of any more.

Things that I stopped in the middle of making,
Arts and Crafts projects,
Like that one braided belt I couldn’t complete,
Things ill conceived, badly done, or tangled,
Or hard things that were always breaking

Or soft things that would just never fit,
Like that wallet with leather parts too thick to sew,
Possessions of little value too valued to throw away.
Some things get lost too easily, I grant,
Yet others seem to cling.

Slides I took of Dan and Charlotte’s happy wedding,
Made moot by hostile divorce and my own estrangement.
Crinkled poems I sent copies of to people I once loved;
Unrelenting Christmas cards received in twos and ones—
Now all the addresses are changed, it seems.

Now all these things are strewn and stuffed
In cluttered boxes, cabinets, and drawers.
What can one do, after the rise and the rush of events,
With wornout remnants still in evidence
Of these losses and lost friends?

Envelopes that remain—some bottle-ringed, stained, and mottled,
Some pristine;
Some empty,
Some with bent-cornered post cards or folded yellow pages spilling out.

Those old receipts, reminders, questions, answers,
Paper peregrinations, perambulations, and forgotten nascent thoughts,
The letters I penned and posted back in youthful haste—
Meaningful these days only to a few old hearts.

Books my friends wrote in—inscriptions, notes, graffiti.
One, who loved Durrell’s Quartet as I did,
Said he’d see me “in another book”—
Some did, some didn’t, George, and some Will yet, I guess.

Some, like you, may dream sweet music to the bitter end
And wish to paint those Dali-esque landscapes in reality,
But reality seems so far away now, back when no one we knew got sick,
I don’t even know how to begin that measure or if you in fact are dead.

Drawings in black and white by friends who now live far away,
Hidden, stored in folders for decades, hung now on paneled walls.
Sketches, sometimes of me, Art and otherwise, now draw me in,
Remind me, remand me, return me for a while in thought,
Where a sense of those old days surrounds me, but never stays.

I tracked dear Wilfried down in Friedberg after 30 years
And we were elated at first. He said he’d long ago abandoned Art
But that it didn’t matter. Too soon, he had no more to say,
Not even of his birds. His life is blurred and lost again in Germany
And, no matter what I say, my old friend is lost to me anew.

Things that people left behind—
A fine line drawing by that Hessian, perhaps,
Or a notebook cover some thoughtless lover
Once scribbled patterns on
Or wrote her treasured name across…

What was a purple and white macramé hatband,
Made for me in happy days by a woman I possessed,
But now so faded two colors have for years been one.
The leather hat I made myself—long gone.
It is so strange how some things stay possessed
Whether I have retained them or not!

Bill’s yellowing old blue-lined address book,
Left here years ago and not returned or sought;
It’s still around, moved from here to there
And back again as time goes by.

I spot it now and then among toy dragons, beside a butterfly in glass,
Some battered insect and cactus books collecting dust, a slight smell like must,
Reminding me of those fungus-scented, antique-timbered, unswept rooms
Where Bill and Waldine worked at Coppini’s defunct old sculpture studio.

Last year’s snapshot of Paula,
Brown-haired with a sprinkle of gray,
Seated with her daughter’s handsome happy half-Tibetan baby boy.
It does not seem so long ago she was a college girl
I made love to and tried but failed to love.

Around and round I went with her like a dog on a bone until perversely
We were friends again. She knew how I’d tried to hate her,
But gave me her forgiveness. I don’t see her much any more,
But I know she makes a very handsome grandma now
And feels remarkably good to hug.

Two black and white old photos of a high-school girl,
My sweetheart then and blonde, but long ago turned gray,
A bright young beauty twice preserved
In glass and silver frames she gave me with her heart.
She’s been discreetly displayed just so for thirty years—

One photo with a smile and one quite serious but serene.
I’ve kept them in this or that room
In each succeeding home I’ve had without her.
Though she’s another’s wife, and plump and flushed and older,
I know that beauty still.

At times I can’t believe I still conserve these foolish things,
These old and sometimes faded dried-up near-forgotten things.
My life is only here upon this page and spilling out once more
Where nothing new is wondrous or will stay,

But I have known a few who were the best,
Of whom I am reminded by all these little things
How good it was to know them
And that I know such beauty still.

rcs.

10th draft: 06/18/04
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

Your Obsession

2004-06-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

Your obsession with your father
Gave you good material, I must say.
All that poetry, I mean. I envy you that.
Always having interesting subject matter.
You've made hay of it, and every poem was good!

It's odd how twisted you got, just thinking
About how powerful he was when you were little—
How intelligent he was, how all-encompassing!
I wonder how it was I never felt him like that,
Never felt him turn his finely focused heat ray on me?

Did I just not draw his fire
Or was I fireproof in some way?
Was I insensate and could not apprehend
That fire and heat despite it being there?
I guess it was only of a certain kind—
Familial, insidious, insinuating,
Not quite for public consumption.

It is strange, isn't it, how, among three offspring,
It was the girl in the middle, not the boys,
who most emulated him?
Perhaps they knew something about him
That you never absorbed?
Was it just that their fascination was less?
Was there something to avoid,
And they required a greater distance
Than Adoration could allow?

Boys don't care much for Adoration,
Unless they're the ones getting it—
But that's neither here nor there.
Or is it?

rcs.

3rd draft: 06/01/04
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

Song For George (Hard, Not Easy)

2004-05-26T19:32:00.000-07:00

"Who can I love?" he sang.
He sang it soft and long.
"Too many wives and lovers are already lost—
Dear God, who can count the hurt, the cost?"
It was his soft and steady song,
But it was hard, not easy.

Who can I love
When time is hard and I am harder
And nothing's ever kind—
Or do I simply mean, however wrong,
That now I find at long, long last that
Nothing's ever been so kind to me as you
Except the one who's dead?

I'm not so bad,
I always like to think.
So why can't I be kind,
Or kinder, or be perceived as such,
Convey myself as such,
Be someone soft to touch, but still a man
And one who's hard to know that much.

You're a woman fit to love, I see.
Dear Polly, who wouldn't want to love
A woman so deserving all
That to resist you would be another Fall,
Or legally Insane, or just a pain—
Still, not easy, these clumsy ballets of love!

Why can't I be true in kind to you
And love you well or myself at bay
Or all these raucous friends of mine
Or all these blinded wounded kin—
Every one so needful or hormone-driven!
Why can't I lead my newly-bearded son
To be less horrible than myself and love me
As even I deserve? Dear God, is it too late for love?

Oh be a little kind, or kinder, ageing heart—
Whatever comes, I cannot help but think
That something soft behind the mask
Might yet be brought to bear upon this task
But you know how men just never dare to ask,
And it's still hard, not easy…

rcs.

10th draft: 05/26/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

Earnur's Lament

2004-05-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

Those who broke into the tomb
Were first and those who did
Not choose to look were wise.

"Oh darling,"
Then the walls begin to sigh,
"Oh, darling,
If we push a little further,
We may die…"

Such sounds that float upon the breezes
Slip softly past the outer shell.

Inside the tower high above
Along the winding stair
Our cruelty ascends;

Oh hear the voice
Oh hear the voice
And turn aside from where
The bodies of the dead attend.

Here seven jaded ladies knelt
To rearrange their face;
Here seven savage widows stood to draw
The line and mark the place.

In this perfect solitary room the dying
King reflects upon imaginary wounds.

The shadow of a fated king
Cast up against imaginary walls,
Cut down, cut down to living size,

The darkness in the faded heart
Of reason bound on every side,
The image of a skull in dreams
As seen through dreamer's eyes.

Now men with pale gray eyes
Complain they cannot breathe
And ghostly feminine faces
Promenade around the tomb.

Cold hands of age complain against the years
And with both sword and knife
Strike out at spider's threads

And hands of grace immersed in tears
Reach out, reach out
To light the candle long unfound—
Yes, here, here beside the bed.

Now all these phantom figures moving in the gloom
The dying king reflects upon,
Until he takes his bed of death, reclines at last
And gasps, without a mask, without a sword or mask…

rcs.

Current draft: 05/05/04
©1972 Ronald C. Southern

Footnote: Earnur -- A passing historical reference from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy. "The Silmarillion" tells more about him, how Earnur, the last king of Gondor, rode alone to the gates of Minas Morgul to meet the Morgul-lord in single combat. "Betrayed by the Nazgûl, he was taken alive into the city of torment and no living man saw him ever again." Hereditary Stewards then reigned for many generations until the downfall of Sauron, brought about by the destruction of the One Ring and the return of the King.

Didactic In November

2004-05-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

Great heart, this flower, has closed;
Has sought, and lost, and chose.
Your touch, your tongue, your heat—fair game,
I deem, for all but me on this predacious street.

Live hard, live long, live gay;
Let the love that you feel lead the way.
My love is caught and held and flung
Like leaves the careless wind has blown
Out where the dead make speech that needs no tongue.

My friend, this power has flown;
Has sought, and found, and known.
Your cry, bold heart, still sings a song of the sea
That flows, Oh! But listen: nothing flows through me.

Love's hard, love's long, love's frayed;
What life will surrender, death takes away.
My life is done and spent and spun
Like dust some careless child has flung
Out where the dead make speech that speaks to none.

rcs.

The Absence Of A Kiss

2004-05-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

In the absence of any kiss is found
A moment that jerks you into stillness,
Breathless stillness, a stillness
That no lonely heart can take,
No guileful word express,
No seeing eye dismiss.

In the absence of a kiss we find
A mindful means to madness as a jest,
The senseless touch of kindness and its death,
The cutting edge of reason without life
Where the silent knife impales itself upon itself

And none here know the reason for,
The beauty of, the distance from
That proffered gift, that lost-in-sift,
The poised and awkward promise of a kiss.

rcs.

3rd draft: 02/10/03
©1972 Ronald C. Southern

The Seduction

2004-05-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

your hand that rests beside you
while you sit taps out a silent
beat; this pulse behind my ear
begins to imitate that beat.

"Are we conversant drums," I wonder,
and rest one hand on your knee,
draw up your skirt with the other.

"I am too cold to be so warm,"
is what you say, but I know
what that means; my hand between
your legs, I smile and say,

"How lovely you are; a beauty
that would suit any taste..."

rcs.

4th draft: 08/26/01
©1979 Ronald C. Southern

Snake-Bit

2004-05-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

One of these days down the road, you’ll see,
Before life ends, it’ll happen,
You’ll be snake-bit or dog-bit or develop a limp
Or mistakenly kiss Michael Jackson’s chimp
Or breed carcinomas under your pits till you ache.

Maybe you’ll hit that next sharp corner
Clutching a cell-phone and a map and you’ll crash
And the semi behind you will crawl up your ass
And your floorboarded feet and all your false teeth
Will fall through the cracks deadly fast,
Leaving that jaunty $4 hat you wear juicy, frayed, and flat.

Or maybe you’ll thoughtlessly open
That creaky front door at home one night
And stumble willy-nilly across some burglar at work
Who didn’t expect you, either,
And the adrenalin will rise to a roar.

Maybe you’ll just be scared or maybe get
Your skull crushed and your eggs reduced to mush—
A thick or thin pink salsa slush
For firemen with rubber-soled feet
To hose off the graveled street.

Just wait, you’ll see…

rcs.

7th draft: 05/03/04
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

Greenhouse

2004-05-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

This older woman likes it, he thought,
Being pawed aggressively like this,
Her back rubbing sensuously
Against the yielding plastic greenhouse wall,
her skirt clutched tightly in one hand,
Her half-seen face gaily grimacing
While she held him to her tightly in the dark.

It was better than she'd ever imagined, he imagined.
Not bad for him, either—he’d never felt better,
Though they’d just now met at the party.
Whatever was true, whatever was false,
The tall woman leaned back on the greenhouse wall
And spread her arms wide like a crucified bride
And trembled like a girl
With the younger man's face on her thighs.

rcs.

4th draft: 05/02/04
©1975 Ronald C. Southern

Reborn Again

2004-05-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

Such heat in the street each evening:
Night’s fall finds the fault in all;
The waste that wore the heart to hardness
Lives in each of us, dies not with the dying Fall.

If time and tongue and tireless feet
Are finally spent from toiling in the dark,
Then through this rent that hope has made,
Shall not judgment pass and forever fade away?

What fanned hell's fire to fury burned bright
In the living flesh, but gave no light to see;
Yet all disheartened hearts must wonder: how
Through this foggy night will break the dawn of day?

These wrongs at the heart of darkness
Made waste in the veins of men; if lust
For love long sought is lost now, then why
This heart so bursting, expectant even now?

What anguish and what joy! The time arrives,
The time departs too soon; blessed be
Pleasure’s pain and pain's delight, for by
These wounds the world and we are wrought!

Men's tempers set the stride,
Make all the measures one of pride—
But pleasure's pain and pain's delight
Care not for pride, but right.

What's wrong with this teething terror makes war
In the souls of men; if pride-of-strength's
The measure now of love long lost, long sought,
Then how this heart so bursting, so buoyant even now?

What fanned hell's fire to fury filled full
Conceited flesh, but starved the frantic heart;
Now in such need of touch we wonder:
Can day that breaks so hard and fast succeed?

If time and tongue and nameless fears
At last are washed away by tears,
Then from this heart of hope and doubt
Shall not judgment be cast out?

Dead heat in the street this evening:
His Fall cries the crime in all;
The haste that bore the Christ to harness
Lives in each of us, dies not with the dying call.

rcs.

8th draft: 08/12/01
©1979 Ronald C. Southern

Freud Me!

2004-05-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Pig me, poig me,
Sigmund Freud me!

The First Foolish Thing

2004-05-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

The first foolish thing that I do every day
Is to crawl out of bed to the chair.