Poetry – Andy Havens

Soft, Sweet Armor

On resisting the things that actually threaten our harmony, our unity. We never go deep enough.

Guard against the joylessness –
the shout
the sloganed cry.
Guard against the chanted curse
and truthful-seeming lie.

Guard against the joylessness –
against the sheepish fright.
Guard against the mirthless marches
that wilt without the light
(a truly righteous Army thrives
even out of sight).

Guard against the joylessness –
the hunt
the bluebird’s noose.
Guard against the flashing placards
that turn a lynching loose.

Guard against the joylessness –
against the textbook heart.
Guard against the low momentum
of the classroom’s faded arts
(the ivory’s crumbling fastest
at the over-polished parts).

Guard against the joylessness
my son,
my girl child,
by suiting up in Mother’s grace
and by wielding Father’s smile.

Cold. Holy. Morning.

Just trying to live in it.

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I only know what morning is
by the way it holds my bones.
It’s the only cold I welcome there
And I feel it, most, alone.

The morning holds me in it like
the water holds the fish.
Like I should try to breathe it in
To be more of what it is.

And the morning is inside of me
the way the water’s in the fish
The morning moves inside of me
Like a fear inside a wish.

Most mornings I forget to think,
and so I chase the cold away
before it can remind me what
my life will cost that day.

But the cold is how I know I start
with a grace as yet unearned.
The crystals of my rising breath
Are holiness confirmed.

Never Stop Laughing

Christmases!

Seven years ago, this was. The Boy wasn’t even a year old, and the girl was only three. They’re 7 and 10 now. Wow.

We didn’t go anywhere in search of Christmas, necessarily. But we did go driving off to a place where Christmas might be, if it were going to be anywhere.

“He looks out the window a lot, Papa.”

“He sure does.”

“Why do you think he does it?”

“Well, do you remember when I told you that his spirit was a miracle?”

“I think so. I think you said it was a miracle because it hasn’t done anything twice.”

“That’s right. Because for a tiny moment, it was the only thing in the world that had not done anything twice. And now there’s a world full of things that he hasn’t seen even once. Turns the world into a kind of miracle for him.”

“That’s why he laughs at it?”

“No, he’s laughing when he looks out at it because he wants to do everything he can with it to make it laugh like he is. He doesn’t know where it comes from or how it starts or anything about it except that he wants it to keep going. That’s how you feel when you are tiny, and new, and haven’t done things twice or seen things once, and it’s the part of it that’s the same for him as it is for us.”

“If it’s the same, Papa, then how come you don’t laugh so much?”

“Jeez, how old are you again?”

“Three and a half.”

“Hm. Well, I guess I don’t laugh so much because after a while you find out that some things don’t laugh back. And after a longer while, after too many things don’t laugh back, you just get tired.”

“Too tired to laugh?”

“Too tired to laugh, baby. But we remember that the world was a miracle for all of us, once. We remember that we saw new things everywhere we looked, and we expected everything to be laughing because we were laughing, even though it has been too long, sometimes, since anything up and laughed with us. That’s what Christmas is, sweetie: Being old and tired and still laughing, for a day, like we did when we were still playing with miracles.”

“But I’m not old.”

“No, you’re not. And you never have to be, because to your brother you are everything he sees when he looks out the window. And laughs.”

When it Works, it Really Works

A bright, tiny poem at the end of some sappy reminiscing. Have a smile on me.

I followed, yesterday, the link to someone who liked my poem. It landed me at a blog called Reowr, a lively and fun place of poetry that I had never visited or heard of before. The author is talented and sincere, and this is what I used to love about the internet.

Eight or more years ago I blogged regularly, almost daily. Through the odd tentacles and tendrils of the world wide web, I made a whole bunch of friends. I never even knew what some of them looked like, how old they were. I only ever met one of them in person, and I don’t think I measured up in real life to what I was in writing, so we never met again. He was (and still is) a big fish out there. At my heyday I was barely a tadpole.

But we all left comments for each other at our blogs, exchanged emails when something called for it, and my family even got a Christmas card from one of them. For me, for a long time, the internet was good.

They’re all gone now. At least gone from me. Their websites are shuttered or stagnant, probably in a lot of cases from the sheer fatigue of keeping up, emotionally, with the too often sinister turns that personal exposure on the internet can take. It’s hard, oddly, to be a public nobody. One of them, a curmudgeonly but generous and compassionate Air Force retiree (and regrettable Red Wings fan) named Buck, died several years ago. I regret not finding out in time to make it to his funeral.

Yesterday I got a little glimmer of that good side of the internet when Cubby, the proprietor and author of the aforementioned Reowr decided she liked my poem, and I, as I always do, decided to go look at her blog. The first poem made me interested in reading a second one, and that’s something. There was a section on her site called “challenges,” and for the most recent one she supplied two lines to a poem and said “finish this.” I was happy to see something that seemed motivated only by joy and creativity, so I, as I almost never do, decided to accept the challenge. So did a whole bunch of other people. Poetry is always fun, but sometimes it’s more than that. Sometimes poetry is cotton candy and high fives and a place where, finally, I don’t hesitate for a second to use exclamation points.

The first two lines are the ones she wrote, the rest is mine:

Dreams like water-colored paintings
Wash away when days are raining
But, the puddles!
My, the puddles!
The muddled, colored, splashable puddles!
I bootbrush the pavement
with the dream-streaky puddles!

Cut

Yes, messy.

There are days you learn things
like the real feel of sawdust,
downy in plush piles
with no trace of the cruelty
of its bellicose birthing.
Days you learn that
the things you don’t long look at –
things made when two mean pieces meet
and one must give –
are too quickly swept away.

The first time you ever smelled it –
a tidy slice that bled all freshness
from the dying whine of the
chopsaw (hard named thing!) –
was in the garage, probably,
or a cobwebbed shed or even
in the bright back woods,
under a stiff wind that could move whole seasons
and could not help but carry
the fruit of hewn spruce and history
straight into you.

That first time it was only looking
for a place to live.
It barely asked a second time
to make it smell like home forever.

We know it now
not as the smell of the jobs of our fathers,
jobs that often didn’t seem enough.
We know it now
as the smell instead of the work they did
that we silent saw
(and they more silent did).

Work that was rough,
that was mean,
that mother sometimes seemed to think
wasn’t good for much.
That it was only the work –
just that, merely the work –
that made them,
merely,
men.

But now we know that Mama knew
and nothing good was left unseen.
We know that she knew that
Papa had to be the silent thing
to clear a little holy space
for a little violent shepherding.

Now we know that Mama knew
what rough cuts made the dust,
and how she must not just sweep it up
but that she must (hard fought stuff!)
form its piles into neat peaks
to bear up the brutes, the boys,
the noise-born boys
whose shouts we shush –
stamp right out –

Believing, hoping we can
polish down the teeth
of the saw,
pad the menacing head
of the hammer,
quench the fires blasting
in the engines of the bulldozers –
And still have a house to live in.

Mama – who made us know
when she made us whole –
sees us act
as if we could make all
the hard things soft and
the loud things quiet and
the mean things nice and
never once put tooth to tree.
As if we could have
the (yes, messy) blessing of the dust
without the saw.

We never saw that mama cuts things, too,
and lifts her blade while
papa (who always mutely knew)
swings his, severing, down.
We stand between and above
with our noses in the air where
we’re made on the hills of their unswept dust,
smelling home with every swipe and hack.

Glide

I.
A long-looking wind blows
memory into drifts and dapples
the withered ego
of an old tree alone
among the husks and chaff.

There is no sound but the rattle-clack
of its old rheumatic branches
in a wind not of its making.
A wind form somewhere else that
bends it nonetheless away –

it always seems away
always bent away because a wind
from somewhere else
never has you in it.

II.
The bent tree tends forever back
and barks ahead across
a thin space made on a frozen pond
in the blown prairie.

A thin space made
of a wisp-drifted memory

where, with no blades to cut the ice
with nothing so precise
we skated in our shoes and listened
for the deep – the ancient –
sound of gasping cracks that we knew,
because we were experts already
in suffering,
would never reach the surface.

The Willing Left Behind

Visible saints, back from visible wars,
Mount our black tarmac and try coming unstuck.
They come bleeding sand from unsettled scores,
Try smiling at wives and babies and luck.
We smile right back as big as we’re able,
Thank them at ballparks and ice hockey rinks.
Hide our old story behind a true fable,
Salute them with handshakes, college, and drinks.
We broadcast their service in movies and books,
Sure to display them with due gratitude.
They did what the softened civilian can’t brook
So we hail their hard hearts (but think ours less crude).
Some, though they drummed in the same brothered band
Cover their ears with their unbloodied hands.