Pensee

A garden full of pansies, long and broad-

Faced, multicolored flower, stern or smiling,

All making faces, frowning as they fling

Away their truest thoughts--their bed's a fraud.

You try to pry into their pansy-thoughts

And you will find your deepest disappointment--

A Sartrean deep angst so when you're spent,

You may proclaim them only flowery naughts.

Their capillary xylem, sap-filled phloem,

Instead of our red arteries and veins

Don't make their lives inert--it's true, life wanes

No single bit in difference of poem.

When we learn many-thought, we'll come to see

All wisdom's poetic reality. 

The Silver Sculpture

My brother and I stood in the white room

Of the museum, each of us staring

At the silver sculpture, mirroring whom-

Ever walked by. A round-bottomed spike sharing

The room with a tall man in uniform,

The security, each uninviting

Until the man told us to push the form--

We did, each making a tinkling delighting

Each of us and the man as the sculpture

Rocked back and forth. This was the thousandth 

Time he had heard the tinkling--the future

Would of course bring more--I doubt the millionth

Could make this man's delight ever depart--

His constant joy was the far better art. 

The Cliffdwellers

The topless natives in grass skirts. The cliffs

Where they have fashioned homes in wind-carved space

That overlook the canyon, petroglyphs

That spell out each dark spiritual place.

The neighbors nearby and across the canyon

All work together to etch out a living--

Dry desert farming and collecting pinyon

Nuts from this desert land, dry yet quite giving

For a century to those who would work

To leave their mark in this echoing place,

Now ghostly silent. Birds and lizard lurk

Here now, but nothing else, a slower pace.

These people now are gone--we don't know where--

But, seeing what they've done, none should despair. 

Mythogenesis

The lion prowls in shadows just outside

The edge of consciousness and the tree's shade,

The blond beast in the sun--it will abide

In our unconscious mind, where fears are made.

The hawk swings, soars above, just out of sight--

It's hiding in the gold-glare of the sun.

His shadow terrorizes, sends to flight

Ancestral fears that death kept at a run.

The serpent slithers, low on the dark ground--

He's venomous and hidden in the grass--

He creeps with crushing coils, won't make a sound--

He brings us fear that few could dare surpass.

Such fiery fears--our minds act as a flagon

To mix these fears and make of them a dragon. 

21st C, Salon

A cafe, black tables, fresh fruit, and wine,

People in black chairs outside conversing,

Surrounded by the thick, sweet scent of pine

That precedes even the flowers of spring.

I miss the salons, the movements, the thought

That comes out of like minds talking as one.

We've missed out on things that we could have taught

Ourselves about culture, what art has done.

The cafe brings us the promise of art

Lifted from the shackles of Heidegger,

Kant, existentialist angst. A new heart

Can now be born, flowering within her.

We sit at the black tables, lean in close,

Art's new medicine is the strongest dose.