Ben, by the way (a guest poem for the Menagerie)

Ben, by the way, when
  one of our parakeets
died last week, was the first to say

when freer days were
  over, and the summer,
alas, had ended coolly,

when I didn’t have
  time for such a poem
as this on the Lost Menagerie,

as we lowered
  the birdcage from our Russian
rafters, Ben was the one to pray.


He prayed, especially
  when I dug the lifeless
bird into the autumn earth,

not quite a
  see-you-later prayer, more
than an hasta-manana blessing,

days before the
  pet store’s replica would
join its brothers in the chapel cage

Ben prayed with
  a grateful appreciation,
saying “thank you for your worth.”


And now the other
  parakeet, placed beside
those who would live another day

and lifted with them
  to hang from the rafters rising
over one who had died

is placid, quiet
  as a gravedigger, or
confused, with no words to offer,

and it was for this
  parakeet, too, by the way,
that Ben was the first to pray.

bedtime reading

Well, the news from Lake Woebegone (ie, Roztoky) has been passing fair. We had a 2nd or 3rd annual municipal event--twice at least for us--on the left and right banks of the Vltava River, north of Prague. Contextually, that's like Stillwater and Bayport for our Roztoky and Klecany, or St Croix Falls and Taylor Falls in the geological reverse. We in Roztoky enjoy the permanent museum and medieval castle and draw of some thousand; those in Klecany enjoy the peace and pride of being on the Troya side of Prague, where the zoo and the royal vineyard reside. Anyway, the rivalry is nil on nights in mid-September, when this new tradition glows and the ferries transport revelers non-stop and the music is from Radim Hladik's Blue Effect, whose music spans five decades and as many genres and restores my faith in the one thing Czechs haven't done so well, 'til now.

School's in full swing here, and we cast our prayers to Syria and Chicago, differently, for their aggravated starts. Teachers defy definitions, even from the empathetic, and so we hope students also learn without presuppositions of their lot. We're thankful for what we all have got. And in this space I want all to know that Ben (especially) knows six-times-seven is forty-two minus ten is thirty-two, God bless the Czechs who teach him well. I'll also say he throws a baseball like my cousins Jim and Paul. That is to say the blood line works in more than mysterious ways.

He was, by the way, the first to say that one of our parakeets died last week (the cage had happily hung from the rafters of our Russian Orthodox Chapel through the summer which, alas, ended coolly). He prayed as I dug it into the earth, not quite a see-you-later, but a thank-you-for-your-worth. The pet store had a replica, and now the other parakeet is either placated or confused. I don't have time for such a poem on Lost Menagerie, so guest poems would be welcome.

And though I needn't say, because I scarcely know, the tiny police patrol had to stretch their tape across two ends of a tiny street in town. We know two people on that street, and so we know they know what next week's news will necessarily report. An argument, a woman runs away, a return to what no one could remotely say, a hanging, a fear of worse, a settling for what is unimaginable if not quite worse, a very blue effect we hadn't counted on...

In our mailbox today is Thirty Birds, flown in by Amazon and local post. Its heft is more in pages and in print than I thought as blogspot made it. I'm happily surprised that canonized poets are adumbrated to the prevailing need to hear another voice. Jon's done his homage, as those forbearing poets had done theirs, and the hints are worth the haunting (in the hallowed sense of the term). I need this bedtime reading. this upward denouement. And if by coincidence I've begun one class with Prufrock--"I do not think they will sing to me"--and another class with Gwendolyn Brooks, who could've/shoud've/would've explained in Maine South's auditorium 1982 what "We / Sing sin" means in the pantheon of theology--if Amazon delivers independently...I'll go to sleep not so etherized, but completely filled with what is a call to cheer, a deeper reason for the rhyme.

Yes, the expanded format 2012 means the World Series Cards are in the play-off hunt--the Braves have their back against the wild card wall. The White Sox can only win within--the AL East too strong... And though this news is least what is really on our minds, I like the news of Woebegone: insular, outgoing, sublime.

thank you, Jonathan, for the book that will always grace our shelves.

Villanelle for a Thirteen Year Old

Here on the prairie everything is true
And in your face: the sun, the wind, the rain
And all of God’s creation touches you

And you can feel the weight of it and you
Can sweat the sweet of it and know the pain
of where you’ve been.
Here on the prairie everything is true

As sure as it is real, as good as new
And you know what will be has always been,
will be again,
And all of God’s creation touches you

With earthy tones of yellow, brown and blue
And every range of color in between,
each shade and stain.
Here on the prairie everything is true

But should the color of your point of view
Turn you around, just turn around again
to where you’ve been
And all of God’s creation touches you:

The wilderness, the world that spins with you,
The marshes and the waves of wild grain.
Here on the prairie everything is true
And all of God’s creation touches you.

The Real Thing

I would like to say
that there is nothing
like the quenching power
of a Diet Coke,
ignoring for one
indulgent moment
what other poets
choose to write about.
I would like to note

the pleasant feeling
of carbonation
and the sweetness of
zero calories
and the bitter hint
of a grownup taste,
the icy chill, the
feeling of steel and
the perk of caffeine,

but I’d have to add
quickly, being one
from that grownup world
of bittersweetly
carbonated gas
how the “real thing” is
hardly everything
and “nothing like” is
much less than it seems

after the bubbles
die down and the air
takes the chill away,
when the buzz wears off
and you hunger for
more, anything more
than the flattened
aluminum taste of
water in disguise.

With wisdom and age,
everything is less
than you thought before,
more than you supposed,
nothing like they told
you when you were young,
something that your youth
might spend all its life
trying to understand,

something like the power
of water with no
color, taste or fizz
poured without ice
into a lucid glass
and then lifted up
to the waiting lips
of simplicity.
I need nothing more.

There Will Be Time

Okay, I’m back!  After four months off from the Stillwater Symposia, I have finally set my fingers to keyboard to write something new for the blog.  But first, thank you, Dan, for announcing my self-publishing of Thirty Birds.  Until I actually set myself to the task of marketing, my book is still not much more than an attic book for posterity, but I am happy to have it in presentable form now.  And thank you for the two five star Amazon reviews from people with different last names!

The book is not what has primarily diverted me these four months, though.  The real diversion started with that hospital scare in April, which prompted me to get very serious about not just exercise and diet but time and stress management.  My workload has been even busier than it was in April, but I am learning how to pace the day (Josh, your office help has been a great help in that regard!) and avoid the stressful moments.   And, yes, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with the diet and exercise, but I’ve reached my weight goal so I am not quite as absolute on the food rules (thanks folks for hot dogs AND hamburgers last weekend).  Still running two miles every morning, though.

And still no caffeine!  Which brings me to the first of the two poems I am offering today.  Anne, you saw a draft of this in July, and Dan, I really did lose it for a month or so, but here it is, my existential commentary (thank you for the word, Anne) on my daughter’s developing caffeine habit.  So far she is not interested in reading it.

The second poem, just written yesterday, is prompted by Andrew’s recent reminding me of how overwhelming the world can sometimes seem to a thirteen year old.  I did read this one to him, and I think he appreciated the effort, if not the villanelle variations or my playing on a Dylan Thomas theme.  Maybe in time.

And, to borrow a line from my book’s Social Creatures* (and from Eliot’s Prufrock) , there will be time.  After four months of seriousness, I do expect to be raging against the dying of the light for quite a few more years now.

* http://www.thirtybirdspoetry.com/2011/03/social-creatures.html

Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part V)

 V.

He had a place to go which, by coincidence, Oleg had never referenced. Strysky Park was quiet and somewhat lonely above the southern skirt of the old city, wooded like so many parts of Kiev. Much was artificial, though, in the groomed swan pond and faux castle ruins. By the middle of his third full day in the city, Yakov had practiced his Tevye voice at a little clearing near the Rapunzel tower: he envisioned a one-man act that would have the milkman pulling a small cart—lost, as it were, on his route and bewildered by the grandeur of the city. “Flogging a dead horse won’t make it run any faster,” he read, then looked up from the book and improvised lines to no one in particular, “and by horse I mean myself, who is (as he speaks) more out of life than the resident robotnik of this very milkcart”—throwing his head back as if jerked by some bridle. “Yes, being lame from his labors is no vacation, but see how cleverly the roles are reversed: he rests in his stable and watches his dear Tevye toil, not even giving me the tips of his trade! And pulling all day with eyes in the mud, I’ve managed to thoroughly lose my way home.” Yakov flipped his book open to an earmarked page and read verbatim,

“You see the tears in my eyes, Pan Sholem Aleichem, and yet must be thinking, how Tevye misses his horse! But what makes you think it’s just my horse? I miss everything, there’s not one thing it doesn’t grieve me to think of. I miss my horse, I miss my village, I miss its elders, I miss its policeman, I miss the dachas of Boiberik, the rich Jews of Yeupetz, I even miss Efrayim the Matchmaker, may the cholera carry him off! When you get right down to it, he’s nothing but a miserably poor Jew himself who’s out to make a living like the rest of us. Don’t ask me what I’ll do in the Land of Israel if I get there safely, God willing, but I do plan to visit Mother Rachel in her grave. I’ll pray there for the daughters I’ll probably never see again, and think of him, too—I mean Efrayim the Matchmaker—and of you, and of Jews everywhere. Here, let’s shake on that! Be well, and have a good trip, and give my very best to any of our friends you may happen to meet on your way.”

He clapped the book shut and burrowed it into his long pants pocket, and mimed a renewed grasp of the cart handles. “As for my journey today, well, it’s only to get food to my noble lame horse, so tomorrow perhaps the rest of us creatures can eat!”

            “So where is your cap to receive your earned alms?” an amused voice came from a bench behind him, and Yakov pivoted in some surprise.

            “Earned?” he tried to temper an oncoming blush. “That was just reading…uh…a rudimentary rehearsal of…”

            “You’re supposed to say: the cap doesn’t come off of Tevye’s head. Tell them to toss what they will into your cart—well, assuming the cart will be there for the catching.”

            “Will you be my manager, then—with due royalties befitting a manager?”

            “I don’t know. Who would have to answer to the passing policeman?”

            “I haven’t gotten that far. At any rate, I’ve lost my way, remember?”

            They talked on the bench for a half hour before she needed to go—back to work, she said, at the Picture Gallery. “On Stefanyk Street. Do you know it?”

            “No. I don’t know much here yet—I’m quite literally off my beaten track.”

            “It’s this way, through Khelnytsky and Citadel parks—a hard trek up but easy down.” She stood and tugged at his sleeve to join. “Don’t forget your horse cart!” They walked leisurely while she explained that she took lunch breaks up here but always got a bad look from the other women who watched the rooms at the museum, as their breaks were finished in a fraction of time. “They’re resentful, most of them, that I’m the director’s daughter, and that I’m only working to fill the summer hours.”

            “You’re a student, then?”

            “At the mathematics faculty—Papa wants art history, but I don’t much care for that. I’m not sure I care much for theorems and postulates, but at least I’m pretty good at all that, or so my professors say. Are you studying here?”

            “Unofficially, yes. Exactly what you see.”

            “Maybe you’d be good at art history.”

            “Well, I could use a job.”

            “You’d probably have to dress up like an old, grim lady!”

            “But you’re not that.”

            “I’m the director’s daughter. If I stayed there forever, I’d look like them.” They strolled slowly down the hill and stopped at the Stefanyk Library. “Across the street is the museum. This place is nice, too, though the ladies here are just as grim.”

            “All grim things have vanished today. Thank you for the walk…”

            “Yulia, I’m called. And You?”

            “I am a stranger in a strange land—”

            “Moses, or is that another piece of Tevye’s narrative?”

            “Both of those, yes, but you can know me as Yakov.”

            “Then I will.”

            Park gates did not open until 6, and sweepers would catch any drunk that the closing guards would, rather unlikely, miss. By hopping the fence, Yakov would have to remain awake and evade detection, and sort play off the sunrise and disappearing stars. The ground was cold and damp, so he wasn’t tempted to lie down. He found the best place to stay was behind the ice cream kiosk, which wouldn’t open until mid-morning at least. There he also found a fifty kopek coin pressed into the soil; he gave a wry smile at the sum total of his present fortunes. The chessboard on his suitcase lent for potential bet-and-wins, but through his fleeting experience around the city, he saw no such enterprises or public interest in the game. The day would unfold in long uncertainties.

            When Yulia did not show up for the lunch hour, Yakov decided to take his chances as well as his life savings to the museum, even though he wished in part not to see her there. He wondered whether his suitcase would be an asset or obstacle to his plan, and decided to lug it along as a safeguard. He practiced what he’d say to get in, and found it rather natural not to lie: “I’ve come from Kiev, a student of the humanities… No, not just off the train, but I haven’t found my long-term lodging yet—if may I check my suitcase in the cloakroom… My name is Jürgen, and I hope my modest budget will permit me the pleasure…” And indeed these lines ushered him past the sympathetic cashier and up the stairs of the gallery.

            The first rooms allowed no place to sit down, so he suffered the need to stand and observe as much as could—he could not afford to rush through the twenty-or-so rooms and be left with nothing to do afterwards. When he came to a broad painting by Johann Baptist Reiter, he smiled at the opportunity to sit at the opposite wall and study the theme at length. ‘Joseph Sold into Egypt’ included all twelve brothers, halved as it were by the central, glowing figure of the title character; there was no Egyptian—the sale, it seemed, had not been made and perhaps this was a final filial moment to consider all angles of their present and future. Benjamin looked older than his full-blooded brother, perhaps because he, too, had come into the world at cost. There was, of course, no hint of Jacob. Because he was now a student—not merely acting as one—Yakov pursued this thought to a smaller painting by Zigmunt Sidorwicz, whose title ‘Object Proof (Corpus Delicte)’ appeared bent to say too much, even though the ‘proof’ of the artist’s theme required some ardent detective work. The eleven-year girl in the painting, dressed as finely as her young mother, wasn’t asking at this point in the scene, and perhaps her mute stare would have been just as frozen a day before, or remain so a week later, or until she too had a palm-sized portrait of a dashing man attired in an officer’s uniform. ‘He existed,’ the voice of the painting seemed to say, ‘and truly is as central as this frame within a frame within a frame…’

            Yakov asked the guard, sitting at the edge of her chair and not so grim, if many visitors looked long at this painting. “Not as long as you,” she said.

            “Do they study ‘Joseph Sold into Egypt’?”

            “That they do. Some of them.”

            “Do they wonder where the father is?”

            “I don’t know.”

            Between these rooms was a statue that commanded Yakov’s attention, even if he had forced his feet to shuffle past it. Now that he had indicated to the guard his interest in Reiter’s painting, he backtracked to that room and gave the statue a further, passing stare. This retracing was not perfunctory—he really wanted to look more deeply at the physiognomies of Reuben, Levi, Dan, Asher… And, satisfying that, he turned to the room of Salvador Albano’s marble sculpture and stopped. A nude figure about Yulia’s size and shape balanced upon a pedestal, pulling at a rope that bound her wrists. She was, by her title, a slave: intensely looking at an area perhaps two body-lengths away (or one, if it hadn’t been for the pedestal). Her hair lay in a rough attempt at a braid—the hempen manacles just enough to tantalize her manipulation of things. Her body looked ready to spring free and defied any frozen, naïve effect of one who might wonder, in luxury, about paternity or loyalty or loss.

            Yakov went past Sidorwicz and the edge-of-chair guard, then into the next room, where he studied the eviction of a peasant family: Our Lady of Kazan above their open door, a broken sack of coins strewn on the floor—as bribe or insufficient funds. Another guard, when asked, said she had heard a university guide’s interpretation that the painter, Zheledowski, had in large championed the communist cause with this work. The icon wouldn’t save the family any more than their capital. Yakov moved on.

            In a rather large room, strangely, there was no guard, but on a far bench sat the only other visitor yet that afternoon. Yakov surmised he was middle-aged, though his back was to the door where Yakov silently entered. His legs were V-d apart, trembling spasmodically as the heels of his shoes spurred the parquet floor. In front of his uplifted head were two tall paintings of similar style: one with a nymph and another with a faceless woman draped against some angled barrier. Thinking fast, Yakov skulked back one room and whispered to the guard that another visitor was in the throes of an ecstasy inappropriate to the environs. The guard swung her head downward and shrugged. Yakov retreated closer to the entrance and whispered the same thing to the first guard, who followed him to the threshold of the larger room. “Can you do something?” she pleaded into Yakov’s ear. He considered the situation and slowly nodded. Just as softly he asked, “May I borrow your badge, please?” She unpinned it and placed it gratefully into his hand. As he attached it to his shirt and walked towards the absorbed man, Yakov cast a sort of prayer, vaguely cognizant of valleys of the shadows of death and such. Laments were rife in life—the psalmist codifying the basic instinct to complain and give over. Let go, if desperately clutching to the semblance of control we know. “Let go,” he heard himself say, in no larger volume than he had just used with the guards. He was now in front of the grimacing man, partially obscuring the view that he had fixed for his licentious foray. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, comrade.”

            “You can’t do—”

            “On behalf of this museum and all things decent, I must… You see, children visit, as well as guests from many cultures. I myself have the right to be free from your intentions. And you have the right to conform to the expectations here.”

            “Who are you, anyway? I’ve come to this place regularly and have never been—”

            “Both of us have said too much under the circumstances. I’ll escort you this way, comrade.”

            Years of setting circus apparatus, wrangling limelit animals, and pushing through some madding crowds provided Yakov a sinewy sense to his comportment. Even his limp, vaguely apparent and far from being a handicap, lent ethos to his present, gentle grasp of the violator’s shoulder as they shuffled past the witnessing guards and the ticket-taker, down the staircase and into the foyer, where the doorman quizzically took the recommendation to “see this comrade out, please.”

            Then Yakov returned to the where the dumbfounded women still stood, handed back the badge, and continued to look at the artwork. He didn’t go back to the tall paintings, but spent some time in front of ‘Jewish Funeral in the Town’ in the same big room, where he tried to determine whether the impressionistic coffin was being shouldered up or down the alley stairs, by equally impressionistic Hasidic men. The largest painting in the room was Josef Brandt’s ‘Prayer in the Steppe’. Were they matins or vespers, Yakov wondered. The garish red glow from the half sun on the horizon seemed to sear into the icon on the side of a stagecoach, and Yakov’s mind went back to the eviction—all art, he realized, could travel in capillary courses. He spent halcyon time in front of a dozen more paintings in the next two rooms, then came to the second sculpture on display, a Polish piece in bronze entitled ‘A Mother’s Kiss’. It was exactly what one would intuit, minus the dug out interior behind their heads. The child was maybe four years old, clasping wholly his mother’s neck and seizing her with wide open eyes; the mother, with eyes closed and more seeing, kissed her boy’s forehead and all essence therein, and Yakov began to cry. Subtly, of course, as there was no reason to; and, if he thought, like Tevye, about how he might be authored, it wasn’t exactly what one might call—

            “Sir?” a gentleman spoke urbanely from the far left of Yakov’s periphery. “Are you okay?”

            Glancing self-consciously, Yakov swallowed and uttered, “quite fine.”

            “I’m glad for it,” the gentleman said, and approached with a practiced savior faire. “I am the director of this museum—Pyotr Nemcenov—and I have been made aware of your citizenship exploits—”

            Yakov thought quickly, as he had done before, and elected not to speak too soon, but also not to let slip the inertia that arguably comes from answered prayer. “I am a student of the humanities,” he began to say, “from Kiev. I haven’t found my long-term… chance to study further… in L’vyiv, but this day—this remarkable museum—has been—”

            “Your visit to us has been remarkable. Simply said, Comrade, uh—”

            “Jürgen.”

            “Yuri, is it?”

            Yakov flit the possibility, then pronounced more clearly: “Jürgen. My father was of German heritage.”

            “Comrade Jürgen—well! Simply said, you have fixed a fault that has occasionally reared its ugly head, challenging the needs of our total operational security. I think you know what I mean, and I thank you for your aplomb.” The director smiled at the sound of his congratulation and waited a moment for Yakov to take it in.

            “Thank you, Director—I really hadn’t expected any kind of recognition, as I was simply acting on instinct—”

            “Exactly, dear Jürgen, which delights me more than if you were acting on orders. My hired guards—don’t get me wrong—relayed by their instinct what they have had difficulty doing in the line of their orders: this indulgent man has been, to say the least, a tricky problem here—he’s rare, he’s of some repute, and he cares not at all about those he deems inferior. Lenin might have qualified him as counter-revolutionary, and (off the record) if we were fully realized as a state, I’d pronounce likewise. But who am I? Merely a lover of art! And some may say he’s likewise! My service to the state is to be director of such art, and his, we may extrapolate, is to take what we provide into his own vortex as director of something else. And by saying this, Jürgen, I mean to exonerate you from any ramifications but also to remind you of how intertwined we all, as servants to the state, really are… Do you understand what I am saying?”

            Yakov, in a practiced sense, thought rapidly and responded, “clearly, Director.”

            Since neither spoke for a half minute, the moment seemed to have suitably passed. But each of them knew, intuitively, that more was at stake. Yakov calculated in silence and newfound prayer; Pyotr kept his level eye and finally broached this prospect: “we could use a guard like you—especially, if I recall you saying, you’re a student of art?”

            “A student of the humanities—”

            “All the better: you mean by that the study of us all!” Pyotr chuckled.

            “More or less. I mean literature first and foremost, but yes, that probably means ‘of us all’.”

            “Could I offer you a job here, as guard to begin with?”

            “I mostly need a place to stay—a job would be welcome, as well.”

            “Then consider it done, Jürgen. I have need for new watchmen as the fall season approaches. This won’t hamper your study commitment in.. did you say,.. Kiev?”

            “Not in the least, as I’m taking leave from that place.”

            “Then come to my office, Jürgen, to settle the details.”

            “Thank you, sir,” and the details were settled.

            The third lunch break into his new job, Yakov trudged up the hill to Strysky Park as he had the days before, hoping to explain things to Yulia. He had barely seen her on her varying shifts, but recognized her disguised scowl when, to her surprise, one of the veteran guards took him on a training tour. She evaded any introduction to Yakov, while her peers—even the grimmer ones—were positively atwitter. Men worked in the floors below, where many thousands of pieces of art were archived or part of a restoration process; to have a man on their floor meant to have more to think about. And Yulia hated sharing that thought. “Why did you go behind my back to impress my father?” she blurted before he knew she was there. “Why did you embarrass me by parading like a peacock?”

            Yakov scratched whatever small beard he had shaved off in these days of employment. He didn’t smile, but felt relieved that she had broken her silence. He waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t, he slid into the side of the bench that she had turned her back on. “I’ve missed you,” he finally offered. “And I’ve missed what it means to let fate be guided by faith.”

            She listened to the details of the night he had left Oleg’s flat, the morning in this very park, the contemplation that on fifty kopeks and a chess board he’d try to gamble his way back to Samarkand for lack of anywhere else to go. Yulia turned to him in confusion: “Who are you anyway in this homeless condition? What did you do? Why are you pulling me into…”

            Yakov raised his eyebrows. “Into?”

            “Into your life story, because I’m falling for you if you can’t tell!”

            “I can’t. I mean, I am, too—if that is—”

            “O God, Yakov, we’re going to be late, and Daddy will be suspicious and the hags will hate me more and—”

            “You go ahead first—I’ll take the heat for being late.”

            “Be here after 8 tonight, and walk me to your home.”

            “You mean Samarkand?”

            At last she smiled, and kissed him, and rushed down the hill. “Seven-thirty, then,” she called, and he closed his eyes to keep it all in.

            They didn’t exactly elope; they made believe, though, flirtingly close to Pyotr’s knowledge. He rarely visited the exhibition halls of his own museum, so had no real idea how his daughter and newest employee intersected their shifts through the day. Other guards could see their sometime shamelessness—not that they held hands or frolicked to the shadier rooms. They stayed to their posts, mainly, and when visitors were few they gravitated to a certain piece of art and talked. “How does your father justify so many religious themes? How does he get by?” he asked her as they looked over Tadueuz Ajdukiewicz’ ‘Prayer in the Desert’.

            “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

            “And does this one with its Sudanese Muslims serve a sort of ballast for the ‘Prayer in the Steppe’ next door?”

            “Are you still praying about me?”

            “Are you?”

            “I’m learning to. Maybe that’s what these pictures were meant to do.”

            “I mean they’re all over this place if you think about it: there’s Leopolski’s ‘Praying Jew’—granted, not such a remarkable picture but well painted—and that ‘Funeral in the Town’—”

            “Do you think they’re praying in that one?”

            “Someone probably… that the coffin doesn’t drop.”

            “I’ve seen that happen, by the way.”

            “A coffin dropping?”

            “A man slipping at the gravesite as the other pallbearers were negotiating the position—it was raining, the mud was uncooperative…”

            “And so he fell all the way in?”

            “No, but he lingered at the edge as if he had time to think about it. Meanwhile, the pallbearers strained against the weight and their own lack of footing—don’t laugh, it was my mother’s dear uncle!”

            “Not laughing, just musing.”

            “About my great uncle?”

            “About the equipoise one has to keep, even in such circumstances.”

            “You mean the way a person walks a tightrope, like you described last night?”

            “What I described was child’s play. But yes, I suppose there is some of that in the most serious of occasions. That is what art does, I’m starting to think: depict the hardest human scenarios in the strokes of very practiced doodlers.”

            “Shall I tell that to Daddy? He might promote you to a guide! Just in time for the gradeschool visits!”

            “Tell your daddy that I love you.”

            “No. Joking aside, he’d banish you and bind me to this prison of prayer paintings forever. Don’t let him know that.”

            “See, that’s what I meant last night: I’ve spellbound many an audience with tumbles and scares, yet nothing about the acts I performed were honest-to-goodness risks. There was nobody I loved at stake. Well, that sounds rather inhuman—I mean that…”

            “…that you’ll walk through fire but not say anything to Daddy.”

            “That I’ll remain a disciple of this ‘prison of prayer’, as you say.”

            “And I’ll do math problems, right?”

            “We’ll have most interesting kids…”

            “Of course we will—they will be born and bred among the swans at Strysky Park!”

            “I’ve known worse launches in life.” Yakov continued to muse. “But perhaps never better.”

[a projected four more chapters to come]

from Elijah's cave

Celebrating Jon's Amazon spot http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Birds-Jonathan-Vold/dp/0615664776/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346510708&sr=1-1&keywords=thirty+birds this poem honors our process, praxis, poiesis. Order the book and spread the Good Word!

            from Elijah's cave

praxis, poiesis, publishing stuff—and

who more than we are such

dreams in the rough,

to work wintry hours in infinite days

with attic contentment

in inchoate

ways. We’re mindful of elders, newborns and  

peers. We sheepishly draft

substance and form,

throw caution to cauldrons and mantras to

wind. We badger our brains,

conjure our bards

and eschew a vision of glory—for

the still small voice of God

in each story—

even in rough-hewn relays. The praxis

remains, beyond writing   

records or facts.

My littlest turtle climbed out of her

tank, fell from the table,

left life above,

waddled and found herself hopelessly lost

(what labors we wage to

feign to be free).

Dried out, days later, venture agroof, ac-

ceeding a heavenly hand,

she put to proof

the abandon of dreams and embrace of

the Fall (the reason we

wander in grace).

So back to that praxis, poiesis and

stuff: it’s not all for naught

that dreams persist

and creatures continue to aimlessly

miss—the mark of our faith,

oblige noblesse.