Halloween

Human Dissection (Happy Halloween)

Posted on by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

 

Sure, ghoulish work,
but cut open any one of us,
grab your lab spatula, blunt probe and clipboard —
note the vitals:

look, some parts are pink as health itself,
like the sonic blooms of azaleas
galloping through spring;

others are half-baked and bloodless,
windblown-dry, crinoline stiff,
from years of howling
about absence and desire;

some shine, vermilioned, red-winged
from years of rising in any weather,
to the integrity of daily labour;

others are seared from staring into the sun for signs,
or tremulous, listening to soundless dark
in the compline of countless nights;

some parts are grey as clay, recalling days when joy
was turned away, for fear of its natural leaving;
some are even galled green like Shylock’s gizzard,
fighting old wars of grudge and glory;

yet others gleam a redeeming crimson,
those moments of humanizing conversation
with Lacy, who panhandles by the 7-11,
and Jay, whose mind is full of abandoned lines,
justifiably unable to be thankful
for the coffee you offer;

still others rejoice in ruby, the precious tanglement
of a caring family, others erupt rose red,
those times when misery’s lonely beast was hobbled,
by the luminescent love of a sturdy friend;

and the balance? tutored through grief and loss,
still glow coral-pink and sing
of the mornings you left your room,
felt your way outside, taking only
your blindness and your hope.

Light/Love

Before Love there’s Attention

Posted on by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

 

I wish you wouldn’t have called me a poet,
now every morning I wake up and try to prove it.
Try to show how everything, like the blue bra
draped over the shower rod, or the half-flower
of a broken fridge magnet, are the bright cries of tigers.
Or how the magpie, now chasing a black squirrel,
just swooped in from another world.

It’s exhausting — a gosling, to the desires of others,
one more somnambulist under the collective hypnosis.
I would have made a better wind instrument,
or a kite, or an accident scene, pondered over
by three gumshoes, each arriving at different conclusions.
Friend, if you showed up at my door with some other friend,
I’d be a mixed metaphor.

One day though, looking through an upper window,
I fell utterly in love. How does that happen?!
And all I was doing was paying attention.
It was like some merciful therapist
unclenched my little fist of self-interest,
like some kindly optometrist gave me new lenses,
brought into focus a wholly benign and gentle light,
enfolding me, releasing me.
I didn’t kneel, I stood watching, terribly awake,
and prayed for the daybreak of justice
for every guileless Job on the globe,
and fortunes of restorative forgiveness,
for the rest of us.

Mercy, understanding, attends the mindful gaze — I believe it,
and good to have had the gleam of it,
but another thing to maintain it — remember it,
work for it — thwart the sidelong glance
and inward turn that betrays it.

It’s not wrong, in this overwrought knock-down world,
to attempt significance.
I don’t mean stand out like a grease spot of celebrity
on your county’s khaki trousers.
I mean, simply, leave love letters at the doors
of those who care for the sick and the oppressed;
carry a sign to the steps of city hall,
saying you’re someone who’s paying attention.

And every so often,
                                     you glimpse a world of redemption.

 

Culture/Violence

Can’t find a poem for this

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

Yesterday, among the thousands of daily aggressions across our convulsing continent, a mother and her child was chased by a sign-carrying woman, who was shouting, almost shrieking, others joining, accusing the mother of abuse because her child was wearing a mask.

And I wondered how this person, perhaps a responsible employee, a decent neighbour, perhaps a mother herself, came to carry out such an act. In front of a school. On an ordinary sidewalk. A warm, clear, sunny day, a day for a slow walk, an attractive day, so many other things one could do.

And I wondered what lies beneath, above, within (is there a place?) such an act. This, on the whole, a minor violence — unless you are the child, or the mother, who would have rushed home carrying her child, would have slid the dead bolt shut, closed the blinds to the cloudless sky.

Tomorrow, recalling the white GMC van on the corner of Wallace and Oak, the lath and stapled cardboard squares in the back seat of the newish Honda, parked three blocks from school — she will take a different route.

Tomorrow, the decent neighbour, good employee, will connect with those of like mind, those who know many certainties — latter, go grocery shopping, at the checkout, mention the beautiful weather, make dinner for her family.

Forgive me. I’d like to find a poem in this. One that carries something worth remembering. One that inoculates against our current contagion of resentment. One that pulls the mask off anything based on vanity and lies. One that makes violence a stranger in our mouths, in our hands. But I cannot. Still, I can’t seem to move on without at least making a note.

 

~

A Grief Observed

Posted on by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

 

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
                                              – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.

When I call, I ask, as I always do,
if she can name what’s happening inside.
These days, she says, I’m trying to memorize
which song goes with which bird.
I’m awake anyway, and first light of dawn
brings a leaf-shaking choir of them.
I listen to a trilling ricochet and say:
dark-eyed junco; and when I hear
a shrill quaver frame a staccato churr,
I say right out loud: Ah, spotted towhee.
The mewling adagio of a red-breasted nuthatch
is unmistakable, not like the
clutch of brunching sparrows:
White-crowned, Gold-crowned, Savanna, Lincoln –
I often get them crossed, all but the atonal
Chipping sparrow, more jack hammer than song.
But I’m getting better at untangling the notes.
And naming the birds has become a job I like.
And with each name I land my world expands – a little –
and I wedge myself back into the afternoon,
and walk into Save-On-Foods like a regular person.
In time, I hope to see green again,
because where there’s all this blue,
there’s got to be green.
Yesterday a great blue heron flew by the upstairs window,
looking, for all, like an oracle,
later, I found myself sitting under a yellow cedar
and I heard a cooing, wailing, then a bright piercing call,
right away I knew what it was, and I smiled at myself,
and I smiled up at the marbled murrelet,
hidden by a spread of thick limbs, 70 feet up,
invisible to me, but there, nonetheless,
like a brush with divinity, and I felt
real close to my partner of 28 years,
my lover for longer, and I shifted my body,
made room in the air, for the air of her,
which, quite unexpectedly, helped me to stand.
You ask what’s happening inside?
I’m opening windows in my bedroom,
and when I leave the house
I tuck the sky under my arm,
and go around naming all the winged beings,
like my life depended on it.