Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Looking through the Bent-backed Tulips

In the early spring of my life
I wrote a poem about
flowers
(each word neatly inked, firmly pressed
onto wide-lined blueish-greenish paper).
A tiny wooden desk.
Miss Niley’s sunny classroom.
Top of the stairs. Third grade.  North School.  
Spring Street.

Greenville, Ohio – 1965.

That same year we learned how to compose a letter,
and practiced by writing “a famous person.”
Some wrote to the Governor
(the bucolic road from Columbus to Kent
not yet treacherous).
Others wrote to the President
(the heavy heart still a small, dark cloud – 
 the size of a child’s fist –
on the distant horizon).

I wrote to John Winston Lennon.

I remember when I met the Beatles.
The needle thumped on revolving vinyl 
and caught the groove.
The Voice of the Theater exploded,
a primal scream that pierced my soul.
Glued to the tube I beheld John in black & white –
outrageous hair, legs spread insolently,
strumming bar chords on his exotic Rickenbacker 325 –
so cool he even came with subtitles: 
“Sorry girls – he’s married!”
And that music...

Revolution or revelation?

My letter to the famous John Winston Lennon
gushed about a band where nothing is real.
PJ was Paul, Mike was Ringo, Randy was John, 
and I...was George.  (I wanted to be John.)
Crude plywood guitars, stringless, knobless,
ice cream tub drums wrapped in shiny foil,
paper plate cymbals on Tinker Toy stands –
we spun 45s and flailed away
as if these songs were our own...

They were.

The years tumbled blindly by.
You let slip that you were more popular than Christ,
and they crucified you 
(because it was true?).
Maharishi Om, Yoko Ono, hair peace, bag productions,
Merry Christmas, war is over 
(if you want it).
Then one December morning, as I soaked in the tub,
elegiac news from the Dakota.
Shattered glasses.  Shattered world.
Oh, boy.
Give peace a chance...

and look what you get.

Decades come, go. 
We still twist and shout.
Real guitars; real drums; real loud.
Your songs, John.
And tonight, as the vernal equinox
summons yet another spring
(in the early autumn of my life),
a circle of poets...

imagine.

You never wrote back.  No reply.
Not a word in your own write.
Even so, John Ono Lennon,
across the universe, I feel fine.
Nothing to get hung about.
Yet one question still haunts me.
Did you give us the truth,
or were you just playing with our minds,
when you let slip that the walrus was

Paul?

CFB (2002/2011)

Ed Sullivan Show


Photo by Bob Gruen, 1974

Friday, June 10, 2011

Going... Going... Gone

In the darkness
the TV glows.
The graduate
and his father
slouch in chairs.

The son rises.
“I’m really going to miss you,” I venture.
“It’s time to grow up,” he says
over his shoulder
as he ambles
toward his computer,
his world.

A moment passes.
It sinks in.
He meant
me.
CFB (2007/2011)

Greenville Creek

Slow and dark the water moves,
silently,
between verdant banks.

Beneath the canopy of willow, sycamore, and ash
we padded along overgrown paths,
youthful exuberance hushed,
senses alert for every danger –
stinging nettles,
the dreaded water moccasin,
hoods, cigarettes dangling from sneering lips.

From my backyard,
it seemed we could hurl stones into the
brown-green water.
But I was never fully at home
down by the “crick” –
that strange, wild, tangled place.

Once it had been home
to the Miami, the Shawnee,
the Delaware, the Wyandot.
They shared the world with
the white-tailed deer, the fox and the beaver,
the great blue heron and the king fisher.

Then their chiefs left
reluctant marks on
Mad Anthony’s deed,
and settlers poured in to
clear the land and till the
deep, black soil.

After yet another war, President Monroe
presumed to grant
water rights to one of his warriors.

Soon a grist mill arose,
thick black walnut boards
enclosing a labyrinth of machines.
Children dug the millrace,
pocketing 50 cents a day.
Precious stones from France,
expertly sharpened,
ground the corn and oats and rye and wheat into
gold dust.

The industrious citizens came to forget
those troubling nights when
Tecumseh stood defiantly,
illuminated by firelight
at the confluence of the Greenville and the Mud,
to protest the treaty
he never signed.

The Shooting Star vanished.
The mill grinds on.

Slow and dark the water moves,
silently,
between verdant banks.


CFB (2005/2011)

Tecumseh Point

Bear's Mill