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by shelley masar
Email: shellwash (nospam) sbcglobal.net (unverified!)
Phone: 217-649-1767
Address: 601 s. race street, urbana, illinois |
22 Jul 2004
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recent poems |
America's Brown Shirts
I go to court
In a country that loves its people
and herds them with guns on hips.
The sheriff-man in brown barks us in,
"Cell Phones OFF!"
He shrugs at those who've stumbled in
to the wrong place, at the wrong time,
"You should have been here yesterday!"
"You're late again!"
He passes paper forms for us to fill.
His only smiles are for the barristers,
who pass above his ministrations.
An auctioneer of command-performance,
the sheriff's deputy rattles out
the order to "RISE for the JUDGE!"
The judge is a woman
who moves as if exhausted
with the import of her robes.
"This is arraignment court..., " she begins,
her auction-tempo taking up
where his left off
and we are given to understand
that this is just
the opening pass
of a long dance,
attended by fees, and fines, and warrants of arrest.
As she takes over
the deputy desists,
and leaves off his out-elbowed pace and passing out
to settle into watchfulness.
The judge moves fast
from those of us
present in the chamber
to those
who appear
on monitors
via cameras
from jail.
Rapidly
she reiterates
rights read like jingles
and formulaic penalties,
" three to seven years in penitentiary and fines up to $200,000..."
She listens to the prosecutors' terse litanies--
"bags of controlled substances,
domestic partners threatened with rifle, fist, insult..."
and to the half-hearted pleas of the defenders--
"a life-long resident of...
not working now, but has been...
dependent children..."
Quickly judicious
she metes out
punishment per formula
on those who earn,
if at all,
$6.30/hour,
time and sums
that will render
their impossibility
ever more ridiculous.
The hours pass,
one, two, three,
as we wait,
and listen,
captivated.
as one by one we stand,
step forward,
state our names,
and hear our sins reviewed.
The seated sheriff's-man has cycled through his 6 positions--
chin in hand, hand to ear, head up, head down, to her, to us,
repeatedly,
a hamster in a cage.
He's startled, and indignant
when a woman calls him to her pew.
She insists her son doesn't understand,
the nature of this hearing.
They've come
three hours from the north.
Must they come back?
Could the case
be transferred there?
"Oh, NO,
you will come back!
Of course,
three times at least!,"
the deputy assures,
eager to get back
to his boredom,
"I'm not a lawyer, you'll have to wait,
Ask the defender,
she'll tell you what,
and when."
Singly
we are dismissed,
the hallway that was filled with people when we went in
is empty as we go out.
Descending the architect-designed balustrade
the city is so proud of,
we feel like crap
as we're waved past
the un-designed metal detector,
by the same
heavily suspicious
door watchers
who did not say "Hello"
when we came in
and do not wish us well
as we go out.
They've seen it all.
They have no love
for those who come and go,
unless in suits and leather briefcase.
I'd prepared myself
with every prayer I knew
but despite my decades of education,
and practiced self-encouragement
on the dignity and responsibility
of conscience,
I am shaking
with rage and indignation--
Thus the poor
of the the land of love and happy profit
are mocked, and scorned, and further wounded
by their courts of law
backed by teeming prisons
where no further punishment is needed
for those who are the victims
to know their lives are nothing
but the grit that pays
for judge and sheriff and paper administration.
Rise up. Rise up.
It's true
They know not what they do!
If nothing else,
Know you are not mistaken--
It has nothing to do
with anything
that is good for you.
Their punishment and penalties
Are criminal,
At least as criminal
As you!
Diaphanous Lolita
Directives 4 a Grieving Poetess in Paris
keep your eye
on the diaphonous pain
that surrounds you
as it will
turn into the joy
of days
and nights to come
& don't dodge
the soft thud
of each dawn
nor refuse
the sensual stretch
of every morning
listen 4
the catch of
the new gear
in your forward motion,
as the handsome children
you have raised
look to you
4 signs
write and dress
beautifully
in
the new
range of blues
and violets
in your Paris poet's pallet
In-coming from the Left with Broken Heart
i
My husband once said
my mother never loved me.
I didn't understand until
I realized
that he didn't.
His mother's love sat
so secure in its
small-town ken
of virtue and discretion.
Small-town pretty,
and small-town mean,
she'd been a one-child wife
who became
a one-son widow.
My mother had
a thousand-times the energy
and early-on
aligned herself
with greater man.
She'd thrown her lot
with finer things
and saw to it
I went with her,
a princess
without a king.
My husband and i
grew ever-more resentful
when we failed to pass
each mothers' muster.
Gradually
it was easier
to love
someone new
than forgive
each other
what we knew
about each other's
mothers.
ii
Tiger Thanatos
My mate is a wounded tiger
on solitary prowl
too heavy for the kill
he survives on lesser meat.
Snarled back from his company,
his children hide
and hold their breaths,
none of us knows what he will do.
We do not fear him,
we wait
for the sound of his heavy limbs,
falling one last time.
Apparently there is nothing
anyone can do.
He is too proud to heal.
There is no solution.
His old mother sleeps
in her pink hell,
sure
of her administration.
iii
embarkation to cythera
in 1996 at 46
i snuck
into the Louvre
for free
i was too old for such shenanigans,
but pressed, non the less,
by a too-fast-for-Paris empty-purse,
i had to visit
watteau's embarkation to cythera
in hommage
to a beloved professor-radical
who had posed
a question for us students
poised as we'd stood on a bank
of the 60s revolution in america--
our professor was depressed and dying
as he projected watteau’s painting on the wall,
look at them he said,
the well-dressed lovers,
depicted in their triangles,
children tugging on their skirts,
under the gaze
of the melancoly hermes merging with the woods,
are they going TO the isle of love,
or coming back?
years later
i am invited
to a rare night of conversation
in the shadow of a midwest university
where a quiet visiting professor from beijing
explained
watteau’s age,
the enlightenment, to me--
the idee aloft
was that man would not be free
until art, science, and morality
were given reign.
(or
to frame it rabidly,
until the last king
were strangled
in the entrails
of the last priest!)
thirty years had passed since I’d first pondered
a despairing intellectual’s projection,
when finally
i began to grasp the question,
and the object of his speculation---
watteau,
drawing from the shadows,
had left
an hermetic gift,
a masterpiece
of soft- washed melancholy
preconscious to the question of his day--
if god were dead,
perhaps love
would also disappoint?
the chinaman post tienaman,
who seemed to read my startled incoherence,
gently continued,
the idee was not so bad,
he said,
the problem was,
they did not come together,
the artists, scientists, moralists
would not come together.
ah, so…
our taiwanese hostess-socialite
who pursues a life
of poetry and passion,
hugged me hard, and said
the rivers of our hearts
gather from their sources
and wend toward stubborn destinations,
there is no higher issue.
what i could not know in ’68 nor ‘96
but grasped that night
was simply that
love can not be,
nor god,
nor revolution,
unless there be all three,
because the source becomes the bed becomes the sea.
iv
born in the usa in 1950
i pursue the millennial conversation
with the thrush who drops
onto the rotting adirondack,
tentatively i tell her
that we've been marginalized,
but some have sought to square the score,
and if we can stay
exquisitely alert,
we get to keep our tenure!
v
conversations with the pastor's wife
for mary anne nagy and charlie vogel
& in memory of bobby
who died on the railroad tracks of champaign-urbana
when he was banned from the Times Center
for "failure to progress."
the homeless ride their bicycles
through the summer morning,
the younger ones so alert
4 anything, any beckoning,
that might affirm
what they already
have cause to doubt,
that the miracle
is happening,
something other
than the grimace
offered as a smile,
or the quarter
tossed
half-
compassionately.
when they are older,
if they stay sane,
they will learn
the fragile flow
of conversation
with the artist-women
and pastor's wives
who hover
on their arcs
from earnestness to dust.
the philosophers among them
will go broadside with their hearts
and find keen eyes,
and sharp ears
amid the railbed weeds,
and stridency
of smallish birds.
amid the beauty and distress
of so-deemed weeds
they will feel
the message
of the cardinal in the hemlock
and find dignity in identities
other than
the iniquitous cruelty
of our showy screens
and schemes.
"Only the homeless are blameless."
vi
mauvais foi (bad faith)
my husband's mother
leeched all his love
for woman-kind.
when challenged she refused
to let go
her grip on him,
and he could not refuse
his responsiveness to her.
the challenger,
I let go
I wasn't up to replacing her,
hers, the wall he knew to climb,
she, the theatre of his lies,
I proffered no alternative.
and yet I spoiled their
perfect conversation
adding to my sense of self
as spoiler
who spoiled my parent's tete a tete,
as I spoiled my husband's with his mother.
will I spoil my childrens' with their mates?
or
am i taking on too much?
is this unnecessary
masochistic
meglomania?
or have I stumbled
on the truth in myth?
I am Eve, de trop,
Too- much Eve,
standing,
with apple,
on the garden's edge
?
vii
hell is other people
"wonder first,
and then hostility,
are the basic relations,"
as
"each of us tries
to make the other an object,
a means to our ends."
one must find the means
to dominate
or allow oneself
to be dominated,
the essence of relationship
is conflict, not togetherness,
even the desire 4 knowledge
is usually the desire to dominate,
and to give
is to subject.
"sex is a duel,
coitus is conquest
marriage is war..."
thus will and ariel durant
explain sartre,
in chapter xii
"sartre and beauvoir"
in a book they
wrote together
in their eighties
at the end of a long
career in which their
apparent exception
served the rule.
viii
my father's doodle
a decade before his death,
an unfinished acrostic
dropped out
of my father's wallet,
written in his pen:
N
O
E
X
I
T
the play by sartre
that portrays
the first hour
in which
3 denizens
of the twentieth
realize they've
been condemned
to unterminating
torture-by-triangulation.
they are
a man
who has betrayed his ambitions and domestic obligations,
a predatory lesbian,
and a woman
"still warm in the decline of beauty and passion"
who has killed her lover and her child.
their perfect fate has put them all
in check.
i assumed
my father's doodle
was a
self-acknowledged rationale
4 drinking himself to death,
this failed figure of my infancy,
would-be architect of social good,
whose wives turned on him with scorn and knives,
whose sons withdrew in abjurant rage,
who came to me on the day he died,
in testament to the blocked love,
i always understood.
i could not ask for confirmation.
ix
more durant
"man is a futile passion
only
when she
has sought
unwisely
beyond her merit
or her means."
"to pronounce the universe absurd
is a subjective and prejudiced judgement"
x
my cat stretches across the keys,
his green eyes search mine,
for the connection,
that will get me to the refrigerator,
but does not explain
why he appears
when my bike returns,
and why he walks with me
around
the neighborhood.
xi
ominous july
a pair of screech owls skim my ears,
a squirrel death strokes on the grass,
a dead cardinal in the path,
i am shocked by the omens
as the corn comes on strong,
and the leaves begin to sag. |
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