Connecting Light
by Frank B. Ford
This book of 61 poems is (c) copyright Frank B. Ford. For all
rights refer to the author. An on-line version of this work, with other
works by Frank B. Ford, is available on the World Wide Web at:
http://las.alfred.edu/~combeff
________________________________________________________________________
Connecting Light
by Frank B. Ford
Contents
1. Young Italian Girl Resting On Her Elbow--Cezanne
2. Running to Light
3. Clothesline Visitation
4. Trio
5. Linking the Miracles
6. At The Elevation
7. Two Met
8. Where
9. The Plan
10. Civilization
11. Bursted
12. Nighthawks, after Hopper
13. Viewed as Drama
14. Way It's
15. To Tamzen On Her Fortieth Birthday
16. Stream
17. The Matter With Us
18. From dark the floating
19. The German Lesson
20. Human Potential
21. Kamikazie
22. Prayer To My Daughter
23. The Peach Boy
24. Black Frost
25. Against the Deck
26. Living Nonsense
27. Mineral Baths--Bursa, Turkey
28. Sung To the Tune of Anything At All
29. Using Air
30. Reply
31. Departure at Twilight
32. At Sounion
33. Three Shortstops
34. Scoring
35. From the Fishing Pier (Nam Decade)
36. Generation
37. The Terrorist
38. The Plain Answer
39. At the University
40. Farce Averted
41. Those Two Again
42. Calling It a Day
43. Home
44. Coastal Graveyard in Branford, Connecticut
45. 4th of July
46. Beer and Sandwich On the Road
47. Overheard
48. Language and the Marketplace
49. There'll Always Be Us
50. The Chance
51. Dentist
52. The Territory
53. Shy
54. Defining Hope
55. Ay
56. The Moment
57. In Our Cold Stars
58. The Hand In the Future
59. Directing The Scene
60. The Grove
61. Visions of the Yale Library
__________________________________________________________________
_Young Italian Girl Resting On Her Elbow--Cezanne _
Such indolence
becomes the light
encounter-
ing her
and him
and us.
What is the art of years
but connecting
light?
__________________________________________________________________
Running to Light
the river and the snow
are taken by their shadows
becoming darkness
with a sound
searching light:
finding the moon
it thrashes it to ribbons.
Rewound at an eddy then
revolving whole and
cold.
__________________________________________________________________
Clothesline Visitation
She releases
sheets to wind.
They snap
brilliances
rowing the swollen green-
blue earth to sudden Him,
a nave
radiating blacks a-
gainst hot, belly-
ing waves.
__________________________________________________________________
Trio
What has fallen?
Most obviously along
the wet floor
of the woods, trees,
but of what human sense,
spirit?
In our walk,
words dessicating
mid-syllable
what once was labeled
a far-away look,
a man and a woman,
something
is being done
with a tree.
__________________________________________________________________
Linking the Miracles
light sung
round the chalice
and round
the priest thrusting up
the host, sunbright
her face
exploding
the front row.
__________________________________________________________________
At The Elevation
of the Host St Mary's
paint smell mixed
with cloying
cold cream + HEAT
pipes HAMMERED
you out of drifted sleep CLAMMY
and there IT is BAD BOY and
growing
on 12! oh my GOD
and what NOW?
__________________________________________________________________
Two Met
Each turns
the glow
to knife
between _o
hold us dark
cupped, sun-
set-rimmed.
Spin us free
when we have drunk
this shimmering
between._
__________________________________________________________________
Where
the curve flows
to become
everywhere
people walk
in fields
amid the flaring
stones and trees,
the grasses
described by birds,
and each is what
touches.
__________________________________________________________________
The Plan
We go our separate ways
to separate our ways
to go our ways separate
to separate our going
to ways of separate
ways of going separate
we go our separate ways
of going separate
to our separate ways
of separate going
to our ways separate
we go
we separate
we go separate
to separate to go our separate ways.
__________________________________________________________________
Civilization
_The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton._
--Wellington
On the playing fields of Eton
I assumed my fair turn in
New Haven Yalie bells held us
as in a vise,
through mine fields since
missing the notices
haphazardly posted a-
mong the swells
of cricketeers and footballers,
the rise of dust in dusk, cool-edged.
There's a good chap when
you miss
your middle-class leg.
__________________________________________________________________
Bursted
At the library display
brown ink, browner-splotched page
in application for a pedlar's license:
"gun bursted" and he could thus
no longer farm, that one arm hanging useless.
Rushing! some farm wife and kids, she the point of V
towards the lurch and buzz and rattle of his coming
down their lane. Oh she at any rate would know
the meaning of the stoutest pot he sold and yet
this slightest fabric for a dress would float
to her the more she kept ahead of paddlers
through that brilliant dust--
their muffled, fussy cries.
Those crazed from life should sell to us.
__________________________________________________________________
Nighthawks, after Hopper
The world, of course, is dead.
It was my father's as this could be
Nickel Charlie's, the all-night restaurant
next to Loew's Poli in New Haven where he'd repair
after the graveyard shift on the Journal-Courier.
A linotype operator his fingers swam
beside a window propped up by Four Roses
against a smothering night. Wasn't, though, this
lead and whiskey universe he died from since
he retired punching the copy out of tape under
a livid, technical flourescence--which is of
my world of course. And I must
sit among these waiting nighthawks to become
the one who shows a slice of face and who observes
the hard-edged guy, nondescript
in the dark suit of his time with gray fe-
dora and black band. I wear it too, sniffing
the coffee, hearing the chromium hiss
of the polished urns, watching the redhead
check her nails. Diner of the Heart.
A blondish counterman thrusts down his arms
like old women washing clothes
in the rivers which erode exhausted cities.
The redhead played
367 for a year and it came out
the day she stopped. I say nothing,
having myself run out
of numbers, bad luck entombed
in the wool of my suit.
But then I mumble past
the obligation of our unconcern that I'll play
it, three, six, seven staring out at nothing from the bright space
of terror. She says play a quarter for me.
__________________________________________________________________
Viewed as Drama
the war's a
disappointment
thus said D. W. Griffith,
FILMMAKER.
Anthony Sangrossa,
BUTCHER, rocks
his cleaver, its
discs of dreamy light.
__________________________________________________________________
Way It's
after shooting the redundant
general and staring in the mirror how
old I look
__________________________________________________________________
To Tamzen On Her Fortieth Birthday
Undoubtedly you'll get this crap from others:
Life begins @ 40 etc. . .you're not getting older you're
getting better--yeah all the Hallmark cliches showering down
to spice the big day up.
Right! Uh huh. (I hear
your edged voice) The heart at any rate
is not as clever as the cards; it knows itself
moment by moment
in love and in hate
and in loneliness, despair, and joy. . .
so often also in that ravaging war within itself.
Your blood plunges on to its own beat,
mocking time to let you taste a memory
more real than now, the memory of a child.
And I alone among your friends can speak to you, that little girl,
about your Father's world, for I have breathed
the air of those same places, like Kimpo Air Base
where he must have touched down at the least,
and where I stood in rain that iced the brilliant
spotlights to hear a shivering, incomprehensible Scot read
my name from a list containing many who would die.
And I am twenty and could be dead soon and am
totally unafraid. I have money for women and booze
and yet, too, I want to get to Tokyo to stay alone in a hotel
that Frank Lloyd Wright designed, earthquake-proof,
floating on a sea of mud--and just to say I stayed there.
I love that wild and shy and scholarly young man
both for his sins and his sweet intents.
And I embrace him as you must embrace yourself today.
I am twenty then,half your years,and if
in the midst of a magic space we meet,
both at that age,and touch fingertips
to fingertips and stare
into each other's eyes,perhaps that selfsame magic
can extract some pain from the ensuing years
and even bring your Daddy back to you
borne up by love on some pure sea of vision.
I know. I know. Images crazy and fanciful. Get real,
Frank!@ I invent your voice again. It stops me,for
what it really says is never give your heart away.
But it changes nothing. Our voices change nothing.
What sustains us is our power to love and nothing else.
Only that will take that grudge you cannot purge
from out your heart,those wry
distrusts.
Then will you float
lovely as you are
upon your life,
but not before.
When you are still
and know.
__________________________________________________________________
Stream
our part
in stopping
forever
fails, I place
the boat mid-
spring past
a wave
of light
blossoms
by your glistening
wrist always
desire
trails it back, the mind
listening,
listening
__________________________________________________________________
The Matter With Us
It is cold
we have made
once more
narrowing
the blaze to this
still point
to turn and
to ponder
dispassionately
concentrating
grains of fire-sung ice
keen as the
much folded tip
of a Japanese sword.
__________________________________________________________________
From dark the floating
voice where I had gone
to feel more
alone, thinking
I was, and then our
sergeant's words,
the straining
wind off ropes outside
the tent. "You okay now?"
_Yeah they said little
flu. Pills they give me._
"Others. Gone." _I know._
"No. Hit mine. Got word. Radio."
Shoving us boys up onto the throbbing truck,
renewing all the giggling by hauling me
back off then for the medics--"His war be-
gins tomorrow!" But on they jeered
and hooted and are still
lurching away from the sun,
faces like singing
grapefruit.
__________________________________________________________________
The German Lesson
The women in one camp fucked
the guards for toilet
paper.
(To what base uses do we all etc.?)
To see us
mincing proudly
now so coy and
FAT.
__________________________________________________________________
Human Potential
We want the language
as a friend
who'll tell a gentle joke
We'll always go out for coffee forgetting
to eye the gauges:
The leaders must hold this engraved.
Well, our own friend's actual head
is gone. Anybody can't hear
jokes is quite exact.
__________________________________________________________________
Kamikazie
means divine wind.
On trains the young men
carried a ball of rice in
leaves, they
headlong, reverent, would
have the shit blown out of them, war
being this sort of capital concern as now
a drink by the same name
by the same name.
__________________________________________________________________
Prayer To My Daughter
What I'd like to have for you is a good liar only
he can tell the truth with conviction since evidently
he knows what it is as contrasted to his obvious duplicity
refusing to lie to himself. So therefore
when you have him you really got something true and more
solid than an alleged good man like your father who unfortunately
doesn't have a daughter.
__________________________________________________________________
The Peach Boy
I bring my GI Orient and Paul, 4,
his dubbed cartoon of Saturday morn-
ing monsters in outer space yet
he hasn't much to lose as I
exclude Sigmund's and Carl's
inner-space hardware store cause
the play opens with the father
discovering this great peach in a stream,
and once home the old couple uncover
a baby inside as samisens bridge my life
in sound back to a small dim room of a
Tokyo club where a guy picks a tune from this white
baby grand and I'm in raw company
alone then, with my girl better and worse
I'm tearing at a steak and throwing back Nip-
pon beer. Cocksure, but she's hushing me now,
because the guy composes, the pale
lid floating inclined on his smoky progressions
in my sliding mind
the Peach Boy has grown
up, is prowling the audience when from his
silk, peach light widens over little Paul
beautifully glow meets glow. Where's the
dragon? he asks just so we're all peach
children, grand babies born to save
the world, rope the ogres round.
Now the Peach Boy's finally up to that onstage.
The witch knifing in she's run through
for her trouble. It has to be to move us to
a place
where a far dark house and tree
press moon and clouds between.
Water spreads to us from there.
In the muted air and soft-lit spill
are all of my selves still
with Paul's. We name all we see
and think eternally,
a lake.
__________________________________________________________________
Black Frost
The kiss among diving
trees as from the jack-o-lantern
house the dread-
ful speeches of our other out-
wreathing in a cone.
Shadows harrowing the stones,
we dream ourselves in breath.
__________________________________________________________________
Against the Deck
she was thin in ways
ay she was as thin
in places
aces were wider,
snide reluctant queens and fat
jacks held their spots;
lots of pain
rained on hands
and has.
__________________________________________________________________
Living Nonsense
Who can treat the meaning-
lessness? No doctor or priest
telling you you're not
the first, thrusting whatever text
through emptiness of air, that
air where you are indeed
first: Alpha in the hollows
whistling your name. It's
important not to think
because you never know
what might start
you out from the white scarves.
As like the weather, it's, than
any idea, something
like a wave comes in
time or doesn't.
__________________________________________________________________
Mineral Baths -- Bursa, Turkey
Steam lifts
to the rotunda, its
art of running arabesques
around windows thick and old,
aswarm with aurioles.
Down here the men soon draw
apart, spurning visionary air
for modesty. The wives
within their separate rooms
play fast and loose
with luminosity,
stream in flesh
inseparable
from light.
Paradise may be a place
we never know
where things leave off.
I know a mo-
ment swims in
sight, those misted baths in Bursa
where Woman flows
as light.
__________________________________________________________________
Sung To the Tune of Anything At All
The sailor danced the whole
insinuated night,
went along home, hers,
to his dismay.
Her apparatus like his
own, though greater,
he beat to death
this epicine coquette.
Papers made a lot of it,
asking who is safe,
but at the trial he swung
the hirsute jury by detail.
A college town
thus used to
universals,
it rankled
to a man, both black and blond:
First to be deceived,
and then outdone.
__________________________________________________________________
Using Air
of a buttered morning a coed
in legwarmers bound
for Poly Sci and yet
they signal rasping
practice boards be-
neath an icy glow, ad-
junct not to art
but pain
splayed out
after a rag
doll flop.
The newest anything jives
sweaty trial and its
impure collapse.
A stylish hat
is softly cool
in form-
ing light. The old heart
heaves to
burn-
ing work.
__________________________________________________________________
Reply
You said I was pretty that evening
of a thousand birds, their wings
beat darkly up from your soft mouth,
sweeping the moon
away. The few who come here now drop
at odds. Querulous. Chatter.
Old old old!
So your sighing friend has journeyed
from your new village asking me
to write you after. . .too long.
The moon, just having risen, trembling-
edged upon the water
in his cedar cup. She
is dead then?
Those who have died are as a swarm of
hands beckoning an older moon
this long white evening to
drown our shadows.
__________________________________________________________________
Departure At Twilight
Soft airs raise the women,
each face a swinging
blaze, their earrings swaying
glimmers into cars
suspended in a cold liquidity.
Sinking to a knee, a gold
surrounded man, struck through
this first time to
his heart of hearts.
__________________________________________________________________
At Sounion
of a morning woven over stone
I bump camera then smock.
We share a mist
wherein I must refuse, no
dreamy photographs desired: my-
self and nothing. Stavros, he
of ghosty smock, is ticked at me.
It rises as a litany
to an imagined sun.
I jab along the slippery rocks
for cooler idioms,
finally to divine
lovers (Byron's one)
who have scratched their hearts to ruins.
Spooners weave through our academies
shunning all the moves to set
their dreaming steps to music
more appropriate.
Or so I later feel with ouzo
at the shivering cafe
before sun fairly rockets through
and temple can assert in flame,
informing wave on wave of rain
the wisdom of arrangment past
this opalescent glass.
__________________________________________________________________
Three Shortstops
Feat
you've gotten the intellectual shove:
reasons for everything and no love.
Corona River
You a-
nother.
Centuries:
which?
The Necessity of Sleaze in Language
I looked up her dress
in the Sears' catalog
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__________________________________________________________________
Scoring
Tuck drove at the basket as the rocket curved,
released the ball to find its softest high be-
neath the swinging bulbs. We never saw it drop
at hands thrust up.They dug out the both of us
from the others & we fuzzed through hospitals.
A year ripped off,we met again, something like
blood with anyone not blown away.His last trip
here was made on snow so back we go at frozen
tracks, & beg of a sunken doctor
once more to mark him down enough
in his fast-darkening room, where
ice is eating out all the windows
he must ritually punch towards me
"Keep at the books;just don't..."
Turn away from his cracking looks
& "Why?"I ask then, why anything?
No answer for his face falls off.
__________________________________________________________________
From The Fishing Pier (Nam Decade)
Far out the surfers start their ride.
The day is gloss and wind and wide
And I have come to get a rest
From _Time_ and Kodachromes of death.
The wind makes dervishes of sand
And bathers shroud their shiny tans,
The surfers now are coming fast,
Upright, tight, then slickly past.
The clouds would seem to shred the sun,
The sea threads white and slides down spun,
The last wave peaks and surfers sag
While plunging into rubber bags.
__________________________________________________________________
Generation
Joe and Madeline
graduated Cornell & went on
to Ph (got married) Ds @ NYU.
gestured intensively
as they rapped a concept
till it, surrounded,
surrendered.
Somehow though it galled
their living for thought
the rent was scrounged up
& the bread got bought,
bed often enough made & unmade etc.
Two kids
bridged their discussions
like afterthoughts.
They tuned out
Joe and Madeline's
mouth.
__________________________________________________________________
The Terrorist
I
wait as
have others.
You
strike
at your wish
or may not
I know
your demands
and have al-
ways.
__________________________________________________________________
The Plain Answer
The logic of a dream is
in it, you learn
but needn't then.
The walking life
cannot play fair
with its burden of desire.
So how find the dream of a day?
Enter the rose,
ask how it knows.
__________________________________________________________________
At the University
Strutting memorial stones
a pigeon fantails between
boy scholars untrue
to anything
might take looking into,
girls aswing with a something
nothing can propound, bi-
cyclists boring under
the latest shit
on man falling
out the window.
__________________________________________________________________
Farce Averted
Will she live with her
little panties here?
Walk around in her underwear?
I'm not so mature that the shadow
of her snatch
won't make a fearful difference thus
with all dark images it must
be left at that:
No Chance.
__________________________________________________________________
Those Two Again
Snow is
crystalgeometrics
fused to hood
a knobby world.
In art
things turned are fired to glaze,
perfect, caught
there right before
a crazed
drunk wrecks the shop, must be
dealt with, giv-
en booze and meat
to keep
his unkempt soul till snow
confides once
more outside the
window,
sticks around to smooth hung-
over light.
__________________________________________________________________
Calling It A Day
The Surrender to the Fools was effected
with mimimum pomp--to their sheerest
miff for they had arrived
in fool regalia: gowns and suits
and hoods and badges, bright
chains of office. Instead
their capitulators gave wry,
exhausted speeches. . .out of order, off in pace
but the snapped-back fools smiled grandly through
them all, surrounding each
whistling irony and wish-
ing everybody all the best
elsewhere, knowing there's no such place.
__________________________________________________________________
Home
Where I come from we
never really lived
(so we said and did)
and here I'm stranger
still for some
place won't answer.
There's pleasure
on paths that birds blur
ahead. They're
joining us
to song.
__________________________________________________________________
Coastal Graveyard in Branford, Connecticut
The frugal spaces
as if Yankees embraced
the dirt down un-
to them. Above,
salt-scoured markers rippling in
exhaust from DATSUN & McDONALDS.
(We must seem to ripple too
inside the supermarket's window.)
A stone shakes
at the end of vision.
OFF THE COAST OF BRAZIL
we had earlier browsed.
The girl scans barcodes
off our frozen food.
_Where water is the jungle,
bronze and green, shrieking
birds of teal-streaked apricot
throng massive heat, drop hushed in
ribbons past the dripping palms.
Through swollen calm,
thence shadowing a dusk-
smoked wave which slides,
an amorist's shoulder._
__________________________________________________________________
4th of July
Ketchup Corvette cradling this winking blonde
bangs at the light with my shuddering Dart hey
big wink for real? mid shimmers of SUN-
OCO & EXXON & GULF & WESTERN CLOTHING SOLD HERE
PIZZA KING BEER BURGER BOY WENDYS the para-
bolic piss of those Golden Arches & ARBYS fries
onions busting through these coarse grains my A-
merican Blonde shouldering diesels hiss in
stinks of asphalt oil & grease glossy ex-
plosions of a thousand cars in shiny black
parking lots puddling suns O my America & O my
new girl quick inside your own raw wave
hey America I'm your native son hanging in
there hard in army pants neon-nylon
jacket rocking my self-destructing motor in a
***ROUTE 1 ECSTASY***
she's off @ spectral green
stands on the brakes then lays down
rubber fishtailing into BUSTERS
WATER HOLE her hair snaps acetylene.
__________________________________________________________________
Beer and Sandwich On The Road
I'M THE GREATEST POLACK EVER INVENTED WHAT'RE YOU?
American. HUH! YOU AINT NO FUCKIN IND-IAN!
Then Irish extraction I'll have to say. YOU'LL HAVE TO SAY
SHIT! DON'T USE NO 50-CENT WORDS ON ME!
IRISH: SHIT IN BED AND KICK IT OUT SO
DON'T GIVE ME NO POLACK JOKES NEITHER I HEARD EM ALL
AND I DON'T TAKE EM SERIOUS--NOT STUPID ENOUGH.
__________________________________________________________________
Overheard
I aint no
CHURCH person
you know
what I MEAN?
All that STUFF! I gotta
get OUTA
there. But everybody
should go.
__________________________________________________________________
Language and the Marketplace
If the particular whore
enjoys an icecream cone
why blame her? O
see can you say
she should rather essay
honest work for her coin, but's
lacking the mere what?
Push? Guts?
Not the latter certainly: Beings courageous
omit the metaphor
we fearfuls live with
and are, therefore.
__________________________________________________________________
There'll Always Be Us
Eat beans AMERICA needs the gas,
and in the event of nuclear attack,
put your head between your legs
and kiss your ass
goodbye. The people'll save us, yes
after all the politicians' twirling
lies, their suck-
ing dry the public tit, it's
the love of the people
makes light of the world.
__________________________________________________________________
The Chance
FEW TIMES I CAN AFFORD DELTA I WATCH
PARTS OF MY FATHER'S DYING IN HOLLYWOOD
FLORIDA CAUSE BIG C GOT HIM OH YEAH
NO APPEAL & HE ASKS ME TO FIX UP THE DART
GET IT INSPECTED YOU KNOW SO HE CAN DRIVE
WHEN HE KNEW HE NEVER WOULD & THEN
THE MECHANIC TELLING ME THE ONE EDGEY
THING. WASN'T SURE BRAKES'D PASS.
_YOU DRIVE AROUND IN THERE & THEY TEST THINGS
TELL YOU SOMETHING TO DO & THEY READ A DIAL
BUT STAY AWAKE & WHEN THEY SAY BRAKES
REALLY HIT EM! SOMETIMES IF YOU..._
& I'M STANDING OUT IN BACK THERE WHILE
HE AIMS THE HEADLIGHTS
AT A CHART INSIDE & I'M WATCHING
HIS BODY MAN HAMMER SUN
INTO BLOTCHES OF OIL IT LOOKED
A WHOLE AWFUL JUMBLE
OF DUSTY WEEDS & JUNK
PARTS SHAKING ON THE HEAT
& THERE'S NO WAY
& NEVER COULD BE ANY
WAY TO TELL YOU GREG HOW GLORIOUSLY
I STOMPED ON THE FUCKERS!
__________________________________________________________________
Dentist
He explains decay in morning light,
I phrase colors of the corrugated shed
three stories down,
changing the language
as light changes and when
it stops, the words must
continue in order
to save us. We say too much and yet
at a still point are graced.
He says his speech again--no use
to talk to me. But then I listen
since we are all of us forgiven.
__________________________________________________________________
The Territory
A current phrase or two
having to do with finding
oneself. What
acquire?
What own?
The danger
of both.
__________________________________________________________________
Shy
the shy experience daily pain
those moments so benign to others
are really Being
forced to Crisis
and even knowing that this too shall pass
they do eventually wear thin,
then breathe a bit
before they breathe their last
_Amen_
__________________________________________________________________
Defining Hope
Let your veins drink where
other veins were let.
Kneel on stones from whence
blood was almost scoured.
(All acts following this
as useless.)
Nearby, a petal down
a stream. . .petals,
showering
onto a stream, a
stream of petals.
__________________________________________________________________
Ay
There is and is not
a rub. It has acquired
your wearing thin.
Times you thought
you gave up.
Dreams are in themselves
arguments.
__________________________________________________________________
The Moment
Evening is a river
of shadows rushing
the trees un-
till you hear water
and are not sure
that it is wind
or that dark
itself can run.
Knowing that
you can't be
sure of anything
alone
then, breathe
your question.
__________________________________________________________________
In Our Cold Stars
An old car waits
in the terrific sun.
We turn away
a moment
to adjust
our shapeless clothes
and stand
for it, the
camera,
dreaming and haste
in our mouths.
We want no part of it now, this ferocity
of self. We have terror in our mouths.
The wind blows stinging grit.
Where is it from?
We must find out.
It is not history,
It is not photographs.
__________________________________________________________________
The Hand In The Future
We are composing ourselves
as the photographer composes.
Our being
guided and
guiding him
and each solely directing such
limited chaos making us
free in a way
of the result.
For one certainly can't hand it
to the photographer. The moment
shown over and over must not be
an accident or the prejudice of
one eye and one waving arm.
But to say
it is us we
were vital-
ly promising
everyone.
__________________________________________________________________
Directing The Scene
This night river breaks the grasses.
I touch air enough to hear
children in the fragrances,
in the river-wind
woods holding seige,
their voices fire against the trees.
The children become a music.
The river is a darker music.
I thrust my hand in it
it bends
everything together.
__________________________________________________________________
The Grove
Those leaning pines with sparse and floating branches,
the sea behind thinned here and there by light:
A Japanese print before I'd seen one.
Does the scene exist before the artist makes it so?
He makes another and he makes it too.
As I do once again listening to music.
I don't think such nonsense at 20 at that sea-brushed
Imperial Navy Hotel as then the giggling maids clean up
after Americans. I know they giggle more at us
than they ever did at them, the cultural differences--
the way we laugh at signs like NOT TO BE SAFETY OF SWIMM.
I can't put Galway out of that young place
woven like the fragrances off sand and pine
through notes running from my record here, his
flute clean-cut along the trees and sea and funny signs.
Weaving in and out of time.
Folk melodies from turn-of-century Japan he plays
and I sense that scattered grove a century before
hotels and such, a farmer hums a tune from his own life
and that is history.
The wind in from the sea is not benign.
But one day it is again and the painter
sets his easel up. He has had his coffee
and needs nothing
more today than the trying to make art
the way and not the way the wind is music
the way and not the way the light informs.
Whatever we find out there is there for us and despite us
and despite the heartbreak years.
Tell the composer at Auschwitz, the dancer at Hiroshima,
all your fine ideas.
__________________________________________________________________
Visions Of The Yale Library
where a sari insinuates
scholars, in hunches, eyes
above blond glasses
diving then to proof
as she is by
and by
the checker, dour enthroned:
both subsumed
as the doorway widens to
mercury noon.
At lunch she'll laugh away
a junior's suave ennui
at George and Harry's,
nod on cue,
wring teabag a-
gainst spoon.
His Despair slouching towards
Elegance she
stares past. . .outside
bright cars contend. . .
and past that old penultimately
randy inference,
thence right to breathing tea
wherein a somebody
unfocusses his gravest
evidence in time
to glimpse along
a scintillant, inner eye
a spiritual dress.
__________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_Frank B. Ford_ is a poet, playright, and fiction writer residing in
Philadelphia, PA. His poems and stories have appeared in various
magazines, and his plays have been performed at, among others, Guthrie
2 in Minneapolis, and New York Stageworks. This is his first volume of
poetry.
Other works by the same author:
WATERMAN appears in _Guthrie New Theater (Vol. 1)_
Mr. Ford welcomes email at
[email protected], or via postal mail at:
Frank B. Ford
c/o The Greene Street Artists
5225 Greene Street
Philadelphia, PA 19144-2927
phone: 215.848.7385
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