Praise Song
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.
—Psalm 150
Lunch, late May, under the Japanese maple
at our home on Vera Cruz, the dire news
of the roughshod world already dried
and yellowed by the drifted pollen, a sun
that has us talking of those days, early
‘80s, meeting at noon at Sue’s Café
Such head-spinning joy back then, such plenty
of pain, each day harvesting a garden
of fresh sorrows, behind us marriages
gone to seed, days, weeks like a harrowing,
yet waking together to ecstasies
of the body, to laughter and great wonder,
nights the newest music, or rehearsing
in the choir Stravinski’s Symphony of Psalms.
“Choose someone in the audience and sing
to them,” Jamison said, raising his baton,
which is what I’d like to do now, hoping
this poem I’m composing for timbrel, harp,
and flute will sing out to you of the wild
world’s surprises, like discovering Zevon
age 13, hung out at Stravinski’s home
studying classical with Robert Craft
instead of watching Leave it to Beaver
and eating SPAM sandwiches on Wonder
Bread like every other kid, an image
that came to me while seeing him again
on the Lettermen show toward the very end,
with wisdom like unto the Psalmist
beseeching us Enjoy every sandwich.
And now our son, who as a boy could play
the flute as well as anyone, comes home,
keeping his firstborn son close to his chest—
Zevon’s phrase from “Veracruz”— a story
of the country’s chronic viciousness—guns,
the racist Wilson…. And yet, the flute riff
lingering. Let everything that hath breath…
The Radical Road
Less light today than yesterday, though the earth, fat apple, turns
innocent of the paring of its golden skin.
That year we managed to begin in the kind of Eden
you can sink your teeth in, climbing Arthur’s Seat,
Edinburgh, on New Year’s morning. In the beginning
we hit a good stride, leaving the gray city
for the lesser gray of the mountain’s first inclination,
where it lifted beyond the well-tended park,
St. Margaret’s Loch opening below us, named for the queen
who served Scotland’s medieval poor, and north
over our shoulder, the Firth of Forth. The stonecrop had gone
brown with winter, but green held in the gorse
around Haggis Knowe and the Dry Dam, the thin sun’s chitterin’
licht—its chill quavering—enough to reveal
North Berwick Law, the ancient hill on the eastern horizon
surrounded by miles of open fields and crowned
since 1709 with the Sign of Leviathan, jawbone
of a whale. No sign of wildlife around us
on our way—hare, weasel, even grazing sheep driven
from the slopes by tourists like us, clambering
around the top when we got there, where Scott, Stevenson,
the two Wordsworths had stood in solitary
contemplation. Still we found it possible to drop down
over the western scarp and, alone, look out on
Fifeshire, where your great-great-grandfather found excess of rain
and scant work reasons enough to make
for America. He knew the stories—the show trials, hangings,
gratuitous beheadings of jobless weavers
following their insurrection in the west. A good lesson,
Scott thought—the proper lawyer—, was to put
a gang of the surviving rabble to heavy labor, laying
the pathway we now follow to the bottom—
that would teach them. I’d like to have heard the work songs
they sang to keep each other going, breaking the stone,
and their cursing. To have seen them turn to gaze on
what they’d made by morning, then evening, the first day.
Snow Moon
In the parking lot
of the Limeport Hotel all
four of us look up
at the sky, glowing—
the blue-white of the snow moon
No one speaks until
our beloved friend, once
a virtuoso surgeon,
now, in mid-winter,
finally retired,
asks the great round face
gazing down at him,
Is that what you’d call
“scudding” clouds?, the long habit
of his precision
intellect almost
lunatic for the right word.
Even closing on
90, laying down
the needlepoint he’s working
for his granddaughter,
a Christmas gift,
Alice & the White Rabbit,
he returns again
to his Goethe, to
Iphigenie auf Taurus,
though I fear my German
is deserting me.
Over dinner I think on
Iphigenia
the Merciful
as I see him with his wife,
filling in the blanks
for her where once were
words: “committed,” & “prostate,”
“testicle,” &
she a former nurse,
as just now “Dodgson” briefly
bounded down some dark
& curious hole
in memory. It’s late, I’m thinking,
thinking of our friend.
When questioned at some
mad party maybe 20
years ago on what
he believed “most sacred,”
he lost no time responding,
My own mind,
our beloved friend,
in mid-winter,
Is that what you’d call
“scudding” ?
Alice the White
Goethe,
deserting me.
Iphigenia
the Merciful
the lot
of all
of us look
Grace Notes
I knew then I was lucky to hear them
from an upper room, the students
who perched on the piano bench
next to you, a twenty-year stream
in the pre- and adolescent
particolor of spark, quirk, and bleak—
the gifted boy, Guatemalan-born,
his long fingers easy on the keys,
the two bright sisters, one renegade
in her anime headband, one mezza voce.
One wore the sīmurğ on her upper arm,
the bird of Persia, a vivid blue tattoo,
one, so intuitive, knew to play Joplin
as notes drifting leaf-like down a summer
river, under a dreaming moon. The boy
who struggled for a full season, spring
training through the Series, his Take Me Out
to the Ball Game executed molto
impetuoso, stylings marked by wild
pitches. repeated balks—think Doc Ellis
throwing on LSD—yet I’d see him walk
tall to his mother’s car, always grinning
because you’d told him he’d achieved
something, that he’d be set for the recital
with a little more practice. Or
the cheerleader, who stumbled over
a tricky rhythm till you stood her up,
told her to clap, to beat with her feet,
and that was that. Some came for the music
they hadn’t fathomed might move them till
it lifted through their fingertips—Ode to Joy,
Für Elise, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,
others came for the listening parent
they longed for and so utterly lacked.
What does it matter, the stories that home
back to you, rising glissando runs
of what they’d become—pilot, physician,
upscale designer, the stuff of “likes” and clicks?
Instead, let one young woman stand for those
who simply deepened, gathered, and rose
on updrafts of self-knowing and wonderment
because of you—so many. I see her
in performance, years after her first lesson,
in sky-blue gown, seated at a dazzling grand,
the sacramental bowing of her head
as her fingers release the opening notes
of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme
by Robert Schumann, Op, 9, as if she’d
channeled the spirits of the Schumann home
in the 1850’s, its darkling weathers—
his visions, voices, demons, the suicide
attempt, and soon after, the institution,
his death. Clara alone; the seven
children; Brahms’s blazing love for her
unconsummated. That a pianist
in her 20’s would stand at the threshold
of that sorrow-parlor and press open
the door so reservedly—not presuming,
but revering what hovered in the dim
beyond her understanding—her offering
like the smoke of sacrifice, floating
above the piano’s great backswept black wing.
—for Karen
Penncento: In Falling Snow, I Cross off My Bucket List
the Walk from Philly to the Presque Isle Lighthouse, Erie
—Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
I want to be pure flame, I want to be your song.
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
we got mangoes and bananas you can pick right off a tree.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
in your heart you'll hear it call you:
Come to me, Come to me. Wait; the great horned owls;
Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
Friends, will you bear with me today?
We go waaaaay back, America.
I think the great chiefs Shikellamy and Cornplanter palavered
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths.
Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
The book of moonlight is not written yet.
One must have a mind of winter.
When the sky goes flat, the lake clams up.
Cover us with your pools of fir.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Tree tree tree tree tree tree tree tree.
This is mortality, this is eternity.
The fish wade in black jade. Somebody bet on the bay.
I, too, dislike it. I get numb and go in.
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s published poems in places such as Callaloo, SALT, and The Southern Review.