R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 5

Shakhnoza

I ask you
can you
hide me
from all
silence that screams
truth that looks
like lies?


I ask you
would you
hide me
from each
word unexpressed
the thought
cut short

tell me
will you
hide me from
all
noisy people
all meaningless
thoughts
that exist

Mortal Simplicity

I do not believe
love is eternal: being mortal
how can we know?
but I think I have known you--
known the gesture
of your face, a flower perched
on the stem of a neck,
the momentary disappointment
of your eyes
and skittery looks away.
I believe that love
is instantaneous and sharp
(that is why we think of arrows)
as the moment you swept
into the room and sat
in front of me
and we changed inside the moment,
a gesture as concisely human
as offering cake to a boy--
as simple and momentary
as that.

The Plane Trees of Bukarah

And in the water, bright red koi
and marinka: the men at fifty
are Chinor, trees that grow from boys
planted here in old days by gods.
When the Arab soldiers came
and told them they must pray
they danced themselves bigger,
thicker, legs rooted in clay,
wore hats like boughs,
like their brothers the plane trees
now a thousand years old.
The slender camel raiders
who found them beneath Persia
were no match with arrows
or words, for their words were
swift like the horses they rode.
They grew in circles drawn by gods
(the poets knew ) and grow still.

Navigator

In the darkest times
I think of lighthouses
the way I used to think
of saints, hope of sailors, vagabonds--
a thin beam offering no map
but a chance of rescue standing
on the brink of some solid place--
away from the seducing sea
that draws us to our death.
I think of Brendan and I say

Saint Brendan in these times
Oh, Broen- Finn, Fair-drop
pupil of Jarlath and Finnian,
star of Kaleedy at the Munster:
have mercy on us.

Your boat of friars,
sixteen adrift in a whirling sea,
in a basket to Eden,
sixteen against the wind.
armored with the wish
to see Kerry and the coast again.
Scourge of demons
sea dragons and despair,
admiral lord of the Irish sea
pray for us.

This journey of ours is little,
and there are horns and bells
and beams of light
to bring us in. We are not you.
We do not have
your faith or your geography
but we are navigators, too.

Who Can Bear This Repetition?

I am losing you
to the sad mountain haze
and the cold height
I see in a September moon

No, you do not yet feel
its breath on your neck,
or see the jaundiced truth
lapping the dead shore, wanting
to pitch higher and farther.

You do not see the black bear,
or the crabs scuttling on the ledge,
or the deer among the trees.
Like them we are hiding,
Like them we live in secret.

Repetition is what's left
when the first surge of love
is scattered by unexpected force--
a boat, an island, a cliff of rock,
a face, whose name I have forgotten,
but worse, a vast unbroken watery space.
The fog settles and and ice forms against the shore
while we see less and less, and wish it more.

How Burnt Cove Got its Name

I've known lobstermen with Harvard degrees
and others whose name was Weed--
"Several generations of Weeds," the old man said proudly.
But mainly there was Jacques
an old Acadian, the rarest of races,
whose fathers fished these little islands
before there were out of work
Cornish and Welsh stone cutters in the island quarries,
before the granite ran out and the libraries
had all been built in Philadelphia and Boston,
when they turned from stone to sea.

Jacques was my friend at the pump and wharf--
the man who never knew your name
but smiled, toothless, when you came by,
always alone (he had a wife who, he said,
his voice like the island mist in my ear,
"kept him straight" and she was dead.

How'd Burnt Cov come to be called what it is?
I asked him a month back.
He half shrugged, knowing that I would
trust his answer, then exhaled--"Welp,
What else'd you call a place that's all worm rot
and drift wood, no stone to tell of
--tide that never fill the basin
and sand the colour of ashes--
with no boat going in or able to get out.
Looks burnt," he said and all was sense.

I heard, I said, it came from your people--
the French named it "Brule-Cote," Burnt Coast,
because of the Indian campfires
hereabout. What do you think."

"I think as little as I can" he said, " and it don't matter
if it came from my people or the settlers
or whatever-- burnt."

He eyes my mask, for this is the season of plague,
smiles and bares his gums.
"But you lot who believe old men
will believe anything and nothing for sure.
I never believed in dentists,
Don't think no mask will save you neither."

Death in Thebes

"Save this city and yourself. Rescue me.
Deliver us from this pollution by the dead.
We are in your hands. For a mortal man
the finest labour he can do is help
with all his power other human beings."
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos


Seven years
the plague had reigned:
young girls died in sweats,
old men choked
and babies drowned
in wombs; husbands in fits.
'Who has caused this, O King'
the people said
'Bring him--we will kill him,
we will gouge out his eyes,
his phlegmed eyes
like dafni grapes
and stone him from the city.
We will kill him
for this miasma, this pollution,
and the gods will
sleep again,
and study Patmos or Kolonos
when they wake.'

'Yes' said Oedipus, relieved
his lies had won them.
'Bring us Teiresias. Get
the old man here
and he will tell the truth
of this pollution--
the foul air, the dying boys
and we will catch the devil
and pluck his eyes
like dafni grapes
and kill him as a sacrifice to Pallas
and we will walk once more
the stone streets of Thebes
in thanks and praise.'

Words

must not
rhyme
alliterate
or scan
the inhumanity
of
person
to person
speak not
of
love (low)
or loud or
gender
typified
or your
eyes
when they
sing me
In.

Sleep

When I move nowadays
I leave my bags packed.
They're a mess inside
and the clothes I wore yesterday
are still wrapped in a Globus Market bag
that says Please Recycle.

What if Richard III had shrieked
'My kingdom for a fag
One lousy cig for this debacle!'
Would we moan or would we giggle?

I think this watching my bag
resting on a bed in a foreign place.
The zipper is frayed: a wheel is
squint
like me. I will wash my face
with foreign water and swirl
Into the deep semitic mass
on streets below--
looking for the local fare,
fried and cheap--the wiry brow
of a vendor hiding the stress
Of dishing up shwarma, chips
And a pack of almonds for later.

I think of you, not of you.
but of the scent of your thighs
trembling to be freed and eyes
burning behind black linen.
Among all this dark mass.
I would find you again.
and sleep you into the past. .

.

Concerning Valentines

"A poem should be palpable and mute, as a globed fruit" (Archibald MacLeish)
For AG



Sometimes we leave the poem
on the desk like a pear and (whisper)
I will leave it there to ripen
and when it's time
she will spring forth like Aphrodite,
As suddenly as Botticelli's girl from the sea,
the froth of her father's swirling might declaring
that the birth of beauty was man's urge
and a motherless unwomanly thing.

How vain were we to think
we created women in stone and paint.
Do we want them soft, or frozen to the touch?
Oh, soft, succulent to the taste and touch--
a Rilke sonnet, an explosion in the mouth
to savour and decipher--bitter, salty, sweet.
But her own creation, hers--not chiseled
by a sculptor's rasp or hammered into being
to prove his handiwork. She is my poem
and writes her own words upon the sad heart.