| Samuel Hazo USA
Sam Hazo, Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania: TO WAIT AS A WAY OF LIFE Waiting to act is where
the drama waits.
Act,
and it's over.
Bad gospel
for the overdoers of this world,
but irrefuteable…
Hamlet pensive
is Hamlet at his truest.
A cobra,
coiled on its coils, is totally
cobra.
The mountain snow
that keeps its avalanche a secret
threatens the deadliest with white
restraint.
Never are brides
more beautiful than in their veils.
Sprinters at the starting blocks
with all their muscles primed
and flexed look equally supreme
before defeat or victory
undoes them.
Look everywhere,
and everything's waiting to happen
next.
Rifles are ready
in their racks.
Lilacs are anxious
to become the first and only
versions of themselves.
Bombers
are waiting with their waiting bombs.
Silently a cougar waits
to charge a deer.
Its eyes
are hungry, but its claws are patient.
FACING THE LAKE WITH ST.-EX A dozen mallards squawk
in a shortarm vee above
Lake Huron.
Without a physicist
among them, they slip each other's
jetwash and wing northward
equidistantly at cloud-speed.
I put aside the wartime prose
of Antoine de St.-Exupery
and track the ducks to Canada.
To be dull as a duck aground
but awesome in flight and even
more awesome in prose describes
St.-Ex in life and death.
If poetry is prose that soars,
his prose in fact is poetry.
It made Consuelo overlook
his dalliances, his sleight-of-hand
with cards, his sudden absences.
How many men dare gravity
with wings and words and win
as no one did before
or since or ever?
Meanwhile,
over the rhythm of waves
the mallards are rowing the wind
in perfect rhyme to show
what's possible without instruction.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 l
The hawk seems almost napping
in his glide.
His arcs are perfect
as geometry.
His eyes hunger
for something about to panic,
something small and unaware.
Higher by two thousand feet
an airbus vectors for its port,
its winglights aiming dead
ahead like eyesight.
The natural
and scheduled worlds keep happening
according to their rules…
"We interrupt
this program…"
Inch by inch
the interruption overrules both worlds,
engulfing us like dustfall
from a building in collapse.
The day
turns dark as an eclipse.
We head
for home as if to be assured
that home is where we left it.
2
Before both towers drowned
in their own dust, someone
downfloated from the hundredth floor.
Then there were others---plunging,
stepping off or diving in tandem,
hand in hand, as if the sea
or nets awaited them.
"My God,
people are jumping!"
Of all
the thousands there, we saw
those few, just those, freefalling
through the sky like flotsam from a blaze…
Nightmares of impact crushed us.
We slept like the doomed or drowned,
then woke to oratory , vigils,
valor, journalists declaring war
and, snapping from aerials or poles,
the furious clamor of flags.
WHAT'S LEFT After we bantered by phone,
I re-opened your book and read it,
back to front.
"My corner
of New Mexico is rather
remote," you told me, as if
remoteness were a fault.
Your book
made bantering forgettable.
Each poem said the unremote,
redeemable world is all
we have this side of promises
we hope are true…
And if
they're not, aren't we the better
for believing?
Lately I've found
that most religions just
repeat themselves.
Miracles,
stigmata, uncorrupted corpses
and the like deliver me to mere
astonishment but little more.
My counterparts for what you saw
in your three children or the buffalo
that almost trampled you to death
are my grandchildren, Pennsylvania
and my daily tug-of-war with words.
They never capture fully
what I know: how children are
the very clock of life and death
or why my wife's brother's painless
passing saddens and maddens
all that gladdens me or where,
in Wilder's words, we find
the life we lose in living.
No theologian but disturbingly frank,
Sinatra praised, "Whatever
gets you through the night."
What
gets me through the night's no less
a miracle than the slow mercy
of sleep.
That gift, along with sight,
mobility and what disposes us
to love, is miracle enough.
As for finality?
Who knows finality
before it happens?
Meanwhile
the passing present and the past
that's never past is all
that's left.
And the world is what
you say it is---"not our mother
but a wild music beyond the self."
For Rebecca Seiferle Two decades of hell could not
convince Odysseus to think
of Ithaca as just another island.
Where else did Churchill go
in his defeat but back to what
he fondly called his "habitation?"
What else but home restores us
in the wake of acts of God
or national catastrophes?
Unlocked, an opening door
extends its own welcome.
Obedient chairs remain on duty
at attention, and sleeping rugs
stay territorial as ever.
While clocks repeat their treadmill
trek of going nowhere
by the numbers twice a day,
the furnace hums the only
tune it knows.
Later
we find the cardinal that died
colliding with our kitchen window.
We bury it enfolded softly
in its wings like every bird
in death.
The birch beyond
the driveway tells us why
our house is not an igloo
or a hut.
Watching faucet-water
being swallowed by an unplugged
drain in slendering swirls,
we fathom the treachery of suckpools
and whirlwinds.
If all our books
were people once, we house
a thousand people underneath
one roof.
The pause between wars
the world calls peace is not
their peace.
They are our truest
natures peacefully in print
in perpetuity.
Like bottles of patient
wine they age in place
and wait to share themselves
with anyone.
Opened, they seem
the same as doors extending
welcomes, page after page.
© All Copyright, Sam Hazo. |
