DAVID COPE
LOST LOVES
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old man slim boy & boy-to-be, I wake in the cold moon where even the crickets lie silent & the leaves hang in the flooding mist, black streets silent— even the midnight screamers gone to bed at last— & hear you though lost forever singing in my ear, feel your tender touch as you stroke my forehead— so many gone down the lost river, so many waiting now for you & me to join them, singing in some night apart, shadow faces, alight with secret fires, love that floods even this room if only we turn to it, & make it ours. |
YEAH, AN' HERE HE WAS,
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leaning down on me with his one eye still full of tears, the other now gone blind, singing an old yiddish ballad in my ear like some long-gone yenta come back to find me a boyfriend—I'd been dreaming in this mile-wide field of headstones, the glass'd pillars in haze beyond with their distant thunder, their tops in clouds, the slaves still quoting stocks in their hopped-up SUVs whistling while they race to work—& above them, the raging torrent of dead souls screaming upward like roman candles into the mild sky toward the emptiness beyond pole star & lost sailor alike. singers of my generation disappeared like lost rain when he left, burrowed away into silent meditation in moonlit mountain cabins, working on dreams deferred, hands rough now building invisible stone towers & tearing them down & learning the meaning of silence. a new breed now runs the show, drives the planet ever closer to mammon's nightmare circus, buying, buying to save themselves from themselves, never looking back, racing like mad horses for some lost horizon nowhere. once we'd thought to howl them back, yet there they go, ears ringing with cash registers & cellphones. the heart's no longer heavy with the grief of loss; there are light moments when one may sing with long-dead friends, watch dreams walk lightly from the living tomb. |
FRANKIE'S BLUES
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Frankie squirmed, eyes brimming, hands shaking—unfolded the letter & struggled to say how he'd turned from his own son, who wouldn't confess to killing the girl even when the judge & jury gave him Jackson. Frankie raised his eyes: his long struggle to hold down jobs, his sweet smile, his war with the crack dealers— & now this, he torn & turned against his family, the boy's mother, who'd used their son as a drug runner when he was five: "I couldn't get to him, they wouldn't. . ." shoving the letter on my desk—his offer to raise money, penance for the crime his son wouldn't admit—hands trembling—hoping they'd forgive, the night-after-night struggle to find some way to redeem his blood—& what help could I give, generations torn & shaking apart before my eyes, what help but to share the silence & the moments with him in his solitude & tears, lost brother safe in memory's lacuna, our breath exhaled & gone forever— what life find light in jiving nightmare tunnel of red-rimmed eyes, what calm sighs sing amid the shaking sobs? |
GHAZAL OF THE HIGH PLATEAU
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mesmerized on the trip to this high plateau—the barren
promontories, windswept spruce giving way to high scrub & thence to rock outcrops where marmosets chattered your names to the wind as you sang, half in your sleep, takes of desert sun & wild waves on faraway November seas— recalling the fallen hiker, his bandaged legs straddling his giant companion, weary eyes haggard in stubbled cheeks whose lips whispered only blues— time passed so quickly you hardly realized you'd arrived, & now, with news of loved ones dead beyond your grasp & hopes, you turn to vanished loves, vanished paths, & find no way, even the path behind you vanished in clouds & mist, only glimpses of far peaks & guessed-at valleys ahead, even the cairns indistinguishable in rock scree. here, there is only one tiny yellow flower, an unearthly flower, nameless, a crooked flower once signed to you by a long-dead sage. this is the sign you were to wait for: consider your frail bones, aging in the meat of your boyhood leaping, those aches in loins that once propelled loves & led to singing heights, that song which brought you here, that you might sit. the mists are the myth of this season; the next path can't be seen with living eyes; the heart's blind cupid can't fathom the love to come; sit. even the light will spill in strange showers over your tired limbs & into your eyes which, blind until now, will open to the shadows of meadows & peaks now unknown. in the dream, deer paths now blazoning broadway, towers stacked high with grumbling dreams & cell-phoned illusions melt away, as does the day you were stopped still before prairie-wild grass, the sun blazing lights & shadows thru waves rolling to the horizon. old friends return like wild leaves in moonlit valleys, sit & sing in your ear. the mountain is not the mountain. inside the vanished waves, beyond mists & lost paths, songs become pathless riddles in your white hair & aging eyes, your child-corpse moving on with naked winged feet, the unearthly flower now a sprig at your ear, as you sing silence at last, a breath, an ayre floating beyond this air as surely as you yourself were sung. |