Publishing a book of poetry is always wonderful. But writing new poetry always is the joy and the challenge. Here are Walter Donway's latest poems--someday, perhaps, to be included in a new book.
Not A Poem
We'd walk beneath the fork-boled birch,
where softest floppy grass caressed bare feet
that hot stone steps had stung.
Or pass an itchy August hour outsprawled
beside the patch of four-leaf clover;
Or pitch the lumpish, worm-pocked apples high,
high and twirling,
over the peeling white and swaybacked barn.
Odor of sweetest, rotting brown
incensed the bees in buzzing orbits above the apples, pears.
We might race down the hay-laced, furrowed orchard path,
where stickling stubs would poke bare feet
and crackly grasshoppers would scatter.
Beneath cool tents of vines,
we'd eat our squishy fill of purple grapes.
No poem in this, nor so much more,
that did not happen in this world
and is too real for metaphor.
Winter Solstice on Fifth Avenue
Abrupt dusk comes like early guests
Intruding on the afternoon;
The icy wet, with callous touch,
Explores my neck; the wind says soon
The snow will fill the black sky.
Some instinct, old as bones, again
Says bend to this imperious wind,
Old despot of the frozen plain.
But not tonight, not now, not here!
Along Fifth Avenue, I see
The windows into scenes from dreams,
Kaleidescopic gaiety:
Not snow, but shoulders white; not ice,
But grinning glass with mist of mirth,
From lips that curve around a laugh.
And darkness? Look, above the Earth,
In tier upon exuberant tier,
A brash geometry of light!
I long to tell you, passerby,
How glad I am for man, tonight.
Spring Pond: Ten Haiku
Through the pond's clear water
The sun finds water lilies
Asleep in the mud.
Green spears of Iris
All thrusting at the spring sun,
Like chanting tribesmen.
Rain half fills my boat.
Each day I leave it like that
My chest feels the weight.
Two old ducks come first,
Struggling up the pond's steep slope.
Corn is their teacher.
The pond is so low
That the big carp's wet green back
Pokes out of his world.
Our Swamp Maple fell,
Too big to stand on a bank
The pond washed away.
The white egret stalks
From step to menacing step,
A snake with a spear.
In the sun a turtle
Is a motionless black stone.
But its pulse quickens.
Brown-speckled egg shells,
Our two ducks never gone, now.
This spring no ducklings.
Now summer is near.
Yellow pollen coats the pond
So frogs leave dark trails.
.
Haru No Yo
(From the Japanese)
I hear the night train
Far away through the spring woods
And curtains of rain.
Undressing for bed,
My wife looks down so I see
Only her bowed head.
Bent to touch her toes,
A girl grins between bare thighs.
To her no train goes.
On Reading Desmond Egan
The poet proffers his considered words,
Close trimmed and set atop an honest scale,
And I must heed, must hear that our spare world
Will ever lay within the Humean pale,
The ghetto of our senses, beyond which lies
But dreaming precincts of reason, where once
Our smug, high-minded kind presumed to go.
I seem to hear his midlands brogue pronounce
That no fine heart can sing the measured song,
Pretending meaning in our farce of pain
Incomprehensible, so long dumbly borne;
The true voice breaks to sing of it again.
But what if reason's brief, appealed at last
Before an honest bar, should be sustained:
A verdict deemed but chattering abstraction
By minds in which mere reason is disdained?
How, too, if all that pain, that rote debit
Duly weighed in weary calculation
Of man's undoing, prove but the price
Exacted for our reason's liquidation?
Poet again could lift the human voice
To sing the human order, a human song
Of man-the-maker, with his sufficient joy,
And man-the-knower: well sing him, and long.
To Barmaid Jen
Chanced across in Dunby's,
You seem an alien thing,
A blush of green demure
That shall not outlast spring.
I ponder what rash hand
Has set this bloom to cling
Night long to life, when shade
Is all that day will bring?
The pond
ever there
in my window
grins, frowns, blinks, pouts,
no expression lost
on its face.
Now,
spring's quick dimples,
wrinkles in white light,
rippling kiss of fish:
the grimaces of waking,
old moods of home coming--
younger by a year.
A Prayer for My County
May you awake as this last hour ticks
Away a world, that lost, history
Will not recall, except to yearn
And marvel. May you wrest from glory
That was your affirmation of man
The will to lift the fierce, white light
Of reason--ever sentinel
Against advance of faith's blind night.
May you call forth from banishment
Enlightenment's sons. May they again
Proclaim to Earth its last best hope
That tyranny's insolent chain--
Of priest and prophet, faith and crown--
May drop from man's mind. May it be hurled
In damnation everlasting
From every shore of the bitter world.
May you cry out, as shadows come
Onrushing, that here Earth saw
The kneeling rise, their sacrament
Nature alone, and nature's law.
A Parting
That afternoon, the sea mere sound
Of rush and wash, we gave our way
To a white fog, where dunes had drowned
As though the Earth might sink that day.
I took your hand as waves unrolled
Beneath a gray-white drape that brushed
The ocean's breast, and, as we strolled,
Caressed your chill, bare back. I crushed
Your hips to mine. But we heard, then,
A rage of foam, and surging higher
Came belly, loins, of stark Poseidon,
Anatomy of rude desire.
You stood as to attention, pale and still,
Then frowned, as at uncertain music,
And turned (and I, as lovers will).
All hazy blue, and sheer as fabric
Shivering on the wind, a siren swayed,
as though she danced a dance with air.
She sang that loveliness must fade,
She vowed a love that shall not care.
The wet sand scarcely traced your feet,
You fled to her so readily.
I chose a log, a gray, hard seat;
Poseidon sighed, and sat by me.
The Frog Pond
So low the drum, so deep the drum, so warm
The pond, and night so warm, so slow the throbbing;
For winter's gone, is gone, and mayflies swarm,
And longing comes, O strong, and lust goes sobbing.
So thick the living stew, the water slick,
The fertile odors drifting, rich and clinging:
The pump of lust lets the cold heart tick,
Lust has cracked the tragic mouth for singing.
O come, just come, on the May moon's streak;
Our bellies itch, our splayed thighs twitch, with yearning.
So slide, divide the pollen crust, to seek
For one who groans with spring's returning.
But lust lies coiled; so still, so silent lies;
And filmy, urgent, moon-crossed eyes are blinking.
The surface bursts, low and long the arc he flies;
She's hit, she flips, the bellies clap; she's sinking.
Wind Shift
Once, Vulcan swung that proud hammer
Most urgently; the sheer face split;
By night, the baffled, skulking wolves
Sniffed at seams where clever stones fit.
His valley-gouging spade could sate
That furnace where the red tongues rise.
He poured the limbs, the skin, that held
The house of man against the skies.
Men whispered fearfully: we live
In peril, as though gods, not beasts;
Rash Vulcan casts us on that altar
Where envious Olympus feasts.
Make haste to shroud the shameless forge
Where flame-lit, sooty Vulcan sinned,
But now sits bowed. At dusk, the wolves
Stopped suddenly to sniff the wind.
.
Not A Poem
We'd walk beneath the twin-boled birch
Where oddly soft and floppy grass
Caressed bare feet that hot stone steps
Had stung. And then perhaps we'd pass
An itchy August hour outsprawled
Beside the patch of four-leaf clover;
Or pitch the lumpish, worm-pocked apples
So high, high and twirling, over
The peeling white, roof-sagging barn.
The scent of sweetest, rotting brown
Delighted bees in buzzing orbits
Round apples, pears. We might race down
The hay-laced, furrowed orchard path,
Where stickling stubs would poke small feet
And crackly grasshoppers would scatter.
Among cool tents of vines we'd eat
Our squishy fill of purple grapes.
No poem in this, nor so much more,
That did not happen in this world
and is too real for metaphor.
On Being Invited to a “Vigil”
Shall I consent to kneel before this stone,
To feel dry grass, cool earth, a late March sun--
Reflect before this lad who dwells in granite
On seasons, years, I have, while he has none?
I would kneel, and gladly, but must inquire
What consecration I should I tender, here:
What promise to this small-town boy, once asked
To give his world, then in its eighteenth year?
A murmured thanks, perhaps, that I have lived,
Have loved, drunk wine, sought this, done that--as though
It's I kept faith with life as he could not?
I cannot guess if he would view it so.
I might avow that had his blood been mine
I would have bled, or would have sent to die
My only son, that other men might live;
I might avow, and wonder: Did I lie?
So what prayer, then? That henceforth I oppose
All war, and all who bid for any truth
For which the heart, sublimely moved, might pay
A single life, a cup of blood, an hour of youth?
I think, for some, good conscience can be bought
At such a price, but my faint heart would cower
That we might live in such a pact with Death:
That we shall die, but never choose the hour.
Echoes
At dawn we saw the golden stalks
At Fresh Pond's edge, where high reeds grow,
Below, wind brushed reflected strings
That rippled in a golden row,
As though a mystic chord for spring.
Two fawns had signed the grayish sand
With dainty quotes; a swan reposed
As scrolls of reeds unrolled on land.
We found a plastic shotgun shell,
Soiled-blue and flat, of years gone by;
You gazed on that lone swan as though,
Should shot ring out, you, you would die.
A Lover Have I Been
A lover have I been who only touched
The softest edge of you, who knew your hair
That brushed my fingers, toes, or watched
But shyly when you flung your passion there
On desolate, blackest rocks until no man
Would dare your towering proud remonstrance.
I walked and thought how I might yet surmount
Your awful, tossed, and wildest high defiance
That hard men ride, ride ever over loins
Unceasing till you feign to sigh and yield;
I dreamed it so, until that peaceful, sly,
Hypnotic day in June that you revealed
The murderous allure in your pure face:
Embraced my little son in tenderest,
Suffocating love, so shrieking I
Died, lived, ripped him from your assassin's breast
And gasped, at last, good breath on that dear shore.
I fear you, fear you, enrapturing whore.
That Summer
(To Amelina)
That summer through, all unaware,
Your pale feet raced across the grass,
You loped the hay-soft orchard path,
Your lean long legs were always bare.
A little printed shift you'd wear,
So brief that when you jumped the fence,
Or swung on limbs, at any chance,
You'd show too much, all unaware.
Your blue eyes with their owlet's stare,
Would lend an instant's audience
Before you'd shrug or pull a face
Or laugh, just laugh, without a care.
You bent, one time, to study where
A red worm twisted down your thigh;
You smeared it with a careless swipe
And dashed away, all unaware.
That fall, your aunts put up your hair
And bothered over scabby knees,
And set you at the vanity,
Explained what fresh young curves must bear.
Summer returns, with days as fair,
But not, I think, wild Eve's' allure,
Or any laugh that's just a laugh,
Or woman's glance, all unaware.
Dad's Song
In church, “O, are ye able...”
My father loved to sing.
Intoning, “said the Master...”
Ah, how his voice would ring,
Then end: “to bear the cross,”
His hand upon my head.
“And you're my cross to bear,”
Was what he always said.
Invitation to A Dog
You used to dive at brambles,
And when the job was done,
You'd sport a badge of burrs.
Your nature was to run.
You'd fire sandy bullets
In dashes through the foam
And never catch a fish.
Your nature was to roam.
Where ever did you go
Those moon-mad nights in May?
You'd scratch my door at dawn
And sleep away the day.
Then late one yellow fall
It seemed you'd gone for good,
But first frost saw you home,
Your muzzle flecked with blood.
So come and lie awhile;
There's gray about your eyes.
You think I never notice
Your struggle when you rise?
You're welcome on the porch
Beside my rocking chair.
You'll find the goodly sun
Is kind to stiff hips there.
You think I never ran?
Or dived into a fight?
Or loosed a lusty howl
Or stalked the restless night?
I don't have anyone
To say “good dog” to me,
Explain the day has come
And what must be, must be.
I say you've earned your place.
And damn-all how it seems.
The moon is on the roads
We're roaming in our dreams.
Once Over South Beach
Do you remember slam! that orange moon
Just blazing big against the South Beach sky?
We idled by those bumpy stuccoed walls,
Still warm--in melon, pink, chartreuse. And I,
I said, “The moonlight slips right through the bars,
For trysts in gardens when a lover comes.”
Insistent sambas, smells of rum, made night
As musky as perfume the dancing warms.
We followed sounds of crazy, happy Cuban
Carcajada, right up an outdoor stair
To where that moon punched pow! into that blue:
You with shoulders silvery and soft and bare.
Across the table, I fidgeted and grinned:
At you? Those Cuban babes? Quien sabe?
And you just said: “Oh God, it's getting late,”
And our last moon, bam! was gone, gone away.
A Lecher's Petition
I humbly ask your gracious leave to quit.
A fight without surrender isn't fair.
A secret sign? Perhaps I may be told it?
Instead, this evening, in my favorite chair,
I Google “Chicken Ranch,” and from Pahrump
Am brought a Web site with a catalog
Of ladies now available to hump,
As featured in a nifty travelogue:
A tour through sauna, bar, and “Lover's Suite”
That ends with Lucy, Darling, Kate, and Alex
Bare breasted in the spa. I click “repeat,”
Though, all in all, I'd sooner cry “King's X”!
I mean, can I just give it up? I've filled
A stool beside ten thousand lovely knees,
The faces in serene profile and skilled
At scanning skies my dim eye never sees.
Or at the gym, I flash my widest smile;
But girls observe my sweat, and think: poor guy,
He grimaces, and spins another mile
On those old legs. They nod in sympathy.
I pant and watch a jouncing butt or bust,
And in this striving can discern a sign
Of some remorseless need to lure a lust
Of which they dream. But never, never mine.
I ponder that a time may come when I,
Yes, even I, may hope to win release:
A year--or season, then?--before I die
That sees my fever break and yield to peace.
At last to walk the world in grace, as man
Not beast; to ponder thoughts a long life leaves
That do not squirm and leer; and never scan
The proffered wares of dreary, preening Eves:
O Holy Mother will it ever be?
King's X! I give! Your mercy, ma'am, on me!
A Proclamation
Whereas, it is the sense (a term applied
Advisedly) of Congress, reinforced
By panicked sundry pols on every side--
The several states concurring, and endorsed
By pollsters of impartial prejudice,
Unable to dissolve statistical
Deposits of their data to dismiss
The obvious--that citizens, who shall
Be known hereafter as “The Sovereign,”
Don't bother with elections (but Congress notes,
With gratitude, the useful citizen
Protecting transfer payments always votes
Until informed no payments can be cut);
And also, whereas, it is evident,
And here acknowledged, anyone, but
Anyone, can run for president,
Who yearns to program half-a-billion lives
With schemes that long experience reveals
To lawyers, senators, frustrated wives,
And others so well-known for high ideals;
It is proclaimed, this day, to hell with it
(The several states do solemnly agree
And polls reveal that no one gives a shit);
Henceforward, be it known, by lottery
Our nation monthly shall denominate
A citizen distinguished by good luck
(We badly need) to serve as head of state;
Become a candidate for just a buck;
Said President, except for any praise
Of “hope,” shall not be subject to recall
For messing with our lives for thirty days;
And may the God of Mercy save us all.
Keeping Count in Orvieto
That evening in October, I set out
From my hotel, the cones of yellow light
Like daubs on dark along the twisty street.
On Via Del Duomo, their faces bright
At dress-shop windows, girls cry out like birds,
“Vieni qui, vieni qui...” and smile,
But not at me. At Cafe Corso,
I idle down the aromatic aisle:
One side biscotti, macaroons, in drifts,
The other couples, all legs and shoulders,
Leaning close at tables small as platters.
And far in back, like storage, the computers
On dark-brown plastic tables: just a cup,
A napkin, outposts of the cheer behind me.
I boot, and frown into the bluish dawn,
Then tiptoe as on ice from key to key.
The Hong Kong price of gold comes up; I nod,
Eight hundred. That calls for cappuccino,
A festive moment, highlight, and I grin.
The waitress asks: “ Angelo buono”?"
The Umbrian moon just edging towers, domes,
The streets still murmuring, I lose my way,
And suddenly she's coming: sparks alight
In eyes and soft on hair where blue lights play.
Above the crimson gown her breasts now swell,
As though we must embrace, until she cries,
“O Dio Mio! Dov'รจ Hotel Rupe?
"You know? Capisci? I'm late to meet two guys!”
The hotel lobby, Sam still up: He calls
“How much today?” I scan the vacant chairs,
As though for her, until he says, “How much”?
“Oh, fifty-thousand, Sam,” I snap. “Who cares?”
For You A Sort of Sonnet
Young in Boston, then, all avenues and bridges:
Romance strolled those proper streets.
Arm-in-arm we climbed four flights
On Newberry, so very “in,” my aerie.
How you adored your boy professor!
A Baez, then a Dylan; you slipped into the kiss,
Yielded bra, and more,
And sobbed, “I can't say 'no.' Not now, to you.”
My lust dug, you clung,
But only love could kiss, those afternoons, and say,
“You see, it shows the clitoris is here, not there.”
Wise desire, although you tossed your hair,
Business of passion,
That made a man for you.
