We have seen the movies
We have seen the movies on slavery,
the row houses and bakers fields.
The common integers of truth and beauty
and the aging juntas that have made it that way.
We have seen the small town mangers
and inimitable neon Christs.
The wise men with their sidemen pointing fingers to the stars.
My own grandparents were gassed, hidden
in sewers and farmer's attics.
Now nowhere can there be light found for their prayer.
Look there and you will see at the bend in the lake
the crane with his head hidden in the valley,
And hear the silver bells of workhorses
trudging through the snow.
So much has gone wrong in a century.
Heidegger and Wagner baiting history.
Young girls raped by puppets
of an unknowable mind,
at Mauthausen, praying for slow death to come
like an Aryan waltz.
The grass grows now over these epiphanies.
The glass slippers of a century fallen.
Its skin lanterns and prayer.
Forgive me if I have not noticed you sooner.
I have loved you the only way I knew how.
Somehow it is our unfinished dreams that save us.
How we were gunrunners in the broken streets of Marrakesh.
The grand Marquis in Seville and pont Neuf in Paris
where we tossed oranges
like fallen moons.
Havana where we danced
to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Reading Anna Karenina and the ballads of Varadero
in Snowdon's dark monasteries.
We know nothing of the crusaders or Spanish civil war,
the knights-errant, or dictators
who have come in our name.
The horses drawn by a tethered hand,
the whispered-lost histories of clay dragons
and confederate dolls.
The sleeves of your gown toe the rough winter air
the sonata of frozen leaves.
Your long blue scarf and fuchsia gloves
these I will remember.
The way your hair falls back
is its own story.
How you go lost
in a world of rabbits and shy flowers.
The reveries of sun and moon, ferns and wild flowers
that call your name, hidden and unnoticed there
in the brown shirts and cattails.
The denizens of green desserts and priggish stars.
I haven't the money or faith that comes with age.
My poems are frocked in a miner's dank clothing
and the small talk of waiters has done little to tame my heart.
You have always noticed simple things;
buildings where there were none
the antics of trees, scrimmage of time.
The shape of things to come.
In that small window I see your Victorian dress,
the meddling of a King and Queen.
The wading pool of imagists, the baronage
of well taught thieves.
A dagger and a prayer.
And I imagine you gentle and kind
as a cactus sea blooms
and the day falls deftly on its back;
while elsewhere humans find their scurrilous ways
and in their lust for all things bright
commit amnesia to memory,
the sun too ancient to penetrate.
And you strangely beautiful
like a small reptile who blinks twice
before the sun is gone.