On Pelicans, and Life in General

"His [Charles] statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy,' instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.'"
-John Fowles, from "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Drunk with pines and long kisses,
like summer I steer the fast sail of the roses,
bent towards the death of the thin day,
stuck into my solid marine madness.

Pale and lashed to my ravenous water,
I cruise in the sour smell of the naked climate,
still dressed in gray and bitter sounds
and a sad crest of abandoned spray.

Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,
lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once,
becalmed in the throat of the fortunate isles
that are white and sweet as cool hips.

In the moist night my garment of kisses trembles
charged to insanity with electric currents,
heroically divided into dreams
and intoxicating roses practicing on me.

Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves,
your parallel body yields to my arms
like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul,
quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.

Poem: Pablo Neruda "IX" from his collection, "Twenty Love Poems" 
Photograph: Tony Rohrbach

this moment / Sonnet

this moment

it's a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great
statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the
great loves,
it's a farce, a farce, a farce,
history and the recording of it,
forget it, forget it.

you must begin all over again.
throw all that out.
all of them out

you are alone with now.

look at your fingernails.
touch your nose.

begin.

the day flings itself upon
you.


Sonnet 

One who speaks of the multifariousness of voices
one through whom the voices speak speaks twice
one through rapt inflections breath on fire
once as metal fathers rising in the blood
the voice becoming wire and things said through it
thinner still so that
one who standing on the outside of a logos looking in
is one who sits within and reaching for the phone
arrives at speech his own by way of voices
he but replicates and theirs ventriloquized in him
are later written down: tundra, reindeer
permafrost that lives beneath the breath
all Spring partly vocable and partly simply cold;
the witness is unspeakable someone dead
who speaks the name a footstep leaves ahead.

Poem: "this moment," Charles Bukowski, from "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire." 1999. 
Poem: "Sonnet," Michael Davidson, from "Post Hoc." 1990. 
Photo: "Vegas Hustle," Tony Rohrbach

XXVI

Infinities away already
are your very slender body
and the tremendous dark of your eyes
where once beyond the laughingness of childhood,
came a breath of jessamine prophetic of summer,
a sudden flutter of yellow butterflies
above dark pools.

Shall I take down my books
and weave from that glance a romance
and build tinsel thrones for you
out of old poets' fancies?

Shall I fashion a temple about you
where to burn out my life like frankincense
till you tower dark behind the sultry veil
huge as Isis?

Or shall I go back to childhood
remembering butterflies in sunny fields
to cower with you when the chilling shadow fleets
across the friendly sun?

Bordeaux

Poem: "XXVI" John Dos Passos from "Winter in Castile" found in "A Pushcart at the Curb" 1922.
Photo: Tony Rohrbach

living for the weekend

walking through weirdtown
two gallons of 2 percent
around the corner from Hawthorne Strip
for some reason I wanted to
scribble that
still walking ten minutes later
and the connection comical
what a pair of jugs
and hearing the crack of a can
beer being opened by a bearded man
then within a powerplay's time
an eerily similar bearded man
imbibing with a bottle in a window
two bearded beer drinkers
what a pair of mugs
the world handed me these silly things
and so I give them back
like trading rugs

Poem: "living for the weekend" Robert Lescatre
Photo: Tony Rohrbach (Rider: Matt Olsen)

pull a string, a puppet moves...

pull a string, a puppet moves...

each man must realize

that it can all disappear very 

quickly:

the cat, the woman, the job

the front tire, 

the bed,  the walls, the 

room; all our necessities

including love-

rest on foundations of sand-

and any given cause, 

no matter how unrelated: 

the death of a boy in Hong Kong

or a blizzard in Omaha...

can serve as your undoing. 

all your chinaware crashing to the 

kitchen floor, your girl will enter

and you'll be standing, drunk, 

in the center of it and she'll ask: 

my god, what's the matter? 

and you'll answer: I don't know, 

I don't know...

Poem: Charles Bukowski, from "Burning in Water Drowning in Flame. Poems 1972-1973"

Photo: Tony Rohrbach