possession

on mt elliot and kerchival streets.

little known Americans, some with their pants sagging below

their hips like Hula dancers decades ago,

all week we stink helpless and immortal against a sky, dimming 

now, an ascription of human

traits to inanimate nature, gray and blowing; the belly of

a dead whale caught in some forgotten net, but still

beautifully resembling a large portrait of something once excellent.

Father showed me the side of him that wants the mouse to live holy

and unharmed in the parish but drives the demons of hunger

from humankind with supernatural madness. Kills the stink

with bundles of  quasi African incense and Frebreeze/

that somehow holiness means your hatreds,

unlike spirit-gum, holds the eyebrows down until you take them dancing,

rename them like the women of Christ. That the simple offerings

of sandwiches and Kool-Aid can sooth the burn of two decades without

ever once saying "Daddy" in trust. I dream, out-loud, that if they could

just rest for once like Whitman did, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom"d"

in the swamp of secluded recesses,

anywhere, in the soft wash of a drooping star. One called himself

a poet because he made words of his belief rhyme, which I guess is what

a pure poet does anyway but to imagine a wall or a window bearing a figure in relief,

then write it out before it finds some moral escape,

that if each time a stranger drew you near, he left you separate and struggling

for the ornaments of nightfall.

O,

each incessant muttering, each loose cigarette, each dream of a mortal Gorgon

slain when decapitated by Perseus, is a dream enraged with hope.

I have heard of such conspicuous intrepidity at great risk of life in action

with an unknown enemy. One side of me, the side that sides with

the downtrodden or homeless, the side that sits with his knees touching civilization

and misery like Gandi did before he grew old as dirt;

listens like an ode to a drawing done with a black magic marker. Dana, write one

thousand times that you care and care deeply. Start, if you can, at Gods beginning.

There is no other side.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

there is something like losing hope, similar to those beggars in the street with nowhere to go but up---yet we want to start over from the beginning...and care again....

the way the world is today...it gets harder to have hope...we just feel discouragement...

we have two sides...the hopeful and the hopeless...

you show those two sides here so well in the juxtaposition of words you use.

always such deep writes.

jacob

[Tree]

It bothers me when I somehow let a poem like this slip through my reading. This piece is pregnant with imagery, and it took several readings for me to extract the vivid colors and its profound, meanings. I thought the structure of the write aided me, each stanza a rung of truth leading to the top of Dana's metaphorical ladder, meaning, the ending. Where those two final stanzas Shook me.


Your mind is rich with imagination.


Diego

[Marie Anzalone]

I am reminded of a line in Janet Fitch's "White Oleander," where she writes of her character seeing homeless men play cards on the street, and wonders of the importance of their actions and their lives in the great scheme of things. Then she switches to artists, and says, [paraphrased] "Rembrandt would have studied and painted them. VanGogh would have painted himself among them."

You, my friend, see through the eyes and heart of a VanGogh.

[W.k.kortas]

Gorgons and Febreeze, Whitman and Kool-Aid. Perhaps the "pure poet" is somehow beholden to ensure that "he made words of his belief rhyme", but I suspect that notion has been belied here. I would guess that this piece does, in the final analysis, center itself about the question "What is the proper use, the proper purpose of poetry?" I would, for my ownself, bring the questioner here (or to any number of places elsewhere in the run of your work) and say simply "This."

[h d e rushin]

finally got my internet connection restored and a better computer...thanks all....dana