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Birches of the Former Fort McKinley, Great Diamond Island
Birches of the Former Fort McKinley, Great Diamond Island
Standing where soldiers once stood sentry,
Sentinel guardians silently huddle in fraternal embrace
Against a cold wind coming across the Bay,
Doubly-wrapped in white peeling papyrus and snow,
The former unwritten upon,
Stories of seasons’ comings and goings,
Of human follies, of precious conversations
Together, present and knowing;
Silent in their wisdom.
Look About
Look About
Part 1 The Secular
Each generation individually rages against Death’s spectre,
But in the end line up to take the bus,
Like well-behaved school children on their first day,
A little scared, but compliant and orderly.
When the bus leaves, the traces of their presence vanish.
But is this true?
Look around and see the imprint of new patent leather shoes,
Stamped in the dirt by the roadside.
Or a forgotten handkerchief, plaid, lying limp on the ground, unmissed, its utility
Was beyond its puerile owner’s comprehension.
Or the road itself, with perfectly squared up curbs, which speaks to
Other presences, long gone, but while here, on this very spot,
Sweated, swore, and cajoled the wayward asphalt into shape,
Effecting a kind of immortality,
Even as they have long since taken the bus home.
Part 2 The Sacred
Now as for us,
In our own vibrantly humming, whirly-swirly now
In this place, our place, where are our hidden stories?
Perhaps in the dappled play of colored sunlight streaming through ancient stained glass,
the window gratefully gives her color to the passing light,
The light gratefully receives the colors,
and then paints a dancing display on a young mother's
Face, delighting her infant son.
She admires the weighty baptismal font thinking about
the generations of infants, oil, water, stone,
parishioners, priests, and prayer that came together over the past century, on this spot,
….. and she thinks about those yet to come.
Sitting next to her, a newcomer’s eyes gaze upwards at the ceiling beams.
The wooden spars resemble an inverted ship's hull,
And speak to other presences,
Long gone, but while here, on this very spot,
Sweated, swore, and cajoled the wayward wood into shape,
Effecting a kind of immortality,
Even as they too have long since taken the bus home.
Insight
Insight
I am no different than others,
In bounding up against the constraints of the body,
Only more so as I watch, disconnected,
My right hand flapping autonomously,
Looking like a newly-landed fish
Flip-flopping about, iridescent scales shimmering in the foreign sunlight,
Not suited for waterless worlds, writhing to return to the sea.
I yearn to return as well, not to water but to that unthinking,
Seamless coordination in writing my signature.
The broad and fluid looping script was a miracle
Of neuromuscular choreography, unrealized for what it was,
Until now, bounding up against corporeal constraints.
Motoric competence or insight; I prefer the former.
Lost in the desert, one is untroubled by the raging sea.
The Relationship
The Relationship
Our relationship is complex at best,
At worst it’s a dull throbbing ache
That won’t go away,
A nightmare without waking,
But with the solace and curse of insight
That one knows it’s no dream.
You take and take again,
Slowly at first,
Barely perceptible, inexorably
Diminishing,
Stepping me back from a lifetime,
Of learned competencies,
Unraveling, I return to more primordial
Ways of being.
Our relationship is complex,
In fairness you have also
Bestowed great gifts.
Unlocking spiritual doors to patience,
Acceptance, and appreciation of the
Quiet miracles bumping up against me
For years, unrealized.
Like the simple and common
Act of knitting a sweater, using chopsticks
Walking apace, or typing a poem.
Each of these an intricate and balanced,
Dance of neurons and networks,
Sinews, joints, and muscles, coordinated,
Rapid-fire commands, assessment, fine adjustment,
And command again,
Infrastructure and operations.
The effortless and easy gait,
The symmetric and even knit,
The pop-up fly caught by the left fielder,
The words on this page,
Each a miracle, whose finer appreciation come
By way of you.
You are a part of me,
But are not me.
You limit me,
But you do not define me,
For I am resilient and resolute,
Full of temerity, transcendant,
I dance with you in my dreams.
What Can I Say?
What Can I Say?
My words are weak tools,
Crude implements crafted in childhood,
Capable of sculpting only dim apparitions
Of Meaning, catching cannonballs with a butterfly net,
Or herding stray house flies.
What can I say?
Lost to connotation,
Bereft of even a basic precision
To share, just for one crystalline moment,
What bears most weightily upon my soul
And life and death, our lives.
What can I say?
Pray accept these platitudes, my shibboleth.
Beyond the discomforting shortcoming,
Of these words, come to my submerged iceberg,
Solid, unwavering, mighty, blissful blue-white, sparkling
Glimmer; a glimpse, knowingly shared, of unspeakable Love.
What more can I say?
My November
My November
Ninth month, golden sunlight,
Impossible rays throw a
Suffusing effervescence
Over all fortunate
To be in its way
And means, meaning
Perception, inception,
Deception,
December
Lurking.
To December
To December
Scallywag, teaser,
Promises of gentler days,
Upended in the biting cold and gnaw
On bone so raw,
It affirms my painful presence,
At your table, in the world, amidst the fray.
The Window Keep
The Window Keep
Watchful, wistful waiting.
A light breeze carries across
The aroma of sea meeting land;
Organic, ambrosial,
Connecting seeming opposites.
An epiphany,
Like her body’s earths and oceans;
Miasmic, organic unity,
Even as she waits
The soul’s defenestration.
Great Diamond Island, ME
11 March 2020
Touch
Touch
The darkest days descend like a viscous sticky black smoke that
Covers me; rapacious, thorough, inventive in its penetration into the soul, such that I become like it.
Monochrome and homogeneous, dispirited, tired of perception,
A bitter tasting saliva,
Free from sweet possibility,
Biding time, awaiting a future constructed with shards of hollow certainties.
But,
Am I certain that each spin of the planet that marks my time is no miracle,
or the festive roiling gyrations of life there upon,
or the notion of beauty and grace,
or elegantly complex and balanced biomes,
or the delicately trusting grasp of a newborn around my finger?
The tiny hand encloses the finger like a ring, pulsing and warm,
As if it were an embrace of the Divine.
Becoming Grammatical
Becoming Grammatical
Language evolves by mistake,
Oftentimes fortuitous change
That results in a punctilious precision
Or clever invention, when it was
Only an error that caught on.
Unlike sculpture emerging from the polyglot marble,
Unconstrained, released, negotiated becoming,
Words chip off the chisel
Miraculously without direction
Becoming grammatical.
The detritus now treasure,
Former usages disregarded,
Like an ancient statue, decapitated and armless,
In the corner of an unvisited museum,
Having become ungrammatical.
Tokyo
Tokyo
Sad and lonely in Tokyo
Aspiration becomes dust
Desiring meets rebuff
Sleep eludes
The Emperor’s New Clothes
The Emperor’s New Clothes
A gentle epistemological philippic
It all started with dribbled, drooling droplets
Of crazy words spoken by a word machine then
Sent oozing out into the world, an infectious miasma.
Normally words pin us down, like another kind of gravity,
To an accounting of sorts, an anchor to truth;
Vulnerability, presence, connection …. even humanity.
But not the mish-mashed potato-words
That churn from the bullying machine,
Posturing, pretending, deluding, demeaning
Piles of prevarication freed from gravity’s pull,
with a touch of cruelty as its gravy.
Who fooled whom in becoming wizened without becoming wise?
Who didn’t know, that not knowing you don’t know
Condemns you to listless wandering amidst the truth shadows?
Ignoring ignorance makes a wan brilliance of this darkness, the new daylight;
Fake newspeak, false divisions, freedom is slavery, arbeit macht frei.
Nevertheless, we the people, find solace in the power of outrage,
Our redemption in the ways that truth, somehow
Always wheedles out of the darkness,
Bearing hope, clarity, and the insight that
The universe is watching, that
Knowledge is freedom, that
People are precious, that
We are better than this, that
We will arise out of the mire, for
The truth matters, and that
In the end, we, the people, know
The emperor has no clothes,
Not even a face mask.
J. Seibyl, MD
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