Through My Telescope

Through the telescope in my mind,
I believe,
lighting past the horizon in the dark,
out there, in unimaginable vastness,
the cosmos-
with all those exoplanets, the weirdly hot,
so hot, they could melt glass, and rain glass,
so cold, all earthly organisms would freeze,
those in wonky orbits at weird angles to each other,
even many and varied sibling earths.
Through the telescope in my mind,
I am
a time traveler, through the lens on humanity,
I see history often told as the story of wars,
the gathered refuse
of wondrously limited beings,
so capable of constructing prophetic scopes,
deciphering ahead, and back to Big Bang beginnings,
all too often trapped inside dark desires,
inside that same Neanderthal cave.
As I aim my instrument for entering that
vast imagined space-
perhaps in a galaxy far, far away,
yet strangely familiar, as looking out
is looking in,
perhaps around some calmer, red dwarf star,
where there has been enough time, more time than we've
ever known on our young, little blue marble in space,
somewhere over that evolving rainbow, even more than
extraterrestrial intelligence, it's extraterrestrial empathy,
I believe.

---

The Intelligence Bridge

"We call that the Intelligence Bridge,"
our tour guide Petr stops to point,
as he steers us through Prague.
"Such a city of castles and concerts!" I say
and get reprimanded for using "Czechoslovakia."
"It's the Czech Republic now, since '93!" he
turns, smiles generously at my inattentiveness.
"It was built by doctors, writers, teachers,
by the educated arrested for thought crimes,
like wanting to leave the country,
by those who refused to lead a double-think life-
toeing the Communist line in public,
thinking on their own in private,
by those who dared take liberties with restrictions,
who wrote and spoke the bitterness in their mouths,
but as they built, they couldn't escape
their unstoppable dream-freedom. ...
Then they forced them to work in uranium mines!
Notice," he points, "only one set of tracks-
a train can go only one way at once.
You're either free or you're not!"

What does it mean to be free?
I muse on genes you're born with,
family, culture you're born into,
all the givens of experience you never chose,
givens that can click genes on and off,
and in our republic, all those terrified children
wrenched away from their parents, no records,
their deplorable train going only one way.

"What does it mean to be free?" I ask aloud.
Petr takes out his smart phone,
shows me his freedom at his fingertips-
"There," he smiles, "can you see,
on that motorcycle in Austria's grand alps,
where it's so big, there, look how wide,
that dot, there, that's me, can you see?"

Petr's father remembered the Prague Spring,
a river of liberalization rising 7 months in '68,
squelched beneath the heavy Warsaw troops and tanks,
the land gone sodden with meaningless deaths...

Cruelty is such a bewildering wilderness,
where roaming can never be completely free,
for cruelty knows only loss.
I think of those bridge builders, holding on,
unsupported at the extremities, buffeted by winds
to shape a span that would outlast them,
overlooking that swirling gap in human empathy,
but only the dead are completely not free,
for they cannot change,
while imprisonment perceives possibilities,
and cruel taskmasters teach unknowingly
the worth of kindness that spans the whole human country.

---

To My Friend Eileen

I'm sorry Eileen,
wherever you are, here
you were, always it seemed
in my after-school playroom,
my next-door girlfriend,
heads taller, feet wider, years younger,
snagged, gagged, giggling
in our many melodramatic thickets,
me mostly spellcaster,
you mostly spellbound.

I'm sorry Eileen,
wherever you are, here
you are again, doorbell,
"Oh, it's only you."
"That's no way to greet someone,"
my dad admonished,
and I set the terms, two sheets,
a thin pencil for you,
the fat black crayon for me,
the first to fill a page would win,
"on your mark," I was set
to congratulate myself,
but facts refract time's different hues,
like seeing sunset reds later.

I'm sorry Eileen,
wherever you are, hear
your mother Tillie yelling,
"Look what you did to her!"
your nose bleeding onto my page
for filching my formidable crayon,
your uncrying silence dripping red
tracks through our hallway,
history unrecorded to your door.

Wherever you are, "Oh,
it's only you," hear Tillie
yelling at our elation's oversudsing
whole families of cloth dolls
in the sink, spritzing ourselves silly,
hear ourselves yelling up
to your courtyard window,
"Tillie, throw down a ball, a fan,
ice-cream money, tissues for Eileen's nose."

"Oh, it's only you."
I'm sorry Eileen, hear
Tillie yelling, "Wherever is she?
Why did you leave her waiting
to walk home with you from school?"
"When is Eileen coming home?"
I missed you every summer in the country,
bored on the stoop, I waited...,
"Oh, it's only you" after you returned.

I'm sorry Eileen,
wherever you are, here I am
witness to my own misgivings, ungivings,
but also to our blazing joys,
our sordid scrapes with knees, parents, witches,
in our thickets, long overgrown,
our ice-cream cone passing like a kiss.
Remodeling

It is rising upon the rooftop
Now become the new floor
A more private room to think in
To rearrange the same old stuff
On more capacious shelving
More space to hang up one's triumphs
And put in their places dreaded defeats
All worked on reinforced skeletal walls
Windows' whole new vista to see through
To look out upon the street of neighbors
Reframing their own horizons
Building new baby rooms
Walking is remodeling
Rethinking the central colors
The clashes and what will cohere
So everywhere lived looks brand new

---

Doing a Jigsaw Puzzle Together

What is this appeal of irregular pieces?-
an eye of the loon? or a luminous leaf
on a branch backlit by cabin light?
or does it fit into the lake's freestyle strokes
as water sees into the sky's other side?
We walk around our table again,
reappraising what's in hand,
trying out each other's angles.
Poised on alertness's edge, at no time at all,
we sort out the frame first, wonder,
how did all these hours pass?
as double straight-backs shape corners
to hold these many variables as one whole,
together, oh the gratifying pleasure
of working out a preformed picture,
the sliding into a shared tradition's
well-wrought ease, as our bodies' gliding
into each other's comfy, cozy crevices,
on the supportive frame of our bed.