BLIND CHILD AT THE PIANO
BRINGING UP FATHER
DIANA AND I DINE AT THE SEAFARER
GRANDFATHER TO GRANDDAUGHTER LEAVING
HONEST ABE IN WASHINGTON
HOW THE GIVER GETS
MEMORIAL for Laura
OF GRANDFATHERS AND STONES
OLD SHOES
REQUIEM FOR ANNE FRANK
RESURRECTION
SONG OF PROMETHEUS
SORTING LAUNDRY
HOMAGE TO THE TATTOOED MAN
...saith the preacher,
vanity
of
vanities,
all is vanity.
The message of his beauty
spread across the desert
like a purple tide of sand verbena
following a rain,
and the quivering air resounded
with a chorus of hosannas,
as a multitude of hopeful blind
gave praise unto his nameless name.
A raven spread a cape of night
across the gothic sky, while shrieking
invocations to the celebrants
of Ego who followed down
his shadowed path into
the arid kingdom
of the spurious Golgatha
to enshrine the tattooed man..
And they came:
Turks with jeweled scimitars,
gypsies draped in rainbows,
midgets tall in top hats,
dusky nymphs with painted breasts
and powder on their thighs,
knights in burnished armor...
and all about them butterflies,
great golden swarms of butterflies
The morning sunshine threw a mat
of shade beneath the preacher,
while it warmed his
tawny body and traced
his sacred symbols
with its luminescent fingers,
anointing with a golden light
his tattooed crown of thorns.
The pilgrims found him naked at the
crossroad where his majesty of presence
and the symbols of his priesthood,
etched in indigo and black,
set them trembling
before him as they kissed
his tattooed back.
The supplicants proclaimed
this miracle of line and life
a hallowed simulacrum.
They groveled in his shadow
and beseeched his benediction,
a grant of fame or treasure,
some mystic act of healing,
immunity from feeling,
a piece beyond all measure.
But he offered only silence,
a cruel offensive silence.
Then the shadow of the mountain
erased the precious icons
and the Queen of Night embraced
him, while the angry congregation
unleashed its mounting fury
in mindless bloody violence
upon the tattooed man
©
Alvin
M.
Laster
top
THE DINNER PARTY
In this gay gathering of the select,
the wealthy and enlightened set
are seated like a jeweled ring
around a festive centerpiece.
They speak about the new French frocks,
and why Clarissa needs a shrink,
the intricacies of put-and-call,
the vagaries of the market-place,
and they recall the costly fall
of all their trusted blue chip stocks.
The sounds of laughter rise and lower
like crystal goblets at a champagne toast;
and in this grand display of opulence
they talk of Mozart, Munch, and Proust,
while gossip searches for an eager
ear,
and ego speaks to ego, stroke
for measured stroke, across a sheer
abyss of mutual indifference.
They speak of life in
Camelot,
and how the welfare state
cannot
afford to tend the misbegot.
And now, the escalopes de veau
is served upon the Rosenthal,
and creamy hollandaise is flowed
across a bright green row
of fat asperges. The diners wait
until the customary ritual
of praise is lavished on the white Bordeaux,
then pinkies perk in unison, and all
the tight-lipped mouths begin to masticate.
After the mousse and Courvoisier,
they play the games of dropping names,
what's hot, what's not, a play review.
And then a line or two of white
delight goes up a straw, and once again,
the players in this bleak soirée
put their timid fears to flight
and gain a state of grace anew.
They say that life is
bittersweet
with all those homeless on
the street,
and "Oh my dear, the price
of meat..."
The great glass clock strikes one
to speed the lingering departure
from the pillared hall.
Here and there a dull cliché,
a stifled yawn, a hackneyed pun,
and then the paneled door
is shut against the honest night, and all
the white Mercedes speed away.
The master pours another comforter
of scotch, staggers to his room
and gives himself to drunken
sleep across the quilted spread.
The butler escorts Madam
to her chambers, undresses her,
serves a lusty last dessert,
then leaves her weeping in her bed.
When face to face, betrayed,
besot,
the beggars dance a grim
gavotte,
and never speak of Camelot.
REMEMBERING
SISYPHUS
for Albert Camus
It was summer in Algiers, dear Albert,
and the eternal chariot rode the blue dome like
doomed Africa on a restless sea. The fragances
of almond and carob, the long brown legs of
women on the beach, cloudshade flitting like
mothwings on the sand-- even such enchantments
failed to spell the mind from the tragedy and
triumph of the stone. Remember?
I am on a strand in Provincetown, not Oran,
though the same torch flickers as a cloud moves by,
and the sea sings the same old rondo in
the language of the moon. But the bright sand
undulates beneath too many bodies on this
littered edge of the sea where I am worming
my way between torsos, blankets, and
boomboxes toward the cooling waters
to immerse my toes in that vast stew
of ocean life with its muck of now and then.
You were so right, Albert. If life were not
absurd, would all these weary mammals lie
about like schools of suicidal porpoises
stranded on a burning beach? Would I have
joined the weekend caravan through
labyrinth and gridlock to congregate with other
babbling strangers, here where ebb and flow of
promise and desire repeat uncertain rhythms
compound anxiety, and breed illusion?
Tomorrow is Monday come around again, Albert,
and the stone is restless. I will bend my
back and face it, dig my toes into the ancient earth
from which Prometheus molded me
and all my fathers, and I will prepare
to shoulder my life another time.
© Alvin M. Laster
BABY
IN BUFF
She plops down on her dimpled sit-upon
and cries
dry
tears,
until she sees a shadow dancing by.
Then
up
she comes
to totter on uncertain pegs of pudge
across
the room.
Two rosy peach halves bounce along
one up,
one
down,
in comic, syncopated invitation
to pinch,
to pat,
perhaps to touch once more the innocence
we lost
too
soon.
©Alvin M. Laster
BALLET IN
A TIN CAN
I open the tin with a slotted key,
rolling up the curtain
to an overture of appetite
and I see the silver-clad Rockettes,
lines of torsos frozen in formation,
waiting for the music to begin,
as if some Pompeian disaster kissed them
and held them in time.
I think of the Portuguese children
and the chap-handed women
humped over the scarred wood table
with its litter of fanned fins
and guillotined heads with their
golden eyes glassy and staring.
I see a red-fingered ballet
dancing the time-set choreography
of the workplace, laying the bodies
to rest in those miniature metal coffins,
alternating cadavers, head to toe
in a numbing routine,
until death do them part
and night comes on, dropping
its own dark keyless curtain
upon the nameless, faceless chorus.
©Alvin
M.
Laster
VISIT TO THE NETHER WORLD
The night wind rose to roil the water and
set the boat to rise and fall. So cold
it was, it chilled my bones and chafed my face,
while at the stern, the back-bent boatman
groaned the rhythm of his pace.
I dipped my fingers in the moving stream,
where steaming water issued fetid
mists that stung my nose and draped
the shore where ghostly trees,
like black-boned skeletons arose.
Too soon, we reached the destined shore,
where blazing fires illumined shades of
squandered years, ego and desire,
pretensions of a Theseus grown old,
diminished, witless and unloved.
And there, emerging from the overgrowth
of tangled brush that claimed the place,
a shape emerged, a form I thought
I knew from years and trials before.
The apparition wore the younger face
I wore, when dawn broke red, and I
knew spring, and partridge berries
decked the forest floor. My arms held high,
extended for embrace, I saw
the ghost reach out to me and sigh.
It waved me back and disappeared.
I bade the ferryman pole me back
to where life’s flaming autumn reigns,
that I may sing my days among the quick,
Till time release me from its chains.
©
Alvin
M.
Laster
SURFING THE INTERNET
Eyes focus on the back-lit screen,
Portal to the internet,
I hit the keyboard keys to get
Phosphor shamans to convene.
They offer insubstantial pages,
Graphics, graphs and information,
Histories of every nation,
All the wisdom of the ages:
How to run a dairy farm,
How to get from here to there,
And should a daring techie dare,
How to make an atom bomb.
Name a subject if you please,
Nasty queries, not forbidden,
Antisocial arts are hidden
In the Net’s interstices.
How the interact seduces!
Never lets attention stray,
How it steals your time away,
Lures you to its many uses.
If for porno, you are lusting,
Erotic sites are dime a dozen,
Just be surreptitious, cousin,
Nice folks find those screens disgusting.
I’ve learned some wisdom from my wife,
(an enemy of AOL)
“Reading books can sure be swell,
So dump the Net and Get A Life!”
© Alvin M. Laster
BRINGING UP FATHER
Last night I saw Father rub his fists
into the hollows of his eyes, a sign
that his day had been too long,
and that he had had enough of waking.
I took him in my arms, gave him
his pacifier, carried him to my crib,
and there I sang him to sleep.
He seemed so peaceful, dreaming
my dreams for me, living my life for me,
becoming my future with each sighing breath;
now and then waking with a start,
as if threatened by some unknown.
I sang him folk songs of the old country
with a touch of Beiderbeck and Coltrane.
Watching him sleep, I was suddenly
overcome by his humanity, his trust.
I wanted to pick him up and hold him,
instead, I punished him for being late
for dinner, for using foul language,
for misunderstandings. When he was good,
I let Father play with my toys, ride my bike,
wear my Tom Mix signal ring. I wanted
to hold him captive in my room; let him
smoke my pipe, and learn life through me.
I scolded him for turning away, for not being me.
He grew into manhood, wearing my old clothes,
wanting everything I had, walking with the same
fast pace, loving the same woman that I loved
as a boy; jealous of the woman I loved
as a man. I resented his being too reliable,
too resolute. I shamed him for disparaging God
and for his frequent declarations of disapproval.
Father did not live up to expectations, nor did I.
Yet, let him who harms this man, this spirit,
be forever consigned to perdition.
At the end, he wrinkled my face and assigned
me to atrophy. Then he was gone...
without a proper goodbye, a proper blessing,
and without asking my permission.
© Alvin M. Laster
It has to be the right stone.
Flat is better... more surface against
the water, so it might belly into bounce.
It must be polished by the flow
of tide and time; balanced, and with trim
leading edges, so it might skip and fly.
This morning, rolling back my years,
I search the lacy border of sea and sand,
until I find a proper stone among the
tide’s debris of weeds and broken shells.
I fondle it, bounce it in my palm to feel
the heft of it. This one is good.
I crook my fingers around its edges.
I get the angle right, draw back my arm
and let it sail into my green years.
The stone arcs and levels, flashes in
the sunlight, before it dips to kiss
the sea, then lifts into flight again.
Even in my skip-stone childhood,
I sensed that my life would have
to be like that... like the right stone,
having a keen edge, a proper shape
and proper balance, if I were
to skip and fly and skip again
to clear the swelling tide
and reach that vague horizon,
where sunstream lights the sky.
© Alvin M. Laster
WORDS
Born out of silence,
we enter a world of sounds
with only a cry in our throats,
mind/word/lips, a dark tunnel,
where language
grows.
Words...
We are filled with them...
articulate syllables,
struggling to convey
meaning, to emerge
like
butterfly
from chrysalis:
"Mama",
"Home"
"Earth",
"Universe".
Listen,
how they fill the hush
like blizzards
of snowflakes.
Words...
symbols that rub against
each other and
catch fire:
warmth
and light for the mind,
music
for the ear,
terror
for
the
soul,
honey
for
the
heart:
"Grace",
"Melody",
"Love".
We are ready, now.
Let
us "SPEAK".
© Alvin M. Laster
ARABESQUE
See how that chain of twining blossoms
draws a border about the mythic scene
featured in this medieval tapestry?
We call those figures "arabesques".
They serve, like grace notes in a
Schumann rondo, to ornament a theme in art.
So it is, when scarlet berries cluster
on the snowy vine or when wisteria adds
its scent to scent of lilac in the air.
So it is when peacocks fan their hundred
eyes or when my lover walks in solitary
elegance across a field of sunlit flowers.
© Alvin M. Laster
COUNTING TIME
Returning from an evening stroll, I peer
into the study window to see reflections
of the bright geometries of evening
imposed upon the features of a dimlit room.
How strange to find Orion spread across
the open sheets upon a music stand.
The night lights stream across the sky
like regiments of fireflies, winking...
lights on, lights off in time, while Pisces
chases Pegasus and winter chases fall;
and I recall my own Polaris of the music
room, silver flute to lips, fingers flying.
Body-bound to the ordered moon, yet
seeking orbits of her own, she turned
against the constancy of lights-on-lights-off
worlds and played her strange tunes
while counting maverick time
with tapping toe:
and one, and three, and two....
The basic order is inviolate. The tides
in ebb and flow, the sun in rise and set,
the earth in frost and flower,
counting time... all dying and reborn,
chasing and chased in turn.
But the beat that keeps us moving
through this spinning concert hall
of dawn to dusk is ever changing.
Each season brings us galaxies
of tapping sprites who search beyond
the hackneyed harmonies in search
of unsung songs... songs unfixed,
unknown to place and mind...
counting time:
and one, and three, and two.
© Alvin M. Laster
SNOWFALL
The snowfall is bleaching
the north meadow,
laying a whisper of white
over furrows and fenceposts,
while transforming bare bones
of treetops into intricate
patterns of lace.
Indolent winter advances
with a white hush,
erasing the signs
of her seasonal poverty
as some men hide
their indigence of character
beneath a mantel
of elegant deception.
She dazzles us with her crystal
rivers and plumed cedars,
while parading her brittle
finery like a lady of the night,
until time wears her down
and a new warming sun
reveals again the green-singing
innocence of Eden.
© Alvin M. Laster
KNEADING LOAVES
On Friday afternoons, Mother baked bread.
Too young for school, I would
kneel on a high stool in the kitchen
with my chin on the table,
leveling my eyes to the white oak
breadboard to witness the
sufferance of the wheat.
To the pull and snap of the kneading,
dark voids lifted from the
living nest and opened small
bird-like mouths that peeped their
sour-sweet messages of fermentation,
the love song of the yeast.
The dough would rise to stroke her palms,
nuzzle knuckles, and lick the satin
flour from her finger folds,
while the happy house
hummed the dream of bread.
Today is Friday, and I am kneading loaves,
my own child watching at my side,
and I am thinking how
repetition can make the heart whole,
just as fairytales told over and over
can pull the familiar around
a small child, like a feather
comforter, to herald safe sleep.
Now the dough springs under my
fingers. Small airy universes
grow and pop to the rhythm of push
and pull, bubbles birthing bubbles,
generation birthing generation,
each speaking to the next, so that
if I bend close enough and listen,
I can hear them whispering:
"Tomorrow. Tomorrow."
© Alvin M. Laster
MEMORIAL
for Laura
This morning on my early walk along
the edge of the wood, a small bird swept
across my path, and lit upon a tree.
Suddenly the whole forest was filled
with one bluebird, its back a continuity
of sky, a red rose blooming upon its
winter breast. Then it was gone like a
season past, the wood still echoing its being.
I am walking now on the edge of evening.
Long shadows wave out of trees, filtering
rose light out of the tumbling sun,
but I can yet see the wondrous bird
in the red breasts of clouds
and the outspreading wings of the sky.
So it is with the passings of singular things,
bluebirds, friends, parents, children.
So it is when the warm hand cools
and falls away, leaving its familiar feel,
like a remembered bluebird, filling
the infinite green forests of time.
Dad
© Alvin M. Laster
MIDAS
The days grow short. The autumn sun hangs low
upon a freckled sky, and chill, still air
assaults the vine. But see how sunset’s glow
has dusted gold and russet everywhere;
how on the crowning featherfringe of hills,
the crimson maples ornament the blue;
and how, down falling slopes, vermillion spills
like wine, puddling around cedar, pine and yew.
Fat moles have burrowed deep beneath the mold,
while hoarding squirrels scamper through the brush,
aware the flaming harvest will turn cold
beneath the aging season’s Midas touch.
And O, how fierce my autumn flames in me;
How dear, how warm! How near the frost must be.
© Alvin M. Laster
SONG OF PROMETHEUS
I took you on a pilgrimage to darkness
into the oozing cave of all beginnings,
where god shadows, torn from elemental
firelight, danced and postured,
giant and menacing, upon the limestone
walls, and told you not to fear.
Kit in mouth, I carried you into the secret halls
of alchemy to smell the burning brimstone
and taste the acrid distillate; to find that dreams
outlive the dreamer, that fools outnumber
wise men, and gold is colder than its starlight glitter.
You grew, and side by side, we hacked
the briars, cleared the undergrowth along
the mountain trail, where air is thin
and heady, where eagles hold dominion,
and sky seems just another leap away.
I told you to tread carefully and look
but briefly at the sun.
Today, I give you fire. See how it lights
the night, warms your flesh, eats the forest?
It is a gift of love, garnered from the heart
of lightning. It is the eagle that waits for me
on a mountain crag. It is the adversary
that waits for you upon the final battlefield.
© Alvin M. Laster
ARRANGING FLOWERS
for
Hannah
Schooled in needlepoint
and cookery,
your fingers flit like
so many butterflies
among the cut flowers
you are rearranging
from an aging bouquet.
You remove the tired daffodils,
cut the stems of keepers,
and face remaining blossoms,
lily, lilac, baby’s breath,
so they might brighten
every aspect of the room.
I herewith pay obeisance
to you, great arranger,
your mind flitting like
so many butterflies
among the details of our lives,
discarding tired cares,
sending children off
to blossom in their
own bouquets, setting
us to keep awhile,
fragile as your
favorite eggshell vase,
yet flaunting
our still-bright colors
in the late afternoon
of our lives.
© Alvin M. Laster
MUSHROOMS
Whispering secrets to the mouldered
Earth, these harbingers of forest thinnings
Elevate their broad sombreros.
Deep within the flesh enfolded,
Lie the seeds of new beginnings
Following tomorrow's snows.
In the shadowed morning light
Up pops another parasol
To cast its spores with indiscretion,
Each a woodland acolyte
Responding to an ancient call,
The sacrament of resurrection.
© Alvin M. Laster
NIGHT SKY
The night is splattered with cold fire,
burnt offerings on a velvet spread.
There flies Pegasus, there Pisces and
here Orion, mighty hunter of the night.
Seeing so grand an evening lightshow
I pause to count my personal stars, those bright
acquirements that lit my way throughout
the long/short season of my wandering.
How could I have known, throughout
my sun-filled days, that when
the light grew dim, such great
and many mysteries would yield their
precious secrets to my knowing?
Now, the hour of the owl come ‘round,
the evening star illuminates the road
behind me, disclosing all the
wisdom and the folly,
so I can see at last
why I have been
where I have been.
© Alvin M. Laster
ORACLE
Take
your question
to the highest mountain,
the promontory where
the world reveals itself
in ragged pieces
through the mists of morning.
Find
the graybeard
who has seen beginnings
and watched a hundred
thousand sunsets kindle fire
in the western skies.
Ask him to set you
on the golden way to wisdom,
the passage to nirvana.
He will
talk to you
of oceans and acorns,
he will sing the songs
of raindrops on a green canopy,
remind you in wind-whispers
that Socrates found it
in the hemlock,
the priest
in an icon, the cripple in his crook,
the lover in an embrace,
and you , dear pilgrim, here...
here upon this promontory,
where the world
reveals itself anew,
piece by splendid piece,
through the mists of morning.
© Alvin M. Laster
Said Mrs. Redwing Blackbird:
"Look at them!
Hinged heads!
Vulture appetites!
Why do I bother, anyway?
Their father calls them tyrants,
and for the most part
shuts his hearing to their shrieks.
"First brood.
How could I have known
while I sat there, imperturbable
upon the marble clutch,
(chirp about boring!)
dreaming of warming
and preening the little downy dears,
and fancying their first
hesitant fits of flight,
that such scrawny starts
of life could be
so unrelentingly demanding?
"Grateful? Don't bet your
last sunflower seed on it.
Today, the moment dawn lifted
its bloodshot eye
above the ruffled treetops,
I started chewing worms to stuff
into each waiting craw,
and even as I stopped to catch my breath,
they wailed in unison for more.
"The sun and I, exhausted from
our grueling nurture,
have had enough.
At last, our petulant charges sated,
we glide in red-eyed grace to rest.
But now, as in my sheltering wings
I fold the sleeping demons of the nest,
heartbeat to tremulous heartbeat,
I think their father overstated.
"Sweet, sweet-sweet-sweet
t-r-r-r-r-r-ouble."
© Alvin M. Laster
SECOND BLOOM
Some years the lilacs bloom
a second time before the summer ends.
Aunt Emma said it only happens
when the sun rubs its ruby back
against September before wandering
off to greener places.
On one of those air-dead August
afternoons, when the heat of day
licks at underarms to leave them
moist and musky, I watched
Aunt Emma dozing, smiling
in the wicker rocker, reviving
last night's luscious dream,
stretching her pleasure longer
than the porch's creaky planks.
The boy of me had marked
Aunt Emma old, had never seen
the wash of gold upon her shoulders,
the swains ogling her swan neck,
Uncle Charlie chasing her among
the apple trees, before he
wandered like September's sun
off to greener places.
When I grew older, Mama
told the man of me that Emma
had an Indian summer.
He was a milkweed tuft riding
a breeze, a tinker passing through,
looking too much like a younger
Uncle Charlie for her to let him pass.
She loosed her hair and held him.
Autumn Emma danced in
swirling chiffon and tasted
lip ambrosia once again.
Some years the lilacs bloom
again at summer's end.
DIFFERENT
There were about eight of them
stretched out upon a silent
talking-wire
looking from far away
like a line of asterisks
against a pale blue page.
Birds. Black birds,
tails where tails and
heads where heads should be,
all ruler-spaced a wing away,
except that one, looking at
another horizon and putting
a wider cushion of indifference
against the flock.
A train of ants, flowing
like one-way traffic,
task-set and single minded,
will sweep a rock-bed
free of sand to build
a fragile mountain.
But there's that renegade
again, finding an errant path
to another place to start
another mountain.
What is it sets a mind
perverse? Rears the rogue?
Sends the monk to granite silence?
What profit can it bring
to sing the marching
song off key?
None can say what
motivates the errant bird,
the maverick ant, the monk, the rogue;
and none can know what impulse
leads a man to don the thorny crown
of principle and urges him
to drag his destiny
to Calvary.
© Alvin M. Laster
THE MEETING
Silent and insubstantial as the passage
of time, I enter the small room.
A veil of dust, patina of neglect,
has settled upon the cluttered furnishings.
The scent of age hangs like
a shroud around the place.
I speak softly. "I am here."
The silent man, gunnysack of bones,
sits slumped upon a straight-backed chair,
wrapped in darkness, transfixed before
the electronic glare of Metromedia TV.
Encased within a silent block
of sound, he hears no more of what
I say, than of the yapping huckster-box
that prattles lunacies between
the pitches for commodities he can
not use or comprehend. I look
into his pouched unseeing eyes,
imprinted with twin replicas of light.
"I think you know me, now. I visited
your home on several occasions in years past.
Come. Let me take your hand
in mine and I will comfort you."
He sees me now, draws back into the
creaking chair. His furrowed face
reflects his grave uncertainty... perhaps,
a lack of recognition. I speak again.
"I will take you to your mother's house,
where a hammock, made of string,
still hangs upon the broad-planked porch.
We will walk the pine-smelling, woodland
trail, you dreamed last night, so soft with
moss and partridge-berry underfoot.
"There you will see your love again
and feel the cool velvet of her inner thigh.
You will hear your sister's liquid laughter
and the spring-cold life-renewing brook."
The old man?s fragile angles round.
He exhales the essence of his life and shuts
his eyes against the luminescent screen.
He knows me, now. He rises to embrace me.
© Alvin M. Laster
LOOKING AT FACES
You guide my hand to the domed
stadium that has risen where
your slim waist used to be.
I feel kick-off and somersault.
I observe momentary angles
and sudden bulges on the parchment
of your tight drum with its
outsy navel, protruding
like a cauliflower ear.
The wonder of it provokes
an urgency. I begin looking at faces:
yours, with its flaring nostrils
and lips puffing to a pout
during these last prenatal days;
mine looking back at me
from the shaving mirror,
oversized nose, crow's feet,
the soft chin lacking determination.
I resurrect the family
album to peruse the faces in
the fading sepia photos,
cracked likenesses, curling
off the black-as-mourning pages:
Aunt Margaret, Uncle Teddy,
your parents with their
23 Skidoo fashions and
their Catskill Mountain smiles.
You are sleeping now, and the moon,
shining through the curtains,
lights a face I know better
than my own. You are still;
but the little drummer is not.
He/she is doing the genetic shuffle...
juggling a gene here, a chromosome
there, within the ageless double helix,
that threads the past and present
to the hungry future.
While you sleep,
the miracle of the night
is stamping its hallmark
upon the old-new countenance
that waits to claim our affection.
And she/he will manifest
every family face we have
ever known and loved.
© Alvin M. Laster
READING THE WALL
Advancing upon the soaring wall, with
long-practiced stealth, I enter the dark jungle
of names: Aaron, Abbendilio, Abernathy....
My pink-cushioned fingers reach out to
reverence sharp-edged letters on a polished face:
Booker, Bouchard, Bouley, Clark....
And I think about names... how the primitives
held them secret, so that no one could steal them,
for to lose one's name, was to lose one's soul.
A 'copter chugs the air above. My skin
tightens. Blood leaps. Reflex trips me
to my knees: Huang, Jones, Kadish, Long...
I crawl into the shadow of the stone, and
find a name I knew, one that wore a bloody face,
Malachik, Charlie Company, a name stolen at Danang.
But where are the names in black pajamas, the
cowering women and children of the flaming huts?
Parks, Reynolds, Sanchez, Turner...
And where is my name... the one I am sobbing against
the wall? Can a soul have been stolen without
the name? Vitale, Wilcox, Wazambo, YAHWEH.
© Alvin M. Laster
Winner: Winchell Award
HOW THE GIVER GETS
Borne on a breeze, the sweet message of scent,
whispers its offering to the bee.
Singing its buzz-song of joy, the bold intruder
enters the long tunnel of the daylily.
There it gathers sweet nectar, while
the blossom bathes it in the gene pool
of its tomorrows, getting as it gives.
So it is with lovers,
each holding the other?s
heart in thrall, one body
welcoming the other,
in a ritual of mutual offering...
release and immortality.
It is the way of the world:
the beggar and the alms giver,
the deer and the meadow,
the earthworm and the sod,
the egret and the ox,
the poet and the muse...
getters and givers, all.
© Alvin M. Laster
KENNY AT THE BAT
Last night I had this time-warp dream,
Ken, that you were four feet tall in your
Little League uniform, playing
center field for Najarian?s Market,
with the score 13 to 12 in the
fourth inning, after a medley
of errors on both sides.
You know how it was.
When you came to the plate,
I stood up in the stands,
expectant father, and shouted:
"Look 'em over, Ken,"
and "Out of the Park!"
When you connected, the ball barely
rolled toward the mound,
and the throw to first
was over the baseman?s head.
You held up at second, both feet
on the bag, having grown at least
a foot taller along the way.
Seeing you there in your small triumph,
I prayed that your life would be
a parade of such small miracles;
that every curve life sends your way
would find you waiting, bat at the ready,
that your feet would be sure and fleet,
and that the throw at home would find
you standing on the plate, your team in
the lead, and the game in your pocket.
© Alvin M. Laster
PAVAN FOR A GODDESS GONE
Hear this pavan for a goddess gone,
who danced with her devils, Desire and Charm,
With pouting lips and lithesome shape
she could fill the masculine heart with lust,
while hidden inside her, a castaway child
cowered and cried for a satiable love,
cried for the love that would still her fears
and hasten her demons to flight.
Come, dance to the song of the castaway child,
dressed in her celluloid goddess gown,
with a push-up bra, and a shattered
id and a vial of sleep in her beaded purse.
Step lightly around the ego-shards,
they are sharper, far, than broken glass,
and the wounds they inflict can cleave
the heart and bleed sensation dry.
This is the end of that sad pavan,
a slab of cold flesh with the fire gone.
Still is the music, and still the child.
Gone is the hunger for a satiable love,
a love like the loves of the silver screen,
since a cry for attention died in the throat
of a castaway child named Norma Jean.
© Alvin M. Laster
top
NIGHT
The sun staged a last gaudy
light show against the sky,
and Night glided in
like a raven to pluck the eye
of the mountain cyclops.
Beneath the moonglow
and the nightsong,
outside of sleep and serenity,
twin beacons of green
search and glide.
It is the time of hunt and hide,
stalk and stealth.
The bobcat tracks the hare,
the snake forsakes rock for rodent,
the owl squeezes the last squeak
out of the mouse.
Only the season of the sun is changed,
as life feeds on life,
feeds on life,
feeds on life,
at night as in day,
on earth as in ocean,
forever and ever.
Amen
© Alvin M. Laster
Bull of a man!
I looked upon your strength with awe...
hulking chest with geographic veins,
cobbled muscle for a back,
great biceps, sinewed arms that tossed
me like a weightless cloud
astride your airplane shoulders.
Mercurial strider!
Sidewalks flowed like rivers beneath
your hurrying feet, while I, on colt legs,
raced breathlessly to keep apace
abetted by your handpull jerks
across the high, intrusive curbs
down byways of segmented slates.
Competent mender!
you renewed all fractured baubles,
broken toys, and wounded pride
with patient care and time-honed skill,
with wire, glue and candy treats
conjured from a gray tin box of everything
except an antidote for time.
Helpless stranger!
Those trembling hands have lost their grasp,
your stride has slowed to halting gate,
faint memory cannot locate
the gray tin box, the lost gray days,
while here I stand in rage and grief
before this fading apparition.
© Alvin M. Laster
Published in Arabesques Trumpets and Grace Notes.
Northwoods Press
Old Mose could dribble a ball across
a hardwood floor like a dancer
doin' pirouettes 'round a bouncin' bubble.
Whoosh, he could find the target
from a mile off, eyes closed, back to hoop,
hook shot sailing up on the screamin'
sound, GOOOOO MOSES !
Ole boy spreads his wings,
blacker-than-night crow, slick feathers
gleamin' an' runnin' sweat under
the hot lights, risin' on thermals, layin'
that ole egg clean in the nest, him
hangin' there 'gainst gravity.
OOOH OOOH! GO DOWN, MOSE!
Then sailin' down court, slippery, like
them words in Psych 101, too many
letters, meanings stranger than
the dude jazzin' his Mom t' other side
the shabby room, a small boy cryin'
waters of the Nile into a torn pillow.
Ole Mose could rack up markers
like an auctioneer at an eviction sale,
bleachers shoutin' the tally,
numbers ridin' the rim of his mind
like sines an' cosines in trig,
screams hurtlin' from tenament rooftops,
sirens waking up the dark streets,
squeezin' the pain outa his head.
Mose be a Nam copter fueled on a snort,
hoverin' forever above fuzzy faces
at a Sunday church service,
the whole congregation singin'
GO DOWN MOSES, him tangled
in the stranglin' net. Whooosh.
Poor Mose. Ain't no promised land
fer you, man. God's truth.
Ain't no promised land.
© Alvin M. Laster
REQUIEM FOR ANNE FRANK
As I walk past the house at Prinsengracht 263,
I glance up at a dark window and see your eyes.
You are looking with longing at the children
rolling hoops in the
street.
It is the Sabbath. Earlier your mother had spent
a small eternity brushing your hair. You seemed
patient enough, but then time was all
you had. Time and words.
Time is all there is for all of us, little Anne,
and language is all we have to explain
ourselves to ourselves, to bandage our
wounds and allay our
fears.
You are gone now, leaving behind the record of
your hours, your lost innocence, and the little
pleasures scattered like small candles
against the gathering
darkness.
© Alvin M. Laster
Published: The Anthology of New England Writers, 1999
and High Tide 1999
VIOLETS
The month of April has barely
made its first tentative statement,
and here come violets
staking out their territory
with purple banners, brazen
as a giggle at a prayer meeting.
It is a bold recurrence that
I try to banish from
my garden by an annual
penance done on bended knee.
When the first sweet wink
of green lures me to the tulip beds,
I find them waiting there,
mocking, multiplying like loaves
and fishes in the Galilee.
They are the trouble that comes in bunches.
Tired, now, of their old haunts,
they have begun to march in brave
battalions across the lawn, in bold
defiance of my weeding fork.
Perhaps one day I'll learn to live with
them, these hallmarks of the season,
these lessons in persistence told again,.
thrusting out their purple tongues
in unison to sing spring's
eager welcome to the sun.
© Alvin M. Laster
BLIND CHILD AT THE PIANO
Polonaise in G Minor.
For B.L.
Somehow Chopin entered into
this darkeyed world, shaped
blunt fingers into nimble sounds,
locked ear and string
in a lover's embrace.
Tell me princess of keyboards,
Is Poland possible where
there are no pictures?
Can fingertips know meadowgreen
or autumngold, when
the black mouths of shadows
swallow all the light?
Her small body sways in time.
Lips tight, lashes lowered
like bars across an opaque window,
her fingertips are a flight
of pink doves, homing.
Tell me sage of the ivories,
what is the color of beauty?
Can a minute pass
when the night cannot?
(c) Alvin M. Laster
High above the trailer park,,
a river of stars flows across
the night sky, and the moon in its
radiant fullness drizzles a pool
of silver upon the metal
roof of the Air-Stream.
Inside, Inez sits transfixed,
the TV screen mirrored in her eyes.
She fills her days with soap operas
and a few rows of white powder,
while her landlord-lover finds salvation
in a bottle down at Carmine's Saloon.
Inez and Angel do not know
that they are good for each other.
Good and bad.
He gives her a roof for shelter,
a shared bed, and three squares.
He indulges her expensive habit.
She gives him companionship,
love, and a body to use and abuse.
She loves the electronic night,
when the TV store is open for business,
parading its gaudy trinkets across the screen,
where a credit card, an 800 number,
and Angel's forbearance has bought her
a tourquoise ring, a plastic bust of Elvis,
a genuine olive-wood crucifix from
the Holy Land, and a framed portrait
of the last supper, blossoming
upon a field of black velvet.
Before Angel returns she will snuff the
candles that flicker before her collection of
plaster saints; she will freshen her body
with a wash cloth, place a dab of cheap
perfume between her breasts, and
prepare herself for heaven and for Him.
© Alvin M. Laster
COMPANY
(a valentine greeting)
There is no way to be alone
in this big house where your
endearing presence leaves
impressions in the chair cushions,
raided cottage cheese
containers in the fridge,
baubles on the night table.
You may be off in some remote bazaar
(Loehmans or the Crystal Mall),
or doing Grandma service
for our newborn seed of seed
in distant places, but there are
always ghosts of you at work
in every room... battalions of footless
shoes waiting at parade rest
at an open closet door,
an oven glove upon the stove,
waiting for your hand, a cheval glass
where charm examined charm
and lingered when you left.
Tonight, in a jangle of sleeplessness,
I leave you singing the sleepsong
of your breath, your still body
nested in our bed,
secure as our long-practised love,
only to find you waiting for me
in the bathroom... a conglomerate
of potions (Ponce de Leon cremes),
a damp washcloth, bleeding a lip print,
crumpled at the sink, and a
corps de ballet of pantyhose
(exquisite annoyances) dancing
brazenly along the shower bar.
Empty hose. Empty room.
Yet there you are, a comfort,
like my old soft slippers,
the baby's first cry,
or the promise of a first kiss.
© Alvin M. Laster
I am heading home, driving northbound
through a country village, where telephone
poles at the roadside hang like rows of crosses
from their wires, even-spaced and linked,
a necklace of fetishes, dangling unceremoniously
before the weary travelers eyes, courtesy
of Northeast Utilities and Ma Bell.
A click of a dashboard switch, and the world intrudes.
Words, springing like swallows from the mouth
of a talk-show sage, inform his youthful
caller that nothing is more important than
what he owes his conscience, nothing
less important than his own pretensions.
The caller, too busy being young to understand,
phrases his confusion and clicks off.
I turn the dial through music, hucksters, weather,
traffic reports and news. I find the air so seeming
full of rock and babble, that there must, I think,
be precious little space left for birds or angels,
or this auto, speeding toward its destination.
My house is waiting with its lights aglow,
a spruce sided cottage, so familiar that
I have given it a name. I call it Home,
this sacred place where the tall birches scratch
at the shingles, whenever the weather turns foul,
to ask if they might come in out of the wind
and rain to share my warmth and company.
I do not bother to find my key. Intuition shouts
the message of my homecoming in her ear.
My knuckle, drumming urgency on the windowpane,
will lure her, smiling, to the door, and while
I wait, I think about the glass between us,
this counterfeit, whose transparency promises
continuity, openness, and access, although
in truth, it is divisive as a wall of steel.
Then she is there, the door swung open,
the smell of dinner mingling with cologne;
and all the grating traces of the day, turn their backs
against the light and slink away, like chastised
children, into the shadowed recesses of night,
©Alvin M. Laster
Grandmother was an iron woman.
Mothered a son, then twin boys
who died in their first year, despite
the desperate cupping and leeching.
Grandma dried her tears and had eight more.
Grandfather was a railroad engineer.
Built bridges and tunnels for the iron horses
that would bundle the nations of Europe.
Spoke seven languages for instructing
the babble of foreign laborers spiking track.
Once each year, Grandpa returned home
bearing gifts from afar... a bolt of colored cloth
for a new dress, and money to pay the debts
run up at the grocer, the cobbler and the weaver.
Then he'd start a new baby and go off again.
When the dynamite misfired and the
tunnel collapsed, Grandpa was among those who
shouldered its weight and was never recovered.
Grandma vowed she would not wear black
until they carried his body home as proof of loss.
She wore the bright-colored cloth he had
brought her... rose red, tansy yellow, purple of gentian,
defying the village harridans, who snickered
and gossiped, as how she should be wearing
the crow-colored dress of mourning.
Finally, at ninety, they dressed her in black,
and carried her off in a coal-black carriage.
They laid her to rest in a tunnel not unlike
Grandpaís and they covered her with loam
in a green-grey garden of stones.
©Alvin M. Laster
A POET'S PRAYER
Dear Lord, please break my pen if I scrawl gibberish;
Make every word I write do service to the tome.
Remind me that each phrase must drive the point I wish
to make, and that a burst of pretty words is not a poem.
Please help me to concoct a stew with lots of meat.
Remind me to remove the fat and add a pinch of spice.
The taste of it should linger, and should you taste it twice,
the redundance should enhance the heady treat.
Don't let me line up adjectives like autos in
a traffic jam, or string a line of adverbs to a strand.
Let me make sense with brevity, but when
I fail, please don't absolve me, Lord. Stay my hand!
© Alvin M. Laster
The old woman sits on
a three legged stool
in the summer garden,
her head bent to the pungent
bulb, tears spilling
down her cheeks.
She is peeling onions.
Her knob-knuckled fingers
deftly wield the paring knife
as, ring by ring, she
works her way through time,
through layers of sun,
layers of rain,
cricket-singing nights.
How perfect the onion;
how like the universe,
its sun and planets,
planets and moons, spinning
in tireless orbit, like
God-loving dervishes celebrating
linkage and wholeness.
It is like the old woman
who is grandmother and mother,
mother and daughter,
daughter and unborn grandmother,
nestled one within the other
like the leaves of the onion,
and always waiting,
always embracing the nearest,
like Russian nesting dolls,
holding against unseen fingers,
resisting separation.
And always the tears
falling on the patient ground,
nourishing the onion field.
© Alvin M. Laster
1.
The cardboard packing case curls like a sleeping
cat upon the subway grating, where welcome
warmth mitigates the winter chill.
Within, the talker-to-himself
(given this day his daily bread)
dines upon cold morsels gleaned from
the rusted rodent-residence behind
the golden arches on fast food boulevard.
2.
In the parking lot of the Gourmet Shopwell,
night falls upon a battered auto
that serves as warehouse for the
portable pickings of former dwellings.
Behind its frosted windows, an infant,
sandwiched between two bags of flesh and rags,
coughs in her sleep and burrows deep
into the warming body pile.
Four arms respond to cozy her.
3.
In the window of the notion shop along
the littered avenue, a guard dog sleeps with
one eye open to the midnight street.
By day, a window shopper might see,
among the cluttered wares, a rack
of day-glo signs bearing such legends as:
GOD LOVES YOU
BLESS THIS HOUSE
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.
Alvin M. Laster ©
Come! I will show you the hunters' signatures:
feathered death upon the beach, coot skulls
lying light as ash along the marsh,
a cake of blood and fur beside a burrow,
a cruciform shadow circling beneath a
bloody sky at day's last fall.
And here is Perigrinus, the hunter's hunter.
He is perched upon his leather throne,
dozing beneath a canopy as black as Homer's slate,
where hood and thong contain his fury,
though the bow is drawn and arrow waiting.
Tell me, court assassin, when you hurtle
through the screaming wind, talons tearing
flesh and feather, can you hear the thumping
in the dying breast? Does bloodlust ease
when you have dropped the crimsoned prize
in tribute at the master’s feet?
Yet, who among us has not worn the hood
and done the master's bidding, ridden the
whirlwinds of the sky, targeting the frightened eye,
pursuing beating wings? Pity the fangless falconer,
lashed to this perilous perch of clay,
while all about the falcons fly and dive like
stones upon a field where everyone is prey.
Alvin M. Laster ©
Each morning they fall
upon the square like locusts
over Pharoahís Egypt,
littering the streets with
excrement, while cooing
lamentations, more mournful
than the prayers of Jews.
Beloved and beleaguered
by children who bait
them with moldy croutons,
they await, with
programmed patience,
the three-o'clock popcorn lady
with the spattered shoes
and chk-chk song.
When the sun falls behind
the granite walls,
the pigeons loosen their wired
grips upon the square and soar to
thatched watchtowers and
battlements along the crumbling
cornices of buildings, high
above the canyon's mischief.
Darkness rises from below.
The last preening dove tucks
his head into a pillow of down,
issues a coo or two
to the grey bundle
of sleeping mate and glides
on wings of sleep into
a gleeful dream of pedestaled
and unperturbable
green generals.
© Alvin M. Laster
THE STORM
Suncrest...a luminous wedge lifts
the lid of darkness,
and the sandpaper day steals in.
We awaken from separate dreams
into echoes of distant thunder,
and we dress behind eggshell screens.
She slippers behind me in the kitchen,
sounding the alarm with her silence,
while yesterday's anger reverberates
like the peal of a bell renewing
itself in diminishing waves
long after the clapper is still.
The storm brews with the coffee,
simmers in the tight etchings
around the mouth, deepens the
violet darkness of her eyes
with its quiet fury, brooding,
anxious as a catapult.
Enough! Show her the broadest
aspect of the back, the line of sinew
shoulder to shoulder. Cockstrut
through the slamming door, through
bird-scatter, with the chill wind
following down the path
into sunstream and flower-scent,
honeysuckle whispering to the nose.
Turn to see her looking
through the window, coffee cup in hand.
Bow and make a scented offering.
Break the granite glance. Disperse clouds.
"Not much of a storm, I guess."
She smiles... nods.
"Just enough to set things straight."
Published: Connecticut River Review (CPS Anthology)
© 1999
CROWS
Looking, in their black cloaks,
like mourners at graveside,
they nudge one another for advantage,
squawk, and tear flesh, lifting
the road-kill with bloody beaks.
Life feeding upon death, they are
the brooms that sweep clean.
Traffic interrupts the feeding frenzy,
and they reluctantly take wing,
tracing intersecting circles in the sky,
before falling once again, like
black snow upon the unfinished
feast on the asphalt plain below.
Eagerly they return to the work
of the world, these necrophiles,
these funereal harpies, somber
morticians of the roadside dead.
© 1999
DEAR THEO,
This day, the light faded from the field as if
some great shutter were closing it out.
The falling sun bronzed the windows of the
big house for a few brief moments before
the fat raven, wings spread against the sky,
lit upon my palette for a perch.
Earlier, I had seen the reaper work his way
toward me in the wheat field as I painted, the
golden grain falling in swaths before his blade,
and I knew I must finish my canvas before he
could reach me with his sharp blade and cold eye,
or I would fall like the wheat before him.
Now the night is alive with fireflies. They
are piercing the night like earthbound stars,
blinking their urgent messages in cold light, while
Time comes to me dressed in an October wind,
pinching my face into shallow wavelets,
chafing my skin and chilling my blood.
Dreams drift like feathers on the night air.
There is Paul picking the sunflowers off the
canvas and holding them to his nose, mockingly.
Then a brown-skinned girl with lamp black hair
lifts her skirt as she passes the window,
and he is gone, leaving the flowers behind.
I awake to see the sharp-tipped cypress slashing
the sky. The stars follow me like the eyes
of wild cats, as I gather my brushes, fold
my easel, and stumble back to my lonely lodging.
Tonight there is a fetid odor on the wind, as if
death had passed me by with eyes averted.
I will remember this turbulent night on canvas,
but there are no pigments for the pain of
Paul’s leaving. The storm gathering in my head
is beating away at my temples, trying
to get out, so I will have to take a larger dose
of laudanum to solicit sleep this night.
Dear Theo, I am sorry to tell you about my pain,
and that the demons have returned. They are
chewing my canvasses to shreds and stealing
my light away. Oh my dear Theo... help me...
help me. Once more, the sky is full of
blackbirds, and I am the seed of the field.
Published in: “Reach of Song” an anthology pub. by the Georgia
Poetry
Society
Published in literary journal, “Blue Unicorn” . . . 1995
© 1999