Five poems --- James Eret

The Thin Red Line

“There is only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.”

A crocodile, silently malevolent, slides slowly

and secretly into the tropical algae,

where the mosquitoes breed and inject malaria

from their blood-bloated syringes,

hovering and swarming in paradise.

“Why does nature vile with itself,

land contends with the sea? 

Is there an avenging power to nature,

not one power but two?”

Beware all the youthful innocence,

beware the mothers who send their healthy-born

into an imperfect world.

Yet they long for answers beyond the distant horizon line,

for they come with their dark tasks

to set this paradise afire with crimes

against their own natures.

Yet there is the endless discovery of beauty,

like the rainbow-colored parrots, tamed to the touch

mimicking their names, seeing the sweating uniforms,

thirsting from every pore in the deep kunai grass.

Hermit crabs tingle the friendly palms.

Tribal songs in their harmony

show no portents of the destructive history to fly

towards them from the near future.

Look what alien stares can lead to,

innocent heads swimming together in a paradise of crystal lagoon,

moving in a womb of time

and treading towards the light of death.

“Who are you who live in these many forms?

Your death encaptures all, all that is to be born.”

How are we to know the right path,

how to cast the dice of sanity, to remember

the splendor and the wide power of the sender,

the world’s mortality and wrath pass it on after our surrender,

the uncompromising figures

of the global Math?

“Your glory, mercy, peace, truth, you give calm,

a spirit’s understanding,

causes the contented heart.”

Always Finding the Moon

 (For my son, Dylan)

No matter how overcast the sky is,

My youngest son always finds the moon,

Pointing at it like he had just discovered it,

Full of youthful excitement, saying “It burns.”

 We drive past a field of dead sunflowers,

Slashing over the puddles and bumpy roads.

From a moving gray haze in the east, rising

Like a dream over the restless Lake Michigan waters,

A full moon appears, disappears, then appears,

My youngest son pointing his rigid finger

Into the eye of The Sea of Tranquility,

Before a lunar silence pulls a tidal blanket

Over once deep-remembered, magnetic night.

 Luna moth, in your sacred greenness not to be seen

By any mortals, fly at the light of the moon, you sporting

Your delicately ribbed lime green and veined wings,

Perfectly camouflaged–flitting through the dark forest

Like a phantom, like my youngest son’s unbridled imagination,

All our imaginations, when we choose to use them

For moonlit visions and Luna moths dance till dawn

 In the fullness of the moonlight.

 Death at the Kabul Marketplace

I awoke to the wails of the muezzin

From the minaret. On the mountains,

Layers of fog masked the fir forests.

I awoke to the calls from the horn of plenty,

Seeds planted in my memory.

Today’s sun shines on market day.

Forgetting the fire and fear of those slayers

Of my sleep, my sons and daughters,

I haggled for fruits and fares.

Arcing from the mountains came produce

No one bargained for, let loose

From the mists that always hide a truce.

I awoke, hearing  shrapnel burst and fly

Around me like a mad festival, the brooding

Mountain peaks silently soaking up

More of the feuding history of my blood.

I awoke and haggled for fruit and my life and lost.

Chisel

“Who will walk with me into this terrible and beautiful world?”

—Dorrianne Laux

Looking down from the rocky fortresses, the imposing parapets,

In the crystal Valletta Harbor, the dghajsas, the bum-boats we called them,

Moored together in families of primary colors,

Sun-saturated and joyful bobbing,

Laid-back lifestyle of Malta.

That eyeball staring at the sun too long,

Slashed with blood and veined

8-Ball hemorrhage.

The sailor, lone sentinel swiveled on the bar stool,

Knew we saw his eye but said nothing;

But so much anger burned in his eye.

Just how did you get that eye?

The White Mice, the Shore Patrol, did this to me.

At Mail Call I got a Dear John letter from my girlfriend.

He ascended the elevator from Hell

To the Garden of Hesperides,

Where the lovers strolled, hand in hand, made out,

Surrounded by the olive trees,

Those benevolent branches,

A quietus in King’s Cross,

The sounds in the distance

Of prayers and chanting Latin vespers.

So filled with good tidings he approached the precipice.

The idea was to finish his leap,

To die in Valletta, Malta,

Such an exotic and mysterious country.

The White Mice talked him down,

No ordinary drunk poised on the edge of the cliff,

His mistake to start cursing them back.

They did it with their night sticks,

While straightjacketed on a litter-

He told the White Mice to fuck themselves

And they thumped and thumped

Blunt trauma bloat his evil eye.

Blind Homer, strumming your sad lyre, sing those songs,

That smell of lemons and olive trees, sea- surge of distant lovers,

Never again to walk, hand in hand.

For the Closing of San Onofre Nuclear Plant

(For Taro Aizu)

Beyond the Pacific beaches

The blind rip tides try to shake

Off their bruises as it is always done. The building many called

"The Two Tits" nipples erected

In the cool sea air, will shut down.

Taro Aizu, haunted in Mt Fuji's triangular shadow, victories come

Less frequent as the world grinds

Off its axis by the man-made fission

Already, the detritus of Japan's tsunami

has drifted to our unclean shores.

Now ghost ships settle down in the lapping surf

Devoid of their captains. 

The two maimed nuclear reactors

Are joined by that vast Pacific

I once crossed, Japan to Hawaii,

When my ship tracked the Apollo 10

With a special radar dish.

So we are close now

In our laments.

San Onofre, silenced nuclear plant,

Some brave souls complain of your closing; lost jobs dog us now.

But Taro Aizu smiles in the wreckage. 

There, on contaminated Fukishima soil

He plants seedlings

Of cherry trees which might thrive,

Given a chance, given a chance.