The Sheiling

The colour seemed arbitrary, the red too bland against the green

and the corrugated cable that lashes the long painted boughs
makes it look like a campfire from a distance but up close
some Dark* battle scene from the Iliad—Man hopelessly bound to war

But is it? The splayed staves, standing like a stook catching the sun’s last rays
has that dark pink of coloured glasses. The only thing missing is the carnage,
though that electrician’s Laocoön points to a painter who showed us:
Jackson Pollock's No. 1, 1948—slaughter on a hanger. Still, beside the lake
in this place it can pass for a symbol for me and you or you and your daughter

and later in the day we drove on a road of silver and gold
loops falling and rising, lashing the poles together
in a kind of truce leading from a point where two lakes meet.

One is flat and the other rises at an angle, like a medieval painting

linking us to the distant island while cabins lie strewn on the grass

at our backs as we sip wine out of plastic bottles

the stars a long yesterday and the good breakfast digested,
the painful call from an angry daughter bursting the bubbles in the bath,
clawing at our two backs 'til nails rub red skeins—that
love-hate bond of mother and child to erase the memory of
lips that sought an understanding that eludes us in words

—a sheiling we seek and sense beyond trouble, like the faces
of our host and hostess. She showed you her family in photographs
nested near the table, asked if our sleep was good, stuffed us
and sent us on our way so bound that we flitter between

the campfire and the war, the spears and the golden meadow
where the farmer’s raked his straw into stooks to dry in the hot sun.

If it weren’t for the cell phone I swear…

there would still be misunderstandings
about our holies of holies and everything inside them.

This is the knitting place then where staves cross, and straw dries
and lips meet, and people, I coming from my lonely undefined days since
and you with no since at all but presence following presence
I all contemplation and you action, estrogen meet testosterone
and let the chips fall. The way leads from this site on the mountain

into mystery and no one knows where it leads except
I'm stubborn and not-having and cursing what is, has—it’s
envy and endless grieving for what cannot be restored

while babies get on buses every day and mothers worry
and hearts go tick... tick... and you cried when I said twenty years
—I don't remember why anymore.

I, stubborn fool, always dancing on the end of  a long bough
tempting it to break, curious to see that one point further ahead
until it does and the wet green through the pants of my knees
tells me that another way to vision is in crawling on the belly
of love and war through its guts for twisting miles and we

have only entered, feeling our way in the dark.

_________
* Shayne Dark’s sculpture at the Oeno Gallery, Picton Ontario, September 2, 2007

© Dan Goorevitch 2007-8, 2019

Advertisement, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 2007

We sat on the cathedral steps and saw the return of Sodom
across the street in a picture in the window, pure water
coming from the feminine globes of a man, another looking on
with either concern or lust, depending on the consumer.

Beside it another scene of two men stalking one another
like animals, and above, like the apex of the grand pyramid
of the Great Bathers by Cézanne, pouty-lipped as the rest of them,
a woman with her anonymous man wearing two day’s growth of beard.

It starts with the jeans and it moves to the life.
All this we saw on the steps of the church of the sainted namesake
of my beloved and she was horrified that I could even read the symbols.

© Dan Goorevitch 2007

Cabin Fever

All I wanted was a little cabin with a mud floor and us:
an inside and an outside—as simple as that.
And outside would be splendour and inside would be bliss.

You looked at the stars and wondered at your happiness
I looked at my happiness and wondered at the stars
and that was that and this is this.

I would still toil in your garden and work in your basement
to be near you. And you would bring me a cold glass
and your children would be beside you. Heaven

is still as simple as you say it is, moving soil around
until your garden’s planet Earth, major navel: air-cord
for dark astronauts at the moments of their birth.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007

A Note to P in Anticipation of Our Visit to the Met

Art galleries are funny places.
There’s a touch of expiation and atonement in the air.
Van Gogh, belatedly beatified, his muddy boots in the corner
an odd contrast to new shoes which, while gazing at Pink Poplars
sound like birds. This is no place to bend the knee
but stand straight and breathe deep,
a repository for you my visitor to look into my eyes
and see that which is shielded not just between you and the stranger
in the subway but wedging husband and wife apart
and worse, between our own selves and our longing
for things that cannot be had because we lack the ability to focus
having lost the context. Observe here now in contradistinction
the whole soul incarnate, matter once dumb now speaking. See?
There is no escaping the creation, the miracle.
Did I say this is no church? I only said the clay,
the breath, the stars and we are one.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007

A Cup of Coffee

The schemes of kings, emperors and retainers,
lobbyists in crisp black suits,
the clicks of heels, high and low, proper shirts, skirts,
slim legs, carnations,
smiles, all the proper gifts exchanged and
the others, mistakenly perhaps (but in good faith)
addressed and delivered by aides de camp.

Conference halls, lit by bright balloons,
Policy speeches and policy meetings.
Committees and their reports.
White papers and green lamps on the burnished tables,
the conference rooms prepared, the delegates chosen,
the NGOs, their plans submitted and approved,
budgets prepared, flight reservations made,
the grants and fundraisers, the billeting arranged
Arrivals, hotel, home, the whole world assembled.

The grand foyer and the masterpiece denouncing war,
the great dome and beneath it
neatly raked rows arranged in semicircle,
earplugs carrying simultaneous translations.

Wheels within wheels,
gears, pulleys, rope,
chain and chainblock,
timber and hoist,
winches and flatbeds,
crane and hook.
Diesel engines feeding cables,
dams, rotors, reactors,
wind and solar panels
all feeding the one machine,
the world’s great labor,
the constant endless hew
—the scaffolding to the sky—
all to one purpose:
to remove the mote
from Israel's eye.

Aren’t you sick to death of Holocaust poetry?
How many times do we have to have our noses thrust
Between cracks into gassy showers, glowing ovens?
One cringes at the mention of boxcars, the image itself a cliché,
the same six million bodies used over and over as ballast
for lightweight arguments, every bad executive another Hitler,
every battle another genocide. How sick I am of it!
The past is past. What good is it to dig it up again?

Milady attended the most reformed of synagogues,
Our Lady of the Thousand Mitzvahs,
and learned so very much from the rabbi,
establishing her pedigree to imprint from her lofty podium
from which to aim—without prejudice—upon us
a perfumed pee from her powdered pudendum.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2003, 2007

Jurgen Goth's Limerick Challenge

Jurgen asked for a limerick to be written with these words:

• lagoon
• candelabra
• rhubarb
• propensity

It took a long time, but I finally came up with a solution:

The Limerick

"My daughter Lavinia's propensity
"To chew rhubarb and men, well, incenses me!
"But your daughter Barbra and her candelabra--
"Loons in lagoons, that's immensity!"

© Dan Goorevitch, 2005

Descending the Subway Stairs

Softly the shoes pace, the concrete now a carpet.
Spring and the billowing flesh, like marigolds, blooms in the garden.

I descend the combed concrete to where a slender violinist and her beau
lean against the tiles, the soundtrack a revolving door.

and I stand staggered by the scene at that checkpoint
where men and women pass in padding percussion

then take the stairs to the sun past the blind beggar I ignore except to think:

“Lucky him, his vision, “to be even more invisible than me.”

© Dan Goorevitch, 2001, 2007

The Garden

These beds are moated castles
armed for war, their concrete sides
blades rotating, gouging broken shins

The paths between no place to walk
or breathe or sit but
bloodgutters.

North of here, hugging the sidewalk
a rosary of stones beneath the lilac
Periwinkle Island & Catherine’s eyes.

I’d set the Blarney Stone beside her there
dug into a ramp of green
recline in its shade.

Hands would clasp my balding pate
one fat calf on its opposite knee
appositely, meerschaum pipe in hand

—more than content
to live a life apart from that
unspeakable shrieking greed

That need to bring others
not to their hearts
but their knees.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2006, 2007