Dan GoorevitchNew Poems

The Lower Depths

2010-10-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

I called her my little white paper boat
light as the kiss she lit on my neck
first opening of the ginger
flower

light touch
of her hand on my arm like
a lily
wrapped dark

There’s a big clay oven
in which I stew
With a bit of rosemary
a bit of thyme.

That and a kiss and a hand on my arm
to bring to a simmer this sweetest of lies.

© Dan Goorevitch 2010

You Broke Your Mama's Heart Again Last Night

2010-05-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

He's a pain when he's sober, he's a pain when he's drunk
A pain when he's too happy, just as bad when he's in a funk
But he's a joy to be around when everything's just right
Oh, you broke your mama's heart again last night.

He's a man who says just what he thinks and doesn't give a damn
About fashions and opinions - all those houses made of sand
But he's a joy to be around when everything's just right
Oh, you broke your mama's heart again last night.

You broke your mama's heart again, she's watching up above
Is this what she worked so hard for? is it why she gave you love?
But he's a joy to be around when everything's just right
Well, you broke your mama's heart again last night.

You broke your mama's heart again, is this why she gave you life
So that you and he could live your lives in a never-ending strife?
But he's a joy to be around when everything's just right
Oh, you broke your mama's heart again last night.

Yes, you broke your mama's heart again last night...

© Dan Goorevitch, 2010

There’s a little place in the desert

2009-12-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

(Revised December 25, 2009)

There’s a little place in the desert where people used to go
where the screen door batters its frame in unpredictable staccato
and upturned glasses fill the tables where no one’s dined in years.
This is the last stop for gas between car and carrion
on a road where even the rain doesn’t stop anymore.

Once there was a cabin on a stream and morning
breezes blew freely between two open doors.
A fresh scent of jade jungle leaf, running water, tender fronds
lay beneath us like lovers, just to touch us, caressing our soles
they sighed. The mud clutched us and we were whole again,

away from the clatter of shrill strident voices. away from the violent city,
the horrific brutality, the shock and the rage of the litterer, the vandal
the screaming of the hungry and of those dispossessed,
banging their bleeding fists on love when the door was open
all the time. Open. That’s what love is.

Ashamed, my bruised hands now send this, raw from the beating
as if my fists could distill love from your blood. Loathe you? I never knew how
to open the door that bangs in the desert place where I wait
listening for you with the glasses turned upside down
to keep them from the dust.

© 2008, 2009, Dan Goorevitch

Weekly

2009-12-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

I love my own stench.
Life’s too short to waste
on people who don’t like
how you smell or think.

She loved me when I fumbled,
things spilling out of my bag,
forgot to change my work clothes...

...put her nose in my armpit
smelled deep and said "I
“love that” and whispered “I wish I had
"more holes for you.” I

think I’ll take a bath come
Saturday, to remind me of my mom and
laugh.

© 2009 Dan Goorevitch

© 2009 Dan Goorevitch

Estaté

2009-05-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Ah, Summer (Estaté)
translated from the song by Brighetti & Martino

Ah, summer—
Your warm embrace is like a kiss remembered
Once full of love but now it’s just an ember,
Like something in the heart one wants to lose.

Ah, summer—
The sun that woke and warmed us every morning,
That painted splendid sunsets every evening
Is useless now except to sear my soul.

Another winter comes and
All the petals dying on the rose
A thousand petals lie beneath the snows—
At least perhaps some peace might come again.

Ah, summer—
You gave your fragrant scent to every flower
And filled us with a love of so much power
So I could slowly perish in its pain!

Another winter comes and...

© Dan Goorevitch 2006

An Ally At Night

2009-04-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

I love back allies: the slightly dangerous places where one finds
new hinges on broken doors, the heavy wood collapsing;
the utter silence of lamplight on cold cars, the haze of long corridors of space:
the rare beauty the city hides in the back of its mouth, the we in who we really are behind the glittering smile, where my soul sighs and says “I’m home.”

© Dan Goorevitch 2009

2009-03-27T18:39:00.001-07:00

Try to mind your own business
and if you must read on
empty your head of everything
but the words you read before you.
Accept no association between them
and any thing gone before
or anything you anticipate.

Try not to judge on what you’ve heard
or read from the mouths and pens of others
and seek quickly the countervailing argument.
Judge rather the speaker by what expectations
and prejudices are implied in that speech
for those are the only meanings of speech—
It is never about the object of speech
but the speaker only.

If you read on, leave yourself behind
which is impossible I know but leave, say
your clothing at least, those artifacts
in which you swathe yourself and confuse with who you are
which is neither your wardrobe nor the birthday suit
you wore when you splashed in the bath
and followed a strange creature with a fascination
which your intensity has not quite matched lately.

Follow this strange creature
through the labyrinth of your mind, not confusing
its thoughts with yours, your fears or expectations
to the goal you once gave yourself as a little girl
or a little boy without reserve and without fear.
And so, having come so far, read, reader: read on.

© Dan Goorevitch 2009

Bittersweet Blanket (revised)

2009-02-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

We wrestled on this bed of roses
over which of us was sweetest.
You liked to pull them up over us
to weave us in and snip the world out.

I try not to think of what we’ve lost
but of a sweetness I never suspected
existed before I saw the petite
fierce bud of joy that was your face
on a blanket full of yellow roses.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2008

Bittersweet Blanket

2008-12-21T23:58:00.000-08:00

We wrestled on this bed of roses
over which of us was sweetest.
You liked to pull them up over us
to weave us in and snip the world out.

Once we lay for what seemed like hours
—never had we kissed so long! never
had we so few secrets to conceal
(from each other) but circumstances,
duty, which has "not the visage
“of a sweetie or a cutie”—expectations
breeding disappointments as you’d say—
‘til finally we argued about the news
and those things one reads there—or not
—a daily nothing to do with roses but
lists of malefactors and their deeds
all open to interminable questions
that can rip embroidered flowers
and worm a brain to leave it raving.

I try not to think of what we’ve lost
but of a sweetness I never suspected
existed before I saw the petite
fierce bud of joy that was your face
on a blanket full of yellow roses.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2008

Between Beak and Stone

2008-12-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

It isn’t me but my heart that hopes.
I’m trying to rise above it
running up the soaped-up slide
that forms our past, which form
impresses itself upon the future
by that delinquent organ.

Desire, that two-edged razor
forms the other side of that projector
and cuts the hand that holds it
when all it finds is stone.

I would love you if I could
without possession, as you wish
and you would love me too
but neither can achieve that trick
we’ve much discussed. But hope?

That’s another thing. Even gods
themselves are impaled between
the beaks of birds and stone.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

The Passion and the Reason

2008-12-08T05:49:00.000-08:00

Something sings in the building and builder,
Something rings in the spike and the wood.
Something sounds in air and the earth
Resounds in the hammer and hand.

I pulled you toward me this morning,
your head and neck on my chest—
a waking serenade, your puzzled
pliant flesh pulled from its pit.

Freedom from is not freedom to
stride in the sound of creation,
the forests shaking in the sound of your boots,
the mountains and lightning rejoicing,

I thrill at the vision you offer
I thrill at the vision we share.
At the moment of emancipation
the tyranny of orthodoxy begins

and that is the point of our unravelling
and that is the point of our joining.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2008

Orpheus, Silent

2008-11-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

The quiver of the lyre has blended
into the silence and ended.
Being, day and glade are one
as he stumbles from the opened
earth and stands in the sun

His legs are sore from stepping,
standing on stones his feet found
in eyeball black his back from standing
at arduous angles, throat sore
from singing in airless clay

He may turn now if he wishes
—there is no rule for the air
but he fears to see her there,
long accustomed to desert habits and more,
he wants to feel her kiss on his neck

so he stands in the clearing and watches
clouds in the afternoon sky, feels air
and his being quiver, blend into day and glade
and gathers himself for the moment
and forever.

There is nothing so beautiful
as a young woman and her man
the curve of her waist and hip
the strength of his hand
their lips' exchange inexpressible in words

Oh my love I’ve lost you
in the twisting curls of my mind
that sickly thing that feeds on itself and its feral growls,
lost you in pointless plots of stupid stories
written in acid and blood

turning, turning
through the earth where I wormed
through Hades and the grey
matter of my sickness
turning myself in the earth.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2008

The Garden

2008-10-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

If I could I'd send you my self to plant
in your garden so every time you'd thrust
your hands into the earth you'd think of me
and every cone from every pine that falls,
crushed underfoot would take root until
the whole forest would be my greening.

Once we drank from the purest springs
and our branches entwined
in the oasis where a cradle rocked
a singing infant

How I mourn for her
who I must plant here in the poem
as you in your garden,
planted back of the house you share
with the boys and the mutt.

You used to bring a slip of her
which I'd plant between my lip and lip
and I sowed a bit in my broken hip
to help me walk along the way

And now my walking will be painful again
and my lips will be chafed and dry
and the air brakes from the garbage trucks declaim:
"Alone, alone, alo-o-o-ne" as they roar by.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2008

Acknowledgements

2008-09-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

I love you like the first almonds and limes. I love you the way a mountain has jagged rocks... I love you the way the sea has both waves and green swell, the way the duck has an evening and morning on the lake, the way a lighthouse has a light and a place to point to, the way a man is nothing except for the earth that buries him yet gives him his food, the way a mother holds an infant and sends him to war, the way the moon breaks the waves into curves and circles yet silvers the winter trees and its corners hook the points of thoughts, swell the tides, light the way for the caravans in ancient deserts, ... my love for you is exactly the way on earth as it is in heaven, the swirl of galaxies, the means of measuring great distances: distances so vast they cannot be measured in the generations born and died, in the generations yet to come that any man can possibly imagine, the way the world was created, the means of its destruction in the nth of time... my angers are not the anger of a man alone but of the way the thunder needs to crackle its airless mass, it is the way in which the tectonic plates of earth open the chasm beneath.... I love you like sun glints on frozen windows where little boys play by putting warm pennies against the glass to get little windows to the street, the way the coin cools his hand, the way pens write on paper, smooth, black or blue scrawls, intense, the way snow crackles under the feet of lovers who walk around and round while a cell phone rings; I love you the way clouds set in the heavens over broken buildings, grey and white, threatening sun or rain; I love you the way the street smells after a rain, the way a boy jumps the pavement on his skateboard, the way an ugly girl smiles and her softened eyes make me realize there’s no such thing as ugly, the way in which the market throngs with sellers and buyers, the way an apricot tastes, the way the greens show their many shades under fluorescent lights, the way a lake sits in such a way it can’t help lap at the tender shore, the way a rock skips across a sea, the way a broken stone reveals its true beauty, the way a school with broken windows show their blackened teeth on a weekend walk to a man alone, the way the papier maché hangs there, the way the cars swoosh swoosh past the stalled streetcar taking on passengers, the surly driver holding the transfer so the patron has to reach to grab it, the way the light glints on the streetcar tracks, the way the driftwood sits just so, its downside up, the way a man passes another and smiles, I love you... I love you... I love you just like that.

The way copper turns green, winter turns white, leaves fall, yellow underfoot, butter-hued; the way a child lets go of her mother’s hand, an alien comes to a foreign land, stone stands on stone, crumbles, the way canola waves its yellow, forsythia the first of spring, the way my vase sits on my table, a little tea in the bottom of a glass, the way the wind feels on a cold day, rain on a sidewalk, patter of red tiny boots, the way withered breasts hang, the way hair lies on the floor of a barber shop or sawdust at the butcher’s, the way Socrates the fishmonger smiles his crooked smile, the way Maria, who sells apricots and other fruits, rice and Turkish delight helps me pack my groceries and took them out of the hand of the woman I knew before you, the way Eric smiled his crooked boyish smile, poor Eric dead so young (“I have not hoped for much my friend but I hope you die young”) the way uneven boards lie above stairs, the way a twitter-twit hops on its twig-like legs, the way you say my butt is no butt at all but leg-tops, the way you took my arm and touched my hand, the three kisses on my neck, the way you said yes, the way the old man, the hunchback braves the years and gravity, the way the con-man asks for money, the way my chequebook’s so unused, the way the twilight, the way thought works, the way the stomach growls, the way dogs howl, the way the husks lie under the Eucalyptus, the way the wasps love Kosher bait—all honey and dough—the gaps in the teeth of children: Deny if you like, deny it til the day you die; acknowledge it or not but all of these—all of these are the ways I love you.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

The Favour Returned or Love's Great Cycle

2008-08-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Like a bulb buried in winter
0000000000woken by the secret
tremor of all things underground
0000000000that whisper in concert
of solitudes and silence

0000000000I know somehow that
Love me or not
0000000000you cannot stop
me from loving you
0000000000and that thought
of my possession of that love
0000000000foments in me
a strange excitement whose name
0000000000I think is joy.

Joy! Joy—my little white paper boat
0000000000sailing in and out of my arms
I could not sleep tonight
0000000000for the brightness of your light,
for the softness of your charms.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

The Pivot

2008-08-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

We were all young once
and had our chance.
We had many chances,
each moment a pivot,
each choice irrevocable
until the next one came.

How was our moment defined?
When you confessed to me?
When we kissed?
When we lay side by side
and breathed the same breath?

What keeps us on our path?
What does time have if not direction?
What makes choice except love?

Commitment, obligation—
can they really be swept away
like a pack of cards
from the surface of a table
and the sweeper proclaim
“There! I am happy?”

Within each of us beats a drum
and two beats in syncopation
precurses philosophy,
intention at sunrise,
decisions at bedtime.

Once I chose happiness
and forgot all about it
when I saw you there,
your bruised and battered face
behind your brave smile.

You hobbled along on a slow dry course,
your back aching, your skin
seven times colder in the searing sun
where at the ends of your vision mirages
loomed to keep an absence of strife
—a low depression that passed for life—
'til you told me how desolate
you really were and we kissed.

I was a dismal failure
at everything but gathering you up
and holding you close
'til your once withered arms
watered at your base became strong enough
to pull me close and push me away

hence the agony pursuing your Perseus:
my achievement seems pyrrhic. You,
my Andromeda, have me chained to stone;
my Pygmalion remakes me, her master,
out of the pearly chips of marble dust... and yet

there is still a place
to stand and turn
within me and remake
the whole event—
to turn the face
of Janus to the West.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

The Surface and The Deep

2008-07-20T11:18:00.001-07:00

You’re a little white paper boat
a sheet afloat on a raging sea
furiously bubbling and boiling that
you’d do this thing to me

to simply float upon my back
with a tread as light as air
that your simple grace could hold me up
in my upside world down there

I looking down and you looking up,
I of the deep and you of the face,
we held each other up, your slight
weight upon the bull, your gentle tap

upon his shoulders, my broad back diving
to the airless fathoms I would be—
Oh little paper boat, who’d believe
One sheet of paper'd hold the sea?

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

There’s a little place in the desert where people used to go

2008-07-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

There’s a little place in the desert where people used to go
where the screen door batters its frame in unpredictable staccato
and upturned glasses fill the tables where no one’s dined in years.
This is the last stop for gas between a car and the buzzards
on a road where even the rain doesn’t stop anymore.

Once there was a cabin on a stream and every morning
the purest air blew unhindered through two open doors
and the fresh scent of a jade jungle of leaf
and running water—wild and tender plants
willing to lie beneath us like lovers

Just to touch us they lay down
so enamoured with our presence
they caressed and kissed our soles and sighed,
the mud clutched us and we were whole again,
away from the clutter of striving striking voices

away from the violent city, the horrific brutality,
the shock of the real, the rage of the litterer and vandal
the screaming of the hungry and those dispossessed,
banging their bleeding fists on love when the door was open
all the time. Open. That’s what love is.

If only I were worthy to send this but my hands are battered
and bruised from the punching you’ve received as if my fists
could distill love from your blood. Loathe you? I never knew
how to open the door that bangs in the desert place where I wait
listening for you with the glasses turned upside down
————————————————————————to keep them from the dust.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Between dust and dust

2008-06-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Between dust and dust
there is very little time
and very little space
and daily it closes
until the one part
touches the other
and closes forever.

Lucky me!
I have an iron bar
to wedge into the cavity
of time to keep it open
to bring light
into the endless dark.

For a thousand lifetimes
these lines might live
or that painting
and those whose walls
touch prematurely
may find comfort in them
as they pass by

and though to God’s eye
even these thousands
are nothing but a spark
to us they are everything—
a place to gather ourselves
together and fill the nothing
between dust and dust.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

And Isaac Laughed

2008-05-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Her breasts were hard as rocks
and through the years I didn’t notice
that they were growing softer
daily but the woman herself
was ripening, blooming, becoming
ever more beautiful.

I didn’t notice a wrinkle
but a smile in her eyes
deepening, broadening.
Every year joy grew fuller
and her bliss was measured
like tree rings.

All this I noticed
though I never knew her.
He didn’t notice
though he did.

Untouched she might have died
unloved, imprisoned, till Abraham,
her lord, her Gabriel came to her,
impregnating her with Grace,
with History, with a world
beyond her experience:

The angel and his horn
full: a cornucopia,
and Isaac laughed
inside her, exploding.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Let Me

2008-05-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

You've given me so much
and all I want is more—all
— is it so much?
You tell me yourself
how little it is —
how worthless you are
in your eyes. Let me
measure you. Let me
assign the value. Let me
cherish you. Let me
be yours so you
can be mine. Tell me
what I am, tell me
I’m your hero again
and again let me
be that for you.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

It Had To Be Lilacs

2008-05-12T10:54:00.001-07:00

It had to be lilacs my mother made me cut, lilacs
for which she thanked me as if the idea had been mine, lilacs
blooming in the park near Lennox Hill where her brother lay dying, lilacs
the blind poet in his grotty closet never lived to smell again, lilacs
this morning on the way to my brother’s house, lilacs
Olga threw on Oblomov's grave, lilacs & an overdose, lilacs
that madden me with grief, worry & regret. Two weeks of lilacs
in Central Park, two more yet to bear up here, lilacs!
The once loved too short season lasts too long this year!

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

A Poem Beginning in the Style of Eric Layman, R.I.P.

2008-05-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

She’s a high maintenance low functioning system
and if that were all there is to her she might be right
that everyone would be better off without her

But she has the sweetest presence
and that quote comes from the meanest of women.
And her smile of wonder lights the world.

She is a candle that must be held
with great care and blown on so gently
(Low functioning high maintenance—

Our lives themselves
time and earth cuts to fit
a plain pine box.)

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Speak, PLEASE!

2008-05-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

You're a soggy newsprint paper boat
sinking in the blue-black water above you,
blue-black as your broken toe.

If only you'd cry for help. If only you'd scream & wail
at the end of your mother's bed, her arms folded,
demand that you be held & cherished as your right.

No matter Tatty—Your tattered hero's here downstage
only demanding that you act. Go down into the garden dear.
Peel one wet leaf from your face. & SPEAK!

Please Do Not Hurry Love

2008-05-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

Next time you can't think of anything to do
go out into the garden, love,
go out and look at the bark on the tree.

Look at the orange on the cedar, dear,
look at the birds in the sky.
A feather has fallen in the dust my love,

and another one lies over there.
Too soon we go to the grave, my love,
please do not hurry there.

Cusp

2008-04-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

Lilac and violet springs in your mouth
Winter turns to crocus and tulips
We cling

we who live on the thinnest of soils
to the rock-face
and persevere

in the lightest touch of your hand
on my arm. Quiet the night and my demons
so long as we cling.

Two twigs lie in the broad path
A light breeze and all is still again.
The petal rests.

Just so we touch and play
with the four little rubber rafts—
the lifeboats of our lips

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

When I Was A Lad

2008-03-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

I crouched on the sidewalk
obsessively breaking stones
with other bigger stones
to see what lay within

and always found the inside
more beautiful, intense and pure
than could have been imagined.

We whisper together
and I gain your glad assent
to battery. Why am I so amazed
to find out now what I found then?

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

You’re a little white paper boat

2008-03-30T08:11:00.001-07:00

You’re a little white paper boat
and under you blue
and above you blue
and orange breaks the sky

You’re a little white paper boat
and the sheets are billowing
and the air is pure and sweet
in the places where we meet.

You’re a little white paper boat
on a silver pond afloat
and the sun is small and white
where a bird turns the sky

You’re a little white paper boat
when lovers lips are brushing
on a fresco of some former time
where tomorrow they’ll be kissing.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

You are

2008-03-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

You are an orchid, a lilac
spray in the scented air,
Hyacinth and juniper,
branching trees up and rooting,
the red sky at night, the moon
in her phases, a single pebble
skipping down the street
from under the tire's wheel,
the sound that's left after
the sound's dissipation,
the boom boom boom
boom boom boom
boom boom boom boom
boom boom boom.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Core

2008-03-10T04:46:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed how the tree twists
ever so slightly in its upward growth?
That, they say, gives its trunk strength
and that's a fact. But the truth is that
rooted in the soil of its love
its seeks the sun like any plant
throughout its clock-wise day.
It seeks you in its depths
and it seeks you in its air. Up
and down are what you are to me
Sky, earth, and everything I love.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

In Transition

2008-02-29T17:40:00.000-08:00

I don’t trust her but then do I trust any of them?
They have webs they use to catch our power
and strip us of it by capturing our essence
and with it weave a man like us they hold aloft
and say “see? Like God I’ve made a man”
raising Cain, who, source of her pride,
is snubbed by God in favor of his brother
hacked with a cleaver—the first murderer who
skulks up and down and through all the earth,
a mark on his head so no one will kill him
a travelling freak show in the days when
such things weren’t commonplace.

And so we arm ourselves with spears
and into battle we thrust through gorgon curls
who our eye has seen and thus made stone
to batter away at her heart yet here we repeat
our error: thinking to defeat her with a bludgeon
she has caught us up in murderous excitation.
Carried away by the thrill of our victory,
the moment of her defeat seemingly imminent
is the moment of her triumph, the strands of our intent
—our own inferior web, thrown like paint on a wall
where her bullocks paint themselves to fruition.
More Cain legs push the wheels of the cycle,
a gerbil in a cage and a sign that reads:
“Hard work, a good home.”

But from my ceiling I’ve hung iron pipes
and from them grommeted canvas in five parts
so the whole thing flutters like a womb
and there are three entries to my sanctuary
just like the trifecta of fuck
of which my lover whispers sadly
she has too few holes for me
to which I answer Adamly:
“Like God, I’ve made a woman!”
A woman like the original arch and cave,
the theatre of life where beasts explode in color!

© Dan Goorevitch 2007-08

A

2008-02-28T07:29:00.001-08:00

A little egg sticks to the plate
—fine China I bathe in the sink.
Tiny hands slap at the water,
eyes like beams to the back of my skull.
And after I wash her tiny parts
she stands with open arms.
I lift her weight and bundle her up
—strong thighs, tiny breasts, perfect nipples
into a cab on a cold winter midnight.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

∧ and ∨at the centre of our Χ

2008-02-27T06:57:00.000-08:00

∧ was walking down the street with ∨
and ∨ said to ∧: "∧,
"∧ are the kind of ∧ who makes a ∨
"feel like a ∨" and ∧ said to ∨, "∨,
"∨ are the kind of ∨ who makes a ∧
"feel like a ∧" as Χ continued on Χ way.

Confessions of a parasite

2008-02-26T21:03:00.001-08:00

∨ lay half-buried under soil
and as ∧ passed ∧ thought
∧ heard a faint scratching &
dug through the unfinished grave
and raised a simple coffin lid.

There ∨ lay, sad and dazed
and ∧ looking down saw
all — the stunned bruised
look about ∨ eyes, the
golden hair, the flowers in ∨ hand

as ∨ floated Letheward ∧
took a white hand and raised ∨.
∨ threw ∨ arms around ∧
and in wonder X found X lips
and with them X asked each other

Who are X? and ∧ answered
“A worm and now a man
“hoisting your cold white slab.”
“No, ∨ said , laughing, X, "X
“are a prince, X, XX, XXX and

"O! O! O! my king! ∨ cried and said
"∧ am a simple ∨— not gold,
"silver, but dross," and ∧ can testify
to the suppleness, the heaviness:
∨ is clay all right... and ∧ breath.

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Apology & Sequel

2008-02-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

Apology

You’re just a little paper boat
in your whites and summer teeth
the melting snow glistening
on your bunched up cheeks.

We entered the ravine
descending snowy steps
and held each other’s hand
and one another up.

You’re just a little paper boat
and I a clumsy corsair who
lately docked forgot to strip
his heavy muddy boots!

Sequel

I strove in battle three whole days
and reclined, a general in his tent,
resting an hour before the banquet
and the claiming of V—, my prize

and there she sat Egyptian-eyed
uncorseted, her tom-boy boots
Corsair-like straddled a chair
and from her cleats

I—at the moment of my conquest
was taken myself a captive—
no general at all but a battlefield—
I—hadn’t come to collect but be collected!

© Dan Goorevitch 2008

Coil

2008-02-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

He’s coiled but no serpent—
a foetal thumb-in-mouth, a bottle
of pills beside him for show.

You stand and command now
he rise after all coaxing failed
even the girdle you borrowed from V.

There are two kinds of men,
varieties of the common party favour,
a snail and an air filled column

covered by skin you blow
into the tube to make it uncoil it needs
to have air. You tell me

he made promises
he never kept, which
unfurls all folumns

and all that’s left is torn paper
—flags and confetti for the broom
after the boom-box fades.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007, 2008

Happy

2007-09-09T15:18:00.001-07:00

If I were Japanese this morning I would have disembowelled myself
and had my best friend cut my head off, Ann, and that would be that,
my shame restored by honour as you leave to carry it away like Salomé
assuming a rather lusty part for you and me that the times miscast.
Bravery, so they say. Today I’ll have to face you and explain
everything and open up my belly and let you take my head
and bite it off, if you like, or if it pleases you better intact
it would be your choice this few days before the New Year
beginning my apologies early. I have a lot to apologize for
and all the days of Awe may not be quite enough. You are
my ramp, my running start, my warmup act, my God in a cardboard cutout
to practise to, my script girl in the place of Brando as Steiger once remarked
but I digress in running jests and risk being accidentally stabbed,
my Hamlet Hamlet’s friend today instead of Hamlet
facing his shame instead of running away.

Waiting, waiting, Hamlet or Godot. Not you, approaching danger
speedily, like Camilla. If I were to write a novel with you as the heroine
it would be called “The Girl Who Sought Out Troubles” and it would be
about a woman who sought out trouble to keep it from finding her. A jest
that may have a grain of truth to it just as my descent for your sake
into the pit of myself to confess everything, to show nothing beneath,
no strings that sustain the levitating virgin, my pit deep and broad
as I’ve dug it and at bottom is cool earth that smells of something fresh
after what I had to dig through. It is flat down here and the sand is soft
but firm. I can build anything I want, digging steel into the sides
and making sure this time to keep the building level stage by stage
—an integral design that can reach as high as time allows.

What was it brought you to me other than trouble? Love, you say
and I am growing used to that light, dim man that I am
so full of contradiction, so blazing bright in passion.
You have unmasked me, undressed me, made me do these things
to myself, the juggler showing off his act, his many faces, this
kaleidoscopic jongleur you wonder at.
Is his love real? Yet he does not act the part
sometimes. Time and time again, they say, and they’re right.
Janus is multiplied sevenfold the sages say, and the sound
symphonic, the truth no bell but a bell with whistles, gunshot,
viola and timbrel, guitar and octopus. Squish. I delight myself
with tomfoolery before you my gentle axewoman cometh
and I put my head once more on the block for you, happy.

© Dan Goorevitch 2007

The Sheiling

2007-09-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

The colour seems arbitrary, the red reading 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 lashed 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:
Pollock: No. 1, 1948—slaughter on a hanger. Still, beside the lake in this place
it can pass as symbols for me and you, 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
like Jacob’s ladder, from 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 lashing at the bubbles in the bath
and clawing the tender backs of the lovers till it runs like red skeins
of the love-hate bond of mother and child to erase the memory of
lips that sought an understanding which sometimes eludes us in words

—a sheiling we seek and sense beyond trouble, like the beaming 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 to one another that we alternate
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, perhaps including each other.

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, oestrogen 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 want to know you and learning is doing things too late
or wrong over and over or it’s being as quick as love

and love is the quickest thing there is and the slowest is anger
and stubbornness and having not and cursing what one has
and it’s envy and endless grieving for what cannot be changed

while babies get on buses every day and mothers worry
and all our hearts go tick, tick, tick and you cried when I said twenty years
thinking of our deaths ahead, not that you feared it but that we’d lose each other

and I, stubborn fool, always dancing on the end of some 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

Advertisement, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 2007

2007-08-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

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

Cat's Cradle

2007-06-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

Love is an endlessly incomplete project
always just beginning and what you are to me my rose
flushed bumpy pumpkin of potato ancestry
with a big ruby Jewish cross around your neck
is something like the dust —no— the first spatters
of rain on the sidewalk that make the air
electric with water and the pattern of wet and dry
the pointillistic dream of impressionist painters
your green eyes against your red hair
your lips in a smile as you look down, then up,
opening and sometimes your finger, pleadingly
as you ball yourself up for me, vortex around which
the swirling race is made with the gooey strings of
the Creator, Cat’s Cradle in his paw, and us.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007

Open The Door

2007-06-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Lonely men have secret pains
secret joys and secret shames;
stay away from them my dears
lest their secrets leave you stained

and you, and you, and you and you
would find yourselves alone
by windows having secret longings
and terrors mute as stones
that feed a yearning of belonging

that one can never get to
because the handle of the door
is a mile across a floor
you really ought to run to.

© Dan Goorevitch 2007

A Bachelor’s Ditty

2007-06-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

I thought I was free and I was
to call an ambulance at any time
to delay my death before I could
do and feel the things I wanted to

and in my bubble I was king
and then she came; to protect her foot
I spread my cloak over water
and then I kissed her tiny thumbs

but I felt unfree in the fear of losing her
and the uncertainty grew
til I steered my boat toward the rocks
—the rest I’ll bet you knew.

© Dan Goorevitch 2007

A Cup of Coffee

2007-06-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

Softly the shoes pace, the concrete now a carpet.
Spring, and the billowing flesh, like marigolds, bloom 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.”

The Garden

2007-04-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

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

Responsa

2007-04-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

What you take to be solid my dear
is nothing but flaccid flesh:
mortal, bloodcrossed, folded
—a slug if not for intention.

It is that which rises toward you
that flutters and twitches. Naked as a king
this blind pauper has no use for windows
though enter every door he must.

Your salty d’varim anoint me
and that little piece of God
He kicked us out with
lets us raise a little Cain

which you hold up and, shouting
in pain your pride at being His equal,
I work my little plough—I know my place—
and break my back in the furrow.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2007

Dream

2006-05-12T16:10:00.001-07:00

She was going to bring doubtful materiel to dubious men
when I told her to tell them I wouldn't permit it.

We caressed though time was less than short
and a dispassionate examination led to our joining.

She and I bounded like a single kangeroo through the park,
a feat requiring extraordnary coordination & unbridled joy!

We avoided a man in our path but only the 1st time:
we failed to climax, but planned to return.

I have been planning it since, in the centre of a park, maybe Alberta.
If space is insufficient, we’ll move to the intergalactic grid.

© 2006 Dan Goorevitch