You Broke Your Mama's Heart Again Last Night

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

Estaté

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 just a burning hole inside 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

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

Acknowledgements

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

Between dust and dust

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

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