Opera Hour at Teaneck Creek Conservancy

Highways eighty, four, the Turnpike
Sing with the conservancy chorus: a chirrup
Of warbler, waxwing, oriole. Then the sibilate
Of the warning fingers of the phragmites.
The instrumentalist: one breeze from the West.

Now in joins a tenor of a train screech;
A howl burning the air for an archaic ascetic;
Now the bass of the jet. And soon, the pneumatic
Baritone of a sledge irrupts the lime and sand it
Had etched to a walkway that once had its way.

Tenebrous reminiscences of ancestors hiss
From the phragmites like a ragout of truth,
Regrets, and a reeking of the receipts of what
We must now pay for.

Five pipes, instruments of the chronicle
Of the possible: a could-have-been
Undoubtable advocate of an out-of-bounds
Unalterable history. Let not it be unlettered.
The antedates mediate all eco mandates.

Still the wooded copse espouses to occupy
And okay the alkyds lasting in the morass.

So much music everywhere, barred within
The envelope of Teaneck, moistening an adhesive
With a tongue that tries to speak.
The conservancy, enveloped, is dropped in a slot
Like a bill we have to pay, falling like a feather
To the crest of a past.
We excavate the acoustics of the chain gang,
That is wishing freedom again. They sing only
Of the weeds’ plea to an orchestral machine.
Still, the life, the sound, the wind and word.

Tomato Bisque

This soup is not bisque;
Tomatoes simply bask in broth;
Two cents in a pot, antagonist
To its own pH; unpaid leave
For the red fruit in a stew;
Routinized mob behaviors
Of its parts; memes on
Interim from their beliefs
And behaviors.
More than a vacation
It needs a mind set,
An amnesty therewithal,
And anisette amnesiac,
A forgetting what we think
We are supposed to be.

POEMS TO BE WRITTEN . . .

. . . IN THIS MILLENIUM

Poems for which there are hopeful messages
of which no more may be said.
Poems for which there are hopeful messages
that are there if you would hear them
that are there if you would see them
that are also there if you would remember.

Poems in which there are realizations of blessings
if you realize
Poems in which the fun of thought emulates
the talk of other places
Poems in which all stored in your cognitive garage
comes out onto the driveway, is opened up
is put to use, is welcomed back into your life
like a friend.
Poems in which that which is not in them
clarifies the weather like the speed and shape of clouds
above the fields, or above the mountains.

Poems out of which come the changes they imply
but cannot be seen, since inside they are not
. . . or is it inside? like what you see in people
is not often what you view in their exterior.

Poems that like wallpaper change the environment
which changes how you feel inside a room.
Poems that serve as iodine to small infections
Poems that take out paradigms, sold to you at market
display their deceiving make, tell you who the
purchase serves besides yourself, and more importantly
besides the earth of your children, all of which are yours.
Poems that may cause danger to the speaker
because of the danger they warn.
Poems that stand like the lake you summered at
as a child, which may change as your many years progress,
but to which you will return, seeing more each decade.

Poems that you can pass to children like the one
expensive watch you ever bought, or which you
were given when you grandfather left.

Poems which are free and have high value.
And because they are free poems, choose themselves
who will be their readers
as one may choose a spouse, or choose a park. Pricing

selects the demographics. Poems you can also pay for
if you want them, or walk into the library
or borrow a friends book, or read in yesterday's newspaper
or hear from someone else, or listen to on the radio,
or watch on television, or watch as the sun comes up above the
pond and the trees just beginning to grow their leaves
glow with gold that is also free.
Poems that are free in being, freedom of speech,
and which shackle freedom of speech.

Poems that tie the people of the past
you don't admit often, to the people you become
yourself as life changes, to the people that
will come out of your every action and spoken word.
Poems that sing the glory of the sun, the sip of cool water,
the sounds you can hear as beauty, and can shape themselves
like blossoms in early March on a page or screen, or mind,

Poems that restate the sins of the past
and forgive them.
Poems that restate the imprisonment of the past
and of the present
and shake keys in the darkness so the imprisoned
will know where to reach for escape;
Poems that tell them in the darkness
that the keys are here, but sometimes far away.

Poems that dance with you, measure with you, count with you,
hope with you, cry with you, detect with you, cut with you,
glue back together with you, reproduce with you, subtract with you,
divide with you. Poems that shake the wooden table, shake the plaster
walls, shake the solid soil when spoken, or just seen, or just remembered,
like the aftershock of earth quakes.

Poems that by shadow will be seen, poems spoken so that
we will not even know from whence they came, or that they are
poems. Poems that were the slight change in a path
so many years ago, so that today we only really know where we are.
Poems that like their author are responsible for
the motions and the choices and acknowledge them or not
but make a change in a world culture that is good somehow.

Poems that think we need this to feel hope.
That is all I want to do.

In Memory of Ann Sharp

Putting Away the Dollhouse

There's a child in the hallway
Waiting to enter a question
Like a moth to a bulb.

Sharp cuts in:
The honeysuckle are asking, is there
Any other world for a redolence
So adolescently received
It’s unable to be smelt
Among all the hullabaloo Dewey eschewed?

Ann means:
Reconsider your noisy thoughts.

The inquiries the child cherishes are
Stored like solace in the dollhouse;
Now placed in a middle school attic.
The heat may melt what it took years
To place in the right rooms:
We withhold our vanity in the parlor;
Our seasonal wardrobe of belief, in the armoire;
Conflict tableaus in the vestibule.

Ann adjoins:
And the atrium houses a criterion
So imperial your query will
Need to hang its hat there on
The rack and stay a while.
Have a cup of Earl Grey with me
As we g.....a....s….p
At the awesome forever of its flavor,
Relish our march to the question mark,
Savor the dollhouse parlor
Where answers are as temporary as ice.


© Copyright 2010 by Christopher Parker

In Memory of 9/11

An Exchange at the World Trade Center

Your city misses you. On rainy nights it whines from its streets and everything that must be discussed drifts from the manholes like steam. You are there in the faces I seem to recognize while riding the elevator to the top of the twin tower. The sun was just down and there was enough light to see into Brooklyn, my brick nest, and into the long island and Staten Island. The suspension bridges lit like candles in the hands of children arranged in a line according to size, and the breeze was almost a wind that said: "pull your feeble jacket around you."

The glint in your eye came on in every light. And as the sky became darker and the slow ferries moved in the bay I knew this city was poison, like vodka in the sweet orange juice and this made me want more and I wanted to drink it all and I couldn't speak I was so drunk with it. And down below -- and I had to lean far over the railing to see this -- but far below a man carrying a parcel moved swiftly into a revolving door and was out of sight and he was you and I called your name in my mind so loudly that a light went on in Flatbush and a ferry struck a pier and a car jolted in a pot hole. I said, this is your city and you are here with me in this wind.

And a lovely blonde walked by; she was dressed a little oddly and spoke in a foreign language to her friends and I loved her so much on the roof of all cities but to take her in my arms would have ruined the little web this instant hung in. She took pictures in the dark that I knew would never develop and I took the same pictures of you and thought they would last forever and at least they lasted till now that I can tell you of them.

You were there too, in the little acrylic lens of her instamatic, snapping the pyrotechnics of a life form that has so much to say one language would never do and no one could ever know even her own part of it.

Habla espanol?

No, un poquito solamente.

Aye, lo siento, lo siento.

I am sorry but your were there, and you must have been thinking of New York because a seagull soared near a low roof and what it saw came to you in a dream or painful reverie and your thought was heavy and long like a steel beam and it moved with grace like a barge on the Hudson and was as eloquent as an actor in a space below Canal street which flowed with all it I wanted it to be, the way if flowed when it was a real canal. But now it's petrified like the dreams you had: cobblestones placed in the street before you were born and on their underside the name of every desire, like the names of church donors.

And the trolley tracks speak out under a wheel now and then, but they don't mean any harm and everyone knows the trolley won’t be back the way it was, the way you said it was before you drank so much that you didn't see the pain crawl up on you and strike you down, the Vesey Street Phone Company your great tomb, in nineteen sixty the tenth tallest building in Manhattan. Now it's off the lists and out of the almanac like anyone whose time is gone, if we ever had a time.

copyright 2010 by Christopher Parker