Mélancolie Mécanique

Dear Mother,

I was in the world
a succession of strangers.
How was I to know?
The dog goes on her lonely
way. I forgot about you for
years. Morning has me

in her claw; disheveled, vacant.
Before sunrise the hard bounce
re-tooling of the clockwork day
is done and the great wheel set
between the glittering city
and the far-flung sea.

I called last night. They told me
you were still dead and too busy
but I know you were there, silent
as the white owl come to the terminal
edge. Now it is up to the rain and 
chance. Y nosotros, tus perdidos.


II.

The wind is idling down the road.
It passes with a backward glance.
It is an old conversation, one I can
neither remember nor forget. No
word means the same thing twice.
I miss you. That I remember in the

mother tongue. They will deny
everything. Potato-bug begins her
trek across the day. I stop to let her
pass. Ant rushes by. Dandelion opens
to the sun. In this inherited dawn,
first light slanted just so catches

movement, something struggling in
the indifferent gears, washed in by
the collapsing wave, cornflower sea
glass eyes etched with irreconcilable
horizons. Beast or demon? But I am
getting ahead of the story.


 asha

Counterpoint

there is a sadness
standing before light
clouds know it
stepping out
into the air—

great storms
born of upper
unseen winds
know it
banished
to the edge of light

but for all its
wonder
Perfection—
stone-like—
is still—
an uncored flute
inert
through which
the disturbing
winds of heaven
cannot blow

there is a gap
nothing can fill
born of what
can never be

there is a yearning
stepping out into mystery
lovers know it—
calling one to the other
the Unknowable
answers back
breaking
their hearts
with unthinkable
melodies.


asha

Cnoc a' Cairn Hill

Famine Graveyard—Dingle Ireland

It’s different here on the westward side

The cairns are small

or not at all

long running mounds—

no one knows how many lie below.

In a dream

I see the sky

so blue above

and—grasses

ringing

the opening

bending down

toward me—

witnesses

generation

after

generation

surviving

everything

even the drought

come upon us late.

The grass remembers,

covers our naked bones,

draws up our misery—

gives it to the sky
to carry away.

asha
published in West & Mid Kerry Live   

 

Winter Solstice

Full moon in Beaver Damn Wash

It has always been spoken of
as the grave and womb of light
this most brief day
this deepest midnight
stiffened with ice and silence.

It is crucial now that there be
harbors and pools and islands
of light, and it is necessary
that there be song
for the dead are everywhere

stricken with grief, wandering
among the birds of winter but
with song they may be comforted
and Love, on this longest of nights,
requires the giving of a gift.


asha

History Lesson

Eating our way out of the jungle
we quit the river we followed.

Finally there was nothing left
of the world that bore us—
nothing left of us
but our hunger.

The dead refuse burial.

Strangers now—
turn your attention
to the sky we breathe

and the fiction of escape—
fiction enough
for another thousand years.



asha
published in 300K: Une Anthologie de Poésie sur L'espèce Humaine /
A Poetry Anthology about the Human Race

Los Viajeros

El camino es largo.
El dia es corto.
La noche es
ruidosa y calor.
Estoy afuera
con la luna.
El camino es angosta.
El cielo es ancho.

Translation:

The Travelers

The road is long.
The day is short.
The night is
noisy and hot.
I am outside
with the moon.
The road is narrow.
The sky is wide.


asha

Writing Instructions

For John & Lee

How do you do, he whispers in her mind.
Take it a little further, he murmurs—
beyond this afternoon, the layers of cliff light—
gray root eyes stern in his pitch thick bush of hair.

Amid the squeaks, twitters and rattles,
the plunking sound of jumping fish,
drifting mumble of lunchers down the lake
and buzz of diving flies,
a fish strikes, bites the meat.

When I was a child I fished,
watched them glide just below the surface—

For a moment only the wind,
winding its way through the tops of the trees,
makes a sound.

Shake out a beginning, middle and end, he whispers.

The boy catches his first fish, grabs
the struggling creature into his world,
his too bright light.
Its tiny teeth sink into his hand;
catch his surprise in the inverted wilderness of water.

Fishing the lake means seeing it from all sides,
he whispers, smiling around his teeth.


asha

Originally published in Byline Magazine

Shadow of the future

 

Drift

I have been up all night
writing and re-writing
tomorrow—
watching the stars
tick across the sky.
Around midnight
the Big Dipper is just
beyond my window.
By 3 am—only stars.
No names.
Then in the hush
just before dawn
when time slows
nearly to a stop

I see my grandmother’s dog
the one she made live outside
that entire North Dakota winter
his pleading, cold-crazed eyes
a sad, two-star constellation.
They shot him in the spring.

The sun doesn't rise.
The world falls face first
into its light, finds its mark
resumes the fiction of the day.

With regret I sense before I can see
the Holy Dark dissolve into grainy
morning. Here and there a bird
stirs in its quills. Before long
they are on the roof rattling
the gutters, pecking at the
tiles. One of these days
they will pull the house beam out
and the whole thing will fall down.


asha