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Edward & Rod: The Brother's McKuen.
Photographed by Diane Kopperman, May 2002 at BB King's New York City
A Thought for Today
Language has no end and no beginning,
other than the coda each death makes and the paragraph that starts with
each new birth.
FROM the¨BOOKS
Today’s poetry is taken from “. . and autumn came,” “Alone” and my newest
book “A Safe Place to Land.”
THREE POEMS FROM “ALONE”
Concerto for Four Hands
Those waiting shadows
have always come along
in time to save me
from the mischief
of myself.
Now in this
snow-baroque winter
this Telemann time
of Empty
do some shadows
not yet formed
conspire to fill
my empty mattress,
my too-wide room ?
Come soon then
for I am growing tired
of Telemann
I could use some Bach.
Butterfly
Yesterday
a butterfly
flew through the eaves
of Villa Trenta
and came to land
upon the middle of my arm.
He crawled with sureness
down to my hand
then back along my shoulder.
He fluttered there
a moment only
then fell dead,
a victim of the heat
or something higher up.
If God
can strike down
birds and butterflies
and then change rain
to rainbows
and clouds to grays and whites
of every hue,
then the ugliness
I’ve shown of late
has surely marked me
for an early death.
What troubles me
is not
my disappearance
but my lack of being
troubled by it.
I am willful now
toward well-meaning friends
when I should have will instead
to fight off the oncoming end.
Cycle
Only lonely men
know freedom.
Love,
as lovely as it is,
still ensnares.
Is it better then
to be on the outside
in the dark and free,
or caged contentedly
but still looking
out beyond the bars?
-from “Alone”, 1975
OCTOBER 25
it’s sky time now... luminary time
the lights of the earth die out
and the sky takes over
each star is a candle...
each bright star a reason to live
the sky is full of innocence tonight
full of tenderness and fog
this is night
a cool breeze along the lake
a moon half empty hiding in the mists
this is saturday night
a cricket counting minutes
a swallow winging... up from the riverbank
alone with himself
the wind sleeps behind a hill
dead like an autumn leaf
and i am content
like still water
with no place to go
- from "and autumn came", 1954, 1969
TODAY’S INSTRUCTIONS
Don’t forget to turn those clocks back an hour tonight and by all means
sleep an hour later tomorrow. And, of course, sleep warm.
RM 10/23/2002 7:45 PM PST
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