Poem Written Shortly After Leaving the Morgue

for M. John

No Seventh Seal

No game of chess

Just a sign by the building’s entrance

Announcing the Hours of Identification

From 9:00 to 5:00

And the computer screen

Turned discretely my way

To enable the speedy display

Of your bloated visage

Pixilated and distorted

Just like an internet meme

Almost beyond recognition

Identification seems pointless

As you've fled the jurisdiction
Where Habeas Corpus has no effect 

Now a poet

May do well

To deny death’s dominion

But setting verbal niceties aside

I see no point in denial

When it comes to such vast holdings

Which extend to the far horizon and  

Now include yet another dear brother
On a slab in this Midtown necropolis

*  *  *  *  *

Yesterday I was charged with the responsibility of identifying a friend’s body in the medical examiner’s office, which served as the prompt for this poem.   From the garden on Sunday to the morgue on Monday, a poet is well advised to travel with a pad and pen close at hand, in order to keep a running chronicle on life and death.

Poem for a Sunday at my Desk

Do you know the poem Lost by David Wagoner, which is also know as Poem for a Sunday in the Woods?  I'd never read it until just now when I came across it posted to a friend's FB page.  Nice poem.  It prompted me to write this poem in reply, appropriately enough it being Sunday afternoon, sitting here at my desk, enjoying the view out my window of the magnificent beech tree on my neighbor Lucille Carter's front lawn:

Poem for a Sunday at my Desk

Sitting at my desk

Understand that everything

Outside and around me

Continues growing

In the warm spring rain

The earth teems with the

Long range plans being made

In the pea green light

That predominates outside

On a Sunday afternoon

Understand that stillness

Plays no part in the

Natural conditions of life

Around here which is presently

Everywhere abounding and  

Thrumming around me

So much so that what

Every single tree and bush

Is presently doing is

Utterly lost on me

And yet still I am found

In the midst of spring’s

General hubbub

The riot proceeds

From the center

To the extremities

As the sap keeps rising

And the living proof stands

Visible just outside the window

There in the grand old beech tree

On my neighbor’s front lawn 

* * * * *

Those of you who are interested can read Wagoner's poem here.


And for those of you who like concision, here's a haiku inspired by the same view from my desk:

Tree within tree

Root within root

At first murmur of spring

Come new tendrils and shoots

On First Meeting Your New Best Friend

The more real you get, the more unreal the world gets

-   John Lennon          

A friend posted this quote on FB the other day.  The more real you get is such a distinctively 60's expression.  It's also striking to me how as we journey East to West there's a dramatically different way of describing the path to enlightenment.  Lennon is speaking and thinking here in a typically western fashion - striving for a radically subjective I - in his formulation, higher consciousness can be achieved by making the Self more real, whatever that means.


A Buddhist takes the exact opposite approach - deeper awareness is attained by journeying down a path of self-diminishment, and enlightenment comes within reach when ego is altogether transcended - making the Self as unreal as it can get.


Truly we live in an interesting time - when these two previously distinct strands of thinking and being are now in the process of being braided together as one.  This is a movement that has been happening fitfully over the last century or so, ever since the swans of Buddhism first came to North American shores.  And now the confluence is well on the way to becoming a more established fact - the Self (in all its western glory and adornment) is now learning to stand astride of the Not-Self;  they are soon to be bosom buddies in fact, like matter and anti-matter or spirit and flesh, rolled up as one.