I worked this Good Friday.
I did not pray.
I wrote about prayer, though.
Made it sound good,
like something worth doing;
I believe I wrote that
doing was praying,
and singed the praises of those who did
good works.
I wrote about them
and did not pray,
yet hoped my work
was prayer, hoped
my prayer was good
in the same way,
I hope this poem
turns to prayer.
Next year, I will pray
on Good Friday
even if I have good work
to do.
On Holy Thursday they found her body
snaking down the Eel River, blond hair
hiding decomposed flesh. Her family
mourned her on Good Friday —
today.
The Unabomber sits in jail, just charged.
A math professor gone bad; theorems turned
into action, into horrible corollaries.
Rescuers search for our Commerce Secretary
who did not know what broke when
his military jet mistook a mountain for a cloud.
Too much has happened this week.
My colleagues call this a good news day.
They are spared from running fluff on the cover.
This all sells. People want to know —
Was she nude? Did she use drugs?
Did he really survive on parsnips?
Did the Bosnians sabotage the plane?
I chose not to sit and pray
to remember the day He died
while others stood by wanting to know
when he would die or if
the weight of his hung life,
the nail holes, the knife wound
in his side or the disgrace
would erase his life.
I had a deadline
for the magazine I write
and really no deadline at all other
than my wanting Easter Day off
and the week to play,
to enjoy my son’s fourth birthday.
Forgive me my vanity, my values,
O Lord, I pray;
Forgive me for my work —
the glory I take in my son’s joy,
the fear I feel for him, for my daughter,
for my soul’s struggle for perfection.
I am too human.
I would watch you die,
write it down, write
how the blood streaked your side like wine
and your mother wept into her veil,
while I asked the guards
to spell their names for me
so that I could get it right.
Wondering what to write
for this year’s passion poem,
thought of nothing
then the clutch began to slip
on the uphill ascent to the garage
knowing they’d have to remove the
traney to free the clutch
and not under warranty
I took the streetcar to work,
the car jouncing in the tunnel below
Twin Peaks, wondered
if the driver was on drugs, his
foot jammed against a dead-man’s pedal,
we emerged at West Portal, no
angels greeting us with rolled back stone,
at work I turned on my computer and saw yesterday’s work
gone, an INIT glitch nailed me, I think,
buried under my work I wait
for daylight, still, it could
be worse, don’t want
to think about it, though.
My daughter fears the night
facing her bed alone, unstoried and abrupt.
She wants to come and join the din.
She does not know my sadness, my
self-pitying whine that I let slip
as prayer each hour over small matters
of money and home. She wants my arm
to encircle her, to shelter her from
her needs. “I want you,” she says, still,
as I hold her. “Here I am,” I say, still,
and she wants a story to fill the
empty spot somewhere that she feels like an
ache in a tooth with her tongue.
My daughter sleeps. I fight the peace offered me
tonight, more at home in my despair than in salvation,
than in a story of passion I find becoming
increasingly my own.
Christ went to a certain place
to pray,
says Luke, who wasn’t there
when the Lord’s prayer
spoke itself in shivers
of intention.
I read it this way: that Christ was certain,
possessing a calm knowledge
that bread would be
delivered daily, and broken,
and that names would be held holy
on the tongue,
spoken only at moments of
passion and passage.
How certain, I wonder, did the
cross feel, rough cut, slivered
and notched as he humped it
to a certain place
that held no secret, only
humiliation and public hanging,
shouting his abandonment
to the lowland traffic?
In his doubt I find
my certainty.
I sense, finally,
a biography.
by Paul Totah
Like the striations of a turtle’s back,
this red rock reveals the layers
of time encrusted on this high peak
of a hill that was once the floor of an ocean.
It overlooks the painted sides of houses:
the gravel beneath this leviathan’s hoary feet.
Their color is not like the white and yellow alyssum
sparking these rocks with small fires of life,
or like the white-gray-green bark on the strands of eucs
that huddle on this windswept hump of hill.
Even this red-tail seems a distraction — his rose-red
feathers a dilution of the maroon stone.
This is the hard rock of what lives inside me today:
a discovery, an outpouring of blue sky, a place
I had never seen before so close
to my old home, a deep red vein
bursting up on the forehead of this plateau,
like the blue vein growing more visible each day
on my forehead, telling me to burst
into truth, into song, into alyssum, into prayer
before it bursts and sends me packing,
humping my way, in turtle fashion,
to some cold and lonely hill of heaven.
by Paul Totah
March 1, 2000
These were barely trees
low scrub cypresses, distressed by winds,
standing on sandy ground.
Even a typical wind
blowing off Ocean Beach
could topple them, expose naked
root nerves to just anyone.
But it was all we had, all we knew.
We built forts in the bushes below,
moving in with transistor radios,
old plates and cups
that our mothers let us play with,
a Bowie knife our mothers didn’t know about.
Above we’d nail two-by-fours to the trunk,
climb to flat branches, woven
among three trees, step on a live platform.
Springy branches supported our supple limbs.
Jays, wrens, robins laughed at us.
Sunlight, unfiltered, lost itself into twilight.
There, in this green world where we belonged,
exalted, at home, clear-eyed and alive.
Barbara Walters once asked a president:
“If you could be a tree,
what tree would you be?”
Barbara, you took shit for that question,
but I will answer you in words of green syllables
as veined as a maple leaf.
I could live as a madrone,
twisting below the taller redwoods,
stunted, peeling purple bark like old scabs,
spreading evergreen leaves to pocket sunlight,
twining my roots with my taller neighbors,
hiccuping berries for birds to eat
and plant my children away from my dangerous shade.
Or I could be a laurel tree, crowning myself
in glorious scents, smelling of peppers and lemon,
sending vertical shafts of branches
off a horizontal span, fingering through
the beams of light timbering the forest.
I could live my long years as a redwood,
spiraling every three months one more notch
toward the forest canopy
until I could branch past the Douglas firs and dwarf oaks
to taste the first light, each dawn
and see first the fog wall avalanching down
toward my thirst and voluminous hunger.
I would choose from among this holy trinity,
despite bacteria, fungus, flood, fire and loggers,
just to live my life above and below,
in the network of roots and stars
in the lair of the raccoon,
in the canopy of the forest.
by Paul Totah
October 23, 1999
Out here in the tide-pool rush
I twist my thoughts into sea-caves
where emotions hide, trying
to pry them loose, poke them
into open air where
cormorants, hawks, sea stars, otters
might attack, pry, gnaw to the bone
leaving only dead shell.
Breakers twist fingers of foam,
smelling of sardine.
They are my desires.
They lull me, lure me
with songs of uterine bloodswell
singing me to the safety
of a cormorant’s cry, of my daughter’s exalted cry
as hands pulled her
from her first ocean
and now I see these emotions
clustered like gooseneck barnacles,
gray grapes ready for the plate,
and I know what I’m feeling,
have felt this half year now —
watching my mother growing old,
limping on her plastic knee among her roses —
is fear as ragged as these waves
torn by clusters of tor,
that she may die before I know her
as I should, love her as I must.
by Paul Totah
March 31, 2000
The larvae in the dead acorn
white, full of life, swimming
in its gray excrement
eats the green heart of the
living seed.
Brian cracks the shell
softly with his sole,
then uses a stiff fallen feather
to prod it toward a new light
where, blind, it wrestles
with death, drowns in air,
not hearing my friend
softly apologize
telling his students
that he trades death for knowledge
so they might know
about the minimals
sprouting at their feet
green and white and alive.