A ghost ship, its gray bulwark
sails above eucalyptus tops,
a prow of wispy vapors,
paints monochrome grayscale in its wake,
erases the light blue morning sky,
pauses
while the rest of the fleet scuttles alongside,
the ghost crew staring me into silence.
The ships are now the sea,
then, slowly, they sink into the green ether
of treebranch, crowflight, rooftop
and the blue bursts like air bubbles
back to the surface.
The long light comes green and red streaming
from the fire’s halo setting
leaf and needle into crisp
fullness filling and readying
for night’s drainpipe blackness. I
see now the fire in the yellow-red bark
blazing upward to paintbrush
washing wild fire strokes
painting and erasing canvases of sky
so low it falls heavy around limbs and
middle leaves, covering
half the trees in shade, shadowing
now what will all be blackened
come nightfall. I
stare at the top half and wait
for the purity of color that comes
only at twilight and dawn
when the angle fails, or succeeds,
and light lights each electron
in the skeleton of the forest.
Sometimes
I am lit like that
I like to think.
My friends who climb mountains
never sing about mountains.
My friends who sing but never climb
sing about mountains—
of their distant beauty
drawn in green and white
against the horizon.
My friends who climb
have seen friends
fall to death when
frozen ropes
snap.
They know the treachery of
handholds, black thunderheads,
thin air,
ice walls, silver-mirrored,
that illuminate hidden ascents,
or sometimes blind.
They do not sing of mountains
because no words come to them
when they climb; they just climb,
their journey beginning with the first breath,
indrawn.
—Paul Totah
Lord:
Grant me peace
Born on grey white waves that
Spill onto brown grey sand
Linger through white washed roads
Weave sawtooth patterns
Expose white striped veins
In basalt, serpentine, chert.
Lord:
Expose my veins
Wear down my rock face
Pummel me into selfless sand
then
Walk on water
To where I sit
On a red rock
Thinking desert thoughts
Without flower or blossom.
(staring at a painting by Luce di Tommè 1365)
A woman swoons in lapus lazuli,
upheld by a man in chartreuse,
a woman in tangerine.
The man’s arm supports the woman’s bent breast
covered in silk the color of cherry soda,
candy apples, field-ripe strawberries,
the same color
as the trickle down the two arms,
the gush below the right nipple
between the rib blades,
the splatter at the feet
staining the wood, running
into a fire-red pool
into a pencil-thin stream, leading out the picture,
out the frame, down the wall,
onto my shoes and through, past dark socks,
through my soles, up capillaries
mixing with my blood, mixing me up
with someone I’m not,
someone I’ll never be,
someone dangling from a cross
while another person below
dressed in red,
holds his arms out
as if to say: Fall.
I’ll catch you.
On Bourbon Street someone
in a blue tee-shirt Southern
Christian Baptist bookseller’s convention logo
holds an electrified cross shouting
“Repent sinners, Jesus is the way…”
on red light emitting diodes beaming
banner headlines while twelve teens
in the same tee-shirts
look at tourists from Iowa
holding plastic-cupped Hurricanes
and wonder at the taste
of that forbidden grenadine.
Meanwhile, one street crosswise,
a drum, piano, banjo, bass,
trombone, trumpet, clarinet septet
preserve, persevere, sever true words
and music from the verity of time
in a hall as small as my garage,
enmeshed in pegboard on which hang
saints who marched in, then out
of a world made better by their songs;
above them, the only real icon in this
holy of holies being the image
of one trombone player forming a T
out of his instrument and torso
while below, the sacred seven
scream and whisper and moan and promise
“I ain’t gonna study war no more,”
to congregations of true listeners
caught in the eternal jazz gumbo
where creation and time meet
in one last crucified intersection
like the one made by a trumpet
and clarinet playing close and hot
in the heartbeat rhythm of holy blood.
— Paul Totah
7/15/00
Who Died Before the Rescue Team Reached the Japan Air 747 That Crashed on a High Mountain
Take care of your mother.
There is no hope.
It’s been a happy life.
Thank you all.
The world is pain —
the sound like knives in the side —
the word “endure” helps me
suffer the world,
suffer myself while I
walk barefoot on tidepools
of blood coral,
sea urchins, wet, dead
kelp and closed mussels (the silent
shell lips)
— the shallows of loss —
before I sink into depths of deep blue
waters, the blue of God’s
eye, unblinking, open,
shining, wet.
The pain suffers me to endure
redeems me somehow
leaves me dry, wet,
waiting, received.
I have receipts to show for it,
wounds on my feet, blisters
of a hard journey, a
slap on my cheek
when I was 13.
It saved me. It may
save me yet.
For Christmas I looked for that wine we drank
sitting in the middle of Siena 11 years ago,
where horses and riders reeled round the campo
as the sounds of canon and pigeon wings
ricocheted off soft stone walls
softened more by centuries of twilight.
I found it off Harrison Street
at a warehouse for wine snobs,
and I spent too much,
because I love you, because this
was the wine we drank
right out of the bottle
sitting on the cold stones
like a homeless pair in the Tenderloin,
cuddling on a car seat under the overpass.
When I went to pay for it,
the salesman told me to wait
five years before opening it.
You know me. I like my gratification
instant, my purchased pleasures
ready for me when I get them home.
But it was the only Brunello di Montelcino in the store,
so I bought it, and thought
five years isn’t so long.
Ten years ago, our daughter was born
when time began its wild ride
slipping past reason.
And we’ll be dead before we know it.
So I’ll let you choose. Do we open this
when we’re 50, disbelieving the tragedy
that we thought only happened to our parents?
Or do we uncork this
when the odometer on our marriage turns 20
and we start laughing at ourselves
uncontrollably, all over again?
Or do we screw good advice
and the cork and drink the young wine
while it tastes of young grapes, sweet potential,
just like we still want to taste?
Slowly rocking my child to sleep
we look out our window and
think a hymn of praise to the One,
thankful for the growth
of the ivy that covers the dead
ten-foot eucalyptus stumps and the
yellowing lemon tree leaves that
need me to stop watering them
and spray iron concentrate
onto their roots and thin veins.
The sky’s metallic fog stills
the sky, pine trees and tall hills
today. The coastal valley
where I live, this green watershed
with occasional creek, is called
Vallemar, my street, Nataqua. Whether
water is born here, or, as I
have seen with my son,
births are of the water, with
Michael emerging fishtail fast,
I’m not sure. The name “nataqua”
my wife believes, is Indian. I’m sure
it’s portmanteau Latin
trying to name what can’t be named,
like my son, whom I still think isn’t
quite a Michael.
Here, rocking him, I watch the growing green,
the dance of gnats,
and give glory,
thanking the One
for this ordinary day.
My prayer: May I never grow too used to you,
my son, this day, these leaves, and the
stilling sky.