Your valley-scented breath

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Music and the arts, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Last evening I had the honor of participating in a local effort, here in Yakima, featuring the work of 30 poets of which I was one. We each were assigned a photograph, also by local artists, and tasked to produce a piece that was representative of that photo. It was a fun affair and drew many poetry/photography/art enthusiasts who drank local wine and beer and otherwise supported a great cause: The Yakima Light Gallery. The name of the event was Light Write. 

The event

The following was my offering (image not included for copyright reasons, and so as not to infringe upon the Gallery’s intention to gain physical viewers…at least until after September!).

_______________________________________________________________________

Your valley-scented breath

Your valley-scented breath, raspy, wind-dried and whiskered,

blusters loudly, secrets untethered from your mountain mistress,

 

haughty and aloof. Your nose, veiled and distant,

thrust shamelessly into the virgin air,

 

undrapes an impish, powdered face,

intruding on the lesser ones.

 

Lacking restraint, you choose to hold back nothing.

Instead, winking impudently, you shrug in brazen withdrawal

 

and tilt the globe to burnish your burnt, brown breast –

glacial bosom, alive, rising above the depths

 

of the hot belching earth, quivering in silence but

creased with ten thousand yesterdays. Dug deep

 

into your dark maw, full of old light and new promises,

there boasts a hardscrabble domain. You wear pitted patterns

 

like a tiara, dousing noon-day heat in cowboy spittle.

There’s a mischievous glint in eyes drawn tight against

 

a yawning sky where your introspections crouch,

petitioning their release from dusty shelves.

 

As the choir of stones sings the well-worn songs,

a valley coos, relaxing on your grizzled lap.

 

An untidy blouse of wayward blue

billows out willing, mottled, stretched across

 

the scarred loom of your ancient back.

There, there it is we shall walk.

 

There, where sallow cheeks of star-burnt faces

hide themselves behind the paint of the green years.

 

Silly fool! What lips have you to kiss these wandering feet,

still too soft, that bleed at your touch?

 

So, cough up your tumbleweed tales of

desperado dances and roughneck rambles.

 

Let your thin, dry tongue trace lightly in meandering lines,

the long-forgotten stories of mound-bellied earth,

 

unaccustomed to such attention. Only then would you

blush and turn the other cheek.

©Robert Alan Rife, May, 2014

The event 2

 The Poets 

The poets

 

 

What happens after,

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

What happens after,

There is a laziness in the light

while evening shadows crouch in fear

behind too much sun, still breathing heavily,

pushing their way, like pain.

________

Windows marble and cut the

dusk, more raw for her energy.

She pants, lurching over a tired prow,

pinching the hours before a Marco Polo

entrance. An ache of greying green sprawls

out on the dirty floor, like boredom.

________

What dalliances lay their grievous joie de misère

under tables of discontent? What mis-

matched lyrics to over-sung songs

ever find their way back to tired voices?

They strain through candied throats the coughed up

suggestions of music more real for its yearning, like lust.

________

Perhaps if Hemingway’s whiskey’d voice, husky

in remonstrance, bellowed his last lines

first of the last first tale?

Told last, would it matter less?

Through Tequilla’d sight, he climbed to heights sufficient to

claim a boastful repast and only good came.

Let’s invoke a simpler meaning to all that hides. Conveying

messages in the unbidden shivers of quilted days, like drunk.

________

“Steady on,” the curtains answer, chilled in

the gossip of an impatient midnight. “Nothing is

yet. Just memorize what couldn’t be found

among the bones.” There will be

another branch to add to another tree,

that only cares to know

what happens afterward, like now.

________

Picture found here

 

 

 

 

The bricks in our walls

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

brickwall1

1974. I remember Burkandt, my Turkish friend with legs that barely worked. His eyebrows, far too bushy for a kid of ten, swept upward in a wave, not unlike his thick, brown, curly hair. It was as though his facial hair just wanted to point us to God. The accent was only an obstacle if someone wasn’t really interested in talking to him. Despite his physical handicap, he was remarkably fast and shockingly strong. I laugh to myself as I recall the piss poor way he’d stumble through telling jokes. He never did understand that a joke is best told with the punch line at the end. At least he tried. He was fascinating. He was my friend.

Jamie-Lee Andrews (pseudonym) cowered in a smelly corner of the schoolyard. She thought herself safer there from the abuse she suffered at the hands of my schoolmates. An only child, she lived with her parents in a house even tinier than the 900 square foot bungalow we called home. Whenever an unholy hoard would surround her with arrowed words and painful jabs, I’d hide away like a coward so as to protect my “conscience” from involvement. If I hadn’t been so horrified of the potential social fallout, she too could have been my friend. Not a soul seemed to like, let alone befriend, her. I ached for her.

My sister’s First Nations friend, Olive Redfoot (also a pseudonym) lived between worlds, caught on an unenviable tightrope of a predominantly white professional community in which her father was a lawyer, and no life at all on the reservation where the other unmentionables were stowed. It was not uncommon for either natives or non-natives to egg their house, showering them in sticky disapproval. She was a beautiful girl with long double-braided hair that flowed, wild but disciplined, past her derrière. My sister loved her. I kind of did, too.

Saturday mornings were best. It was a time I looked forward to with stomach-rumbling anticipation every week. My parents would drive me the fifteen miles from our home for bagpipe lessons. At the time it was in the town of Midnapore, well beyond the extreme south end of my home town of Calgary, where we lived. Nowadays, the entire journey is one elongated shopping extravaganza with hardly a green space to be found. We would pass at least half a dozen grain elevators, innumerable cattle, and a train station (it used to run within a stone’s throw of our home). From 9:00 a.m. until noon, the smell of elk-hide pipe bags, cobbler’s wax, cane reeds, Mr. Reed’s coffee, and a room full of young boys would map themselves into my nasal memory.

Dana was my best friend. He lived four houses down from me. We used to pretend we were WWF wrestlers, dinosaurs or superheroes, and trade NHL hockey cards. Fights were inevitable given his insistence upon championing the Black Hawks when the Montreal Canadiens were the betting man’s choice. We’d walk to school with my other friend, Darrell, who lived across the street from us, and just be troublesome, generally speaking. One day we were lighting farts behind his house and a flame came out of Dana’s flaming air-trap that burned the paint off the side of his parent’s trailer. We were a classy lot.

I wish these were more than just a random collection of disparate memories in a middle-aged guy’s sketchy recall. Sometimes, they push their way to the front of a crowded reminiscence and I can still touch their faces, like bricks in my wall; walls not meant to guard, but to support and frame.

 

Picture found here

Loving Judas

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Kiss-of-Judas-Caravaggio-1602

 

Legs dangle, arms crossed, nestled in the humming lilacs,

oblivious to all but the playful patter of unicorn hooves –

a wax doll flays a panda and steals a school bus

like the lips of Judas kissing his friend.

 

There is a flower, stamen intact, but anemic to incursion of lesser bees,

boasting contempt for unadorned suitors, never met.

Sweetest honey, end game of lovers and shared hives,

cannot match the preferred taste of a bloodless friend.

 

Pen at the ready, the steady scratch of solitary ink,

the price of life pretended, unlived living gets written instead.

Freedom, pillaged by cool tranquility, sits aloof on a park bench,

munching contentedly the bones of a dead friend.

 

Drifting, like the Lady of the Lake on a

fairy tale palm frond, someone catches a reflection –

a presence, vaguely recognizable, still unflinching,

puckers again the brutal kiss, in full view of no one.

 

Yet even Judas was brother to some, friend of one.

A silver mouth overlaid with the tarnish of deceived deceit

was still not enough to steal compassion’s face,

bearing down on the grain of a lost friend.

 

Image: “The Kiss of Judas” by Caravaggio

To thine own self…

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, poetry, sacramental living, spiritual formation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Spiritualk-Maturity

My DNA, such as it is, swims in the veins of two amazing young men – my sons, Calum – 23 and Graeme – 18. Each morning, looking back from the bathroom mirror is a reminder that a percentage of my younger self dwells in their lives. To some degree, when they see their own reflections, they are seeing me. As they experience fear, pain, remorse or joy, they do so in ways similar to my own. Their responses, either good or bad, to the involuntary stimuli thrown out from a quivering universe will be reminiscent of my own. Whatever I’ve been able to cobble together as my present ‘self’, God and I struggling together, is what they too must face. It will be their challenge as they overcome in themselves my numerous knotted patterns of being that, sometimes, can strangle or eviscerate. But it is also their gift, implanted in their psyches to help guide them in those mirky moments that will require whatever small intuition was gifted me.

Watching my younger son graduate from high school last Thursday night (6/5/14) was pause enough to sing the praise of both these men. I cannot claim to be half the man I need to be for them. Indeed, I cannot always claim I’ve been a man at all to them. What I can say with a clear conscience and not inconsiderable pride is how much I wish I were more like them. That more of them might be seen in me. My life, my energy, the very blood in my veins, belongs to them.

Their calling now is to find their calling; to find their truest selves; to be their most passionate selves for a very needy world that awaits them, and needs who they are (thanks Mr. Buechner). Precious few would I trust to write what they should most hear. Today, I entrust this sacred task into the hands of the late John O’Donohue…

For the Unknown Self

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

 

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

 

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

 

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

 

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

 

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

 

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

 

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

 

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.

____________________________

Picture found here

Amanuensis to a dream

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words3 Comments

Dream

Amanuensis to a dream –

a butler opening doors

with white gloves and

careless amusement.

 

Playing Pluto to Saturn’s

tune, the cloudless cosmos

settles in for dancing and drinks,

before retiring to deep.

 

All that is good drips heavy,

drunk on its own promise.

A shimmering green shrinks, succumbing

to the blue expanse, wan and

pilgriming. Empathy returns

 

to roost in harbor-homes,

and portraits replace selfies

gone bad. Smog gives way

to fog, sitting still, but

lifting for better songs.

 

Nothing more than minstrels,

casting notes like seeds on desperate

soil, pages of the best book,

written in our own history.

 

Image from here

Accessorizing

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

people-crowd-15602579

Accessorizing a borrowed life with faces –

no names – they’re unnecessary.

Don’t complicate the process by streamlining

a story made prettier by scar tissue, scabbing.

 

A fault line runs through the doubting  

air, fat on it’s own labor, like lighting

cigarettes on sunburnt backs. The first one always

clouds the breathing space

 

like too many clouds in too little sky.

A single teabag in the bathtub where

life gets stored, wrinkled-skin shining

toward a sleeker consumption. Borderlands fold inside out.

 

Don’t look anything in the eye. There’s a smoke

storm coming. A cigarette exhaled in someone

else’s kitchen. Riddle-red cheeks fade back into

other-storied guests.

 

We’ve been here the whole time.

________________________

Image found here

At least they choir

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Fickle, flaky, Freudian in

the way of a nasal winter –

 

hiding on a park-bench

pidgeon’d hole o’ Gram

 

pa’s forgotten stash.

Dive, dive, dive, oh wing-ed

 

wonder, wallowing on the shell-

crusted beach, almost in

 

noon-sleep, snoring through

whiskers thick with doubt.

 

One can only shiver

against gulls, gobbling

 

a breakfast, marooned and

still. Shout at their noisy

 

music, with sea-shanty poker-

faces. They may be raucous,

 

but at least they choir.

Inhale

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic4 Comments

Morning bones, cracked at the seams,

splice themselves into subway-tag poetry.

Ignore the crowd, they’ll trace

their own lines

back to when the post-

man knew where to go.

 

Still damp letters in stilettos

march and fall through city

grates that can smell soar feet.

But these feet write semaphore

that only sing

when you read backwards on

pages wind-blown forward,

east of the garden.

 

Words, stolen

from other people’s lives, hearth tales, fireside

songs, thirteen-year old misfit

adventures crouch and whisper their

secrets

out from

the corners, feed

a hungry pen, growling

for colors on gray paper.

 

Once you can no longer smell the parchment,

eyes adjust,

and life begins.

The ghosts are hungry

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

ghosts

 

The ghosts are hungry for more.

But chiming bells overflow the glass

and teeth chatter in the gray sun.

There is music in the gravel tide,

washing up like red medicine –

bloodied capsules of cotton-talk,

gauze-word, suture-see. It only

gags the throat of a traffic laden wood.

Clouds crippled by the old songs, are still

just clouds.

 

Can you taste the buds of blue, jagged

sweat germinating tomorrow’s winter

garden, stuffed in a teapot on top of your lone

May Pole? Maybe the French kiss

nightmare taught a thing or two about that

unnamed wishing well world?

 

With hunched-back scar-tissue tongue

you lasso the last, unlucky

stragglers from the playground of ordinary

sights, you suck the juice out of the sunlight.

No more wrought-iron tail feathers for

this sidewinder peasant.

 

Suckling the teat of frozen landscapes, you

always forgot what nourished most

until they circle back round and

stump you from behind –

where all the best tales are.

 

Image found here