Epitaph (2011)

We are stilled by such tragedies
as we cannot comprehend. Those
children in Russia, Virginia,
Norway, Colorado. So many.

Nature, too, inflicts inertia.
Tsunamis, hurricanes, and fires
deconstruct the careful longing,
our sure pretense of relevance,

leaving inadequate options:
to take comfort in words in which
there can be no comfort, to paint
our religions, coax them to life.

Mapmakers today understand
the world is made entirely
of layers: air patterns, land and
watersheds, forest and roadways,

urban densities, also known
as towns and the people within.
Remove these layers and the earth
becomes almost invisible,

surely as it must have been when
God laid the framework for first sin.
Are we to take heart knowing that
even He started over once?

It is easy to view the stars
as souls, and if the stars then birds,
some rivers. And if rivers we
might be baptized in each other.

The coffee mugs are always clean.
The muddled bedroom is empty.
God, after this grief, every
I love you feels like goodbye.

(Revised July 2011, c. Martin A. Bartels. Prayers for Norway. This poem appeared in Poetry24 on July 26, 2011).

Landing

In the room adjacent you are undressing
and I imagine the wall between us is more
transparent than my heart. I trace the

shadow that marks the differences between
us (postpone for a moment the need to determine
who is light and who is darkness--both states are

preferable to the nothing in between). In this house
I wonder at the walls, how they could have been
built so much thinner than my own. At night,

deep at night, I lay awake imagining I am
on the roof mystified by starlight, lost in the
lack of self, the dark matter and the dark

energy, the dark at all, where I become the
shadow. This starlight itself is our distant past,
the place where we began. I am helpless against

the onslaught of memories. Between you and
between I there was the catalyst of love, the
spark that traveled one hundred thousand

light years to become us today. We were astronauts
training for space travel, hitching a ride on a
shuttle bound to skim Earth’s fragile atmosphere.

We catapulted fiercely upward in the poignant
attempt to grasp those altitudes previously
imagined only by poets and smitten nerds;

the moon, the stars, Jupiter's satellites, mere space.
We methodically composed a future without end
and now, stalled on this eternal landing strip, are left

embarrassingly unprepared for the inevitable
anticlimax. After all of it... after the one step, the giant
leap, the missions and the thrust, after the spectacular

and the tragic, after the epiphanies of hearts left
momentarily unbound by gravity of thought or
promise or debt, after we soared beyond all

expectations, we confront the persistent disability
that we are tethered here, after all, by our most
mundane realities. There is no app for reinvention.

--Martin A. Bartels

A Good Day's Work

I admit now to defeat by the
     relentless onslaught
of a full laundry basket,
     leading its attack employing
a strategy that places,
     on opposing flanks,
last night’s dishes stacked 

     menacingly in the sink
near the window overlooking my
     yard succumbing to weeds.

I would resolve all of these matters intently,
and still have left the energy to make love.
That would be a good day’s work.

I am sometimes paralyzed by a
     blank page, a blank canvas,
and the two or three paintings
     left unfinished in the closet
for more than a year.
     Forget entirely any attempt
to repair the car engine,
     rewire electrical outlets,
or fix plumbing (the last foray
     being comically disastrous).

I would learn the trades of a dozen artisans
and still enjoy a night at the ballet.
That would be a good day’s work.

Solitude is impossible for me to bear
     for more than a day or two, but I
require that day or two regularly
     to preserve my sense of faith.
This thing called a career baffles me,
     being a person of many interests and
almost as many professions; it’s not the
     work that defeats me, rather it’s the need
to wake up and answer the question
     “Is this all?” with an emphatic “No.”

I would consider it a good day’s work to wake up smiling,
or if not smiling at least not as a grumpy, aging bastard.

When I punch the clock, shortly after
     a simple breakfast of toast,
homemade jam, and a
     pat or two of soft-ripened cheese,
I would walk perhaps three miles
     in silence by a small river,
my two girls beside me
     while they are still young enough
to hold my hands without 

     a hint of self-consciousness.

I would teach them something worth remembering.
That would be a good day’s work.

—Martin A. Bartels

Index of First Lines

Please read this poem and other fantastic found poems in the Fall 2011 issue of The Found Poetry Review. And thanks to Jenni Baker and everyone else at TFPR for selecting my poem!

—Martin A. Bartels

Packing for New York

It is possible to see things in New York
that existed before the world was created. 
There is compelling evidence that God
was manufactured in New York, strung together
of bridge struts, exhaust, furious sounds, dim sum,
and concrete (for endurance). Thus created,

he walked through these streets both born and reborn,
resisted the temptations of whores, bankers
and artists, passed churches and synagogues,
mosques and temples, tilted his head questioning
and opted for a bottle of wine in Central Park. 
Several children, recognizing him,

ran up to coax the more profound answers
from his lips: What is blood? Do you pray at night?
Can you make it snow? They laughed at his clothing
and tugged on his robes made of light. New York
is not a city you can know from the outside.
To pack for this place is to presume one can

bring anything to it. The contents of my
luggage are strangely anonymous; upon
close inspection one would miss the stray hair
of a lovely woman, the memories, the
quantum particles that hitched rides from
prior destinations and dreams. I am

notorious for over-packing and so
reduce the collection to the barest 
essentials: A book, these sentences, the razor
that daily reshapes my image, the shirt that
clings to my skin, the buttons and the fingers
upon them. Each thing I pack is a part of you.


—Martin A. Bartels

Small Things

Neither of us good
at small talk, we drove through the
desperate silence

settling on the
meaningful soap opera
of politics as

distraction. The night
before, I woke to your tears
at 2, both of us

dislocated from
dreams of a future that had
been rewritten in

the illegible
scrawl of a doctor's pen. They
measure tumors in

millimeters and
leave us to measure the
consequences in faith.

—Martin A. Bartels

Wisconsin

Please read this poem and fanstastic works by other writers in 'Verse Wisconsin | Issue 107: Earthworks.' And thanks to the folks at Verse Wisconsin for including my poem!


—Martin A. Bartels

Junk Drawer

The skeleton key reaches back

deeper than childhood. it once unlocked

memories to come: the grist and

rhyme of sacred words recited 

largely by rote on grandmother's 

ample lap, the vast yard where

cousins played then dutifully

heeded the dinner bell, the drawer

of old keys, rubber bands, talcum,

the rosary from Rome wearied

by Hail Mary's through the war and

then the years of change. A vial of

holy water dabbed as perfume

when making the sign of the cross.

A deck of cards and the leather

dice cup. The dice themselves are cast

in perfect calculus. There are

pieces of life that fit nowhere else.

—Martin A. Bartels

Epitaph

We are stilled by such tragedies

as we cannot comprehend. Those 

children in Russia, Virginia,

in Colorado. So many.

Nature, too, inflicts inertia.

Tsunamis, hurricanes and fires

deconstruct the careful longing,

our sure pretense of relevance,

leaving inadequate options:

to take comfort in words in which

there can be no comfort, to paint

our religions, coax them to life.

Mapmakers today understand

the world is made entirely 

of layers: air patterns, land and

watersheds, forest and roadways,

urban densities, also known

as towns and the people within.

Remove these layers and the earth

becomes almost invisible,

surely as it must have been when 

God laid the framework for first sin.

Are we to take heart knowing that

even He started over once?

It is easy to view the stars 

as souls, and if the stars then birds, 

some rivers. And if rivers we 

might be baptized in each other.

      The coffee mugs are always clean.

      The muddled bedroom is empty.

      God, after this grief, every 

      I love you feels like goodbye.

(c. 2009, Martin A. Bartels)