Archaeology

Given the
long history
of life on earth
one must finally
conclude that
everything we
walk upon is, in
some way, death.
The ash and detritus
of a trillion bones and
skin, marrow and
blood all ground to
dust. In time we all
master the art of
disappearing,
some more gracefully
than others. The
dinosaurs left bones
but nothing in the
way of useful
observation.
The cavemen left
some lovely
paintings, proving
that art must be
our second language.
Pots and pans of
lost civilizations
fill museums, the
digs themselves
strange mazes
of all that is forgotten.
The architecture of
our love is more fragile
than those walls.


--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Five Three-Sentence 'I Love You's'

1.

At ten thousand feet above sea level, the night sky is 

palpable with starlight. If you stare long enough you 

begin to fall upward, levitating toward infinity.

I was lost for a moment in you being lost.

2.

At last count there were more than twenty-nine thousand

things that might cripple our hope. Stalled economies

rarely take into account the desperate needs of lovers in

turmoil, politicians singularly unpoetic. 
Love is an unpredictable buffer against such angst.

3.

I still seek symbols and omens in common experience. 

They are most often lacking and I wonder at my 

insistence on meaning. It could be that everywhere I 

looked, the only answer was you and I wasn’t listening.

4.

The closing door is a distinct goodbye, effective as a 

period and not quite an exclamation point. You wouldn’t have 

heard because I whispered them—the words, I mean.

The ones you wanted to hear when you first opened the door. 

5.

After all this time we still struggle with what it means to love.

It is difficult to accept that, at times, it may be only to endure.

This might then be the final measure of true love: The 

elderly lovers--hands grasped mutually, frail bodies 

bent at angles designed to keep one another upright.


--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Tori Amos

(poem II of Star Cycle)

The setting: a university musicians' workshop, 

Northwestern, students gather in nervous clusters, 

fireflies circling. Whip-frayed and glowing, your

dangerous locks stray loosely around the room, weave us

into a diaphanous quilt. The questions: Where do your 

songs come from? Do you write music or words first? 

And for sheer genius how could any of us match “...little 

Fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl”? 

This is simply unfair. Siren and muse, elemental candy, 

you sit at the piano—the black & white behemoth that 

swallows you, your fingers tease it at first, coax the artist's

something-that-never-before-existed, the dissonant 

sound palette. You are a force possessing. It is possible 

in this auditorium filled with people to close my eyes and 

believe we are alone, to pray that I become the piano, 

though I must acknowledge the sobering realization that 

everyone here has just done the same. we are powerless 

in your aftermath. we are drenched in your sweat.

I do not remember the hello or goodbye, but am of a

memory of a glancing hug, a Euro kiss, a freckled cheek

lacking makeup, framed by fragrant hair, the scents of 

rose, patchouli, earth, and damp forest, the Tori-speak 

of irises and unicorns, mythos and mysticism, of your  

world into which we can only yearn to have been born.

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

The Plural of Grief

Driving after an overnight ice storm the morning sun

crested hills, glancing trees just so: There illumined, a

staggering array of diamonds or earth-bound starlight,

an ice-glazed land without explanation or want of one.

I would have painted or photographed that scene, and

believe still that the light itself would have defied such

capture. I am left to mere words. They are inadequate

but all we have, discomfited as we are by silence.

I look to words to describe that November’s sainted frost,

the drenching humidity of a mid-Atlantic August,

how what seems so simple to others befuddles me,

how I excel at what seems impossible to others,

and why at the age of three my youngest daughter,

Emma, painted her October pumpkins pink and placed

one in her bedroom window, one in her closet,

and closed the door. “It’s my guardian pumpkin,” she said.

One must look to words to describe the fundamental

incompatibility of hope and life, the substance and

calculus that conspire to strip away our defense,

compel us to scream “why” at a God that suggests,

in return, it is not our question to ask. (Admit, finally,

that the word “because” does not answer anything.)

You must tap your deepest self time and time again to

overcome the raging arc of life, the aches and yearnings, the

fallibilities and the grief, the anguish of a loved one borne

away by cancers, lost minds, lost hearts, lost loves, loss.

It takes courage and more to survive these things,

and I have, but I am singularly uncourageous and lack the

simplest of skills to accomplish anything but to endure.

I am a conscript of the peculiar faith that suggests God

will impose nothing that we cannot survive. But he will

do his damndest to find our particular tolerances. 

-Martin A. Bartels (draft version)