Movement

The movement of the clouds 

makes the earth spin faster.

There is no space between 

horizon and sky.

In Genoa the hotel window

opened to an industrial port

while the television spilled

insistent news into the shallow room.

I longed for a familiar word and went

momentarily crazy for lack of English.

Distances expose our most 

vulnerable selves. I still remember

the blue wine bottle that cast 

blue moonlight on your skin in

Positano, the taste of raisins wrapped

in lemon leaf that clung to your lips.

I mine these memories because

I have none left, there is only the 

dream of going forward,

where no one else has been.

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Address Book

Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, these the

predominant states in my address book,

each home a temporary stop on a journey

defined not so much by destination but place.

Home is a door that opens inward and contains

our breath, our cries, the ghosts of our passions.

Home is a stairway that climbs and descends, the 

choice of direction unknown until we arrive.

Walls, then, must be designed to protect us from the

embarrassing display of our spirits’ disarray.

Home is also a door that opens outward,

as I discovered upon learning of distance.

We step first foot outside, inhale, and are seduced

by sirens of potential in remote places.

* * *

An old red house stands vacant beside a scenic 

rural road in the hills of northern Virginia.

Two willows occupy the land beside a stream

fed by springs and winter’s residue. No doubt the

land here was once trod by soldiers; battlefields near

yield fertile grasses, in fall they turn blood-amber.

But this house stands pondering. Wisdom seeps out of 

twenty well-placed windows from which timorous ghosts

view themselves as children; aging, dying as 

must be the final way of all we witness.

You are drawn to this place. You peer inside one warped

single-pane window through sunlit dust and stillness,

the only furniture an old desk. Wide-plank floors 

creak beneath the weight of the past. Walls sigh.

* * *

Distance itself may be the first illusion. 

Now is only now and not where we are bound.

There may be a lesson: The first step is not where 

the journey of one thousand miles begins. It starts 

the moment that our fingertips touch the doorknob. 

Before its squeaky turn unlocks bolt from wood, 

before the door is pulled on lazy hinges to

look outside or in, before we exhale.

And when we next inhale, we are hurtling 

through life’s rain of lovers, grief, and redemption.

Love is a poor excuse for a travel guide 

and there are no cartographers of the human heart.

Meet me on the front porch of the red house. I will 

wait for you so we may open this door together. 

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Prayer of the World

The lions, tigers, and chimps ran free,

let loose upon a modern world from which 

there is no escape. So fearfully we took aim, 

all of us, really, and shot them dead. 

We grieve our fear and our loss of humanity. 

To end the despot’s rule we picked up arms, 

all of us, really, and brought him down with 

vengeance as was due. “For all of us, it is a hard 

road, because our battle is against ourselves.”*

We take over power that will inevitably dictate us. 

There should be hope in this: That among the

uprisings one group lays down arms, says it will

no longer kill to fight, but not so fast: All of us, really,

for survival’s sake, remain skeptics of peace. 

We lift up to some god our hopeless hearts.

It should be no surprise, then, as markets crumple 

that we uncover the final irony: All of us, really, are 

linked not by dollar, yen, euro or pound, but by the

common need to bear up under the weight of it all.

We are broken and impoverished. Mend us, heal us.

These may all be lessons that we’ve learned before.

All of us are prisoners of someone else’s war.

All of us are victims of someone else’s crime.

All of us are powerless, by our own design.

--Martin A. Bartels (This poem first appeared in Poetry24) 

*Ahmed Ounaies, as quoted in the New York Times 10/23)

The Everything of You

Though it is very difficult to imagine, 

that you might not have all of this, 

one day it may be gone, 

the everything of you. 

That is, if you count your self among the 

things you possess and that possess you, 

if you measure worth by value instead of

action, if you allow your comfortable fictions

to become the definition of you, they will 

almost certainly one day fail you. Do not

feel guilt for what you have and what you hold,

do not fear for its loss, but best be prepared 

and get to know the other you, get to know it 

well. Know the self you will be when the hunger 

and the thirst and the fear of open night take you, 

when you must make the impossible choice 

with your last dollar or dime or penny, know the 

gnawing doubt of when the next check will arrive 

and the impotent fury at how much of it remains 

after the fees of poverty and desperation are imposed. 

Know the you that wanders empty of heart and

frightened mind, through street or field or desert 

seemingly abandoned by God, so you are certain 
that this must be where you finally belong. 


And then know the you that takes the next step, 
and the next. Though it is very difficult to 
imagine, the nothing of you, you might.

And that is, after all, the miracle of you.

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)
(Author's note may be found under comments)

Single-Breath Cabin Poems

i.

Our canoe drifts out,

paddles launch ripples that

die unseen, far away.

ii.

Sunlight pierces trees,

sideways cones of fire that light

this green heart, my heart.

iii.

Lake, bordered by pines, 

reflects just one cloud. I rest 

here, seeing double.

iv.

Afternoon rainfall

drenches us and lines your face 

with happy tears.

v.

Sunset lights up cloud 

bellies. Looking downward, do

they see such beauty? 

vi.

Full moon displaces

stars that would have settled on

this lake like cinders.

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

(Author's note may be found under comments)

Starlings in Rome

Outside Stazione di Roma Termini, packs heavier 

on our backs than the elation we feel at having 

finally arrived, we stand as lost as any tourist. 

The specific foreignness of it all impresses us

so heavily, extricated from our familiar selves by the 

most mundane of things. People mill nearby in 

casual entrances and exits. Above us, an arcane  

dance: The coffee-filter swarm of starlings at flight, 

weaving so intricately that time below seems suddenly 

irrelevant. Few people notice them, the thousands of 

birds, perhaps they are so common here that locals 

are simply immune to their magic. I once read about 

a syndrome of sorts, that some suffer seizures after 

viewing too many extravagant cathedrals, too much 

extraordinary art, something in hindsight I might think 

a good way to go. I don’t know if it’s true. You noticed 

me noticing them, the birds, and we stared together 

seeking meaning. One saw birds, merely starlings, the 

other saw the possibility that within their flight was the 

shape of God’s own DNA in constant motion, ever  

reinventing, the single breath of enlightenment.

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)