Kentucky Sketches

The borders between us are largely

an invention, though one can cross

from one state to the next and in

some way know the world has changed.

It is a particularly perplexing moment

when I realize that no roads end,

though one can be surprised by

sudden turns and the misplaced hayfield.

Rolling westward into Kentucky,

somewhere off of I-64, there is a

sudden vacancy in the road as a

bridge spans the most unusual

valley, a sharp and verdant V

anchored by what might be called a

river or an errant thought that drifts

across the blue hills and blue smoke

of this land. I turn off in favor of the

black post-and-board fences and

low-slung drystone walls, late-summer

flowers and tired tobacco barns.

These are farm and pasture lands,

not entirely devoid of surprise but

largely unaccustomed to it.

Even the trill of a warbler, slightly

out of season, tips the delicate balance

of slow time, as if it were embarrassed

by the momentary silence that follows;

an inappropriate laugh during a

serious lecture, the awkward applause

in the pause before a concerto is complete,

so that we are made to be aware

for an instant

of our presence.

c. 2012, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage."

Totem

The beasts within us are much worse than those we invent.

Reason and even prayer fails us,

results from each 

imperceptible or absent.

In the face of the incomprehensible we crumble and rebuild;

Camus’ irreverent stone made real.

Results themselves are our comfortable fiction.

We finally confront the bitter fruit of 

our first and only selves.

***

Contrary to popular belief,

perceptions are not reality but are more often presumptions. 

            

The bartender wears her myths in ink,

    (a canvas I admit I sometimes long to touch and to taste).

How is it I find ephemeral redemption

in the stray glance of a woman's eye

and certainly her smile?

        Make me a fool then, this is my shame,

        I wasted a lifetime and then some

        failing beauty. 

We may all die for 

lack of an appropriate yardstick

to measure our better selves.

           

I still persist in the attempt.

***

In the Bay of Fundy, 

    streams reverse their flows in the great tidal bores,

    not without some pain. 

    Even the slow breath of the earth must gasp.

There are shadows and scars on our souls.

There is no compelling evidence that

we are born with them. 

Sin is merely the first excuse. 

We cultivate our children, only to discover we have little influence 

and less control

over the eventual outcomes.

Left to these fearful conclusions 

we can only rely on fragile love.

Things must be precisely as they are,

a view profoundly imponderable.

***

Sound does not travel in a vacuum

so the conundrum remains:

If the sun roars in its fire and there is 

no atmosphere to carry it,

no soul to listen, 

no soul to 

burn in its fires,

does it make a sound?

We can spin on such questions endlessly,

then dinner must be prepared and the dogs let out to run.

***

Gravity requires a certain weight to be felt,

even more to master its substance.

The Greeks cast gods as fickle beings, 

then killed them in starlight.

The myths we persist in maintaining are

no less surreal, but perhaps lack the poetry.

We all die in starlight.

Dreams contain the stray calculi of our experience,

the sum of which add up to something:

           

 Our first and only selves.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage"

Grey Chambered Moon

I entered your dream as you clambered onto the dappled grey,

leapt out past the thicket of oaks arranged as a forest chamber,

bare shoulders brushed by light sprung from the full withering moon.

I may not have been welcome. My distraction nearly made you fall.

“I can’t… I can’t.” This is what you said in wisdom.

My needs would have driven you off course.

It is possible I should have known this, of course.

There are too many moments written in shades of grey

and in the heat of time we sometimes lack wisdom.

These are poor excuses drafted from an old man’s chamber,

not so old, maybe, but this summer is too quickly turning to fall.

You can tell by the waning slant of the yellowed moon.

I will remind you of the things I remember: The crescent moon

of your left breast loosely exposed by a blue V-neck. The course

of our random and unexpected language of attraction. My fall

from grace, wishing you would join me. The staggering grey

smoke of fireworks, us cast below as residents of a gas chamber.

“I love this moment,” we said, wondering at our mutual lack of wisdom.

One day, you told me, you will visit Argentina’s City of Wisdom,

the park full of gods where you will pull down your pants and moon

them. You mentioned then you weren’t wearing underwear, your chamber

of secrets momentarily exposed in my imagination, a crash course

in erotic resistance, your voice the brushstrokes of Payne’s grey

that captured and condemned Eve moments before the Fall.

There is no fall from grace or perhaps we always fall,

that terrifying dream in which we have no wings, no wisdom

to fly. We float anyway, and in this dream each of our hairs turn grey.

Before this I had never noticed the similarity between age and the moon.

The shades of the moon laugh at youth’s chambered

innocence, for all that, its light may still keep us on course.

In the end, I apologize. There is a peculiar chamber

of the heart reserved for remorse, the place from which blood falls

when pierced by love or lust, the place of abandon or recourse,

the place from which we choose to ignore wisdom

and rely instead upon hope—that impossible, scathing moon

that drenches us in a constant monochromatic palette of grey.

Love must be a chambered bullet, not silver but grey

and dark so that to fall in such is not like moonlight,

but an urgent trajectory whose course denies all wisdom.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage."
Please see author's note under "comments."

Northwoods

It is late spring and too warm by far for the

season, so that blue vapors settle in the

mystic Northwoods pines, bring to mind  

ancient gods and those who invented them.

The waters of the timeless lake unfold

from your skin, so that the fracture of

sudden sunlight as you emerge

drapes you in furious diamonds.

Water sculpts us and absorbs us,

christens and absolves us, but that may

not be enough; it is only water after all.

Vast clouds approach and the thunder

rolls out in a way that I have never heard:

As the storm nears there is a constant

insistent rumble. It goes on so for 30 minutes

without pause. The worst of the rain skirts us,

we learn later, still soaked in the memory of a

drenching downpour, its sound the

enlightened ohm that empties all thoughts.

At night, the loons defy language in their

absurd haunting calls, intone wood-deep

chants from which certain spells might be

cast when mixed with native ingredients.

I am an old witch,

haggard in her tumbled ways,

soaking sumac and drying herbs

against the backdrop of barking wolves.

There are more elements than we can count.

Earth, air, fire, and water are all

one and the same. This is the only secret.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage"

The Au Pairs

The three young women gathered

at the green park bench,

each lovely in her own way, in the

ways that women are beautiful.

Seated at the bench beside them I

couldn’t help but overhear their

European accents, that they’d never

met before. You are German, too?

the newcomer asked of one.

No, French, said the taller of the

three. From Montendre. And you?

—I am from Italy but I speak German, too.

And then the blonde, the German,

said something in her native tongue.

They all laughed at this delightful

little secret. I smiled in happy envy

at the fleeting instance of being a

foreigner in my own country.

Their charges, the children, I mean,

careened across the playground,

oblivious to this moment and its

import, if any might be ascribed.

As practiced as mothers, perhaps

more patiently, even, the au pairs

corralled the children with

gentle calls and admonitions.

In this small park that held the 

world, the women shared at least

two languages, their youth, the
responsibility of caring for

wealthy people’s children, and 

the mixed joy of a new country.

Maybe a certain worldliness, too,

that I—a well-traveled stranger—

can only resurrect from memory,

sitting instead now on a

park bench as my daughter

climbs the playground set,

imagining herself a great explorer

in distant, undiscovered lands.

c. 2012, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, “Unlanguage.”

A Week in Blessings

Apologies to author Ashley Ream, from whom I stole the title for this entry and may again. I hope she will forgive me if I list her first among the many people I've met (blogospherically speaking), and been inspired by since committing to my writing. You can read her blog, follow her on Twitter, and for goodness' sake, buy her book "Losing Clementine." I loved it!

When I hit a dead-end with some poem or another earlier this week, I randomly reached out to a regular reader of my work who happens to live "across the pond." Thanks to my new friend HyperCRYPTICal. I am thrilled and humbled to have (many) readers in the UK, as well as Brazil, India, Germany, France, and Russia. I refuse to believe any of these are spiders, spammers or other nefarious Internet thingies.

I met a fellow poet (Marshall), an amazing artist (Jenn), a great young photographer (Thomas), and a well-connected journalist (Joe) this week -- in each case the conversation was refreshing and the mutual affirmation inspiring. I gotta get out more. 

I tinkered with the design of my blog page, just because I can. Let me know whatcha think.

--MAB

Sunlight

How long does it take to learn the nuances of your love,

the DNA of her breath and the way clouds cast shadows

over her eyes, so that in the grey light of day she is still

something of night,

something of dreams

that you recall for many years, but only in fragments.

It must take decades, perhaps, to learn such nuances and

so few of us, it seems, have the patience to endure, to

tolerate our own surprise at the smallest of discoveries and 

accept such tiny moments

as the progress of our love.

A simple half-step and there you are.

It takes a lifetime to grasp the simple, longer still to know yourself.

Artists still flock to the Amalfi Coast to capture the

incomprehensible Mediterranean light. Perched on the

fragmented, chaotic cliffs one constantly hedges against

the persistent lure of

tumbling downward, seaward,

ending in the transcendental need to climb back up.

One feels the downward pull, too, of the falls at

Niagara, the existential suction of so much water that

you are left breathless in the perpetual vacuum. Even

there one might observe the

rebellious mist that lifts upward,

miniscule tears of preposterous hope.

Drop your baggage here and you will rise up, too.

Language will eventually fail to provide the words necessary to

describe everything. Left to our silences we will momentarily

accept the world for everything it is and fails to be. Some might

confuse such insight with

enlightenment, forgetting that

at least part of bliss is walking on coals.

On storm-laden days you might see a ray of sunlight that pierces

dark clouds, or filters through spring’s pale leaves at sunset or dawn.

Such rays make even the dying chaff and dirt of forest floors

something to worship.

Something on which to kneel,

bury your fingers, look skyward, cleansed by that singular light.

Let the one who reminds you of sunlight be sunlight.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, “Unlanguage.”

Shelf Life

I'm changing up a bit--I'll continue to publish poems-in-progress on a more or less weekly basis, but will also post regular essays on whatever comes to mind. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to share and comment.
--MAB


It seems terribly self-conscious when a writer writes about writing. Self-indulgent, too, maybe. But the craft and process demand a kind of discipline that fills pages with words, so that even when you’re not working on the novel or short story or poem, you’re writing. Something has to fill the page. Your fingers keep typing even when you’re not at a computer.

I recently purged a vast quantity of books, first at a big yard sale, then through donations. Over the years I had collected perhaps 1,500 books, not all great, but most of them quite good and memorable. For a long time I had thought of them as friends, but then I came to realize they—along with my even more vast collection of music CDs—represented my graduate studies. I earned my masters degree with Jim Harrison and Tim Robbins, then my PhD from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Richard Brautigan. Bach, Gorecki, Gershwin, Monk, and hundreds of more contemporary names were more than the soundtrack; they were integral to my studies.

Getting rid of the books and CDs—an act that people (with little understanding of who I am or what a writer does) often recommended—came with a certain amount of pain and melancholy. Unexpectedly, it also came with a sense of liberation, like without so many words filling my library I was free to write my own.

Of course there were quite a few that I kept, will always keep no matter how many times I have to pack them in boxes, move them, then re-organize them on shelves in some contrived life order like John Cusack’s character in “Hi-Fidelity.”

What did I keep? All of the above writers, of course, and my meager but important collection of poets. Any Nobel or Pulitzer winners I’d collected (Gao Xingjian’s “One Man’s Bible” is brilliant). A few oddities: seminal works of science fiction, Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Carson McCullers’ “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Oh, and of course the five remaining copies of my own out-of-print book, published in the ‘90s.

There’s some space on my shelves and it’s been a while since I visited a bookstore.

--MAB

Photo Album

In the end it may be that others

perceive us only as snapshots,

points in time stilled by the

blink of an eye, the frame of memory.

Even close friends and family are

vulnerable to singular interpretations,

no fault of their own; we reveal who we are

in the light by which we prefer to be seen.

The personality test (I wonder how I might

fail at it) insists I select from  

myriad adjectives to describe myself.

Gregarious, introverted, insecure, confident,

ambitious. There was no checkbox for

“all of the above at different times;

occasionally, all at once,” because we must be

absolute and definable to be swallowed.

It is possible I am simply advocating for nuance,

a relatively unspectacular proposition.

In Saint Lucia, the travel writer whose

            name I don’t recall, boarded the yellow bus

bound for the top of Soufriere. The sad and

            reticent volcano spews the stench of sulfur and

boiling springs. The stones around them ashen,

 white as prehistoric bones. One is forced to

ponder then when history began.            

We retreated to the dilapidated

row of shops where local women sold

colorful batik, then ditched the island’s PR

lieutenants to opt for bottomless plates of

conch and callaloo (made from the dense green leaf

called elephant ear), supplemented by thoughtful

doses of rum. Looking for a story, we might

write ourselves. Our glasses never emptied. 

I chased a shy lizard from her bed before

kissing her quietly and without need. We

smiled and I left her room. There is something

gratifying about loving a woman without desire,

as if we have momentarily conquered the

inevitable appetite of our species.

To carry a barracuda from boat to pot

you must pierce thumb and forefinger through

each eye socket. Natives of the island of

Ambergris Caye, Belize make a starchy soup from

vegetables, onions, herbs and the bony fish,

satisfying paired with a Beliken or Guinness.

Lazy, we paid $200 US to fish the shallow waters

inside the reef, where sea life boasts improbable colors.

In the nature of our world living things defy the

best intentions of artists and photographers.

Indigo bunting, queen angelfish, yellowtail damselfish,

tulips in spring; Monet came closest, perhaps, in

Water Lilies but was tormented by color, a sad tradeoff.

Snorkeling at night the water condenses the

diving light to a perfect cone. Underwater, the

speed of light is reduced to a fraction of itself.

In front of you is nothing but the dark sea.

Beside you, barracuda flash in silver-lit streaks

so close you can feel the current of their

passage. This is as close as I will ever be to the

lead goose in a V-formation. The water is silent

except for breath through this hollow tube.

Separated from the normal corridors of

human existence I am untethered and yet

profoundly centered, adrift but

self-propelled knowing only that

destiny must surely be contained in

darkness. It would be years before the

scent of coconut oil failed to remind me of

Lynn, a smell so erotic – the oil itself so sensual –

that my skin long remembered the buttery

contact with hers that followed weekend afternoons

at the pool and one particularly decadent

vacation in the Keys. Visiting her ex-boyfriend, we

smoked from a bail of pot he had discovered

floating off the beach; I learned how to clean

lobster and to keep to myself when personal

histories are relived. Fortunately such errors in

judgment are rarely fatal. I left her only weeks

after I had come home to find her sitting in the

kitchen dropping steak knives from

table height onto her foot in a sadistic game of

mumblety-peg. The fresh bottle of frozen Stoli’s was

two-thirds gone, her eyes cast in the glaze of

someone who is ultimately lost. There is no way

to count the population of people 

who are repulsed by their lovers.

Keep passing the open windows, she said,

the tragedy lost on me until she explained:

When you want to kill yourself you have to

keep passing the open windows. I left because I

like open windows, the attraction being not height but

distance and the cool breeze of foreign moments.


c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)
Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage."

The Unbearable Weight of Nothing

I thought I had many years to

prepare for your major questions:

Where do babies come from?

What is the meaning of life?

Dad, may I use the car tonight?

But at four years old you asked this:

Are adults scared of anything?

And I had no answer.

At the middle school talent show, the

young girl stood on stage,

quiet and shyly poised. When the
emcee announced her song, we gasped.

“If I Die Young,” she said, by

The Band Perry, the

poignant ache of lyrics we all knew

sung by a girl too young to appreciate

our fears. We applauded loudly when

she finished, raised up by her a cappella

rendition, relieved to think, finally,

it was only a song.

Are adults scared of anything?

The house stood empty as the

day we first moved in, sunlight

pouring through bare windows, the

scattered dust of boxes and memories

tangible as our shared fear. With nothing but

our possessions in hand, the future was

exposed as truly unknowable as it is;

our greatest vulnerability revealed as the

chance merely to influence probabilities,

weak at that. Stripped down,

bare as the empty house,

this is all we are, we thought,

and it was an unexpected relief.

Adults are scared of almost anything, I thought.

Our childhood fears evolve from imagined

beasts and abandonment anxieties

to the usual cast of unbearable realities.

At first fear is imagined, then

learned; the deaths of loved ones,

sordid acts of violence, ultimately

reducible to simply loss, plain loss.

Buddha intoned that life is suffering,

that we might overcome such pain by

enlightened detachment, but for all his

later incarnations we remain

simple peasants of peculiar glory.

Are adults scared of anything?

Yes, string bean, we are.

But we endure because of love.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

part of my new collection, “Unlanguage”

The Unbearable Weight of Nothing, Part 1

I thought I had many years to

prepare for your major questions:

Where do babies come from?

What is the meaning of life?

Dad, may I use the car tonight?

But at four years old you asked this:

Are adults scared of anything?

And I had no answer. 


c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels
part of my new collection, "Unlanguage"

First Dance

There are one hundred and twelve seams

along the sidewalk on our block, plus

twenty eight cracks of varying length and width

that you tiptoe around, careful not to let loose

your spiderweb grasp of my hand.

Music plays in my mind sometimes,

random and unbidden,

Charlie Parker or Coltrane,

Mendelssohn or a rare acoustic set by the

Yeah Yeah Yeahs. On a bicycle these

same seams bump out the rhythm to

“Maps,” or “Bessie’s Blues.” Then I imagine

your wedding reception, our first dance,

you are twirling in our spiderweb grasp,

and I will be careful not to let go again.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage" 

At the End of the Day

(Author's note: This poem was first published at ninaalvarez.net, as winner of her 5th anniversary poetry contest. Thanks, Nina! And congratulations on 5 great years supporting poetry and poets. —MAB)

A simple place to write with a friendly pub nearby.

Land to grow vegetables and herbs for our evening stew.

A landscape of pasture lands, a river nearby for fish,

the cheap cuts of steer or pig, a plucked chicken

(save the parts for stock). A cast iron pan. Good wine.

A quiet place to read where the land stretches its legs,

reminds us that we are humbled eternally by grace and

beauty. To know these moments is our only ambition.

At the end of the day you come home to what you are.

The corporate ladder is climbed primarily to patch walls and

change light bulbs. The serene young blonde at the corner bar

has aspirations. She will either live them or not, both results

equally poignant. The herons defend their twilight, blue-grey

mystics in a perpetual stance of expectation, until their wings

explode in the urgent energy of exploration. Mythic dances

unfold unobserved. These are our first angels. The moon in

           

daylight pretends to be a cloud. Nimbus or cumulus, I’m unsure.

In daylight the moon is a won ton, cloud-swallowing minister,

the monk who chops wood before and after enlightenment.

Wood chips on the grill smoke white cloud riffs against the sky.

The clouds themselves are thin fish bones; sky soup. The breeze

moves through us at the same pace as clouds. The moon

remains still. The moon is a skull in this light, not threatening but

ponderous. Strange dreams flow out of it that remind you of the

long poem by Harrison. The moon in daylight said this to me:

You are the changing line in the I Ching symbol that suggests

you will be a great man one day. I am buckled by the notion,

having no such pretensions. The old man who told me we are

born with nothing has it wrong. We come into this world

with everything. We leave with everything.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels.
Part of my new collection, Unlanguage

French Onion Soup

Light a candle and sip French

wine so as not to draw tears

Slice onions, shallots and 

leeks thin, patient

so as not to cut fingers

Salt and pepper to balance the

sweet times of life,

Sugar for the heavy times

Dark broth

Crusty bread for your soul and

Cheese for the pleasure, let it

melt inside you

Serve warm in bowls with love.

—from Imagined Recipes from my Grandmother’s Cookbook

c. 2012, Martin A. Bartels,

part of my new collection, ‘Unlanguage’

watch rain turn to snow

watch rain turn to snow

as flakes fall they struggle for their

ephemeral dominance

as the temperature turns just so

they emerge in a slow fall of self-creation

quiet seeps from the ground

settles within our own cold atmospheres

clouds pause

c. 2012, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

part of my new collection, "Unlanguage."

Digital Memory

I’m sorry now

I deleted the

photograph of you.

It wasn’t that good,

quite blurry, actually.

I needed the space.

c. 2012, Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

from my new collection, "Unlanguage"

Dream Strangers

Those strangers who sometimes populate

our dreams, those whom we have never met

yet in our somnolence, know well.

How is it they take such fleeting residence

in our dark night minds? Last night, this visitor:

the lovely, tall woman whose name is Lor,

short, I guess, for Laura. She prefers Lor for its

mythic quality, a conceit that may be true of all

dream strangers. We share a mutual but

cautious attraction, the beginning of a courtship.

I feel the irresistible lure into unexplored spaces

of the heart. She shares a ground-floor apartment

with a male roommate, Joe or Tom or Steve, a

monosyllabic who is trouble. Her sister is Pamela,

photos of her frame the hallway. Lor is thin, with

sandy skin and short-cropped blonde hair that

suggest California and sunlit beaches, ocean.

We sit outside her apartment now, afternoon,

plastic deck chairs on a concrete slab, while her

roommate throws a tantrum inside. Sawdust

from a construction project across the street

floats in the air: wooden snow. “Is it always like this?”

I ask, meaning him. “Pretty much,” she admits,

resigned to his behavior for some reason she

fails to elaborate. Later we are inside, her space

daylight in springtime, discretely floral. I have

never seen this place awake, yet the subtle

scent of lilac drifting from her bedroom lingers,

coats me in a kind of memory that folds around me

long after I have finished my first cup of coffee.

c. 2012, by Martin A. Bartels, working draft

(part of my new collection, “Unlanguage”)