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)

Rules In My Daughter’s Sixth Grade Handbook (That Weren’t In Mine)

(A found poem--draft)

Underwear exposed or worn
as outerwear
is unacceptable;

no pajamas or slippers
will be permitted
(except on Pajama Day).

Pants should be an appropriate length
and not dragging on the ground.

Students must act responsibly and use
appropriate language and behavior
on computers and the Internet.

Use of toys and electronic devices
(including but not limited to

radios,
CD players,
games,
cell phones,
beepers,
cameras,
pagers, and
laser pointers)

are not permitted during school hours.

Public displays of affection, including
hugging, kissing, holding hands, etc…
are not appropriate in the school setting.

--Martin A. Bartels

"Marisa Tomei, Marisa Tomei"

We had a fleeting affair although
it’s possible you may not remember
your briefest cameo.

By coincidence we followed the same
map of Italy while you filmed “Only You”—
Florence, San Gimignano, Certaldo, Rome,

and then Positano where I turned a corner
outside Le Sirenuse, our eyes met and
we were cast into the inevitable.

Again, it is possible you may not remember.

Tabloids would soon ask “who is this man?”
as poets are singularly anonymous but
love the word “paparazzi.”

I asked you if actresses could be trusted
not to turn each day into vastly complex
movie scenes and you laughed at me knowing

I would one day write this very scene.
“Should I trust a poet?” you scoffed. I was
stupidly miffed. A stray dog followed us into

Chez Black and you insisted he stay
over the protests of our waiter. We tipped well.

Leaving, a young boy out of a film by Fellini
ran up the street shouting your name.

—Martin A. Bartels


(Author's notes may be found under "Comments")

Camping

(draft, Aug. 10, 2011)

Inevitably it rains, the chirrup of the forest night
muted by a thousand tiny drumbeats of raindrops on our
tent roof. The smell of smoldering firewood clings to

everything, a rustic bouquet accented by hints of 
pine, damp dirt, decaying leaves, our humid sweat.
The scents mingle until there is no differentiation,

we have become our forest selves--a stray leaf settles
in your hair as proof. Tiny stones and dirt clamber to fill the
space between my toes. They, in turn, yearn to become roots,

and that itself is the lure: We seek out this tiny isolation to
lose ourselves in the nothingness, the simplicity that is
not the us of every day. This is the reset button: Start anew.

The rain slows, then fades, forest noises reassert. I cannot
help but succumb to primal anxiety in this darkest hour. 
Confronted by such elemental weakness, I bemoan the fact 

that there are no superheroes whose indefatigable strengths 
are love and patience, understanding, faith, and the ability to 
withstand the sudden onslaught of painful memories.

--Martin A. Bartels

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

Job Description

(experimental: A found poem, adapted from AltaVista Babel Fish translation of a German language job posting)

The consistent experience of
creation and technology is our daily
requirement. We create applications,
which knows today still nobody –
not times we ourselves.
Therefore we live pioneer culture.

Do they go along?

The conception stands at the
beginning of each project.
Here the project ideas in close teeth
with the Design and the consultation,
which are then taken up and developed
in the specialist areas, develop.

Conception is the development and
formulation of a communicable guidance idea,
the definition of the measures and applications
that can be seized, as well as their
switching, opposite the customer.
Clear marketing adjustment first experience

in the rough and fine conception on
relevant customer projects,
above average interest in communication,
ability to the precision in expression and in the
ability, switching of ideas, minted abstraction,
very good general knowledge and social authority.

--Martin A. Bartels, July 2011