Sighs Matter

Take note of the number 

of your sighs each day;

those in sadness,

in frustration, in anger, 

and dismantlement. 

Compare them to the sighs of 

sunrises witnessed,

sunset prayers,

the size of hearts met 

and gathered as life’s wheat. 

Witness your sighs 

because they are breath.

The breath revealed in late fall,

traced on car windows as a heart,

the opposite of inhaling the 

scent of spring,

your first love,

those later to come.

The opposite of startlement, 

the counter to your last breath.

Buddha’s Error

I am a fiction

And you are, too, 

And in between

We make reality.

I am nothing,

And you are nothing.

And in between 

We are everything.

Stop crying out in pain.

This is the pain of life. 

Everything hurts. 

Even being well.

Everything hurts.

But it’s not all suffering.

Buddha fucked it all up 

When he said everything is suffering.

Everything is healing.

Martin A. Bartels, c. March 27, 2018

Music

Every time

Someone predicts

The world is coming to an end

It does

In some small infinite

And ponderable way

We are all breathless 

And changed

Fathom the unthinkable 

For a moment

And stop

As if you are the stops

Of an organ

That performs 

Extraordinary music

Defend

Stab me with a sharp knife

It will only hurt as much as I allow

Goldfish understand

Because they swallow infinitely

c. Martin A. Bartels

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."