Selected Poems
All poem are under copy right with Daniel Meyers. For permission to reprint please contact:
bertmeyerspoet@gmail.com
From EARLY RAIN
(Alan Swallow, 1960)
PICTURE FRAMING
My fingers graze in the fields of wood.
I sand pine, walnut, bass,
and sweat to raise their grain.
Paints, powder and brush,
are the seasons of my trade.
At the end of the day
I drive home
the proud cattle of my hands.
BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH SPEED
Because there's so much speed
without any place to go,
and driven, blind as light,
we rush from stone to stone
and bump against the world,
I like the subtle snail:
wrapped in its wooden fog
it crawls across my yard;
and where it goes, it paints
the ground with useless roads.
Day and night, in its world,
leaves fall without a sound;
and flowers become suns
that bugs like little planets
in a green astronomy
go round and round and round.
MY PARENTS
When my mother puts her flowers
in a bowl -- amaryllis, rose --
light from a different afternoon
still makes her lonely body glow.
And still my father comes, poor man,
a hard day on his knees from money.
My mother turns to an old piano,
her hands snowbound among the keys.
I know they sleep in the same dream,
while the fat moth spreads its dust.
My parents wear each other's breath;
their clock's forgotten how to tell the time.
THIS MORNING
We were the rain last night.
Our smell still lingers
in the flower beds.
The white hills rise
like crumpled moons;
a swarm of insects
lights a lawn's dull face.
We go to see ourselves
in puddles, you and I,
clear fragments of the flood.
from THE DARK BIRDS
(Doubleday, 1968)
THE DARK BIRDS
The dark birds came,
I didn't know their name.
They walked in Hebrew on the sand
so I'd understand.
They sang, the sea flowed,
though no one made a road.
I shivered on the shore
when the water closed its door.
Then as I felt the birds return
to me like ashes to an urn,
and sunlight warmed the stones,
fire undressed my bones.
THEY WHO WASTE ME
When I ask for a hand,
they give me a shovel.
If I complain, they say,
Worms are needles at work
to clothe a corpse for spring.
I sigh. Whoever breathes
has inhaled a neighbour.
THE POET
1
They said, Go, rise each day
with her, become
the reliable dough a family needs.
I wouldn’t. I walked away
from the kitchen, the store
she was building in her breast . . .
And everything grows dim
like the little stone
brought home from the shore.
2
What will I bring
if I come to your house?
A cold wind at the door,
bad dreams to your spouse.
There isn’t a tree
in your backyard;
the lawns are plastic,
the chairs are too hard.
No, I wouldn’t talk.
I’d be full of spite
and I’d strike my head
like a match that won’t light.
3
Woman, mirror of all my sides,
I pass through you to the window.
When I lay my hand on the grass
forgive me if I call the earth my child.
4
Always poor, he knows
the crickets will leave him
small jars of money.
He waits, he admires a weed.
His dreams are addressed.
At night by his desk
he becomes a flower;
children are bees in his arms,
a little pain making honey.
THE DRIVE
Because their bed was calm
and they'd never done
what they read about,
they drove to the hills,
left the car, and climbed
high over the shale
and spread her dress in the dirt.
Soft ceramic quail,
the natives there,
stared from the chaparral
while they groaned
and hurt themselves.
The heat made ants
bubble out of the ground.
The hill was a flower
that evening closed.
They were naked
and very small,
and they put on their clothes.
The car would give them back
their power.
STARS CLIMB GIRDERS OF LIGHT
Stars climb girders of light.
They arrange themselves
in the usual place,
they quit before dawn,
and nothing's been done.
Then men come out.
Their helmets fill the sky;
their cities rise and fall
and men descend,
proud carpenters of dew.
Man brief as the storm,
more than five feet of lightning,
twisted and beautiful.
Man, made like his roads,
with somewhere to go.
From SUNLIGHT ON THE WALL
Kayak Press, 1976
L. A.
The world’s largest ashtray,
the latest in concrete,
capital of the absurd;
one huge studio
where people drive
from set to set and everyone’s
from a different planet.
For miles, the palm trees,
exotic janitors,
sweep out the sky at dusk.
The grey air molds.
Geraniums heat the alleys.
Jasmine and gasoline
undress the night.
This is the desert
that lost its mind,
the place that boredom built.
Freeways, condominiums, malls,
where cartons of trash and diamonds
and ideologies
are opened, used, dumped near the sea.
FOOTHILLS
Every morning here,
black-plumed the knightly quail
go riding through the grass.
In the wind, a mild army
of mustard runs uphill.
The yucca toss their spears.
Now and then, a child,
abandoned in its kite,
drifts out into the sky.
At twilight, the foothills
are a pile of rose petals
the color of grapes …
There went the sun
in a crumpled hat,
to see the rest of the world.
G. F.
He’s a law about to be broken
a man rippling at the edge
He edits news of a material world
while under his tongue intelligent nouns
are preparing their adjectives
for a view of the city without crime
This man encircles himself
his waist is his own embrace
his smile is a private door
I admire him for his agile fat
a mind like an animal’s jaw
his poems that escape from their chains
He awakens to books like birthdays
He tries to grow where he stands
He’s a warm wall his daughter climbs
This man has put his ear
to his heart and kept the secret
At the head of his round table
far from the ancient onion of mother
he settles between his shoulders
to be a calm king of argument
though his castle burns
and his people are alone.
O’KEEFFE
One morning, Georgia O’Keeffe
Cobblestoned the infinite with clouds.
She stared at space. It blushed.
She smiled. Fire and sword,
mountain range and stream –
the vulva’s green silk rippled –
everything burned to its bone
and a black cross grew
from the radiant grave of forms.
from THE WILD OLIVE TREE
(West Coast Poetry Review, 1979)
SIGNATURE
I earn a living
and I have a family
but to tell the truth
I’m a wild olive tree
I like cognac
and a proud Jewish song
I live wherever
I don’t belong
I watch the world decay
on every page on every face
it’s a sick man’s clouded eye
that rolls around in space
And my obsession’s
a line I can’t revise
to be a gardener in paradise
TO MY ENEMIES
I'm still here, in a skin
thinner than a dybbuk's raincoat;
strange as the birds who scrounge,
those stubborn pumps
that bring up nothing . . .
Maddened by you
for whom the cash register,
with its clerical bells,
is a national church;
you, whose instant smile
cracks the earth at my feet . . .
May your wife go to paradise
with the garbage man,
your prick hang like a shoelace,
your balls become raisins,
hair grow on the whites of your eyes
and your eyelashes turn
into lawn mowers
that cut from nine to five . . .
Man is a skin disease
that covers the earth.
The stars are antibodies
approaching, your president
is a tsetse-fly . . .
EVICTION
Where could he go
from a house hidden by trees,
whose days were pebbles
in a steam of birds,
with his wife, his children,
all the books like bottles of wine
that glow on their shelves?
To a neighborhood
of crypts with windows,
high–rise transistors,
cars brighter than people;
where everyone stares
like a loaded gun
and the grass is sinister…
He stood in the yard.
A rose opened its wound,
a spider repaired its net,
an old leaf touched him
like his father’s hand;
and the trucks delivered,
or took away.
THE WIDOW
Leaves gnaw at the porch.
The century, like her family, disappears.
Life is a movie she's already seen.
Her cheeks are rose petals
in the book of better days.
Wrinkled and powdered and rouged,
bewildered by others,
alone wherever she is,
she opens her purse, she opens a drawer:
it's twilight -- she enters a photograph.
FOR W.R. RODGERS (1909 - 1969)
I knew a candle of a man,
whose voice, meandering in a flame,
could make the shadows on the wall
listen to what he said.
Time flowed from a vein that ran
its blue crack through his pale forehead.
He's done. You'd need a broom
to arouse him now.
All things burn before they're dead.
Some men are words that warmed a room.
DAYBREAK
Birds drip from the trees.
The moon's a little goat
over there on the hill;
dawn, as blue as her milk,
fills the sky's tin pail.
The air's so cold a gas station
glitters in an ice-cube.
The freeway hums like a pipe
when the water's on.
Streetlights turn off their dew.
The sun climbs down from a roof,
stops by a house and strikes
its long match on a wall,
takes out a ring of brass keys
and opens every door.
from THE BLUE CAFÉ
songs for Anat and Daniel
What we want is simple
a country like a poem
that’s beautiful and true
and makes us feel at home
THE OLD CAFÉ
There’s an old café
open everyday
and all night long
on the boulevard of time
Jeremiah wept there
Plato came to teach
It’s where proud Baudelaire
stroked his boredom’s
endless hair
and Gandhi learned to preach
and everyone
at least just once
saw the wonder in the grime
watching people
all the people
on the boulevard of time
You and I sat there
when we were young
We saw Joan of Arc
talking to her angel
at a nearby table
heard Cain condemning Abel
Marx and Freud
trying to analyze the void
between reality and desire
And I saw beauty
love and passion
in two thousand
years of fashion
always look the same
sitting in the old café
on the boulevard of time
It’s getting late
Come spare an hour
and join a table
where people spread
like petals around a flower
faces bloom like roses
strangers greeting strangers
tourists from the stars
and have a little wine
before it closes
on the boulevard of time
IT’S ALL DISSOLVING
It’s all dissolving
like an aspirin
in a glass of doom
Speak quietly
There’s a microphone
in every tree
and a White House on the moon
They’ve killed today
and put tomorrow
in a cage
and feed it
promises and lies
Sometimes you’re glowing
with a silent rage
and broken bloodshot eyes
The unemployed are hungry
the boss plays in the snow
It’s all dissolving
and there ain’t no place to go
I felt a raindrop burn
I heard bones crumble in a breeze
Chemicals are everywhere
and everything’s diseased
And the funerals drive by
with their headlights on at noon
through cancer’s crazy city
where everyone dies too soon
But when the rich and mighty
were at their banquet
feeling safe and sound
blind Samson had a vision
and pulled the temple down
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