Excerpt | Preface
Once, in Manhattan, I stopped on my way to watch a chalk artist drawing on the sidewalk. He was doing reproductions of the works of the masters with startling accuracy. Other passers-by also paused to appreciate his talent, sometimes throwing a dollar or some change into his glass jar. Out over the East River, a storm began crowding the city—a foreboding thunderhead carrying a downpour that would not be kind to chalk. As the sky continued to darken, the artist, who had finished a magnificent sidewalk portrait, began packing up. Tomorrow would bring a fresh canvas. The jar held four dollars.

In minutes, the sky let loose, and the chalk images dissolved, but they had been there, and that stretch of sidewalk could never be the same for those of us who had seen this masterful work and its vanishing.

These poems are sidewalk drawings—sketches inspired by people who came into my life directly or indirectly, some for a moment, some for longer, in various encounters all of which time has washed away, but which in another sense have proved indelible.

Philip Golabuk

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Mr. Alan

Mumbling of oil wells
out west,
this old man creaks
in a pine-white rocker.
Ninety years,
this storm’s been coming.
The man is mad.
His oil wells have left him ranting.
A tired sister tends to him
and counts the days unspeakably.

Mr. Alan’s one good eye
looks off into the overcast—
thick, black crescendo of murky air,
rocking, rocking deeply
toward the soil’s dark deliverance.

Ninety years
from ninety years ago,
the one-eyed man with hair like snow
gave his chair to silence
and burst like wealth into the other world.

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Caress and Variations

Robert, rocking a newborn suite,
laughs at the taste of virgin drool—
unresisting kisses
lend the soft of peaches to southern sky,
fruity, stark calligraphy
of infant pink,
a mother’s breast can almost taste.

Midnight’s faithful stars observe
a symmetry of straining;
youthful mouths pressed,
one to the other—
the night-air animals invent
such sweet old, sweaty sounds of love.
Stars and semen know the way;
they catch their breath and are not questioned.

Antiseptic meeting place
for Grandpa and descendent.
Pig-headed man—at eighty, still a fighter;
he hates the doctors,
hurls his hellish, waning eyes upon their world
of tubes and tests,
an immigrant again.
At the end, he rips the bottle proudly from his arm
and throws his boy one, final kiss.
After this,
an aperture of sky,
and one angry, Russian angel
heading home.

---

The Invitation of Christ

Let it die then, dearie.
Come home to dinner
while you are still warm.

We will find love by guessing why
the gladiolas in the study have opened
in such a white way.

a cock to asclepius

One by one,
my brothers in philosophy
fell like pages from their binding,
anointing each other with promises
to oil the rusty world.

Spinning there, bathed between Orion and Medusa,
they gave it up to the jeweled, gypsy ethers
and dreamed thick dreams
of flashing, starry steel and leering stone.

And while they slipped with adorable ease
into various kinds of blemish,
I, damned by thought to eternal narration,
stayed outside
among the mind’s learned lepers
and fought to free the fire in me.

Then, seeing suddenly that place to dwell
wherein life kisses and swallows its burning shreds
in an endless rite of love,
I befriended the Western centuries,
drank my innocence, and leapt,
killing Descartes with a single blink.

Just beyond the picture window,
I see my brother grinning.
Our book is blue,
and punctuates the garden well.

---

Courage in the Country

Morning mares,
grazing where their foals were born,
move along the fence-frames
bracing their unspoken, musty blessedness.

This country silence marks a sort of time
within the fence posts,
where grub worms chew their way
through old pine-textured destiny.
Slowly,
weakening the mighty, wooden man,
oblivious to their eternal work,
they even eat beneath the stars
when every calf is snoring.

South,
behind the stable,
Daniel and his faithful wife
retire to their featherbed.
Lightly, lightly
they have given up their soaring dreams
of other loves, other ways.
The insects feast within the wood;
the man works hard,
the woman—she is good to him
and keeps him from an early crumbling.

Lately, in his eyes,
a doubt has broken through.
She sees it in the way
he does not stroke the animals at feed;
she heard it in the unlit hours
when in his sleep,
he spoke to her of a dying bird,
buried in his childhood.
Its eyes had turned to salt,
its body into pottery.
Replacing it within his dream
in a tiny hole now long grown over,
he’d said in sleep:
“I do not like to cover me.”

Lifting up their heavy heads,
the saintly beasts,
bristling against the wire,
watch the man walk out alone
to take them in for milking.
They do not love him,
do not fear him.
They know their place in the dawn of things.
A morning moth atop the marker
feels a shudder as two worms meet.

From the window, Katherine gleams;
Daniel does not know she watches.
In her heart she makes a salve
to ease the pain of boyhood lost.
The farmer’s troubled hand comes up
and smacks with love, a dusty hide.

Away, away
the fence post cracks.
Katherine knows as Daniel knows:
half a life ago is not too long
to have buried an eagle.
Half a life left is just enough
to dig him out again.