Dane Cervine: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Dane Cervine
Five Poems
Sounds and Colors of The Great Matter
Let us awaken – awaken . . .
—Traditional Zen recitation on The Great Matter of life & death
I thought my fire was out, and I stirred the ashes. I burnt my fingers.
—Antonio Machado
After a quiet weekend, grandson Wyatt and his friend Hudson
visit again, eat silently at the kitchen counter
like poets about to compose a poem,
then sneak under chairs in the front room,
find brightly colored balls—red, blue, green—
forgotten from the previous week, sort by color,
place in the large cobalt-blue basket
that houses them. Inspired now,
they strip off their shirts,
roar and run through the house as though
the great matter was just beginning. All day,
they cavort. While I sit
with the old dogs in the open door
between study and garden. Like Bandit,
sniff the air for any sign of what lies
beyond; or Stella, who, like her namesake
tries to ignore the chaos, listens
to her own canine radio waves
without thought of any other
desire than this.
Bandit and the Bird
Just now, I see a flash of feathers in the window,
hear a thump against the side of the house, then Bandit the dog
chasing like the ungainly predator lurking in his DNA
the flurry of bird across the ground and round the corner
in the backyard. Following,
I find Bandit hunching over the now-still bird,
one paw raised like a hunting dog, but his eyes uncertain
what to do now that the bird lies motionless in the dirt.
The tiny eye dark black, a polished marble, unseeing.
I usher Bandit away, who withdraws only because of my foot,
then touch the still soft bird-body to feel
if any life remains. Only softness. Only stillness.
Knowing dogs and their bones, I dig a hole and bury the bird
in a clean, tender rag deep beneath the wet
Thanksgiving ground. Place a garden stone from a river
atop the mound. After, Bandit scours the yard for clues
where the bird has disappeared to—this mystery now a puzzle,
even for a dog.
The Impossible Red
Metaphor is an interior form of nature…
—Mark Nepo
I ask my grown daughter Kelsey
as she wanders the garden with little Wyatt
who pokes in the overgrown strawberry bed
for one ripe red mystery to eat, about the lost
leather key chain I found upstairs. The inked
engraving Mama Tried.
Kelsey laughs, says it’s the old Meryl Haggard song
and suddenly the metaphor of earth and mother and wry lyric
arcs between us, knowing how hard we both tried,
children the anthem inside a mother’s desiring
body, hers now, and my wife’s, and my own
still. This
old Earth trying so damn hard too
to bear the song of us and
here we are in an untamed garden of gorgeous berry
and weed, each wayward thing desiring life—
where a strawberry is more than a word
in my grandson’s tiny hand, and a metaphor
is none other than the impossible
red itself.
Mantra
The cab-driver’s long fingernails are curved like tiny knives
as he drives us through Bangkok’s rain
from Wat Pho’s immense Reclining Buddha.
He says
the city swells regularly to ten million
coming, as he did, from the countryside
because there is no work in the green hills.
He chatters on his cell in this taxi he spends
twelve hours a day in—weathered skin,
black handlebar mustache, raspy voice
a mantra of different timbre than a monk’s
silence. I’d stood at the reclining statue’s end
next to Buddha’s immense tattooed soles,
stared the length of his golden body
one hundred fifty-one feet from big toe to crown,
listened into the bustle of pilgrim and tourist
for the ancient mantra. The
golden silence. I do hear it, inside
the cabbie’s cackle, the engine’s
tortured gear shifts, the rain
singing like ten million souls
on the battered roof.
Books
Dharamshala & California
In the Dalai Lama’s temple,
I run my fingers along the old golden wood
framing immense glass cabinets from floor to ceiling
filled with wood-print parchments and scrolls.
One hundred volumes of the Kagyur—
sutras of the Buddha himself, translated from Sanskrit.
Then, the Tangyur—two hundred volumes of Buddhist philosophy,
astrology, poetry & art, medicine & science.
I can almost touch the ink, the hands of endless monks,
Indians who first carted this precious cargo
to China and Tibet, the endless copying,
the meticulous transcriptions; again, fleeing
through Himalayan snows, evading
military outposts, imprisonment, death,
to resurrect this library where, a millennium later,
I stand with mouth agape. This,
what any book lover might feel—
it is an ongoing affair. I see
this shared obsession in the eyes of Ajeer,
our weathered guide who confesses his library holds 5,000 books,
none which he can orphan,
despite his wife and daughter’s pleas
to simplify his life before it’s too late.
We laugh as conspirators burdened
with the same impossible love.
~
Landing again in California,
my cousin Cynthia—a lover of rare books—
listens as I tell her of Ajeer, the Tibetan archives,
show her my own modest shelves filled with poets,
philosophers, scientists. Dante’s Divine Comedy,
even a book from the 1700’s rescued from
Logos Used Books on its last day:
The Works of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave,
Marquis of Normandy, & Duke of Buckingham.
Someone has to love such old conceits.
She smiles, tells her own tale
of scouring the internet to buy
five of the Merchant of Venice’s 300 copies
printed in the 1800’s on vellum with gilt lettering
for her theater group—in honor
of the ancient play’s 300th performance.
Says she once visited Hay-on-Wye in Wales,
a small village with 40 rare book shops,
and a castle full of books.
Some loves take you on a journey—
over the Silk Road, through Tibet,
old Europe. A book
may be polyamorous, we muse—
loves to be loved by many, yet is content
to be held tenderly
in the hands of only one.
Author Bio:
Dane Cervine’s recent books of poetry include DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.typepad.com/
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