Murray Silverstein: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Murray Silverstein

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Murray Silverstein

Five Poems

A VISIT WITH A DYING FRIEND

for Max Jacobson

1

Recent work. Nude model, two-minute poses

with charcoal sticks and powder. “Life drawing,”

he says, husky voice. We’re sitting together

on his couch, turning the pages of his sketch book.

I pause to study one. The deep blacks, a cloudy smudge

of gray gives way to one quick contour line. Elegant.

“That one’s crap,” he says, “turn…”

and a few days later he’s dead.

But a few weeks later he’s back,

eyes open, stretched out on the floor of my study.

I stumble, trying to step around him as anxiously I prepare

for a talk I’m to give, but on what and to whom I’ve no idea.

And, worse, I’m to be there soon, the audience is waiting.

But where’s the hall, and what did I do with my notes?

Rising on one elbow, “I can help,”

he whispers.  “Let me show you how it’s done.”

2

You were cremated. Simple Buddhist ceremony

Helen arranged at Chapel of the Chimes

that Julia Morgan we admired, its stately colonnade

marking the end of the road.

But no. Again you came back. This time

we’re in the old office—the building’s been sold—

and the new owner’s asking questions, wants me

to climb a ladder, examine an old brick flue.

What on earth was it for, he wants to know,

there was no fireplace. “It vented our old furnace,”

I explain, “a converted coal burner, useless thing,

warming only those who stood close. Max,”

I say (you’re standing beside me now), “why

did we put up with it, the pilot always going out?”

“No,” you say, “that’s wrong. It worked just fine.    

I loved the heat, the jets of gulping flame.”

3. “See, they return, and bring us with them.” 

`                              —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

Woke this morning, the bed disheveled, not with a dream but with words on my mind,

the title of a book I loved, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

Jacobson/Silverstein Architects. We were.

And teased ourselves into thinking there’s life in a well-made thing.

Find now, uncoupled, there’s nothing, that nothing’s the engine of life wanting more.

Called to account in dreams, it’s the dead that do the dreaming. Our loyal dead.

And what they dream is us.

THE REFINING FLAME

When he’s near the top of Mt. Purgatory, pilgrim Dante encounters the soul of an old friend, a fellow poet, and, to comfort his dead friend, he says, “So long as words endure, your poems will make precious the ink in which they’re written.”

“Kind of you to say,” the dead friend replies, “but no, that’s wrong…” and points to a soul up ahead, about to enter a wall of flame. “That one over there, he’s the real deal: If it’s a poetry of love you seek, go talk to him.”

Purgatorio, Canto 26, 136-148, a translation:

I inch forward toward the one pointed out to me,

            tell him I’m eager to know his name.

“I hear kindness in your question,”

            he says without hesitation, “which assures me

I’ve nothing to hide: I’m the soul of the troubadour,

            Arnaut Daniel, dead for almost a hundred years.

You read my poems when you were a boy.

            Here on the mountain I’ve come to see

the madness of my ways, but, too, the joy of release

            that lies ahead. If, as it seems, you’re still alive,

may I ask that you remember me,

            tell of how I suffered?”

Then he stepped into the fire

            and vanished in the refining flame.

OLD MAN, OLDER HOUSE

After Patrick Kavanagh

We borrowed the dough to make the down

on the shingled house on Harwood,

the dormer, the gate backed up to a creek,

the rickety porch, the redwood….

While scraping and painting, settling in—

the kids were one and almost four—

Can I look around, I was born here?

an old woman came to the door.

Slowly she paced the rooms, the yard,

Here were the chickens, Gertie, my hen…

till now it’s me who names lost names—

Jerry, the Stevens, the Colliers, Ben—

until a world comes into view,

complete with Nancy’s cat and dog,

and the god of imagination

rising from an Oakland fog.

WHAT TIME IS IT?

New Years Day 2026, for Du Fu and Albert Einstein

When we speed up—as, in a flash, Albert, you saw—time slows.

It’s what, Du Fu, you discovered considering the moon:

the speed of light requires night. I stare, too, same moon,

same light, and think we’re stones dropped into a well,

the deep-dark well of time, and though the earth is spinning,

the well is standing still; it’s us does all the falling.

Those at the top listening for us to splash,

they’re our dead. To them the well seems bottomless,

we’re taking forever, they think, to fall.

To us falling, no: as science sprinkles the minutes

on us, music the tempo of space between, our days

are speeding up. Yesterday near noon, “Noon,”

I said, rounding up, to a woman on the street.

“Do you know,” she’d asked, “what time it is?”

“Thanks,” she said, pleased. Because isn’t it always a time?

But what’s this it of which you speak—it’s Du Fu

and Albert, in chorus now—and hope to measure

with your stanzas, your broken lines? 

THE FOREVER TREE

Tiny, pink, invisible almost, the buds

            on the redbud: you stare

at bare branches, and there they suddenly are!

            Later, popped and petal’d, the petals

more pink than the buds—the buds

            were more a magenta—the tree’s

an offering now: beauty sprung from trauma—

            the neighbors’ willow, a year ago,

fell and took half of it down.

            Then begins a sloughing of buds,

petals unfold, edges trimmed

            in creamy white: the patch of blue

they open to paradise on the cheap,

            the meaningful forever

we’re always carping doesn’t exist,

            or does but we have to go.

No. This patch of forever’s forever,

            let yourself in, back in.

Author Bio:

Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems, Red Studio, appeared Spring 2024 from Sixteen Rivers Press. He has been published in RATTLE, The Brooklyn Review, Cape Rock Poetry, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA, Elysian Fields Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Pembroke Magazine, among others. He has authored two previous books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. All were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. A retired architect, Silverstein co-authored four books about architecture including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), and lives in Oakland, California.