L'chaim!

Temptation

2006-04-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Temptation on Pran’s Sri Lanka Blog - the Flower

Glorious flower in the garden. Gloriosa Superba,
Flame Lily, Climbing Lily, Glorious Lily. Pran

Its dull orange glow isn’t loud.
But it fills up the screen as if we all
know it, as if its sly tubers
are everywhere. Its five circling
climbing arms bulge, burst up ruby-
round into their prickly flames, then come
neatly together at the top.

It’s no interplanetary visitor.
It twirls in earthy reddish peach, sun-
shredding east and west.

Almost cunningly at the bottom
green vines wind and turn, stick out
their sleekest slender wires
with yellow miniature foot-pedals
on the ends, as if they’re kids’ toys
ready for races, tingling.

Who knows if their real size is for tiny feet
or a giant hand. Each pedal waits
in a goody-good, tea-banana humor
to be plucked off. Sucked and
sucked? on the tongue! like a childhood
flower. Instead Pran says no no, never
and he’s a doctor.

The whole flower causes an unexpected
and nasty ending with abdominal pain,
nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding
manifestations, confusion, convulsions
and coma if imbibed.

I guess it’s a glory because
its creeping, tuberous trembling makes
everybody want to taste it.

Maybe it’s a leftover
from that oldest allegorical
garden, served up for know-
it-alls. It’s like a little reminder
of something we’re not supposed
to have. And here I am, trying to inhale
its sunny pain-parts, looking for time
to explore all its fiery mysteries.

Now it’s so close I can almost chew
on each of its friendly
mistakes – so far away
my lips loll
with spit.

I’d like to play some soft, saliva-
salacious, brassy symphonic chords to it –
you know, the reddish-yellow
french horn kind, set to explode
into golden satisfactions, the blissful
endings we all really want
to sink into together.

Pran found it in his backyard.
It may show up some day
in one of ours, all ready
with its glorious colors to clamor,
coax and coax. I wonder
what we’ll do then.

Interpreters needed February 2006

2006-02-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

Interpreters needed - February 2006

On Mondays we listen
to hear what the planet thinks,
turning and turning.

The trees strain, bend – the wells
murmur, maybe go drier.
All the oceans clench

their silvery fish as if they’ll never
let fish fling themselves
onto the banks to join us.

Even the birds keep their black
shorthand in the sky
to themselves

when the earth won’t
think out loud for us, so
mute, inscrutable.

--- Puah

While the cartoon-quarreling goes on ... for Anne Frank a poem

2006-02-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

My musings are below but first a poem

Erev Yom HaShoah

On this night the stars
can twinkle like yahrzeit
memorial candles. In the sky
so-called heavenly bodies are as lively
as kids’ sparklers - their light’s
urgent, shimmers

in the inky darkness, translates
six-pointed yellow stars into
these white resiliences.
After the gases

and the fires, the amazing
energetic thrusts
through the chimneys
they’re our bright nudges, sharp
as glass. When we remember
a child called Anne or Moshe, Yitzak
or Rachel, David or Ruth

our desert memories remind us
of descendants for
Sarah, Abraham. Their perpetuity
was a promise. We count

and count the stars, each
a shining substitute
for a faithful ancestor,
a gravestone.

--- Puah

Well, yesterday I heard that my muslim brothers and sisters are posting their rages into their own cartoons. This is good - a better place for offenses taken than the streets and a lot less harmful than torching the buildings and cars - or actually killing people. So now shall we Jews also be outraged and start bringing physical harm and pain in retaliation? I'm certainly hurt by the cartoon that has Anne Frank and Hitler in a big bed together. Ah Anne, you've been used by so many people to shore up so many arguments ... But I'm not going to start counting them again.

There are quite a few holidays before Holocaust Day [Yom HaShoah] which comes on April 25th [27 Nisan]. But I don't know ... I feel like posting this poem anyway, today. In honor of Anne the almost-still-child - living in the cramped attic from her 13-15th years before being shipped off to be killed in Bergen Belsen: She wrote in her diary, "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and so impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because inspite of everything I still believe that people have a good heart." I like to think of the way children respond to the world. It's good for me to remember, especially after watching all the hate on the tv screens. Did anybody watch the Olympics last night? It was such a good change to just see all the countries coming in together with smiles. [Also the "renaissance/baroque" production was fabulous but that's for another day.]

Before Hanukkah

2005-12-16T22:33:00.001-08:00

Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light.

Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light.

Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

Alan Ginsberg, Psalm III.

I know the crooked at once. How it tries
to circle, catch a sudden pale gleam,
how it sparks a pearly surprise
against the sky, its silhouette
making a little bend

just before the sun is visible. The straight
is harder. No curves, no beckoning,
just unendingly in the place

we’re used to. It’s not exactly
boring. It can stiffen hard to flatten
silence in the light while it seeks.
Maybe that’s why looking for light
when the season says Hanukkah

is so hard, so easy: the Maccabees fight,
win, the Greeks leave - the straight plain
facts plus one drop of oil burning for eight days
to light up the crooked, just for kids.
Maybe light, plain light

is always unexpected, like a trick? Or like stars

reflected on living room windows outside.
We stand in the yard at night, see stars window-
gleam at us as though really we can hold
onto them if we want to inside, behind the glass.

This morning before the sun
could struggle through the fog we found
a dead bluebird on our deck.

It stayed so long in the garden
this fall we could watch it flicker
blue light up and down
through all the greens of the trees.

Did the window-glass play a trick
on the bluebird, look like some blaze of enlightenment
our bird knew it had to reach? It’s hard
to fling yourself against a mirage in the dark.

When Hanukkah makes winter official
for us in one week we’ll remember
the straight blue wings
lying flat, think of the surprisingly
pearly legs catching a sparkle, wavering up
in two skinny half-circles in the fog

as if they had a kind of faith
in the continuing light.

-- puah

Animal, mineral, vegetable

2005-11-29T09:38:00.000-08:00

Animal, mineral, vegetable or could it be
a bird

(You should study the green mountains, using
numerous worlds as your standards..Japanese
Zen master Eihei Dogen, 13th c.)

We go inside a Zen mountain
stealthily, as if it’s a room
with no light, no window,
no glassy eye with sky
in the ceiling. We slide
our feet along the bottom
all the way around
its dim space to make sure
we won’t trip. If we reach

with our hands we may
find an unexpected glazed
shelf with tiny bottles
side by side because it’s so hard
to be a boulder. Or melt
into jutting greens. We want
the softest grasses to whisper
like oracles. If we feel a jolt

we stop to clench
our eyes while we wait
for somebody to come
along with a flashlight. Mostly

we hope for a pillow
like a cloud. As if we can sleep
so easily we begin to curve, lift
like peaceful glaciers, float
the mosses in the light.

The Arbor

2005-11-27T10:44:00.000-08:00

The arbor

Inside a storm
brews up

to darken
our innocence.

Somebody’s
calling

to take her
in, lift

her up
into the trees

with us to sing
her heart out

in the branches.
We can’t do it.

Her voice
down there

is too thick. It
twines around

us like vines,
pulls at us

until none of us
can breathe.

All our leaves
are choking.

-- puah

Buddha statues

2005-11-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

Buddha statues

If you’re like me you think
of their bellies first, or those
broadly stretched-out eyes staring

over your head. Of course they’re beyond
questions and logic. Their inscrutable
hands rest lightly on their knees

with raised knuckles, thumbs
pressing forefingers so carefully
it’s as if any single desire

of yours or mine is not their problem.
Frankly, those thick fat thighs
and bellies’ bulges

seem beyond ethereal
wisdoms for truth-seekers.
It’s probably better to stare

at a flower somewhere near you
for answers. Yesterday I held
a daffodil so heavy

with yellow its head drooped
between my own thumb
and forefinger. Illogical as any

Buddha it poured lemony color onto
my three other fingers like a spot-
light, like wet butter, maybe even
like a little sun.

Puah

You, Me

2005-11-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

You, me

( In 1903 the Austrian composer Alban Berg’s opera
Lulu was inspired by Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit
& Pandora’s Box, with a heroine finally killed off by Jack
the Ripper, wandering through Europe. Before Lulu
dies so violently she causes wars, suicides, destructions …)

O Lulu, I slipped inside you
so easily. You were my first fun
part, with no billowing wigs. How I stared

through our widening mascara’d eyes.

How I felt your contemptuous
shrugging naked shoulder
my own, your legs criss-crossing
openings inside slitted skirts, my own.

It was you and me against
everybody, just the two of us

carried off in Berg’s possessive, grating
dissonances. We never cried
once.

We dreamed our life shimmering
history cracks for us in smoky wisps
like silk, satin, like slippery sweet, salty
body smells. O, our slides
into honey, our rises to the highest
coloratura’d molasses-
cajoling with the seductive Countess, while all our tenors
& baritones stiffened, melted, groaned
in our arms like weepy
slavish clowns!

Their voices cried out passions
in high-and-low-pitched raging whispers
so loud in our ears we knew
we were queen.

Do you still feel the eyes crawling spidery
all over our skin the way we walked alone
later, night-lonesome on the streets
until the throat-

slasher came to get us?
o Lulu o Lulu o
now I don’t sing your life

anymore. But I remember how
we felt at the end, how we held our breath
inside, all exposed on the darkening stage
in a blaze of light to the roaring, hand-clapping, the Lulu-
mesmerizing mesmerized

wildly murderous crowds.

(Puah)

Peace to everybody II

2005-11-12T10:17:00.000-08:00

The quote below is from the Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen, from "Mountains and Rivers Sutra," in the thirteenth century.

Peace to everybody

2005-11-12T08:24:00.000-08:00

So I am here again, feeling very Zen-ish today. How is everybody out there? This is my first visit since last spring. I've been writing, writing ... thought I'd post another opera poem ... it's not very peace-full though, so I'm adding one that's looking for peace and wishing everybody a way towards peace. Just looking to see where it is makes me feel less at war with the world. Here's a nice thought for Shabbat from Jane Hirschfield's essay book Nine Gates:

You should study the green mountains, using numerous worlds as your standards.

Two poems are coming later today. I'm going to shul first.

Spoon

2005-07-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

Spoon

blog question: what comes first,
the spoon or the fork?

Spoon always comes after
fork; fork’s prongs are jealous
of knife’s slicings so fork sneaks
away from knife and waits
for revenge; fork can be
dangerous but knife always
came first, for killing; you
knew that; after the slashes

and wailing, digging and hope
show up metallic-hard
to form spoon, homely assistance
when nothing else is at hand;

spoon can gouge but would rather
dip, echo circles deep enough
to scoop and hold tears; spoon
rounds out to fit everything, daughter-
amiable; spoon lifts soup as hot
as a hope or digs down hard
for some foretastes of comfort;

sometimes spoon reflects
our faces back at us in case
we forget how knife and fork work.

- puah

2005-06-21T12:49:00.000-07:00

The good good girl

2005-06-14T22:38:00.000-07:00

I think poems are always "autobiographical" - but this one is coming right out of my first professional life so does that make it more about "me" than my first blog-poems? Posting here for / to myself certainly raises some interesting [for me, nu] questions. Such as - do diva "good girls" always have to die? The only way you don't get killed off is if you're playing/singing an ingenue who ends up belonging to a man - mostly a tenor but maybe a baritone. Active, "lively" women evidently only come to a good end if their endings are final -- unlike old soldiers ["who never die" as the old song says, bla bla] ...

The good good girl

The diva’s not rebellious; she always sways nicely

at the end of the opera for bows with her ensemble
and holds the hands of her tenor, her baritone,
quite properly behind the beaming hot footlights

that sear and blind and always twinkle
like some nutty demon with too many eyes;
when she bows and curtseys and shows a bent neck

you can’t see if she clutches at her tenor’s fingers
and tries not to stagger; you can’t see she’s held
hard for the next time in case she doesn’t want

to die again; you can’t see if she thinks she knows
she’s not the tortured star in real life and this is
just pretend; and you can’t tell if she wonders

if these hysterical shouting sobs (brava! brava!)
after her last cadenzas always mean the audience
wants her dying to never never stop;

but for her solo bows, all alone in front of the long
hard curtain she’s always polite anyway,
inclining her head with that smile

like a little geisha, not just for Madame Butterfly –
after all Gilda, Traviata, Lucia, Antonia, Manon
and even Salome all have to die too –

but for you, personally, as if she knows
such an insistent dying and dying
with no bullets

is probably not your fault
and she’s giving you the benefit of the doubt
for your painful, held but silent breaths

during the fireworks of all her endings;
she knows when her breath gets stopped
you virtuous ones in your plush seats

are sort of sad and after all what can you
as an individual do and she also knows
you’re having a good even lovely time

enjoying your own marvelous empathy
for operatic dying but she’s not holding it
against you for she is always charitable

and so she stays nicely inbetween for you,
not real, not a ghost either, mascara-
eyes wide to show she can still see, a single-

gowned petitioner not quite headless, stretching out
one hand as if to plead for some more life while
she graciously bends her other arm

into a little circle for all the flowers; the bargain is
you music lovers call her name
so she’ll know it’s for her and not for death

and no wounds will be torn open
by her to bleed in public;
thus there’s absolutely nothing up there

in front of the curtain to stain
the evening’s sturdy entertainment
and the diva’s not rebellious -

she always sways nicely.

-- puah

At the table

2005-06-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

"There's a certain tenderness in bananas"
(Mercy, Esther Altshul Helfgott)

When the walls pray down a blessing
all of a sudden without any annunciations
or angels or even the sun coming out
with some special brightness for breakfast

you weren't expecting much more
than clearing the table and now
the table's gleaming, the milk
whiter than it was before; the spoons
stretch out silvery, strong enough to show
your face lifting, surprised; your two
almost empty bowls are so round

they embrace each last piece of fruit; the book-
shelves swell fuller, their books' bindings
benevolent, as if they're noticing
him, too, his face calm, serene as he clears his throat
again over what he's noticing, the mercy,
the prayers, this room.

- puah