Just listen to some powerful lines from the bared heart

The best poem I’ve ever read in nearly six decades of the New Yorker is one that wasn’t even presented as one of its two weekly poetry selections.

Instead, it appeared recently within a theater review, where the play under consideration reminded the critic “of the late poet Essex Hemphill, a master of frank desire whose smart, life-hungry speakers toss of lines like these:

I am lonely for past kisses,
for wild lips certain streets
breed for pleasure.
Romance is a foxhole.
This kind of love frightens me.
I don’t want to die sleeping with soldiers
I don’t love.”

A bit later comes a couplet from a different Hemphill poem:

I am beautiful.
I will endure.

~*~

My, how I admire the directness of those lines, their acerbic observations unencumbered by literary aspirations.

Yes, he skirts the imagist realm of so much of my own verse but somehow, to my eyes, averts any preachiness that can come from the subjects he’s examining.

What hits me the most is the clarity and intensity of his self-examination.

Yes, each time I return to these.

Dearest Evita, inevitably

the home trip was shorter than any desire worth pursuit followed by a week strip-mined between Wheeling and Zanesville where the alphabet winds down and begins again in Ashland or Barnesville, maybe in another language still here I’m settling down as a monk in my scriptorium or as a bootlegger distilling silos of citations and trophies or as a bachelor milking his own antiquity to that point where you no longer know if you’re any good or not, you’re just pushing what you have to your best abilities . not everyone comes back

Precocious precious Elise

back to drive across mountains and plains how well I remember unanticipated letters in my post box before phone calls from a colleague fed up with working in a field of little growth but with no desire to return to the daily buzzard “from what I’ve seen, for what’s demanded, our managers are far under-compensated” within major cities parallel to something I’ve been preaching the last thirty years amen hope you find welcome me too wishing upon that star

Zap, zap squared

whatever abundance before the eye rests under that spirit of being guided through the wall after waiting through dry periods when you’ve voiced those personal, esoteric why must it be myself or the other when feeling a drawing away to that which I alone happen to sense when working and nodded without anticipating any fulfillment except in so many conjectures now absolutely engaged in the hand of accomplishment you definitely pursue now so romantic exciting perhaps with some overlap perhaps you too understand

Quoting from a master of secret teachings

here you perceive it’s not within my nature to offer any spoken contention in the row of bricks other craftsmen would so often enwrap in false modesty if you can tolerate canned soup or a vulcanized cheese omelet, well, then you’ll also observe how turning together after so many years  maybe occupied with survival in the rarified air the conundrum by God becomes devotion

Chuckles, anyway

knock, knock, in the name of the law in the Name of Jesus let us pray together naming and claiming in either case not quite the letter but the spirit of authority bet your life beginning as a child traversing the expanse of your own moniker with some Divine confrontation and wonder, as they’d say, Warmly with the chattering monkeys

Whatayasay Dusty

of heaven and earth and so right at the moment this righteousness struck a relationship without a tinge of merely imagined fragrance closer and more real, the daily repetition overflows into a sink of unwashed dishes of confusing lion and the lamb of dilemmas, paradoxes, even tedious crosscurrents the Adversary complicates a profusion of weeds just doesn’t ring clear the first time around oh, my poor memory, in callous fingers clutching whatever

Lovely and Corky

not exactly anywhere dutiful in all my difficulty gearing up for minor chores regular folks seem to enjoy defining their lives thereby at least scrubbing their ass break back to poverty, Dharma! would be scouring the bathtub one morning or a manuscript or adding oil to the leaky BMW such a thrill put aside long enough it evaporates two months overdue or just punctuates existence, the vacuum of rooms of the mind or the plate and so if one makes other things wait, yes, the grass grows or leaves fall in all that running as in down some sewer of household drain, so how would you handle a valet or fulltime maid