Part 1: Splashes (Poems)
by Alan Harris
1988
To Linda
Wife and Best Friend
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Free PDF download of the poetry section of this book: Splashes and Breezes in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (32 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
Alma Mater Revisited
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The campus seems all hollow today as I walk in its leaves again. The marching band warms up in the distance for a football game of whumpgrunters and whoopleaders-- but the booming band sounds vacant. All the music is there--the brass, the drums, the tearing and merging of harmonies-- but I am gone, nowhere near it. The now magicless bookstore I worked in has shabby Shakespeares languishing between glossy audio-visual texts and sterile physical geology workbooks. Is the college hollow, or am I? I remember classes where cocky professors taught stimulating sensical stuff which flew the way of June fireflies after exams. Hormone-smitten twist dancers flexed and flirted their nervous bodies toward flippant connubialities while I tried to study my brain into a tested heaven of alphas. The fatuous sounds of today's rah-rahs echo as before among stately buildings that housed the tenure-drones of worked-over lectures. Now, whom are we all trying to fool? College is, I confess, as dead in me as a syllogism, but supportive America of a Saturday puts down its newspaper, pours out a Bud Light, and remotely emotes from its easychair over conference headcrunching seen through colored electrons on glass. Who died? Did I? Are the college sounds I hear today on my old campus--the band, the cheers, the dead leaves underfoot-- any hollower than 25 years ago? No, no, I heard their emptiness in youth, but this milieu quickened me then as liberation from a safely parented childhood and insurance against an empty future. After a full life I would be most ungrateful now to pronounce college dead, but let us stick with hollow. |
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Animal Tao
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A cat is mostly yin; of the Cosmos she is the twin. Like the mysterious Cosmic Laws, she keeps well-hidden her claws until some urgent necessity. A dog is thoroughly yang, with his boisterous bark and his fang. Ignoring the subtler laws and concealing none of his flaws, he pursues life and cats with avidity. A dog is always searching, but a cat is content with perching. The dog loves to follow his nose, while the cat simply sits there and--knows. Activity ends in tranquillity. |
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August Sunday
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Pounding hammers sing along with church choir anthem-- confusing rhythms. Depth of azure sky recedes to far galaxies behind daylit moon. A leaf waves gently in a breath from summer's lungs, then hangs green and still. |
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Cat Lying Down
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When my cat lies down, it is with utmost gravity. No circular trampling first like a clumsy canine, no great sigh like a human being on a couch. My cat lies down slowly, naturally, smoothly, participating with controlled abandon in a dignified gravitational event. |
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The Cry of Everything
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Where the crow twitters and the bluebird cackles, there is the cry of everything. Bees moo and ducks roar; horses croak and rocks snore. The cry of everything, yes all of all, fills creation and non-creation with the delectable din of a monstrous pin drop. Screen nothing out; mute nothing. All is here but for an eternal moment, a timeless flicker of the sun. And when the cry of everything dies out-- well, won't that be grand too? |
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Death Is Life Bursting into Bloom
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
When I die, I will not die. I will be a foot coming out of a too-small shoe, a bird flying free out of a cramping cage, an astronaut taking off his space suit, having safely returned home. When you die, you will not die either. You are not your body, as I'm not mine. You will see a brighter rainbow and hear heaven's ethereal music which no stereo can capture. When I die but not die, I will leave a little part of me inside your memory. It will be your key to my door that is always open in heaven. When you die but not die, I will have the key to your door too. Better to have keys for open doors than closed doors without keys, as in this locked-up life on earth. When I am gone but not gone, think of me and I am there. When you are gone but not gone, I will send you flowers through the air. Let us celebrate the magnificent safety of death. |
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Death through a Peephole
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How can I word it? I am 45, on the downhill side of life. Lying on the couch, eyes closed, my stereo playing Bach's St. Matthew Passion, I see death through an inner peephole-- a visionless glimpse. There it is, a threatless, benevolent space, neither outer nor inner, where neither moon nor Andromeda move. I feel the grip of a subsonic bass note in my chest, a whole note from the bottom of the cosmos. Death? Is that you? A beautiful black emptiness full of friendly steadiness? Yes, comes no answer. I look up at the ceiling and smile at 46. |
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Effort
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Try to force a flower, and what do you have? A mutilated bud. Try to be happy, and very existence becomes trying. Try to live long by running and jumping, eating by the book, sleeping wisely, and die truly old in a nursing home beside a pot of plastic flowers. |
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Free Now
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I get up in the morni ng, and my life is totally, ra dically free. What do I do? Do I m ake the bed? Do I ta ke a shower? Do I eat a meal ca lled breakfast? Do I go to wor k at an office? Do I sell my house and move to a nother state? Do I give my mon ey to charity and beg? How do I think if I am free? Do I thin k of myself at all? Do I think of o thers? Am I just a clear lens which sees, b ehind which there is no thing, an d in front of which is every thing? I a m free, but how do I act? What do I do? I am free from how, and from doin g, but my heart still beats, I brea the, I must eat, I must elimina te and perspire. Do I feel overw helmed with freedom and long for the old cages? Do I become depress ed because I can find nothing to do? If I see the futility in every hum an motion and emotion, how can I live? Where is my base of operations? In space? In nothingness? In someth ing called God? In whatever love is? Am I really totally, radically f ree, or have I just enlarged my c age? Can I find the boundaries of my p rison if they are invisible to me? I feel them holding me in. Am I free? Yes, I am free. No more family is necessary. No more society. No more civilization. I can walk ou t the door and never come back. I ca n go anywhere on earth. I am com pletely free. But to go anywhere is to not go everywhere else. I leave a trail. I remember. People remember me. There are ties. Within memory ca n I be free? Can I remember without encum brance, without attachment, withou t hope, without fear? Yes. I am free. I sit on a rock. Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here? Am I free? Yes, totally, radically f ree. Do I like it? That is not the question. F reedom is all there is, and I am it. Each thin g matters as much as each other thing, an d yet no thing matters. Matterin g is a trap, but things are just th ings. I am free to lie in the mud o r to go to the office or to sit here on th e rock. What am I to do? Free, as I am, what is there in life? The cage has been sprung open and destroyed, and there is no going back to it. I b reathe, and I walk, and I stumble, a nd eat, and see. A man walk s by and sees me sitting on t he rock, and he says, "Hello. Nice mornin g, isn't it?" I say, "Yes, it is." Am I still free? What is another person, r eally? Before, I could only assume, bu t now I must investigate. What, really, is another person? I breathe deeply, and I get up and walk toward nothing, away from nothi ng, just walk. Now I know what I mus t do, now that I am radically free. I m ust find out what the other person is. He is there. I see him. He is not an illu sion. Is he free? If not, can I free him? Am I free no t to free him? What is relationship when th ere is freedom? I will investigate until I die. A bird lands on a fence post. |
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Frozen Fantasy
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My first breath outside on a winter morning speaks a frosty sentence and drifts off. When my hand sticks to a cold pipe, I have joined the winter club. When the sneaky wind finds a crack in my coat, I feel the grip of zero. Winter is, if anything, a surprise in ice. |
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Two Haiku
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Our supper table, magnet of our emotions, lies covered with crumbs. Gusting summer rain glitters into our backyard under shining sun. |
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Howling at a Real Moon
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What is illusion, really? Is it the satisfied look on a rich lady's face? Is it a boy smelling the evening breeze as he rubs his magic lamp and has visions? Is it the mathematically maternal thrill of writing a tight algorithm for a computer? What is reality, sort of? Is it the headache after too much ice cream too fast? Is it the birds before a spring sunrise singing their hearts out? Is it the symphonic climax hurled out of a conductor's baton? If we knew what illusion is, would it be found but a word? If we knew what reality is, how long before the knowing were but a memory? Give me a breath at a time and keep your reality. Show me a round orange moonrise and I will fully embrace illusion. I look into your eyes and I see the absolute reality of illusion. Then it is that I forget the illusion of reality. |
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How We Came to Know Truth
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Our village mystic (who, by the way, is President of the National Mystical Association) decided he had studied enough. He would, by God, climb the sacred mountain out beyond the village limits and find out what was what. We villagers don't understand him, but we know he must be quite great. Someone even says there's a faint halo around his head, visible only to the more advanced souls. This is probably true, for why would an advanced soul lie to anyone? So Mike (our mystic) climbed the sacred mountain a week ago when there was a quadruple conjunction of some planets I'd heard of and some I hadn't (I don't understand these things, but I did think the air smelled different that day). Mike meditated (you know, where you sit down and do holy things to yourself) and then climbed the mountain just like he owned the damn thing. We all watched from the bottom. He was at the top about half an hour, maybe receiving his instructions, and then he came back down. We all gathered around him and asked him what he saw, what he learned, what he heard, how did it feel? Mike rolled his eyes up and began to speak in a quiet but firm voice, saying: "I have been to the mountain top. I have had an Experience. I cannot possibly tell you how it really was. I must speak in veiled terms for your own good. I say unto you, 'Roses are red, Violets are blue, What's false is false, And what's true is true.'" As he spoke, I thought I noticed a faint shimmer of light around his holy head. It is humbling to be able to live in the same village with one who knows, and who knows he knows, and has a halo according to some reports. |
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Love Is
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Sunlight twinkles yellow off the neighbor's tree leaves, stirred by a sibilant breeze. All is well. The sky is empty, empty, empty, and azure. Do not worry. The rose window decal on our east window glows with what glass and plastic know of love-- crimson, aqua, yellow, and amethyst, concentric in twelves. It is all right. Your eyes shine behind mine, energizing my thoughts, giving off a gentle voltage. Fret not. You are more than you are. You are the prism, the white light, the rainbow, and more. Notice your depth sometime as you awaken from sleep, and rest assured that depth never dies. Serenity, a smooth current of calmness, surrounds. Permeates. Is. Is. Is. It is too silly now to say what love is, or that I love you. Words trouble the serenity. Definitions becloud the sky. Tremulant leaves twinkle sunlight. The sky is empty, pure. The rose window glows with color. Your eyes, your deep eyes-- enough. |
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Moodrider
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How so up we go and so down, we moodriders, spirits abuilding and acrumbling. A day or peaceful two, then zapperoo, off we tumble from our pinnacle of hail-fellow peace into a tar barrel of angry gloom. Pin me up on a bulletin board and study me, Mr. Doctor. Give me lithium or understanding or electric temples to make me cool. Thank you. Now I see. I see the gentle love-waves shimmering in the atmosphere. I see WHAT IS-- the sharp outlines of the furniture, the swaying trees. Here we are in reality, or what's left of it. Peel me off the periphery of mortals, would someone? Why cannot I have the normal agonies of mankind? Why do I ride on a little toy boat through such choppy moodwaters? Give me a reason, please. No, don't. It's all right. I see so many normal folks in such pain, caught in business envelopes of stuffy fright or pulsing with radioactive rap music or yammering in their beer. What right have I to ask that a corner of the universe be lifted so I can peek at God's underwear and understand why I am why I am? I do my work and I pay my bills and I contribute to the coffers of such democracy as we have. Oh, I emote a bit unevenly, yes, I do. But then, Uranus doesn't rotate the same as the other planets do, and it still makes the charts. Whatever the mood, there is a place that is here and a time that is now and a cracklingly deep intelligence smack in the middle of everydude, be he into pills or pajamas or private jets. How so up we go and so down, with a smile, with a frown, slightly unpinned, scarf in the wind. |
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Moon and Mars Conjunct
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Walking at night to the corner mailbox, breathing deeply of cool September air, I look up and see Mars by the full moon, quiet friends, like a tiny garnet by a round opal set in the sky's planetary ring. A carful of teenage girls zooms by, emanating shrieks and laughs and whoops, careening between curbs through our planned community. The red taillights soon zigzag away into velvet distance, and silence prevails, broken now by this old mailbox accepting my letters with a chuff and a clanky groan. I look skyward again. Mars and the moon, quiet friends still, stare winkless from the surface of the universe. Has anything changed? Yes, my letters are in the mailbox; yes, the car has painted a picture in my ears; yes, the moon is imperceptibly closer to Mars now-- but nothing deep has changed. The night has merely taken a breath. |
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Mother Greets Newborn
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I see you have been traveling through the universe without a map again. Welcome to earth, my friend. I breathe on you with my eyes and I hear you with my breast. You squall and you squirm, but you did come to this place, and I opened the door, so let's learn to be together. As your first guide on this strange planet, I will introduce you to your body and mine and everything else. Let us proceed together now as companions. Earth is not a bad place to live. There is much room here for love. There, there, there.... Drink of the earth and sleep. |
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One Glance
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From its western podium the setting sun conducts for half an hour a symphony of colored sky: loud oranges and penetrating purples resolving into softer pinks and muted blues. Under this musical sky, noticing your smile and breeze-tossed hair, I glance deep into the centuries behind your clear eyes-- and I remember. This moment was and is and will be. It never was not, and never cannot be-- one precious moment of purest love, breathless and deathless. Inner spirit needs only one glance, no more-- no rush or embrace or kiss or promise. One glance opens your soul to me, and I know your soul and love your soul. This musical sky is fleeting; these bodies will grow old and cold; but my memory of this one glance will never fade, as must the sky. Our symphonic sun's bright colors have mellowed now to a somber gray as we walk along not knowing what to say. |
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Philosophy
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I saw a philosopher driving to work at the college in his Pontiac Sunbird to pick up his biweekly paycheck, and I said to myself, "What does this really mean?" |
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Planting an Apple Tree
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Our green earth is turning brown like a skinless apple when wrapped in clear plastic. We cough and spit our technology into its atmosphere, pumping it full of our pumpings, heating it with our heatings. We fail to hear earth wheeze as we motor to the flea market for our next bargain or to the supermarket for 2% milk. We dump our chemists' ideas into the only air there is and pump carbon into our children's lungs. Already we smell our urban halitosis blowing back into our faces and we make little jokes about it. Will earthlife fade away along with our generation? Or will we let it breathe the saving breath of trees? It is too smoky to tell from here, but I plant this apple tree in case earth heals one day and some new Newton needs a lump on the head. |
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Rolling with the Thunder
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Why I was angry matters not, but fury had blossomed in me, and I was it--no turning away. Fingers atremble, voice ashake, heart apump, I challenged a present wrong yielded up to me from some chasm of an obscure past. I stood resiliently firm, arteries turgid with love and law. It is over, and I did not lose. No one lost--or won. The conflict was as imperative and brief as a summer thunderstorm. I sit now electric with leftover adrenaline, images of the struggle reverberating in my thoughts-- but already a silence in my blood begins to bathe me with merciful forgetting. |
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The Sound of Dying
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If you have heard a train go by, you know the sound of dying. A buzz, a roar, and no more. Oh, maybe a little clacking in the distance, but nothing to speak of. |
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Suburban Reverie
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Watering the flowers, I happen to think of all the famous authors working on their newest books. Mowing the yard, I wonder how the great mathematicians can prove their theorems even with computers. Sitting in my front yard, listening to the songs of cardinals and wrens, robins and blue jays, I wonder at the amount of practice an opera star must submit to. How about the columnists and cartoonists and astronauts and painters, all being something? Here I am, sitting in my front yard, in an aluminum lawn chair, staring at my suburban home, supporting and supported by a nice family, wondering, wondering. I'll water the flowers a little more. |
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Three Root Words
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When all the words are done, and all the gestures and looks, I love you. When all the miles are traveled and all the roadblocks passed, I love you. When all the arguments are over and the smile comes after gloom, I love you. Love abides beneath all words. Love knows no distance. Love dissolves every difference. I love you. |
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Tavern Talk
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Did you ever look deeply into the eye of a chicken? No, you say, they have nothing between their eyes but cartilage, and you laugh at your little joke. Did you ever look deeply into the eye of a chicken? Yes, you say, and it came over and bought me a drink, and you laugh some more. Did you ever look deeply into the eye of a chicken? No, you say, have you? Yes, I have. What did you see? you ask. I saw a light like a little egg-shaped sun, and inside it were countless smaller eggs. It was like touching my eyeball to a live wire, and it lasted for only a split second, but I saw infinity in the eye of a chicken. Yeah, I saw that once in a waitress's eye, you say with a snicker. Same infinity I saw, only I didn't have to leave a tip. |
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Tired Minds
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Our minds, like tires, tread round and round, going places, coming back, going flat, getting pumped, wearing down, and finally retiring. |
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Two Birds in a Tree
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A large bird alights on a small branch at the top of a poplar tree. He bounces and wavers in the breeze, keeping his balance. Such is human life. Another bird alights on a small branch very near the first one. Both bounce and waver in the breeze, but in different rhythms. Such is married life. |
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Previous Poetry Collection: Sparks from the Flame (1985) |
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Next Poetry Collection: Echoes of the Decalogue (1990) |