Loren Laird Burris

 

The happy inventor

But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.
Shel Silverstein

is, and is braver
than gunmen
who face assassins
and don't flinch,

who want not to make,
but to unmake.
The inventor gives one hand
to good creation

and one hand to another's
hand. There is no dominant
hand, now weapon.
To magicians

their conjuring,
to scientists their hours
of trial, conjecture, discovery.
To old men their anecdotes,

to the screwy young men
their maturity
and gains. And to the inventor
his helpful hand

pressed without pressing
the palm of an acolyte.
That is, everyone. To all bliss
and tools of creation, come!

We can all learn
to live, and to live
must give the air its fragrance,
the eye its glad objects, the paper

its stain of grace
and verse.

 

 

Self-portrait in hiding
 

A goldheaded morning
is afternoon. Heap up the sun,
stockpile those items that anyone
with your inclinations will bring

shakyhanded overhead to fight
loneliness. Books, paper and pen,
a rifle to potshot the blazing season-
and lifelong inertia rests. The kite

of your black mood slumps
from its drifting. Cloudwanting,
it slumps to the grass. Haunting
the grass of hospital grounds, slums

behind stucco where psychotic throwaway
citizens yelp or mope in their distress.
But you are now sheltered, your wealth blesses
itself-your individual arsenal, your outcry to the day

that buzzes with other cries,
the torments of mornings that flare
up in raw afternoons. Hair,
scalp, skin, skeleton, a human otherwise

hyenalike-yelping, your body that of a man,
and beneath the common pose
you're a jumble of organs, but your mind rose
strangely and burns within you. A man

otherwise. The mind, fermenting,
though your bulwark is sure, solid
as obsidian. What happened? What acid
was poured through a crack in your skull, melting

all, leaving empty every corner of your youth?
Belowground now, peering at the street
so hot at twelve that it cooks the feet
of walkers, of vagrant cats. The growth

of ratcities disturbs you. Why?
You're cool enough, you eat all
your meals, you're not in a hospital.
But the rats-they are part of a prophecy.

Do you want to notch that rifle today?
Your hand won't move to scratch the stock,
but you will be free. The room is locked,
and the rats will rush you away.
 

 

The bucket

I am acquainted with profound
thirst and the acts that set spikes
in the veins of a pasture-and desert
surrounds thereafter. The nightlike
well. Look into it. It is as dry, as dirt
bottomed as the ground

that presses above your skull's
sockets, your stripped ribs, and traps
your sailor's legs in the mad grip
of a brown ocean. Before you lapse
altogether from my history, I must rip
up everything: your sailor's whites, your travels, the needles

and the contents that set lethargy
in your flagging, aimless legs
as you fled from father.
I can't talk details. he is blistered and begs
off explanations, father.
He won't discuss his penalties,

the vivid wounds he left on you. He has no mercy
for himself, he is reinforced against questions.
So you and I are alone, at the hem
of a wasted pasture. Such sensations
and sandhammers the wind provokes! Slim,
as I recall, gaunt really, the last we met. Tree

high you were, taller than I will ever be,
your scalp ricepale in the bulblight from the ceiling
that haloed everything in the apartment.
I laid on the carpet, a dialogue behind me healing
no one, perhaps adding wounds. Father, head bent,
had apologized, but was peace achieved?

My reveries were touched by voices. I wanted
the secrets to fill my ear by invitation.
The garish wallpaper, the bright
idiocy of some program on the television.
It seemed I was to be distracted. Had I no right
to the last words you spoke? Or were you an underfed

stranger to me? Were you a pilgrim, once passed
through a room, that passage irrelevant, senseless,
as if you were born to vanish? Years cauterize
details, unless they were the essence
of the after noon I found father weeping, surprised
to be found so broken. His remorse was wasted,

of course, and I was driven from the room. Pilgrim,
I'm afraid we have passed through each other.
That thirst that pulls all of us to the well-
to wet our lips, our tongues, our tragedies, smother
the devils with sand, anything. You and I at the well.
What is down there? A broken bucket? And if even that is lost, the hem

of a desert pasture at our heels? Should the rope
snap and the bucket drop, our thirst will never be met.
I've hollered into it, I've kicked the stone, but hope
is a dull nickel in dryness, a well or fountain-the jets

of water gone. So you and I are in passage away
from each other. I recall a television screen,
but your voice is now vague. A weak ray
up from the dryness, a thin light is your pale sheen.

 

 

The nightletter

Nighttime is complete
with correspondence
incognito.

Here the ink strokes
drift and the paper
holds more sleep

than sense since,
incognito,
the sleeper writes

in the margins,
writes gloriously
in a drowsy hand

to a mistress, a murderous,
a Magdalene, all likely
to unnerve a sleeper,

but in gentle ways.
Hello, love, dismayed
as I am that you are absent.

For now, love is awake,
but why not nod off tonight? 
She'll breathe on you in the morning,

when the burden of distance
becomes nearness.
Which it will not. Goodnight.

( first published in the Panhandler Quarterly, Texas )

 

The Dostoevsky poem

Even to the blare
of the Underground Man's contention
that, should man's every
freedom

be struck
down
by a science homogenizing
the livelong life,

every move regimented
to the exact flick
of a finger,
a firebrand yet will turn

the minds of the flies,
mumbling over their nests of maggots, 
and draw them uncontrollably
again to stomp and kill

and squander freely-
ah, but the drawn and fruitless
multitudes will revert
to the tyranny of science,

their energy monitored,
and the straitjacketed livelong
horror will come back overbearing
to the flies and their nests of maggots.

 

The ocean mother

wept
her glaucous eyes
rolled madly
not in dying

but in simple
fishlike awe
that she was caught
and was dry

her meager boat
rowed in no
true direction
by infant hands

 
N.B: Perhaps I tackled the underlying issue in this poem rather abstrusely, yet there could be no other way the poem could be written. The idea itself is convoluted: I was thinking of infanticide and certain attendant ideas. Consider the position of the mother: adrift in both a sea of sorrow and of public rancor and their sense of justice. Which is more torturous, sorrow or punishment, is moot. Moreover, the mother may be afflicted: drug addict, mentally ill, etc. The ocean has its special symbolic properties in a number of ways: The sense of the murdering mother that she is isolated, adrift in the scorn and outrage of the public. Perhaps she is adrift in her grief and shame, her illness if any, etc. The boat rowed by infant hands has another meaning: the death of the baby propels the mother in "no true direction" insofar as profound sorrow, shame, et al suggests that the mother's existence is aimless. The baby in that sense is a symbol of the doom that tails the mother, or of the catalyst behind the mother's ultimate alienation and outcast status.

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