My father
said: be a man of honor.
Children
know nothing of honor, they live
every day
waiting for the next moment.
Just wait for years to pass and you’ll
learn.
The second
hand ticks, and the minutes pass
us by. Bye:
never to be seen again.
Yet again
and again they are lost to
the past.
Forever passed, changing, going.
Slowly
turning around, you notice you
have
changed. I’m better? Worse? I’m in between
this
discontinuous evolution
of
progression fighting off regression,
detoxification-retox
battle.
I wrote
years ago to a friend: I will
live for something more. “Moor - to make secure.”
How can a
cloud be more if it’s secure?
The dark
cloud inside condenses and rains,
Then let it
pour, let it out, let it go.
GO. Leave.
Get out. Don’t you just run away,
You’ll see,
see-saws must go up and then down.
They have a
rhythm much like you and I,
Eyes fueled
by a blaze inside that we fan.
(Yet I am
still a fan, and I won’t char.)
What I’ve
drawn is not so clear, we scribble
On our
canvas and pass it off as art.
The jobs,
the grind, sore feet, and broken skin
Hoping
someone out there, up there, buys it.
(Just for a
reason to scribble again)
So let us
pick up that pencil again
And think of
what comes next, heaviest lead?
Pour out
your secrets in your own language;
A cipher that
centuries cannot b.r.e.a.k.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Pencil
BY MARIANNE
BORUCH
My drawing
teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.
Look, I told
myself.
And waited
to be marked.
Clouds are
white but they darken
with rain.
Even a child blurs them back
to little
woolies on a hillside, little
bundles
without legs. Look, my teacher
would surely
tell me, they’re nothing
like that.
Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.
She said:
Respond to the heaviest part
of the
figure first. Density is
form. That I
keep hearing destiny
is not a
mark of character. Like pilgrimage
once morphed
to mirage in a noisy room, someone
so earnest
at my ear. Then marriage slid.
Mir-aage,
Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose
awry into
her microphone, triumphant.
The figure
to be drawn —
not even
half my age. She’s completely
emptied her
face for this job of standing still an hour.
Look. Okay.
But the little
dream in
there, inside the think
that comes
next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life
is charcoal,
the wood already burnt,
a sacrifice.
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