Your life depicted on a grayish film,
With an ivory wand that sees through cells:
Two legs, long for such an age as yours,
Yet thin as winter sticks.

I could not predict that swelling of the heart,
And soul, felt long before other signs,
And even then, your soul hung in the balance,
For two or three heartbeats of mine.

Then it was decided by my lover and me
To keep you with us,
Through pain until, perhaps, eternity.

Now you are grown, surprisingly apt,
Pupil of ourselves and you,
Thinking on your own, you are prone,
To tell me things I never knew.

Your soul fills our world with joy,
Even in the darkest frame of mind,
Your longing songs about the boy
Who loves the girl he left behind
Fill the air with hypnotic ambiance,
Soothing the listener,
Making happiness a trance.

As a child I'd dream of running away,
Nigh unto winter and not too far,
From Dad’s and Mom's, where I used to play
But which was now bitten hard.
A barn in a field was just one dream,
An old one where no one ever came.
Delight by myself, attainable seemed,
Where I could rest and collect my name.
Russet woods and graying woods,
Fueled fantasy and desire,
For simple things must do some good,
In corrupt towns, soul is renewed by fire.

Airplanes on a Still Day

(Two in One Hour)

The sound softens
Something inside my brain—
Tangible, hypnotic,
Remote and forgiving,
Like a little Buddha within,
Or flying this sound trail
Through the draftless heavens.

The tiny drone
Rids the world of
Human clatter and its rush.

As a child, I savored it inside,
A sliding down the spine
And into the heart and through me;
A reverse of the rush of wine.

Back then, it was unquestioned, enjoyed.
But fifty or more years later, I asked why.
Time moved by and left no answer.
Nothing but a spring-like stillness aloft,
Unbound by seasons below.

But as I relished that sound this afternoon,
I felt the sense of spring again
In that aimless hum.
And knew at last why pilots sailed
In any weather, in crystalline air.

Up there, it was always spring,
Always sweet and calm
With promise;
A miracle that they ever descend!

If silence had a sound
Or utter calm
Were an elixir,
This would be its form.

Ten years of sunshine, fantasies, and song.
Nothing was right; nothing was wrong.
Suddenly you’re up against a wall.
It seems like everything or nothing at all.

When you were younger, things were what they seemed;
Bedtime stories and parent’s esteem.
Everyone said you were funny and enchanting.
You didn’t despair, were never wanting.

What happened to that perfect world?
Why are you now so scared?
Did it vanish in the morning?
Like a wistful vision, without warning…
Or was it taken from you by
A cold and pitiless world?
Did it make you shun the things that you once dared?

At sixteen, you’re just a little bit older;
The world seems much  harsher and it feels much colder.
But it’s still the same place,
Then why the sorrow in your face?
Do you think you should have been told?
Think anyone told him or her?
But it’s the same place it’s always been.
Ask your mother and father how they fit in!

It’s not easy on the outside, looking in,
You seek it for comfort, but that’s hollow and thin.
You’re a loner, despite all your friends,
And your pain doesn’t stop where the loneliness ends.
You can try all you want, to be one of them,
Yet you’re still just yourself in the end.

Vast the landscape I watch that rolls out, ragged,
Before my eyes, hurt words describing, haggard.
Moby soothes me but a little as I watch still fractured sights
Of what was and is in Chernobyl.
Marshlands filled with death and mutation,
Homely houses putrid with abandonment and radiation.

Broken tokens of people’s former lives and loves –
Where are they now?
Their hairless dolls, sitting in the middle of rooms,
Bathtubs, broken and oblique, empty.
Soap washes memory and nothing else away.
The sky has spoken; it is broken.

Push the poison out to sea. To see
They hadn’t time to leave a memory,
But ran, already dead while living,
Not allowed to gather souvenirs.
There’s nothing left for them here.
But did they die?
Nobody told us where they went,
Or why
This happened.

They are gone now, dispersed in Eurasia I suppose,
Like ash in the wind, like their future or past ghosts.
They haunt the places, the buildings and the waters,
Engulfing fish, and drying fungus on the northern trees,
Watching wolves still move through winter freeze,
Still beautiful in the taiga sun.
Tainted yet rife with energy not destroyed,
Trying to paint its passion on the sides of walls,
To venerate the people here and their lives,
Their animals, their clothing only frozen.

Favorite word: “nymphet”, but no!
Halcyon, a kind of drug, you know.
Searching through the pages’ mist
And imagined deeds
Of poets’ needs…
I found my favourite word,
As asked,
Neither sacred nor profane
That describes the Venetian rain
In my beloved’s eyes
And the Florentine sun upon her hair:
“Auburn, russet, mythopoeic”.
Oh, it is not fair,
To liken an object
Of my lust and love
To anything as mortal as autumn air!
Nor “October’s orchard Haze”;
She had her own
Inscrutable, premeditated ways!
Rather let me say that she was perfect,
Though her eyes, pale and myopic,
Her shuffling gait and
Graceless limbs, to them Grace lends
Fey charm, the power to mend
My suffering and
Delusions of a poet’s end
As anything but pathetic,
(Her mother’s fondness for vague emetics)
And I left softly hanging,
On a girl’s new taste,
A tang of russet apples on her face,
But no, not that, the sum
Of my love, My Lo!
Then her bleak demise, partly by my hand
That none of you brutes could understand;
The pure love,
So sadly consummated,
Between a lover
And the one she hated
Yet loved once with inexplicable delight,
On one stolen, frightened night…
In which the two of us agreed
To satisfy a simple, yet maniacal need,
And then depart…
But I could not,
You see;
She was my life,
My love, my heart.

Humbert Humbert 1950

Sharon Talbot ca. 2005

Ötzi

Even in my long sleep,
I dreamed of this.
A waking by strangers
A grasping of my wrist
And I wrench it back from them!

My dreams beneath the ice
Were warm, in summer vales,
Where children played
Under my watch, old but hale.
An easy thing, my guard was then.

I tend sore limbs as supper warms,
And aching joints inflamed,
And muscles tough as ibex horn;
For a while I can be lame.
And see my copper ax in the red-gold flame.

I dream of how it came to me,
After vanquishing a headsman.
Intruders fell before me!
And I earned this talisman.
Weapon, scepter, power of my clan!

Then I was sent across the mountain,
A lone journey I knew well.
To trade with kinsmen in a the northern glen,
With gifts, arrow shafts and tales to tell,
Never guessing betrayal that walked behind.

Alone upon the highest peak
I ate my last meal by the fire.
To me the gods seemed trying to speak,
As men I knew climbed higher.
We had words, but they were my kin!

In my long sleep I wonder why
These false friends turned to hate.
I’d watched over them, yet they cried
That my rule was done, and it was too late,
So I turned from them and faced my doom.

I crossed the last protruding rock
And now felt safe from them.
But then a blow, beneath my heart: a shock!
I fell in a soft, snowy glen,
And then a dull pain in my skull…and black.

Beneath me, I can feel the ax;
They’d never take that from me!
Nor my arrows, quivers and packs;
And risk the fury of the gods.
They’d taken my power and left a naked soul.

Five-thousand years I spent beneath the frost,
Until I was found and freed.
My scattered ions watched, angry and lost.
They dragged my body from its bed
And my soul from another life.

Now part of me lies in a crypt
Another frozen tomb.
If only I hadn’t run and slipped,
All those ages ago,
I would now lie in sacred ground,
Back in the earth to which all are bound.