A FEW MORE POEMS




Acorn

 

The Origins of Milk

Platypuses are born from eggs from a bird
but feed their babies from breasts like a mammal.
Someone said breasts come from the brood patches
Ancient animal-bird-lizards secreting fluid to protect
the newborn from infections
I don’t know.

Where do breasts come from?
They are not there merely
to deceive the male imagination
into thinking maybe they are buttocks.
They are there to feed and comfort a baby
Gorillas have breasts and feed baby gorillas
Chimps are attentive mothers who feed their babies up to four years
Raccoons feed raccoons
Coyotes feed coyotes
Dolphins feed out of slits in their abdomen
and the mother controls the amount of milk the baby drinks
Whales milk looks like cottage cheese
Human milk is sweet and light
not heavy and creamy like cow milk.
Cow milk is for cows, not humans
Corporations like nestle and carnation
started conning women into using
cows milk a hundred years ago
Imagine if the orangutans in Indonesia
started caging human females and
attaching their breasts to milking machines.
UNISEF estimates 1.5 million babies die
every year because they are not breastfed.
Cow milk makes children more prone to disease and infection.
Breastfeeding produces natural contraceptive hormones
They call it "formula" to make it sound like it’s science.
Pushing bogus scientific milk has pushed up
African populations to famine levels
Corporations want to take over your breasts
and make you pay for what nature gives for free.
A mother seal or sea lion gives birth on land
She soon leaves her baby for two to five days
to fish out at sea
It must be hard to leave her baby
Some of the babies do not survive
The mother could return and find the baby dead.
I found a dead baby harbor seal once
lying lonely beneath the sand dunes.
No mother returned to feed it.

Breasts are what give life
The origin of milk is love
or rather,
love has its origin in milk

Hard times

No matter how hard the times are
flowers will bloom by the roadside next year.
Concentrate on your death all you want
It will not stop this crimson sunset.
No matter what dark words smoke
out of the mouth of your hate,
the revolution will not stop
the orange burst of the bluebird’s song.
However far you sink into memories
 of those who were lost or died
your blood still flows with the sap of sunflowers
and the ocean laps the shore with living sands.
Never mind that you were left alone
with a dark crystal and a cruel mirror
the yellow butterfly still circles the blue aster
and a baby still looks at its mother with hope.
Whatever sorrows weigh down a woman’s sad hands
the air will soon be cleared with her tears and
death will come to clean the world of cruel men.
Winter comes and goes and the herons
once again will fly up to feed the young in their nests.
This fragile membrane of being still lives and trembles.



 

Vain gods and  Hummingbirds

My dear, unreligious hummer,
daily, throughout the summer,
beyond gods of Odysseus or Hector
you drink sweet, unspiritual nectar.

 No heaven that glows or hell that freezes,
Nor plastic, imaginary Jesus,
nor Buddha’s negating smile of peace,
nor Krishna, or Jason’s gold fleece,

 has anything, whatever, to say
about the wonder of your days.
Hardly bigger than a thimble,
you show the lie of poet’s symbols

Toward Big systems they abstractly strain,
after “truth” and “god”, and all in vain---
Wheras to you the mystery is plain:
a miracle is a hummer in the rain,

flying from red  to redder flowers
void of gods and transcendent powers
knowing what matters is what is near
this sun, this field, this reality
plain and clear.

The Meaning of Life?

What is the meaning of your life?
Are you merely a circus, strung up on a high wire?
 A poor monkey dancing on a spinning top.
No, the circus ought  to be dissolved
and the monkey  brought back to his family
in the jungle he was stolen form.
They miss him.
And when the day of death arrives,
and the circus is packing up
the trucks are about to leave town,
who will miss you?
What is the meaning of your life?
Will it be measured in who misses you when you die?

Why does life have to mean something?
What is the meaning of bumble bees,
with yellow belts wound around their purple waist.
I wish I could wear a suit like that.
That might mean something
If I could dress like a lady bug
or wear multicolored clothes as fine as the chameleon.
What if I could finally discuss
the meaning of feathers with birds?
That would be something.
Is the meaning of life in the imagining?
No, because you can’t hold dreams in your hands,
they don’t kiss you back,
or wave goodbye when you go away.
Making money, losing money, who cares?
As long as the children are cared for.
Perhaps if I hadn't spent so many years
with dusty shelves of books.
Too many years studying symbols and dry ideas
that left me left unsure where reality begins and sadness ends.
Perhaps I spent too many years haunted by signs and symbols
that I didn't know how to read.
And when I learned to read them at last,
they didn't say anything worth repeating.

The meaning of life ended up being
much different than I imagined it would be.
part of the meaning has to do with getting over my disappointment.
Part of it has to do with spending time, being curious and following wonder.
No matter how Wittgenstein forbade us,
The meaning is not something we have to be silent about.
The meaning of life was once an old boat
my brother and I found
that had a few small holes in the bottom,
We rowed up and down the river all day till it sank.

Raccoons have scent glands in their hands
and smell with their palms.
The meaning of their life is in their paws
smelling the earth with their hands.
I had a pet raccoon once who liked to sleep on my neck.

The meaning of life is in the living.
This worn out old pair of pants.
An old woman’s hands
wrinkled as waxed paper,
are still holding on to a yellow flower.
She is my mother
And she has forgotten how to use language,
but beauty still matters to her.
I don’t know what it is all about,
it is not about words, certainly,
but I wait for my wife to come home
and I’m lonely till she does.
The ruby throated hummingbird
has an answer to the riddle of life
in the blurr of its wings
as it drinks from the flower.

Poem for my infant daughter

I want to talk to you ten or twenty years from now
and to tell you that as dear as my face has been to you
or the face of your mother, there are other kinds of faces
to embrace with your feelings—
there are Otter faces and Frogs, Grackle and Deer faces
the face of the weather and how the forest looks at you….
I pretend you are ten years old and wonder—
have I made your life easier for you than it was for me?
I so much want to teach you an inner joy and the skill
of comforting yourself in the face of what you fear.
Will I teach you enough about birds and how they live without money?
Will you understand that money is a disease
that human created and have yet to find a vaccine against?
Someday you might hold hummingbird’s eggs,
or at least find one of their nests—something I have yet to do,
and not for lack of trying.
I hope you will see the wonder of sunlight in the rainbow of your eyelashes.
I will teach you about dragonflies flying above the swift water of rushing creeks
and about how blue snow can be found under the shadows of pines
on the far side of the mountain where we saw the red fox.
I will teach you the love of mathematics
by showing you how animals pair and mate,
how two birds become six awkward and fluffy fledglings.
I will teach you that the number million is not a number but, in fact,
the number million equals exactly how many rainbows
we saw in how many water drops falling down the waterfall in one second.
One billion is the number of orange leaves blanketing the forest floor
where we will lay down in October.
You and I will say that the number of the sun is the number of everybody.
Everybody deserves equal access to light.
But here I am and you are not even born yet

And I’m dreaming of looking at tide pools with you.
Little daughter or son, I already hope you will be strong in ways I am not.
I hope you will feel with your eyes and sense light in your hands
and touch the world with care and wonder, the same way I touch your mother’s belly
Now growing round all around you.

Our Coyote Resistance

How do you hold the face of life close
to you when it is slipping away?
You can’t  ignore the mirror of time
that holds up the image of death’s silver nothingness.
You can’t ignore the collapse of your face with age
or the darkening ring of vision that closes around your eyes.
All you have is memories of everything that you love.
I remember when I ran away from home at 15
and I had no place to sleep
and I laid down next to the highway
the grasses smelled like car exhaust
and the car lights whizzed past,  blinding my eyes
and there was no place like home
but I was lost and homeless
longing for those who care
just like I am now, 30 years later
and I wonder can I find myself in this lostness?
I tell myself to accept that loneliness is not to be mourned
even though it seems that so much of what I have loved
has been taken from me and I cannot get it back.
But in the end it is the coyote that  runs in front of the car lights
and he escapes the definition of the city dwellers
who know nothing of the strength it takes
to accept the loneliness of starlight
the emptiness of the wind that blows sand in your face
and what does it matter
that who they thought I was, was a person I never knew?
They condemned me falsely for things that they actually did,
Im still running from the car lights like Coyote,
and I know the beaming sting of their slanders
and the way their lies still
come back to me years after they were told.
I know how they steam their mirrors silver with their breath of hate.
What do they have to do with me?
My hair bristles in the wolfen twilight.
I am not ready to give up caring
I know what it means to have what you love stolen and denied to you.
I have fought against the killers of hearts,
 the jealous conspiracy of the greedy
But imagine this then--
imagine
you are with another person
who has also been stripped naked
and shorn of all the comforts of what was,
and both of you are cast out homeless on the roads.
Imagine finally being free
 of the lies of the critics and the overlords of restraint.
This is the way it really is,
We are not alone on the road.
I want you to join our resistance.
I want to run with these coyote-beloveds
and be strong with sage plants in the desert.
I want to run with the pronghorn
contemptuous of trucks and human highways.
Never mind all the harm they have done

I will not deny my love of beauty.
It is the desperate strength of this loneliness
that loves the smell of  wildflowers.
and I blossom in the fragrance of defiance.

May 04

Abalone

RoadKill

There is the matter of my eyes being on fire
not with vision, but with a luminous fear
because my  failing body is distempered and clutches itself
like an animal wanting to escape from death.
What do I say about my my body in suffering,
any body in suffering.
it is not true Buddha is beyond this
or Christ transcended it.
I didn’t know my body could hurt so much.
The mind is not free when suffering is too much.
It ceases to have elegant thoughts—
there are no huge vistas.
I am this pain, this animal flesh and I hurt with the same
cells as fish, cows and chickens.
I do not believe that I can stand more pain than this.
For a minute death seems preferable
but then the pain passes and I still cling to life.
Do not forget that this body suffering is the same as animals suffering.
It is hard to understand so much horror in life.

 Yes of course. I know only one or two people
would care if I died--- I am not blind
to seeing how little they care
and run over animals
in the road not once, but twice---
a hundred times---
until the bones are flattened into sun-dried skins
as thin as communion wafers on the bloody macadam.
Why don't they eat those on Sunday?
They only care about getting to the mall for a sale
to buy Christmas presents no one needs
and the animal they killed was in their way.

 So yes, of course, I hold dear to my intimate secrets
about how reflections of autumn leaves cast on river’s waters
hold a still tension on the surface of my seeing;
and my intuitions of the feel of snow under the body of a winter bird
warmed by tiny crystals in the blue rainbows of starlit snowflakes.
I have always stopped to pick up roadkill
and place their dear bodies
in the welcoming cornucopia of roadside weeds.
How many lives of deer, raccoons, foxes, porcupines, skunks
I have carried at their crucial end
to lie comfortably under birches or fall maples
or dead fawns softly resting
under a canopy of Coyote bushes.

Why shouldn’t I care for animals
as much as I care for humans?
I realize that like elephants, the best I can hope
for is the feel of familiar trunks touching my body
just as my cat nuzzles her soft head against my chin
or as my wife cradles my face
against the warmth of her cheek.
I face the lonely fear of having to die
with memories of candlelight
pushing back the circle of darkness
and warm waters around me
and my eyes closed in a cave of comfort
and my most loved one beside me
touching my forehead with a love that nurses.

That is why I am gentle with dead animals.
I don’t want to be a roadkill someone leaves
in the middle of the street,
disrespected, run over, again and again---
as if their lives meant nothing---
and only the income of impersonal markets
or the salesman who already has too much money
is all that mattered.
I already hold in my eyes
a recognition of a long life in love with seeing.
So this is why my animal eyes are burning.
glowing reddish green in the dark---
afraid of the malice of headlights
that mindlessly lights up
a nation’s funeral highways

Nov. 2003

Endangered Species
 

Maybe I saw the rare Bachman’s Warbler

or the Ivory Billed Woodpecker,

last seen in 1987.

Should I tell them?

those men in green uniforms,

who claim to be nature’s police

and call themselves "Naturalists".

What do they do,

these men who get paid to be green?

They sit in offices,

counting the value of one animal

against another, nature’s bankers,

cost- benefits of killing this deer

against that wildflower,

this rare trillium against that ungulate,

this tundra grass against that snow goose

turning species against species,

like card sharks playing angles against nature.

They make a mafia of diversity.
 

They maximize hunting profits

so many antlers sold

so many antlerless deer

so many grouse or turkey

sold to men who like killing for fun.

They set up a lottery to kill the really rare.

Big horn sheep. Elephants.

Should I tell them?--

these men with ID books

Peterson’s field guides

these men who serve hunters

when it was hunters who killed

the last Carolina Parakeet

the last Passeneger Pigion.

Nature is all "Natural Resources" to them

so much oil and gas like so much Red Osier Dogwood

so many woodducks like so much silver to be mined.

They are midway between

the robber barons of mineral rights

and the Agribusiness tycoons;

selling animal skulls and the right to torture.

These green men are Grey men.

Might as well be on Wall Street.

Count products as a KMart cashier.

Work in a slaughter house

Cutting cattle into meat strips.

Maybe I saw the rare trillium

or the Ivory Billed woodpecker.

But I won’t tell.

I will never tell.

Lost Canada of My Heart.

Juncos have come from the tundra,
from near Hudson’s Bay
where the Beluga or Narwhal go.
There are no red maple leaves
on the backs of Juncos. 
They are not Canadians,
just as I am not American.
I am more Junconian or Beluganian
or even Narwhalian than American.

Loons cry out from my eyes
at the loss of the Northwest forests.
Ghosts of White Pines drift over Alberta
looking for the lost Buffalo.
Canada is where the sad rivers moan
with seagulls over Tierra del Fuego.
Canada is in the mists that burn 
over the decimated Amazon.
Canada disappears with the salmon
that no longer follow rivers
to the sea.
Canada dies where the prairie dog towns
are silent.

It is true I am not Canadian,
Nor American, nor of any country
that kills warblers
or murders waters with pesticides.
No land is mine that
despises wild wolves
and hunts moose for pleasure.

I am from the country of Coyote,
where the wily dog smiles
between Tenochlitlan and
Nova Scotia.

Call me Cinnamon Teal if you like,
burnt red like autumn fire.
Call me Yellow Warbler,
the spring singer, green seeker,
sunlight lover,
from Seneca lands in New York
to Costa Rica overwintering.

But I will not be Canadian
or American
until the great Grey Owls
no longer hear chain saws
and cod return to the Great Banks
unmolested by greed.

I am from where
the Canada goose flies
with snow geese
beyond Canadian borders
outside the fiction of
cruel countries.
I am from the no man’s land
that renounced nationalism.
I am of the land of Musk Ox dying
where the last Eskimo Curlew cries.


Loons cry out from my eyes
at the loss of the Northwest forests.
Ghosts of White Pines drift over
Alberta looking for the lost Buffalo.
Canada is a land lost in my heart
Until  the forests return
and the fish come back
and no red maple leaves
fall in polluted water.

Until then
no land is mine
except where the plover goes.
I am from the country of Coyote,
where the wily dog smiles
between Macchu Picchu and
the Inuit Islands.

Canada Goose Egg
and the Mhother's Down

Maybe it’s a hatred of nature,

a need to repress it,

cage it behind wire or bars,

hinder it, conquer it,

limit it, tie it with fences

to gawk at the reptile beauty;

coral and corn and blue racer,

python and rainbow boa ?
 

Or is it hatred of sex,

male collectors gather trophies

of their impotence,

monuments to their ignorance

of what is free.

Christian fanatics

putting the dragon lizard

in a victorian gold cage,

Green cameleon captured

like a muticolored plumed serpent,

rainbow liberty stolen by

grey curiosity ?
 

Is it a religious perversion---

the desire of corrupt piety

to shrivel the luxuriant

repress all serpentine carresses

and force undulating organisms

into the pain of confined spaces?

Christians hated dragons and snakes

as much as they hated sex and life.

and wanted to kill the dragon.

The Chinese turned the dragon (Tao) into

a symbol of the emperor

and tried to steal its power

for the all glorious state.

The whole universe is a rainbow serpent

that cannot be caged or stolen.

Those who cage the serpent

merely prove their own perfidy.
 

Or is it the need of spoiled boys

to play with poison. and tempt danger,

and torture beings weaker than they.

The need of bullies to feel better than the small.?

The malice of ignorant men

to kill or cage

what they cannot understand?
 

Or is it merely a fad,

fashion, a trend in neo-colonial

fascism, to sell the exotic

and market the strange

as a badge of notoriety,

The vanity of zoos,

the creulty of possession,

pathetic owners of sideshow spectacle:

They market to adolescent capitalists

the stolen living jewels

from the same rain forests

that they now destroy.

Caged reptiles are symbols of plunder,

mementos of corporate rape.

What are these Macaws,

Cukoos. Iguanas, Ocelots,

Anacondas, Parrots
and rare Fish

but marvels of their place

whose right to life and place

have been stolen form them

like slaves ripped from Africa

sold for cages in suburban

living rooms,

far from the free wilds

of their quickly

vanishing biomes.

Their owners watch TV

drinking beer

nostalgic for nature

with a bird or lizard in a cage

near the couch

oblivious that the caged Iquana

has lost its color

and the flightess parrot

withers without rain forest.

No one owns the butterfly

no one possesses the hummingbird

The night of wild Iguanas

smells like jungle gardenia

Liberty is a flock of wild parrots.

And the snake that sleeps

at the base of a redwood

dreams of a future

when good men

neither hunt nor cage

but set the rainbow of

animals free

Copyright © 2002 Mark Koslow. All Rights Reserved.