by Jack Myers

After I am gone and the ache begins
to cease and the slow erosion I felt,
being years ahead of you, starts
to invade you too, you’ll come to see
that desert is the memory of water,

like remembering when we were walking
in beautiful Barcelona you said you thought trees
were gods because they were rooted in earth
and flew in the air and magically made food
out of light and gave us the air we breathe.

I was stunned you could open up a God-space
just like that.  Like when my 2-year-old dug holes
in the yard and fit his face into each of them to see,
as he explained, if he could find where the darkness
came from.  Then you asked me why I never prayed.

I believe whatever disappears or survives
or comes into being is a prayer that’s been
already answered, and that we feel alone
because we won’t let go of what is gone
or has changed or hasn’t happened yet.

Waking this morning with my arms around you,
the dogs snoring, and a mourning dove cooing
I felt I had awakened in a peaceable kingdom
where the fear of death turned itself inside-out
into a love for life.  If I prayed, I’d pray for that for you.

Note: Thanks to the writer Jim Cornfield (“Living History,”
Continental, 8/08) for the title.

by Jack Myers

is a quality of attention,
the way color says how
light feels: yellow for the
aerosol of happiness, black
for the zero of what isn’t;
the way light, lined up right,
can cut through steel.  Anything
is art if the mind’s flawed right:
how soup feels being stirred,
how silence, broken open just so,
releases its essence and graces
the mind as a mint leaf in the air.

It’s those who can’t understand and
are dumbfounded by the obvious,
who thrive on dissonance and
subverting the ordinary into the
extraordinary who end up being
artists.  What good is that, you ask?
No practical use as far as I can see.
In fact, Archimedes could’ve been
bragging about art’s uselessness when
he said “Give me a long enough lever,
a place to stand, and I will lift the earth.”

by Jack Myers

The smart ones think
they can climb
with their brains.

The talented ones
slide halfway up
without trying.

Those who merely feel
deeply drown
in their own syrup.

But the quiet girl
from Bangladesh
who fled here alone

reads her poem
about a tea party
she had as a child.

She fills each cup
with tiny white flowers
then re-paints her
imaginary guests’
chipped red fingernails red.

by Jack Myers

Immaculate white swans float in the river’s
fishless dishwater like squat question marks.

Under the huge stone buildings,
looking like sunken wedding cakes,
lovers kiss long and slow as if growing
shells of longing over themselves,

as if dreariness decided to imagine them
as pink and purple petals of amnesia
growing out of something long and terrible.

At dinner, a waitress charges me $10
for a bottle of water without blinking,
as if cost could be a ladder out of loss.

Next morning on the tram a well-dressed man
whose eyes are all white gets up.  Then his wife,
who is also blind takes his arm, and they get off.
I close my eyes to feel what it is like to be her
and follow the sound of tapping our way home.

I’ve set the camera to snap a picture of me
under a portico of gods and caryatids.  I have
no idea where I am.  But I could never be from here.
Then again I think, why not?  I’m always tying to catch up to
where I’m at.  I’ve always felt I can’t be where I’m from.