Dreams are not
as beautiful
arthur dobrin
© 2010
Contents
My Desire
Volunteers
Next Door
Voices Upon the Wall
Houdini’s Grave
Long Island History
My Brother’s Accordion in a Crocodile Case
Kismet
Through You Like Stars
Aunts and Uncles
Montana Convent
Water Trees
Brooklyn Botanic
Questions for Menke
Center of the Heart
Affirmation
What I Know
Dreams Are Not as Beautiful
Newborn
Inheritance
In the Mouth of Rainbows
Angel of Suburbia
So Many Possibilities
My Desire
On a cold spring day,
When the wet tames the wild
And cherry blossoms are here but not you,
Your absence defines all that is.
My desire the daffodils and yours
Daisies you dream forth
From sodden ground you plough,
Until I leave and flowers go on
Growing in fields you have sown.
Volunteers
Nearly nothing grows
Planned in the garden,
No straight lines or rows,
Only occult rationality reasoned
From soil, sun, and shadow.
Scallions, lemon balm, and basil
Volunteer themselves as you do
Year after year in early autumn
By the wild ivy more beautiful
For the hidden colors of autumn.
Next Door
Our neighbor plants the earth
As if this were Iowa.
Her husband of nearly fifty years
Grumbles about his receding lawn
Gobbled by tomatoes and autumn flowers.
They eat food that tastes of soil,
Look at each other with dimming eyes,
And their hands warm for they are fire
And they are music and their house overflows
Like an apple tree in autumn.
Voices Upon the Wall
Waking early to walk downstairs
I hear the cellist on the wall
And voices singing to her bow.
When I neared adolescence on the city street,
This house was born on a blacksmith’s shed
And potatoes grew on the nearby plains.
Waking early to walk downstairs
When my family is still asleep,
I listen to the chorus of those
I’ve never met, the neighbors from before.
I touch the walls they once touched,
Walk the floor they walked before.
As for me, what will I leave?
Who will hear
My voice upon the wall?
I’ve often thought of homesteads,
A house of many generations,
Gravestones near a maple tree.
It’s not possible to be buried in my garden.
Someone will have to pack my bones
To take with them as they go.
We are the ones who won’t stay still,
The generation without memory or guilt.
I wonder which is the greater burden:
To live in a land of ancestors
In time counted by trees
Or in a house where waking
Early to walk downstairs
The voices are all unknown.
Westbury
No trace of Indian lives
Can be found among the houses,
Not an arrow has been uncovered
Even while digging for suburbia.
Of course there are no headstones
But neither are there tools nor bones
Worthy of consideration.
Many crossed the broad water,
Fished the salty seas,
Trapped small game
in the woods north of here.
What did they know about
The greatest plains east of the Mississippi?
If they crossed this country,
They took their traces with them,
Holding their lives in their quivers,
Packing their shadows as they went.
On this earth we grow berries and asparagus;
Now beans and grapes grow full.
Massapequa, look for me in my dreams.
Tell me the secret of this forbidden place.
Houdini’s Grave
Knowing Houdini slept
A bicycle ride away
On a cemetery ridge
Beside a winding road—
A divide between this life and that—
I searched in a maze of marble
Mausoleums and tombstones
Touched by the hand of God.
Looking for a sign,
The earth I saw remained
Undisturbed by resurrection,
A promise yet fulfilled.
Certain now the dead stay still
And even magicians have limits
I pedaled home to sleep
And dreamed of falling chains.
Long Island History
Bargain and barter
Knowing the price paid is swindle—
Ghost ship and dwarf pine
Seastrand and mall,
House and highway.
Stuff the head with spice,
Scrape the scales,
Slit the stomach and prepare:
Potato and pumpkin
Apple and peach,
Oyster and duck.
This splendid island
Long gone.
My Brother’s Accordion in a Crocodile Case
Open it.
And a world
Bellows out—
On a cobblestone street in Queens,
Iorio’s workshop thick with glue,
Reeds, white keys, black buttons,
A floor covered in wood shavings.
Lessons in an Old World apartment
Beside a riverside drive,
A room as strange as Viennese cafes,
Tango studios in Argentina.
A monkey is in the case,
An attraction in a sour bar,
Songs sung under sparking
And rattling rails.
Kismet
Early in the morning
The house by the sea
We walk to the swale where beach
Grass and bayberry lay
On a hidden slope and look
At ourselves from the outside in.
No emptiness but the sky fastened
There at Manhattan and Montauk in mist,
Herring gulls above and we walk alone,
Place ourselves like chalk,
Later find a nearer place
Where a bather is closer by.
We gather our inhibitions
And spread them across the sand.
Everything breathes green and still
As our winter dreams are put by.
We look at ourselves from the inside out,
Walk to the water warm and free.
When we look back with
Clear and innocent eyes:
Joy in our passion drunk upon water,
Little smiles and midday sleep.
In those moments a garland of small pleasures.
Without measure that was the place to be.
Through You Like Stars
When I begin to speak
Like this silence crushes my throat—
Fallen from nowhere through your womb
From the beginning it is a matter of discipline—
Before I was we were attached
And since have grown alone—
Your heart is more full of me
Than mine is of you—
It flows away like water downward
Never upward like sap feeding trees —
I come back to where I started
Through you like star and fish—
My mother who art
In heaven is your name.
Aunts and Uncles
Strange that one and her son
In a shoebox room,
Twin beds pressed together.
One uncle’s face sand smooth,
His feline marriage counted
On a calendar’s page.
Another greets me from deserts,
Talks of men on the moon
Until his brain is burned clean.
Fay, aptly named, the youngest,
Possessed by a foreign tribe
In woods where timeless children played.
Silence falls like stones in a pond.
Around our dinner plates they ripple
As against a distant shore.
Montana Convent
A storm of frozen stars
Swirls across the plains
My beard cakes with ice
Women work
Mercy in a broken world
Silent hearts of red
A cross above the bed
I’m under Christ's feet
Asleep
My ancestors tremble
At my dumb courage
A lonely night
I dream of straps and boxes
Fringed shawls and candles
Snow soaked in blood
Tonight there are no boots
No accusations of deicide
No attempt at conversion
Only coffee and conversation
At the breakfast table
Sister, brother in a winter room
Water Trees
Who will remember
To water trees
Or plant apples
And plums in autumn?
Forests care for themselves
But gardens and orchards—
Who will care for them
As we slide through earth
Lighter than blue doves
And flying more splendid
Than jungle birds of paradise?
Brooklyn Botanic
We stop
Talking
And
Are lost
For words.
There, old friend—
A motionless heron,
A torii in a pond,
And cherry blossoms
Falling
Falling
And
Floating
On water.
Questions for Menke
Singer of the Milky Way,
Poet of potatoes,
Child of trampled streets
Pig sweet in Michaleshik—
We weave our souls,
Sip sweet wine
At my meatless table.
Tell me: Did Grandpa know
Horses’ hooves thick
With pillagers’ mud
In his burning village
Called Novaradok?
Where did they go,
Those who didn’t run
From swords and boots
But lived for another day?
Tell them they are not alone.
My hand, your brother’s,
Your mother’s mouth we touch.
And the smell of you on the pillow.
Center of the Heart
Some things are so beautiful
To hold them is to bring
The sun to the center of the heart
These things on the tongue
Of the pages I hold
These things in the eye
Of the spinning earth.
These things once said
Are again and again
Persimmon, rose, and cinnabar.
Some things are so beautiful
To hold them is to die.
Affirmation
Out of the infinite dark
I’ve stumbled a billion
Billion years in waiting,
Honey and oak, cotton and wind,
Scarlet dust and dung am I.
My eyes are winter wheat,
My hands woven linen.
The sky combs my chestnut hair.
I lean against all others,
Raddle my blood on a rainbow loom,
Scatter seeds like stars, for children,
Mice, horses that fly in my dreams.
Life, never could I imagine such as you,
Summer slowing to autumn and summer again,
Leaves burning brighter than crystal
Mulching fields of sleeping berries.
Life—“Sister,” a Russian called you—
Overflowing I build in the nest
Of my heart for nightwalkers
In the dark.
What I Know
Such skills I have:
Clipping heavy rams’ hooves,
Pruning thin limbs of coffee trees.
I can ride subways in several cities,
Speak a language and a half,
Tease scholarly words out of hiding.
My tongue can find its way in your darkness
Sweetened with baby’s breath and cocoa,
Softened by decades in tandem,
Chastened by our children sleeping
Their separate lives.
Dreams Are Not As Beautiful
How many times?
Who can remember?
Callow first from college
Until your belly swelled.
Nine years later a stone
House on a green hill.
The silence of safaris,
Lavender sky and savannah.
Yours the elephants,
Mine the giraffe.
The buzz of mosquitoes,
The flight of butterflies.
Our names: Moraa, Osoro,
Nyakundi, Kwamboka.
Theirs: Ongesa, Maranga,
Pereira, Singh.
The places: Africa, Kenya,
Kisii, Tabaka.
Dreams are not
As beautiful.
To return and return:
This our hearts.
Newborn
In my hands
My newborn son
His hair still stiff with
The rubyjuice of birth.
I hold the break of day
And in my hands
Generations waiting.
Inheritance
This you inherit:
The gold of Africa’s sun
Bathing a boma of straw,
Gospel singing to close the sores—
And your other part
Chosen to keep the Word
In two thousand years of wandering.
This is yours,
You who came to us
The color of fawn,
African girl,
Daughter of Jerusalem.
In the Mouth of Rainbows
A thousand hands
made you
A thousand nights
of dust
A thousand lips
made you
A thousand caresses
in forgotten places
In nights deeper
than indigo
In days longer
than seas
And here you are
under one quilt
Returning each star
to its proper place
Returning each lip
to the mouth of rainbows
Angel of Suburbia
O stars
Beyond all counting,
Galaxies beyond all seeing,
Dust of the world’s four winds:
The grass now greener than green,
Apples more scented than hayflower,
Our hearts flow over
More full than the Nile,
Ganges, Neman, Hudson,
Angel of suburbia,
You dreaming yet of paradise,
We holding it here,
You.
So Many Possibilities
Bent over you whispering
Wanting to know why
Approaching nine moons
You rush your becoming
Flesh out of water
We ask you—
Son, brother, cousin,
Grandson—
How so many possibilities
Can be contained in so little.