Monday, December 29, 2014

The Old Man Next Door Died

The Old Man Next Door Died

The old man next door died,
the one with the yard neat as a calendar.

Then his son moved in,
the one the neighbors don’t like.

Then a car hit a deer and it died by the road
and rotted to bones on his uncut grass.

Weeks gone by now
and he hasn’t gathered the bones,

the ones with skin loose on the frame
and the frame loose on the ground.

Takes a long time,
a long time.


Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Cargo Cult

Cargo Cult

Then one day the cargo comes,
after the weeds have eaten the runway
and the man who waves torches at its end

has gone home without food,
and the plane made of sticks has collapsed,
and the indifferent jungle has grown

like the sea to the world's edge:
something lands and takes off.
Not during your sly devotions,

but in darkness while you sleep,
the part of you tracking arrivals
hears an engine through the trees

and reaches to touch one you love,
slipping your hand over her skin
lightly and smoothly as a bird in the air.

12-16-14

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Pretzel Man

Pretzel Man

I amble down Manhattan Island
thinking about the bare spots in Cezanne’s paintings
where the unworked canvas shows through,
where the sense of his presence is deepest,

and thinking how the dark schist boulders in Central Park,
the unworked bedrock of the Island,
are the obdurate bare spots
of Olmsted’s landscaped canvas,

while eating a salt pretzel and keeping a canny eye cocked
for those uncomposed moments when a composition
breaks through, pinning my restless eye
to the visible world and one of its infinite arrangements,

and wondering if photos can have empty spaces,
and what the unpainted ground of the mind might be,
when some local hustlers push tickets at my face
for the tourist bus downtown to Broadway.

As a tourist I’m free not to speak, so I don’t,
and one of them says:  Pretzel man don’t want nothin’. 
And for just that moment, he’s right.

David Noah
11-18-14

Saturday, July 19, 2014

First, Words Drop Like Overripe Fruit


First, words drop like overripe fruit
from the page, and the page turns to paper.

Then stories on television go—
all those faceless young fools

shuffled like a strobe-lit tarot.
Who can think with that nonsense going on?

We turn away and see nothing very much.
We listen closely to the air slide over our skin.

Now what, we ask no one,
as our feet like little soldiers

march into a room once silent
but now magnetized by a whisper:

Once upon a time
there was a little old man…

And even though we’re through with tales,
we open our mouths.  We listen.

We know how this one ends—
all happy deaths are alike—

but the plot is a page-turner
that grabs us by the throat. 

7/5/14

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Ambulance Howls

The Ambulance Howls

The ambulance howls
high and long—it’s on the scent.

We pull over and crouch
like terrified gazelles by the roadside.

Let it pass by.
Let it find some other tragic avenue.

Let it sniff around the alleys
in another part of town.

Let it turn the corner on a far road
where I don’t love anyone.

Let it hunt in the dead ends,
in the hidden cul-de-sacs,

on the abandoned boulevards
where weeds crack the pavement.

No one I know lives on that street.
Everyone I know lives on that street.

4-15-14

L. H. N.

L. H. N.

My dad had a tattoo on his forearm
inked in dark blue:  the letters L. H. N.
But since he didn’t have a middle name,
I asked, when I was thirteen and ready,

what H stood for.  “Hell,” he said, “or Heaven.
One night in the navy we got real drunk
and all got tattooed by some handsome guy
who asked what I wanted.  I said No hearts

and no flowers, just write my initials:
L. N., and the guy said ‘No middle name?’
Make it an H,  I told him with a grin,
and that’s how I learned my calling.

For not one of us knows our own true name
until a stranger writes it on our skin.”

At night like a hothouse

At night like a hothouse

At night like a hothouse I dream orchids.
Under a sheet, under the sky, under a spell,
I cup my ear to the door
(beyond that door another door)
and listen to my dreams tell me
what it means to wake up.
While on the other side of the door
someone else listens to my heart beat
and refuses, from compassion, to speak. 

7-7-14

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Spring


Spring
3-18-14

how water surges from faucets
how the dead visit us in dreams

how the moon rises like steam behind dark trees
how the moon rolls over the stars like a man in a barrel

how the dead speak without sound, saying everything at once
how stars roll out of faucets and find lovers' beds

how roots elbow aside old bones and whisper everything to the branches
how the branches surge and the air reddens around them

how light floods the evening and overflows its banks
how light swells like fresh salt bread

how in dreams the dead live without sorrow and our hearts surge
how nothing is left unchanged, not trees, not dreams, not light, not lovers

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Bestsellers

Bestsellers

Sometimes I stand in the book aisle at Kroger
and read just the first lines of the bestsellers,
thinking how those lines caught an editor’s attention.
Often I'm dumbfounded by their dumbness, but sometimes
caught just enough to stand there and keep reading--the ink,
as someone once said, dribbling from my mouth.

Other times I sample a single grape from the open bags
in the produce department, pretending I'm checking for ripeness
but really just stealing a grape. That special sweetness.
I wonder how a single grape fits into the world-wide late capitalist agro-industrial complex.
I wonder how a single line of a book can erase the grocery store, its parking lot, my city, my sorrows, and all the world except my willing leap into a story.
It was purple, and ripe, and the rain was falling...

Privet

Privet
David Noah
2-26-14

I pull privet from the dirt with both fists
and think the world a better place, knowing,

as I bend, that privet makes endless lace
beneath my feet:  its grasp exceeds my reach.

Every day I throw away one true thought
as though thoughts were ocean and truth was rain,

and still go on living, never minding
the loss or missing the sound that it made. 

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

The First Time

The First Time

The first time I had sex it was in the back seat of a blue Ford Falcon
parked beside the Colorado River in Austin, Texas.
It was July 20th, 1969,
a night otherwise remembered for the first moon landing.
We tuned the radio to KNOW
the Top 40 station with all the hits all the time
because in those years the radio was always on
and because music is better than silence when silence is better than speech.
The dj cut back and forth between the moon landing
and a song called Purple People Eater—
the Sheb Wooley hit about alien encounters,
and while Neil Armstrong gently fired his thrusters
for a soft landing on the virgin lunar surface
we maneuvered our adolescent bodies
with and without gravity
into the Kama Sutra position known as The Landing Gear in the Lotus,
all our eyes watching a new world grow closer
until only the moon only the earth only you and I
were (only the stars)
brighter once and forever
and only we were there that night
only all of us
only you

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Theme & Variations

Theme & Variations
    “One rib, the whole cage, both, neither.”  ~ C. Durden


Heart in a cage, brain in a bone—
we’re always in drag,
like fire wearing stone.
              
        *

Every skeleton hides a closet,
and nothing we do or don’t do
can close it.

        *

Pecs, tits, tits, pecs—
gender is phrenology:
the mind has no sex.

        *

A bit of silk sliding over
hard muscle or a fedora
sitting pretty on a head of curls

is a sumptuous investment
in epistemological anxiety.
We say:  a body of knowledge.

        *

I, if that’s the word I want,
have never spoken without
the cunning articulate bones

translating every word
into something absurd,

so that even my quietest moans
are whispers dressed up as shouts.
I am my own haunt.

Sun Dials

Sun Dials

Everything with shadows is a clock.
Even the bee’s dim blur on stigma and ovary
or the pulse of a field mouse in tall grass
can track the seconds of the sun’s arc. 

A deer will shade dry leaves
exactly at this hour each year you live,
and the owl’s wings ticking over snow
are swift and certain as a strobe light.

Nothing stays noon for long. 

Linoleum

Linoleum
10-11-13


We lay it on concrete slabs, under prisoners,
the contagious old, the supplicant poor;
under nameless others we keep
without holding; under all
who walk between stations in dim light,
who clutch their heads in hallways and cry out,
who count the tiles and explain to someone
why they must eat, why they need a card,
why their life is without a ground.

It papers the floors of insurance companies. 
It tessellates the dining rooms of double-wides.
It silences the rubber-soled shoes
of government workers; in the windowless rooms
of the Pentagon it keeps blood secrets.
Up and down Manhattan Island
melancholy expatriates
clean it twice daily in subways.
It teaches us one-point perspective.

Like us it is never single.
Like us it wears out.
Like us it will be replaced.
Like us it endures.