RUNES

by Lance Lee

Night empties a pitcher of rain through my trees.
     Sibelius spins, weeps, rages.
The washer rocks back and forth.

My dog barks, but Orion, behind the blinding storm
     tightens his belt and passes unseen
as my friend cries, grief-stricken, but holds

leechlike to death, sucking life from the dying rune
     of his wife.
I want to say nothing ever dies, but wonder

if I can move so far from despair and fear,
     my own wife so near death once,
my life full of terror from wishing ill,

dreading good, so incomplete a man
     threatened by wholeness or lack in you,
touching the dread of living with my death,

that child who grows in me until one day
     I will be the old skin he sheds.
The truth is very strange, for the best things

are wrung from opposites, closeness
     from hate, courage from despair, life from death:
profoundest love from the grave.

                                                                                    In memory of Bob Rodman

Grandfather Daddy Wilds

              or

                         Myth, Malevolence, Truth

Two images haunt me:  Daddy Wilds
willfully slewing his Lincoln around
at a hundred miles an hour in the rain,
sure he would spin the right way home:
and, his face battered as a refined
boxer’s, shambling from his room
at the end, though warned
any motion would burst his heart.

He was the wild free father brimming
with gifts:  cars replacing those
his son smashed, always found unused
in some maiden aunt’s garage; money
he went on making as a stockbroker,
after the ’29 crash; adoration
of my mother he kept company
as she modelled, outfacing
all the young men until too sick
to face my father down; the castle
and title he spurned because
they weren’t good enough:

and he was the man whose mastery
grandmother punished for ten years
with no sex,
who laid in his deathbed while
his son went on smashing things
for someone else to make good, and
his daughter brushed leadpaint and
turpentine around, as if no one was there:
the man who got up and broke
the only heart he knew he could.

  I

Some nights I hear him hum
like an engine under the dry
white rain of stars we spin beneath
and I grow dizzy looking for true home
and lie there, short-breathed,
my jaw set like a boxer’s against
the pain in my side, weighing
what fuels our pride,
our bribery of love,
our final love of death.

                                                  (1985)

  II

Or so my father whispered
when I was young. Older,
the truth is precious as breath.
Grandfather smelled no paint
where he lay on the far side
of his home, while all his son smashed
were Germans in North Africa
and France, and himself, earning
a Purple Heart: and grandfather
died in bed in my mother’s arms,
who was heavy with me—
his death a shockwave in us both.

Some nights I hear him hum
like an engine under the dry
white rain of stars we spin beneath
and I grow dizzy looking for true home
and lie there, short-breathed,
my jaw set like a boxer’s against
the pain in my side, weighing
what fuels our pride,
our bribery of love,
our final temptation to love our end—
or if, as he clove to her ripe body
he knew too
life is more pure more adamant
than death.

                                                 (2017)

The Names of Love

         or

The Red-Tailed Hawk of My Forgetting

rises on a thermal of desire over the sunlit seacliff,
     red red tail flashing
as he turns head lowered, eyes spears that seek
     the merest telltale motion in the chaparral—
found, he stoops down the angle of his need
     a sharply exhaled breath,
talons hammerheads to the careless head
     whose thin scream they cut off
in a fury of feathers and dust and blood.

     Or he perches on eucalyptus trees
winter winds have long stripped,
     that brace one another or they would fall—
Ten years he muses      twenty slides downwind
     in hunger      forty mark him changeless
as I age.
     So I shimmy up the gunbarrel smooth trunk
to meet his gaze, dig my feet in for traction:
     sweat blinds I shake from my eyes until
with a last heave his gaze meets mine…

         ‘There is the man who day by day
     watches me. His father mother children
         are all one, and no one. The years are
     long peels of eucalyptus skin that fall
         to the earth, the man always the same
     while in me waits one whose greater
         wings one day will spread and shed me
     like a husk as he cries into the sun.
         In his gaze I forget my father’s name,
     mother’s, children’s, and love forgets mine.
         I am become everyone, and nothing…’

     ‘Here is the hawk who day by day
         ignores me. His father mother children
     are all one, and no one. The years are
         long peels of eucalyptus skin that fall
     to the earth, the hawk always the same
         while in me waits one who someday
     will shed me like a husk as he steps
         away from the sun. In his gaze
     I forget my father’s name, mother’s,
         children’s, and love forgets mine.
     I am become everything, and no one…’

Therefore wherever I go I name all I see,
     given or  new-coined— it is all one to me.
What I record may last while the sun endures,
     past that no one can care.
Name by name I chip away at my forgetting.
     Each word I give is a name for my love.

Report from the Front

Everything tumbles together, syringa
          in bloom, sweet clover on the air,
the earth’s breath between showers,
            bitterns poised to strike unwary fish
who abandon their granite posts
            with staccato QUAWKQuawkquawks!
when I come too close;
            muskrat who ignores me
as she parts the water with her nose,
            twigs for her den in her teeth;
and hissing snapper with jaws
            even death respects
who slides into tall grass
            that trembles at his passage.
Not far from this suburban edge
            semis from Quebec roll by
with cargoes of furs, blocks of ice,
            cedar sprays, antlers, Eskimo songs
and shrieks of children from farthest north
            where they fence small squares of sky
from wilderness and polar bears. I want
            to link all these in a causal chain,
as though I am he who knows, weighs,
            values, names—
but only this moment by moment teeming
            answers my hunger for sense.

BIO

Lance Lee is a Los Angeles poet, playwright and author. His poems, stories and articles have been accepted in both American and English journals such as Antioch Review, Cross Currents, Agenda, Outposts, Stand, Acumen, Nimrod, Iron, and Poetry Northwest. Recent publications include Iconoclast, The New European (UK), Ambit (60 Anniv. issue) (UK), Orbis (UK), POEM, Chiron Review, and Blue Unicorn. Books include Wrestling with the Angel, Becoming Human, Human/Nature and Seasons of Defiance (2010). His most recent book, Homecomings, is available here and in the UK. He is a recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and various other scholarships. A full review of his works and further samples can be found at lanceleeauthor.com