by V.B. Price
For those of us living in joy in spite of our selves.
LARAMIE
Beethoven grass
teasing and rolling
through the high alone,
surrounding us
with inner spaces
as far as we can breathe, intimate
as not being seen, as soul mates
conversing over supper,
rising and falling with each other,
fitting perfectly
as geology and weather,
as bone and the chemistry of ideas.
Politics is seen for what it is
—death house green
gas storage tanks and pipelines,
fiscal zits defined benign
by those making money
for themselves
from what belongs to all of us,
wanting to steal that future
rising in us
as our whole true being with each other
under the sky. Among the notes
swelling across the plains,
money is just
ticks and lice in the beautiful
fur of the music
bounding over the hills.
GLENWOOD SPRINGS
Ego leather,
old gloves
tough, soft
with use
as when
you stop
comparing
who you are
to others. Greedy
for more
from yourself,
you stop
looking
in all the wrong places,
wanting praise
from those
who mean nothing
to you.
Then ego becomes
an old shovel,
sanded, filed down to an edge,
with histories of dozens of gardens in it,
then it becomes
the other face of the guide you can trust
but only
when it compares
who you are
to who you really are
with just
a little more
patience.
ALBUQUERQUE
Beginning is always.
Who you were
is not
who you are, anymore than you are
your name,
your aches and pains,
your failures,
your grand accolades.
As beginning is
forever, all ending is just
a crease in the carpet,
bunched up time,
messed matter settling,
always leveling
and rolling up
greater than
flatness.
What matters
is starting, always,
always again
the fathomless chance
to get it right,
to follow the cracked leaves, bent twigs,
flutters of red string
through the forest,
zeroing in
on beginning
as it flows always
toward its freedom, always
with you and without you,
beyond hope, beyond virtue,
beyond reward.
In one way or another I think we are all living in spite of ourselves these days… or perhaps because of ourselves, which may be the same thing. To be able to pull these powerful poems out of a time of grief, rage, sorrow, and–against all odds–hope, is the mark of a master poet. Thank you.
VB: Beethoven grass..what a great line! and the beautiful drift in Albuquerque belongs equally in a Kyoto monastery or in a psychiatric ward! Randall is right: you have shown enormous talent and depth here, and the themes are fitting for the contemporary age. You may remember me from NM Humanities Council days with the late Alan Gerlach. Thanks, and I’d love to have lunch with you some time.