Permanent Collection—a dozen of Steve's favorite poems

  THE CLOCK . . . 

  . . . without hands
  still may understand the time,
  but cannot speak to me. 

  I walk down the street
  gaze at faces of other clocks
  as we pass each other by, 

  wish I could supply
  each one of them
  with the hands it lacks, 

  wish, in fact,
  that I could remember
  where I left my own.


  SELF PORTRAIT

  Every day of my life
            somewhere
  a lover selects a flower to pluck
            from her meadow;
  a prisoner dreams of what lies
            beyond the dungeon;
  a child takes first steps;
  raindrops re-sculpt a mountain peak;
  music is performed that none
            has ever heard before;
  somebody, once again, admires
            a Van Gogh self-portrait.

  Our calendar says it’s September thirteenth,
  two thousand seven, and my days therefore
  number twenty two thousand two hundred
  eighty. If the mental math is a bit much,
  I can reveal that this number divided
  by three hundred sixty five gives the result
            of sixty one,
  with a remainder of fifteen (a tally for every
            fourth February).

  Today is the twenty two thousand two hundred
  eightieth day on which I will not paint
            my self-portrait.
  Yet, stumbling like a child’s first steps,
  I compose another poem, think of the times
  when music, or flowers, reminded me that life
  is more than what we can see from the inside
            of our prison cells.

  Yes, I know that every mountain
  wears down in the wind and rain.
  You have no need to remind me.
  I respond that even hills that are older,
  more rounded than I still
  stand awe-filled, silhouetted
           against the sunrise,
  offer us the wisdom of everything
           they have understood.

  I cannot mourn.  

  And when that time arrives,
  I ask that you remember,
           in my honor
  (perhaps on some future thirteenth of September):
  The only human beings who never die
  are those who were never born.


  DREAMS OF IMMORTALITY 

  Perhaps, one day
  I will be famous—
  so famous that they’ll name
  a bridge, or a school,
  or a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike
  after me and everyone
  as they pass by,
              or over,
                          or through,
  will read the sign and ask themselves: “Who,
  I wonder, was Steve Bloom?”
          

  EXPLORATION LEADS TO DISCOVERY

  Two hundred years ago?

  What are two hundred years, when the people they visited
  had lived beside the Missouri for a thousand summers or more,
  and did not care about the lines Easterners drew on maps?

  President Thomas Jefferson cared enough to send Meriwether Lewis
  along with William Clark on their famous expedition, with a vision
  of turning these heathen people into farmers, and traders.
  There was, however, already a city (sixteen hundred miles
  from the mouth of the river) where 4000 lived—more
  than in Washington, or St. Louis. And their farms provided the corn
  so these explorers would survive
  the cold of 1804 to 1805.
 
  Amy Mossat lives today in New Town, North Dakota,
  along with her fellow Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara.
  Here she plants this same corn in her garden, unmodified
  by hybridization, or genetic engineering.
 
  Lewis, in his journals, referred to the native people as “children.”
  The Indians, in return, named one of their own who 
  acted as a guide “Furnishes the white men with brains.”
 
  Amy Mossat can no longer live in Old Town,  because it
  was hybridized, or perhaps genetically engineered,
  some decades ago, inundated by the Garrison Dam
  along with 155,000 acres of farm land—that many acres
  of memories, and of sacred places.
 
  Lewis and Clark passed through 50 nations. Each with its sacred places.
  You and I know a few names, like the one we borrowed for a capital city
  after the Omaha village of  Tonwontaga was wiped out by the pox,
  or Chinook, because we gave it to a fish. 
 
  We take the time to worry about the future of fish. But who
  can tell me what has happened to the Chinook people?
  The Otoe and the Missouri were expelled to Oklahoma,
  where descendants still long for their northern plains.
  The Lemhi Shoshone were herded to the desert of southern Idaho.
  Some of the elders of the Nez Percé, in 1877, who were children
  when that tribe twice saved our explorers from starvation,
  remembered—as they were rounded up and removed. 
 
  You, too, can remember. Just follow
  the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail through towns
  where suicide is the number one cause of death.
 
  *Based on reporting by Timothy Egan (New York Times, June 15, 2003)


  WHERE YOU FIND YOURSELF

  If we see flowers planted in a line
  or shrubs, trimmed with perpendicular sides,
  you know right away that you are in a place
  of human habitation.

  If we see a river
  constrained by concrete banks
  to make sure it does not intrude
  on the spaces selected for humans
  to inhabit, you are surely in a city,
  or at least a large town.

  No river begins its existence
  with perpendicular banks
  of hand-poured stone.
  Nor did the trees, the grasses,
  the frogs and turtles,
  egrets, dragonflies, sandbanks
  or tumble-down rocks that once
  lived along these shores ever
  think to object if the waters
  changed shape from time to time,
  visited their lives more intimately. Indeed
  this was something they needed
  to remain alive and in proper harmony.

  Which is why, when I seek
  to remain alive and in harmony
  I go where the river offers me
  its unfettered intimacy,
  play the game I call “imagine”—
  that there is no place on earth
  where flowers are grown
  in straight lines, our lives
  channeled by hand-poured stone.


  A POEM IS

  A poem is god's way
  of compensating us for the fact
  that she doesn't exist.


  FLOWER PLOTS

  Watch out for the caucus of crocuses
  there, on the hill.
  I hear they are hatching a plot
  to overthrow the daffodils. 
 
  Beware the wisteria conspiracy
  up on the ledge,
  perfecting a plan I suspect,
  to overgrow the privet hedge.

  I wouldn’t interfere, if I were you,
  should bleeding hearts and columbine combine
  to show defiance
  against that great lilac alliance.  

  And it’s OK to stand where you might see
  but don’t get in the way
  as the cherry blossom posse gallops by,
  leaving pink hoofprints against the sky.  

  There’s so much more I’ll bet you never knew
  about what flowers do,
  and—when no one’s looking—where they go.
  (Just don’t let on who told you so.)  


  DIALOGUE

  “You are my Springtime flood
  after years of drought,
  the cool evening breeze
  after a summer day, affirmation
  that the sky is up,
      the earth down
  after so many moments of doubt,”
  says the poet.

  “I love you, too,” she replies.

  “I stroke your bare flesh,
  hold your body close to mine,
  explore your eyes, your mouth,
  the secret place which lies
  where a female belly curves away
  to disappear between two thighs—
  and forget, for just a moment,
  that there is anyone else,
  besides the two of us,
  in the universe,” he tells her.

  “You are so wonderful,” she glows.

  “Your smile is all the food and drink
  my soul requires, your caress
  my shelter from the world.”

  She gently squeezes his hand, whispers:
  “Thank you so much for loving me.”

  And he stares into her face, unable
  to speak again, awed
  by the eloquence of her words.


  IN MEMORIAM

  Most martyrs rest in graves undraped with flowers.
  Nobody will remember when or where or how
  they sacrificed—all that was within their power—
  and so I cannot tell you now. . . .
  Most martyrs rest in graves undraped with flowers.
  Beneath more storied tombs, I sense it’s always true,
  lie countless other heroines and heroes who
  gave equally as they were called and so,
  although well-praised the celebrated dead must be,
  this round let’s toast a deeper victory.
  For deeds which otherwise remain unsung, unfurl
  the banner left too long unhung for all
  who could in life achieve no more than try their best,
  and now, at last, in graves we’ve draped with flowers, rest.


  MINUTES

  Annual meeting
  National Association of Procrastinators
  (acronym: "NAP").  

  Scheduled start time: 10:00 am
  Actual opening: 3:25 pm  
  Motion: To postpone this session until Tomorrow—
  carried unanimously.


  MISSING IN REACTION

  I look through the compact discs
  for some music by Alma Schindler,
  but there is none,
  nor any under the name
  of Alma Mahler—though
  there are symphonies
  and songs by Gustav.

  Before they married, you see,
  he made her promise that after
  she would never try to fulfill
  her promise as a young composer.
  His wife must have no career
  save to make her husband comfortable.
  He will create the music
  in the family, thank you very much.  

  So she wrote
  not one note more
  during the next sixty years—
  including five decades
  that she survived
  after Gustav’s death.  

  I have no way of knowing, however,
  as I browse today,
  that Alma's music is what I crave—
  to restore the rhyme my life is missing.
  And so I’ll keep on searching.


  APRIL 10, 2006
  (New York City)

  Sometimes politics proves to be
  as strange as poetry.  

  Never thought that I would feel
  at home in a demonstration
  where one American flag
  follows another,
         after another,
                after another.
  But today it’s not the usual “my
  country can beat up your country” crowd.
  No, this time it’s the invisible people,
  speaking out loud for a change.  

  “I am Haitian;
         I am Korean;
                I am Pakistani,”
   they tell me.  

  “I am Dominican;
         I am Mexicana;
                I am Filipino;
  I am Ethiopian;
         I am Jamaican;
                I am Guatemalan and
  I live here too.
  I will not be less of a human being than you.  

  “I fly the flag of my country.
  And I fly the flag of my other country;
  for whether I am there or here
         your nation would collapse
                without the work I do.”  

  So I stand watching, ask myself
  whether we have, perhaps, just taken
  one small step toward the day
  when every human being
  will, at last, fly every flag
         of every nation
                and still feel at home.