Poems from Turn the Wheel (2003)
“The news that stays news is the modus operandi. . . . bracing, smart,
tight, perfectly greased works, luminous and poignant by turn. I enjoy
Cope’s stretch from familial to sublime and his consummate poet’s
generous heart.”
—Anne Waldman
“David Cope’s poetry reaches into true silence and from that place within
himself derives its indelible sanity of gothic dreams, direct musicality,
sustained multiple resonance, objectivist heart, vernacular ear.
His work is a paradox of detached
lyricism confronting the abysses of his soul.”
—Jim Cohn
Copyright ©2003 by David Cope
Acknowledgements
Poems
from Turn the Wheel were published in
Heaven Bone, Big Scream,
Napalm Health Spa, Hazmat, Big Hammer, and Freeman Magazine. “Tender
Petals for Calm Crossing” appeared in Van Gogh’s Ear: Poetry for the New
Millennium 2.1 (Committee on
Poetry/French Connection, 2003) and in Sins
and
Felonies (Ed. G. F. Korreck, Barbaric Yawp, 2007); “Emile at the Crossroad” was
also published in Sins
& Felonies.. “Ghazal of the High
Plateau” appeared in The
“A Well-Versed Man,” article by Beth Loechler, Grand Rapids Press, Sunday,
April
9, 2006. J 1-2.
Poems Included Here:
Fran
Gone (as you are)
Ghazal of the High Plateau
Lost Loves
Tender Petals for Calm Crossing
In Silence
Emile at the Crossroad
The dharma at last
–––
Fran
I see my parents still
wailing
in the living room
a grey day, no wind
& out the window traffic flashing past—Aunt Fran's
husband & son Dutch, my older cousin who'd
filled his room with electronics, a genius at 13, killed,
accident in the
& she in a hospital, her arm broken—my first
memory of lives, faces swept away from my life—
later, when the sun broke thru,
wondering where we go—I was six—
& after that, Dutch's oak furniture arrived,
his bed to be my bed, his mirror where my face
would stare back, sigh & dream of love—
& Fran, recovered, circled the world alone, sent me
coins from
mysterious envelopes that arrived in the mail
worlds beyond my suburban sidewalks
& mystery gardens where I'd pause
before an open rose & lose a day in dreams—
later, her house burned & she escaped
miraculously,
settled & worked in
as my parents' marriage cracked up,
grandpa died, I raged at fallen love & lost my heart
until, lost child, I found myself in Sue
& found my father again & heard
my long-lost grandma's sighs,
Fran the oldest child who'd seen more
& kept herself apart, learned to be alone—
yet after the loss & the fire & the years apart,
she met her Hale & danced in her 70s like
a teenager, a few years without pain—
a few years blooming in the fullness of her womanhood—
who guesses how much we can know even of those
nearest us, how others cope & sing above their suffering?
she'd refuse a funeral, would
go home to lie with her Hale—
these last months
awaiting an end that now comes swiftly—& I, learning of it,
sit with my sisters & my family, my 50th birthday
stilled in this quiet moment filled with her life,
flocks of birds wheeling in slow motion, hovering around
the feeder in winter snow—
Gone (as you are)
when the currents push you
straight into that hairpin turn where
slammed sideways around
the bend two fallen mammoth tree trunks, stripped
& bleached, lie along each bank,
branches forcing rushing water into
a narrow channel—brake
& cut thru surging waves, avoid the crash
that'd toss you into the roar the
frigid waters, your craft swamped or adrift in
wild plunging currents—
somehow you're through,
the river widens out,
calm, & you can
sit back as morning sun fills forest & swamp.
ahead, deer wake to your imagin'd silence,
leap for their lives
through cedar budding kinnickinnic giant firs,
breezes raising whitecaps racing
toward you, & you await the moment when
the wave line hits & you lift your eyes
to the new sky where
all the sleepers are finally pushing seaward skyward
in a mad rush
where the cranes lift themselves & are gone,
as you are.
Ghazal of The High Plateau
mesmerized on the trip to this high plateau—the barren promontories,
windswept spruce giving way to high scrub & thence to rock outcrops
where marmosets chattered your names to the wind as you sang, half
in your sleep, tales of desert sun & wild waves on faraway November seas—
recalling the fallen hiker, his bandaged legs straddling his giant companion,
weary eyes haggard in stubbled cheeks whose lips whispered only blues—
time passed so quickly you hardly realized you'd arrived, & now, with
news of loved ones dead beyond your grasp & hopes, you turn to vanished
loves, vanished paths, & find no way, even the path behind you vanished
in clouds & mist, only glimpses of far peaks & guessed-at valleys ahead,
even the
tiny yellow flower, an unearthly flower, nameless, a crooked flower once
signed to you by a long-dead sage. this is the sign you were to wait for:
consider your frail bones, aging in the meat of your boyhood leaping,
those aches in loins that once propelled loves & led to singing heights,
that song which brought you here, that you might sit. the mists are
the myth of this season; the next path can't be seen with living eyes;
the heart's blind cupid can't fathom the love to come; sit. even the light
will spill in strange showers over your tired limbs & into your eyes which,
blind until now, will open to the shadows of meadows & peaks still
unknown. in the dream, deer paths now blazoning broadway,
towers stacked high with grumbling dreams & cell-phoned illusions
melt away, as does the day you were stopped still before prairie-wild
grass, the sun blazing lights & shadows thru waves rolling to the horizon.
old friends return like wild leaves in moonlit valleys, sit & sing in your ear.
the mountain is not the mountain. inside the vanished waves, beyond
mists & lost paths, songs become pathless riddles in your white hair
& aging eyes, your child-corpse moving on with naked winged feet,
the unearthly flower now a sprig at your ear, as you sing silence at last,
a breath, an ayre floating beyond this air as surely as you yourself were sung.
Lost Loves
old man slim boy
& boy-to-be,
I wake in the cold
moon where even
the crickets lie silent & the leaves
hang in the flooding mist,
black streets silent—
even the midnight
screamers gone to bed at last—
& hear you though lost
forever
singing in my ear, feel your
tender touch as you
stroke my forehead—
so many gone down
the lost river, so many waiting
now for you & me to
join them, singing
in some night apart,
shadow faces alight with
secret fires,
love that floods
even this room if only we
turn to it, & make it ours.
Tender Petals for Calm Crossing
along this silent path among cliffs thru terraced green you'll
sing beneath your breath where the poet once dreamed
of his escape thru the clouds, where whole populations fled
to rebuild shattered dreams, hands in the moist earth—
stone masons who shaped the rock attentively, that it might
interlock & honor earth that gave both seed & harvest
in the sweep of seasons—ghosts today, they wander with you,
picking your pockets, to know what dreams you bring
to this place, what breath you leave among these rocks,
what song you gather in your backpack & basket of silence:
here, the lost mother weeping for her child born to minutes
of love before its last breath, the father pouring a lifetime's
devotion thru his hands, his face red with defeated love yet
shining in all the brilliance of that loss—here, the lovers moving
together, their short gasps echoing in a great sigh thru which
another child comes—here, the lost father who could not face
the wreck of his love in his own child's eyes, his sorrow like
a hermit lost in the passes of his own valleys, his heart bursting
with roses he could not bring to his own table—here, warriors
cut down like corn on a day as crisp as this, eyes turning skyward
one last time, up to the light as their blood gushes out on fertile
ground, shining path where arms & legs of the dead clutch
& kick at heaven, vanishing dreams of hungry ghosts. so
you come, bringing blessings & eyes to flush the tears that
still pool in the world's grief thru all the rages of lost centuries,
all the weeping sisters crying for lovers who never appeared,
all the lost brothers marched thru barbed wire to death's
final anonymity in the last bursts they'd ever hear, minds
turned inward to their mother's cries on the day they forced
their way into this light, compassion now for them all:
that your dream be clear when you come to this pass, I send you
this wish where tender petals turn, open in both darkness and light.
In Silence
for Ann Barber
hour after hour
they waited in the ER,
expecting the onrush
of wounded & maimed—
yet there were only
firefighters with
smoke inhalation,
cuts & bruises, hour after
hour, the minutes
ticking away, the dust not
even settled, filling
the winter garden, the palm
court, where no
wounded walked nor
rescuers bore the maimed,
only the silence &
the realization at last
that none would come
thru the open door,
beyond the shrieks & sighs
& the endless roar.
Emile at the Crossroad
too many blue hours too many nights in the mirror,
hiding, running, his eyes now bulging in daily nightmare—
the helmeted gunner, machine gun spraying near-naked
bodies, writhing, wrapped in blood mists jugular spray
as they fall, corpses bulldozed into ditches eyes wide
in death, & he, standing along a ditch—he, spared to
finish the work—he, looking into the blue faces
open mouths disappearing beneath a wave of sand,
neighbors, lovers, one hand last to sink beneath—he—
now at a downtown intersection alone with his
clutch of daisies & one red rose wrapped in green,
the anniversary of Heloise's disappearance, she who
had sustained him, her red hair like a fire
in his brain, her impetuous smile & blue-eyed
laughter at his angst, his vain pronouncements—
the candle she'd lit in the window time
& again to welcome him in during his darkest
hours—a brief repast, a tender touch, a moment
shared where they could reach into silence
& hear the lost songs—now gone forty years,
now a dream he clings to, awaiting the signal
to change & let him go, far from the maddened traffic at last.
The dharma at last
longdead in his dream the boys leap
one by one over the cliff into the wild splash
& the singing current—the tow pulling them
down into green dark & silt where the sunken
trees fell & were pinned as well, great black
branches looming up in the murk, fish tearing
the guts of whitened & bloated corpses as
their eyes stared, marbled spheres like moons
glowing in the dark. by night, the water clears, the
shadow moon reflects off the pale carcasses—
& he is awake, panting, the moon shining
thru his midnight window. he hears the voices of
thousands singing & weeping as police line up
& swat batons swat batons swat batons & march
march march into the now-screaming singers,
their ranks breaking—the one-eyed bard chanting
for calm—the ranks all fled, he left alone to sweat on
a factory floor, in a madhouse swabbing urinals. now
the dreams are all moonlit, no destination
& yet this weary traveler sings in his passing
steps, careless in the theatre of stars where the dead
walk with him daily, nightly, old companions
urging him to rest as even days grow darker,
the news ever more ominous. he must consider
the sleek craft of his final voyages, the turns in his
last river, the song he will compose to take him
beyond his last lay to sing in dreams where
his companions fled, to learn to walk among
the living like a shadow in the daylight of
their certainties, waiting for them to leap at last.