Poems Niederngasse, no. 82, 2007, http://www.niederngasse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=54&Itemid=1
Beyond the chapel’s blackened door:
John the Baptist carved from wood,
Matthew with his book,
terra cotta prophets, angels
cracked along the grain, saints
flecked with remnant color.
Abraham once had two arms;
saw marks mar his shoulder stump.
By moonless night a peasant pried a latch,
crept into an incensed realm.
His pocket blade cut fast.
The relic kept all holiness gained in church
to banish thieves, enrich harvests,
stay the plague—through generations,
till it fell off a cart escaping war.
Or its wood was burned by heirs in want.
Eyes gaining in the dimness,
we see Eve without the hand
that picked the apple, George’s dragon
short of tail. Peter, headless,
grips the key. We leave content,
knowing as little of our unknowing
as medievals knew of theirs,
and bow our heads
because the door’s too low.
Sand Hill Review, v. 6, p. 88, 2005
We left the paved city
and house of our usual bed,
two miles down, two states west,
and walked from Road’s End
across three crests and valleys,
through five steep aspen groves—
as if we belong beside this creek
in this meadow. Your face glows
against cold black behind
flames from bristlecone branchsticks
we gathered and broke underfoot.
Shine reflects in your eyes. Flames
shoot up as if to live, or die,
beyond the gibbous moon
and unseen sun. They leap
and fade into smoke. Tomorrow
we’ll return, looking out
to desert as we hike
these cool wet peaks. We’ll go back
to the city until we turn to smoke.
Sand Hill Review, v. 6, p. 89-90, 2005
"…proclaim the territory of Hawaii to be the 50th of our United States."
Dwight David Eisenhower, August 21, 1959.
We gather at the old buoy grounded
at the end of Third Street
near the water-lapped rocks, its yellow-lettered
SOUTHERNMOST POINT IN THE USA
still proud and true. Tinny voices
spew out of red plastic in Nancy’s hand—
Buddy Holly—Missile Gap—Fidel.
News: Honolulu tells of reveling mobs,
outrigger canoes, roast suckling pigs, surfboards,
girls in grass skirts, drinks in coconut shells as big
as somebody’s head, skywriting, and smoke flares
shot off in pre-dusk light. In our own moist air
we count the final minutes and seconds
of our Southernmost Point, knowing not
an atom will be lost, no life will cease, yet something
will pass from this place, like glassy light gone out
from a streetlamp smashed. The hulking steel
will stay, but something within
its multi-coats of paint
will instantly transport itself to lodge
inside some surf-bathed chunk of pahoehoe
in the tropical Pacific. Larry holds his kid,
who bats it with a cool blue hula hoop.
We all, fifteen or so, touch to feel the buoy change,
like medieval alchemists watching
the scale on which they put a dying man
to learn the soul’s weight as it departs
at death. Ear on painted metal, I hear
the mingled song of human touches,
I hear incessant stirring of the waves
within the great gray-black mass extending
south to the flat horizon and beyond.
Homestead Review, no. 19, p. 16, Spring/Summer 2005
I swim in tropical water and dive deeper,
deeper to explore encrusted tubeworms at the bottom
of the Marianas Trench,
then rise, kicking smoothly
through seven miles to the surface where I take my breath.
I walk through high Montana forest toward wildfire,
past antelope and badgers running the other way as they and I
are enveloped in hot swirling smoke,
dirty with cinder crumbs, some glowing,
then I stride through white-hot flame
into a black and gray world
over ashes that are hot, then warm, then cool,
and into a green meadow where I drink from a clear spring.
I lean over the low stone wall at Hermits Rest
on the Grand Canyon’s rim,
and a backwards-capped kid pushes me to tumble
through scrubby woods on the dense white layers
of Coconino sandstone,
and after four long seconds
off the Redwall,
falling free,
I bounce across the sloping platform of the Tonto Plateau
where thorny mesquite rips my skin until I plummet
from the Precambrian edge and stop
on flat hard black rock
where I reassemble my splattered body and swim
down the icy blue Colorado until I find something to eat.
I lie back in my bed, put my right hand on the coarse, curly hair
and soft, warm flesh of my chest, to feel the rigid
topography of my rib cage undulate
with every breath;
press my left hand to my head and hear,
pulsing through tiny vessels in the ear’s thin sheet of a drum,
each fated rhythmic rush of heart-pushed blood.
Rattle, issue 17, v. 8, no. 1, p. 65, Summer 2002
and wiped blank
Michelangelo's sibyls and saints,
the great, outstretched
hand of God, the spark
of life, Adam and all
his progeny, and the angels
of the heavenly host;
if you plastered over
the little window
that the cardinals who gather
from every nation
send white smoke through
when they have chosen
the new pope;
and then if you expelled
the whole hive of drifting,
gaping, sweating tourists
and their guides
babbling Dutch, Italian,
Japanese, French, and German
under lofted pom-poms,
bowler hats, and stuffed toy kittens;
and swept away the robed man
who appears every five minutes
to shout “Silenzio!”
it would look and smell
remarkably like
the Fellowship Hall
of the First Methodist Church,
Maywood, California,
built in 1928.
Poetalk, p. 32, Autumn 2001
I saw her in the chair
unsmiling, like
her mother—
turned-down mouth,
soft wrinkles,
blue eyes dull.
I hoped her vision
was failing
because, for once
my presence
sparked in her no joy.
Poetalk, p. 23, Winter 2001
I do not know why the butterfly,
idle on a leaf, waves its brilliant
red and yellow wings
slowly up and down.
I do not know why the earthworm,
dead and dry on the walk,
came out of the safe soil
beneath the grass.
I do not know why the scrub oak
grows as high as the house
and stops, or why doves,
unseen in fog, coo their
sad cry, or why they
and I
are alive but I know
that in part the answer is
to ask these questions.
Copyright © by John Nimmo, 339 Nita Avenue, Mountain View, California 94043 USA
Email: John@rubydoor.org