Where I live – there’s heresy in trees,

An orange apostasy amid the green denominations.

At first it’s just a single branch

In some dank corner of the lowlands –

A nickering doubt in the clicking of crickets

That gets a nod from the goldenrod,

A pang of white-haired dread in a dark night’s frost -

And suddenly a failure of the faith in the eternal power of Summer

Bursts forth among the congregation of the Leaves.

Is this cold October wind the Grand Inquisitor,

Keening his charges? – " Renegade, recant " he gusts, and

With " Blasphemy ", shushes voices of dissent

And bears down upon the forests from thin ascetic clouds.

And the trees – they are divided.

The pious pines keep their green habits

Telling nervous rosaries on the round brown cones,

Looking down demurely, shaking their cowled heads

In shame and fear and secret horrified delight,

While the others lift their hands to heaven –

Half the woods afire with licks of flame,

Orange, yellow, red – copper purple, even -

Beseeching beeches, moaning oaks,

Begging birches bilious with fear,

Bark like flagellated skin,

The quiet sumac in a sudden glory of Transfiguration

Martyred maples – all rooted to the stake

All given to the Holy Fire.

At last and all too soon the flames die out,

And with a healing cry of rain

The black-clad char, November storm

Tears the tatters from the ashen trees

And leave a world of winter silence.

Only the pines risk a whispered rush of prayer

As they await – with perfect faith

But no proof - the rekindling miracle of spring.

And do you stand with those

Who keep their color green, who stay the course,

Who stand and wait the winter out?

Or will you join the ones who flame,

So brief, so bright, so unexpected

And confounding – but who must die,

Numb and having left the world unchanged

But for a carpet of brown husks

Pressed into the soil of another year?

Nov 2004

Father Abraham

Votive

I would vote for a conservative, my friend, if I could find one.
A conservative would be about conserving something, wouldn’t he?

Conserving oil, for starters – that sticky goop in the earth
That no one was impressed with until the right whales ran out.
I wish there’d been some conservatives then
As we flensed huge mammals for a smokeless flame.
It’s not over til the fat lady sings.
Did we leave one to sing us through our curtain call?

As the whales got rarer and their oil got dearer
Refined petroleum came within reach.
In one short, hard century we drilled and flamed
Two billion years of accumulated fuel.
Greased the rails
At about 4% efficiency.
So that much of the heat and long tons of carbon
Escaped to confuse the self-adjustment of the earth.
A conservative approves of self-regulation,
Or so I thought. Or does he not?

It cost the sun a million bucks –
That’s today’s dollars, my friend -
To press each barrel of this organic wine.
We’ve been on a drinking spree.
A conservative worth his salt, and worth my votes
Would see the log, not pick at motes
Would sober up, contain our mirth
Would shore up oil for all he’s worth
So our grandchildren will not say to us,
“You used essence of dinosaur, precious oil
To push just you and tons of metal
Around those ‘roads’ you love so much?”
As we say to our grandparents,
“You did fatal liposuction
On an intelligent fellow creature
To light your bleedin’ houses?”

I’m on watch for a true conservative
One who wants to preserve the land.
There’s so little left untrampled,
Let’s save a bit, so we remember what it’s like.
I don’t mind if you want to hunt, my friend,
I’m not much for guns myself
But I empathize the ethos
Of the getting up early, and the communion of being quiet.

What I don’t understand is the relentless paving, and digging, and leaving behind -
It feels so liberal, so profligate –
A conservative would pause, wouldn’t he?
Before the last of the wood was gone.

And our seed stock’s worth conserving
It’s part of the commons
3 billion years of God’s gardening
Does not belong to Monsanto, or anyone else
You want to provide for the common defense?
Don’t stick us on the edge of starvation
By locking down the genes to your one-year seeds,
And your blight-free wheat run amok.
We’re one bad weather season away from famine,
All the time.

I want that strict interpretation
From a libertarian on human rights,
Who wouldn’t dream of leaving prisoners
Without access to a trial.
Who wouldn’t dream of interfering
In another human’s sacred body,
Who champions self-determination
In all things medical and ethical.
The beginning of life, the end of life –
Surely if something’s mine in this world
It’s my own two legs, my own two balls
My own two minds.

No one, my friend, likes abortion -
Least of all those who have to have it done.
The very word is synonym for a botched failure,
For innocence brutally torn from the heart of the soul.
It’s murder, alright - so let’s all work to have it
No longer around – by education, by a better method,
By abstinence, if you can make it stick,
But a carrot of economic opportunity
Would surely do more than ‘Just say no.”

Oh, and by the way:
To be consistent, my conservative
Must be pro-life on torture
And the penalty of death -
These policies are way too liberal for me.

And while we’re talking about it,
A little fiscal conservatism wouldn’t go amiss.
I liked that conservative Clinton,
Who stayed within the budget,
And didn’t ask our children
To pay for the 90’s.

(The story goes that Lincoln,
Told that Grant was drinking whiskey,
Said, “Find out what brand it is,
And I’ll send a case to all my other generals.”
Along this line, won’t someone please volunteer
To crawl under Bush’s desk
So that we can impeach him, too?)

Anyway, now we’re in a time of the bullies
Whaddya call this decade? The ‘oughts’, the ‘naughties”?
I know what we’re in now - the ‘uh-ohs’
Corporations, intelligently designed without a soul,
Engineer socialism for the rich,
While they liberally waste the only educational resource –
Our ever-fewer children.

It’s a joke – look for the school
Named for a champion of justice and integration –
‘Martin Luther King’ or ‘Rosa Parks’ or ‘Cesar Chavez’ –
Go inside – they’re 98% black and latino, not a white face to be seen,
Nor a book, nor a microscope,
While the ‘conservative’s’ kids (and the liberals too – my own included)
Pay $20 grand a year for economic segregation.

I crave that strict interpretation.
Show me a conservative, one who will stop this liberal madness
One who will restore the commons, not carve it up for cronies
Who will make it fair for the entrepreneur
Not a guarantee for any behemoth slouching toward Washington
One, most of all, who will conserve resources
For I see we are spending capital way too fast.
Anyone who takes the true conservative line –
He – or she – has my vote.

II

And I would vote for a Christian
If I could find one.
If I could find one
Who has accepted Christ
As his personal political philosopher,
Who would turn the other cheek -
You know the drill -
Who would do unto others,
And bless the meek.
Who would accept Churchill’s essentially Christian homily:
“Jaw, jaw is better than War! War!”

Someday everyone will see
That all the boys have died in vain
Heroically, valiantly, dutifully - but all for nothing,
When war, terrorism, and killing in general
Is abandoned for the ineffective strategy
That Moses and Jesus told us it was.

Oh, yes, I’d support a Christian
If one would run for office
Who carried Faith, Hope, and Caritas,
Even after the election,
Into the gritty work of dividing the money
Between the possible future
And the limited present.

The soul cannot be forced into salvation.
A Christian leaves the soul free
To seek its own transcendence.
He smiles with the blessed, nurtures the cursed,
And seeks not the gilded life of the Pharisee.
Oh, the Christians I see are so unlike the Christ I know.

Oh, yes, I’d vote for Christ –
Better an ineffective government
Going heavenward
Than an effective one digging us straight for hell.

III

I have been a card-carrying socialist, Joe, in my day
And Rush, I’m an environmental wacko
But these days I’ll match conservatism with you
Anytime - I’m dyed in the wool, rock-ribbed. –
Like you, I don’t trust government
Especially with you in it.
Like you, I revere the Constitution –
Especially the ‘We, the People’ part.

A vote is a vow – they’re the same word.
I vow to vote for a conservative Christian
If one ever shows up.
But I vow to fight
These illiberal reactionaries
Whose policies preserve nothing.
Neither fair, nor consistent,
Their redemptive power is nullified
By the meanness of their vision,
And their conservative label is negated
By the profligate liberal waste of God’s oh-so-natural gifts.

November 2005

Quan on Christmas

The stars glimmer through the runic branches
For all the world like Christmas candles
The air stirs the pines like a Saviour’s first breath
The dawn curves to fit the hills
Like a tiny knowing hand on Mary’s breast

It must be Christmas morning
And to wake up beside you
In the house that you have made
Brings a loud “Hosanna”
From the choir in my heart
Did it wake you?

Jesus must have been sickly too
Carrying all that spirit
In Her frail human heart
Did it not overtake Him, and shake Him
In the lonely hours between miracles?

I pray to Him for you
And I pray to you for Him
Only in your growing confidence
Can He be healed

December 2004

That’s The Way It Goes

Words by Gloria Nye and Tom Myers
Music by Tom Myers and Misty Myers

Tell me:

Did you ever hear an apple orchard sigh,
Its branches all neglected, its fruit all for the flies?

Chorus: Sometimes, that’s life (3x)
That’s the way it goes

Have you ever hid the truth of what your eyes have seen,
The bruises on a child, the bottles of Jim Beam?

Chorus

Have you ever lost the will to live and have no where to go,
The one you love is leaving, packing up to go?

Chorus

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief –
We’re all looking for a little relief.
Liar, liar, pants on fire,
Running for the wire on the wings of belief

Chorus

Did you ever speak the words no one was meant to hear,
As they shattered all your dreams, into a sea of tears

Chorus

Dear Mr Rambo

(an answer to Rimbaud's 'Drunk One Morning')

Fundamental passion thrums from the deep
Down, where All is Still
In Motion turbulent,
Down, the murky and unfathomable
Unnamed and unexplained,
Where coincidence is not yet torn to shreds,
From the realm of giants-
Rolls up, full blue
Roll up water walls
To cry the light-
Itself, insubstance, impenetrate.

These summer spiral emostorms
The edge-fight of wind and water, extravage terror
Pounding on dunes and Redonda's scoured shores,
They spend themselves by Brownsville.

And was I by this dismasted, yes-
In the scud and swell of its lee end
Chopping myself free of splintered wood and wire,
I limp to the East-
Eyes listening, stomach groping
For tell-tale signs of Gulf
Stream passion under me
So fulsome, warm and strong
So potent is this planet throb-
Yea, lift and carry me, willing jetsam,
Even so far as Devon's shore.

April 1991

CERISE SAUVAGE -

(to a child who died)

There once was a girl named Cerise Sauvage
Who lived in the top of a parking garage
Her house was a tent made of sail-cloth and hides
With a hole in the top and seams in the sides
Which she held together with leather thongs
And kept herself warm by dancing her songs.
The parking garage would echo her chorus –
Maybe we can get her to sing one of them for us!

What Cerise liked to eat was greasy beef stew
If you go up to visit, she'll serve it to you.
But its worth it to choke down a bowl of her slop
Because once she starts singing, you won't want her to stop
She howls and trills, she's a songbird, a lion
Pretty soon all who are listening are crying
She delights you and moves you with tales of all kinds
Its amazing how well she can sing while she mimes
Out the story in prancing and dancing so strong
That you run out of breath just following along.
In the courts of the ancients she'd be covered in glory
Where they didn't have TV, so they loved a good story.

But Cerise Sauvage plays today for whoever will watch
While the concrete walls of the parking garage
Make her voice huge with echoes and shadows
And you sit there transported to mountains and meadows
Or wherever it is that she wants you to go,
For she doesn't have to live up there, you know
She likes it, what the garage does to her voice,
She's really quite rich and has plenty of choice,
But if you want to hear her and see what she do
You've got to go up, and sit cold, and eat globby old stew.

She comes down to the city each day at eight
She's rarely early, she's never late
Cerise stalks the city to look for material
(And besides in the morning she hates stew and wants cereal)
For its out of the lives of the folks in the city
That Cerise makes her songs and her dances so pretty
She watches the shops and the cops on the beat
She mumbles her songs to herself on the street
She talks in the coffeeshops, sits with drunks in back alleys
And somehow makes all of this grime into valleys
And mountains of epic proportion
In her mind its translation, not a distortion
She sees the greatness behind everyone's life
And cuts the illusions away with her knife
Revealing a fantasy picture more true
Than any new social statistic could do.

So if ever you visit the city out east
Don't let the weirdness put you off in the least
For you will never forget the parking garage
And listening and watching Cerise Sauvage.

May 1989

Hunting with Dad

I remember, I remember
Not well enough
Is others’ grief the sum of our immortality?
What if all we’re left with is our memories?
Mine are only the faint blue exhaust
Of all these ‘here’s that fuel my thrust to ‘there’.
What if ‘there’ isn’t?

But I do remember
At 2 in the February morning.
Black as cold, and cold as glass
That broad bearish back bent over the pump
Crisp clinking of a wrench on a spark plug
That must fire to save the drowning lobsters
Grunting mild imprecations
In time to the yanks
On the starter rope.
Behind, in the smell of creosote
And mildewed life jackets,
My knees scrape forward, wanting to help
Or, feeling lazy and ill-used,
I let the light wander while I kick at the piled chains.
He woke me up to help, but he’s doing it all himself!
Then I’m hanging from the seafront door
Shrieking over the pour in the tanks
“Go up and say when it’s working” he said.
He knows already, of course.
When the motor tungued, hiccupped and growled
And the water titched in the empty pipes
There was nowhere else for it to go.
But I’m yelling anyway, and waving - my donation.
Now we can go back to bed…
False hope! He always lingered, returning the tools
Listening to the engine
Pausing to make some point on a map.

Or rowing in November dawns
Swaddled in woolens
Hip-heavy with 20 gauge shells.
Freeing driftwood branches to break the lines of the boat
And then sitting behind the boulder
Losing my edges into the stillness and the cold
What duck in his right mind would come here?
If some do, then there’s the release of sudden movement
The way men do, with a crack of force
Impotent, often as not, as guns are –
Ducks were by-and-large safe from Edward.
Hit or miss, now it’s time for milky tea.
But if the eel grass or that Bean quacker doesn’t bring ‘em,
If the sky remains empty as it fills with light
When the black and white dawn has yielded to a full color world
His lips loosen, go “Weeeeaaaalll…” and we row back, lighter ourselves
Toward another day at the office.

March 1997

Tom Myers

• Tom's poems
• Sea Stories
• Clarks Cove
  • The History of Clarks Cove
• Edward Myers
• Anatomy Trains Travels