Category Archives: Poetry

Selva Latina

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Selva latina, or Tristes tropiques

Selva Latina

”…For the first time in  my life I was on the other side of the Equator, in the tropics, and in the New World. By what master-token should I recognize this triple transformation? What voice would confirm it for me, what never-yet- heard note ring out in my ear? Flippancies first: Rio seemed to me like one huge drawing-room.”

”The trees were so high that they seemed to touch the sky; and, if I understood right, they never lose their leaves; for they were as fresh and as green in November as ours are in the month of May; some were even in flower, and others were bearing fruit And wherever I turned the nightingales were singing, accompanied by thousands of other birds of one sort and another.”

Excerpts from:  Tristes tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss; 1955.

Encounter on the Beach

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LakeWeyba Stone 001

What is it?

This object

Thrown across the sand by the tide.

Where has it been?

This object

Which nestles in it’s own crater.

Who’s seas has it seen?

This object

Buried deeply, a mystic thing.

Is it treasure?

This object

Overwhelmed by the flood.

Was it ever yours?

This object

A weapon under the sea of Mananon.

Can it ever be mine?

This object

If it was ever yours.

Too Late?

That object

Lost to me for a time under the closing tide.

Souvenirs

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The World in my Apartment:

a coffee mug with Haida fish

a Grecian vase and soapstone Inuit owl

Laura’s black pot from the Fraser delta

two perfectly spherical stones
from the Capilano river

another (flat) stone
picked from the ground at Wounded Knee

my guitar
leaning against the wall
with a capo on the third fret
and souvenir buttons on the strap:
Graceland
Grand ol’ Opry
Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame
(to name a few)

a photograph of my father
as a young man in India
in the uniform of the Royal Air Force

trilobites from Ontario

my Mexican blanket with the Mitla motif

six pieces of charred paper blown from the
World Trade Center on 9/11
and picked off the streets of Brooklyn

photographs of Lake Louise

The ginkgoes of Brooklyn

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This is a poem written some years ago upon the approach of winter.
As the ginkgo leaves turn yellow, and the nuts drop, Chinese women used to appear and gather the nuts up — not part of the poem, but interesting to recall. I thought of this poem while noticing the yellowing ginkgoes the other day during a walk around Brooklyn Heights.

AUTUMN_BROOKLYN