After Afternoon Musings & Other Poems

Near Sofia, Bulgaria

A sequence of poems written after a poem by Charles Whittaker & some Other Poems 

Afternoon Musings
by Charles Whittaker

On a projected
Reality—the sensible—
I can’t take credit for—

What makes it so
Funny—what fictitious power
Dreamt it up,
As in a time without
Beginning or end? As I am
Sensible, too, I wonder
About my place
In it, how subject to death,
I know nothing but panic
At loss of the literal,
While yet preserving something
Of the dreamer in me.

Sofia, Bulgaria, Train Station

After Afternoon Musings 

by Jeff Gburek

they go drifting

ahead of us, leaves
glowing yellow,
pushed by air
force of a fan
held in the gloved
hands of orange-clad
workers with head-
phones, silencers,
clamped over
their ears as they
yell loudly perhaps
about the beauty
of those pesky

leaves, I think not.

*

in the ambulance whelping by

dread defibrillators

stoke the border-line

passagero -- why --

enough to know

emergency reasons

alone with silence,

skill & thought

saturated with necessity

unless truly entranced

the dancer leaps

a choreography

through light

merger of moth-wings

imaginary finer

than any particles,

soul-dust

of it's

inside

turned without

the brim

of the bell

chings

*

that tram, what number

ever again another

cycle passes

13

they go looking over

shoulders into

other people's

i-Phone screens

and I muse

Je est un autre

i-Phone

on the blink

*

heel spur

keeps me here

not Achilles

in the least

I ashore

myself

*

Fine


Other Poems, 2018

In Krakow grey against green oak, 

(August, 2018)

 In Krakow grey against green oak,

the leaves, the acorns bleed rain,

only under trees form puddles

 Someone is not ringing a bell physically

but the sound of the bell fits like wire rims

wound around my ears the bells

 The desk lamp belongs to whoever

turns it on thanking the light

clasping and cusping the invisible tassles

 The ripples in the pool never touch one another

The oud strings buzz like bottle brushes

Quill snaps to wood

 A poet being only a thing of legend

Charles Olson exaggerates the line length

encompassing the equator.

Saturn, that fat-man in the far sky

loops of ice fingering

Van Allen, his belt

Tying shoe-laces

one creates the Ouroboros.

My book of poems, an ant-hill, other people's poems,
 broken shoe-laces, etc

  Gypsy girls down to the wedding grounds

down the hill in high-heels

 red dresses meaning they're married

while greens means a something else

  The next image does not seem

 disconnected enough and skids wheel

over to the margin, drops off.

Voices of pleasure through the ventilator's

grill merge into foggy mirrors.

 The candle burns down and the flame

rises up but the flame follows

the candle-path also, the oddly

hardened pool of wax, perfectly
describing the oblivion

 The thoughts one has wearing

a hard-hat as if magically hats

conferred upon neurons

directing vectors or norms.

 A mint plant, roots and all,

trapped between door

& sweep, scented now.

How long will it be

until I know what to do?

Until I know how to bring the horizon

into my own heart

throwing a song my throat

melts, between teeth

Staring into the central-split

in the fox's skull,
Bulgarian canine bone...

So keres? Looking into the missing

eyes of the fox's skull,
the Bulgarian frame
for absent optics

still looking into me,

I fathom the blood journey:

the split, a joining seam,

fissure of a fearful symmetry

in everything we see.

--

Rough Timbre
(after looking into Whitman's Collected)

This wood torn down shrieks

chain-saws, raw entanglements, branches, limbs,

laws, logs, circular saw, mill-saw, hand-axe

the hacking and splitting machines, industrial

mulcher of stumps, snipped off

human ears amassed in a dumpster

missing concerts in galleries and pubs

the music of mangled forests

surrounds us with particle board

& the silence of birds no longer breeding

as the lynx paws the margins

of this once-our-world, searching the last pine

to talon-step into cloud-beyond, hunting

--space fathomless wide as deep--

clawing after celestial game

& lynx eyes like asteroids, fly

fade into dwarf stars mocking, googling

oogling, grazing, musing,

through the sockets of my poem, ever
 not so kindly upon the cities of hew-men

--

Gili

 the little song, the diamond

(from the Polish Romany of Papusza
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82awa_Wajs
Papusza writes at the end of Romany experience of the tabor culture
and her name in Romany means "doll" & she speaks
not of poems but of "songs out of the head of Papusza)

the forest girls are going into

the forest, the Gypsy girls

young & pretty 

as blackberries

going into the forest, 

the forest girls, singing

we would like to wear earrings

golden ones,

all the while their eyes go shining

like true gold

the teeth white like pearls

little Gypsy girls singing

pretty as blackberries

where are those earrings?

have those earrings flown

into the forest?

& will none of the city-smiths

here forge

earrings of gold?

will no one make

earrings for them?

they run, calling

 "great golden earrings!

great golden earrings!

where are you today"?

my black eyes are looking for them

in the darkness now

 & the fires almost gone

ah, wind don't blow

so fiercely... please, don't blow...

and still the songs grow

 ever more silent

while the forest

more silent

took their songs

off into the world

& brought them back again

 & whenever the oak leaf falls

on the girls' knees

the Gypsy girls

 with eyes of true gold

fall upon the oak's leaves

on their knees & they run, crying:

we will make of golden

oak-leaves

our earrings

shining like diamonds

and she makes the oaken leaves

their golden earrings

which they sing about

in turns

*