Published Poems.
July 2018 -- Below are some recently published poems. A quick note about them -- A Sense of Balance is a reflection on love and mortality based on a small moment of epiphany that I had doing some routine household tasks. I began American November in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, then set it aside and finished it a year later, when the sense of foreboding in the first draft appeared sadly prescient instead of misplaced. The idea for Dark Orb (retitled after first publication as Sibling Rivalry) started with the solar eclipse in the summer of 2017, then morphed into a meditation anthropomorphizing the earth and the moon as a dysfunctional, sibling-like pair. Benediction for a Graduate was written for my oldest child's graduation from grad school, but inspired by Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats. By the Tap Root tries to capture what it is like being a kid moving away from his friends and his comforts to a new unknown. Hospice Policy: (the fussy punctuation helps set up the first line) is based on my memory of the last day that I spent with my mother before her passing. You can read Pegasus Broken without knowing anything about the Greco-Roman myth of Medusa and Pegasus, but you might get a little more out of it if you google it (never any shame in that).
August, 2018 update: Two more published poems are posted. Cavity tries to explore the idea of a higher power in daily life without falling back onto purely religious constructs. Written By Window Light is an ekphrastic poem (fancy Greek name for a poem about a painting or sculpture). The picture that inspired it is below.
April 2020 update: Three more published poems are posted. Let Us Take This is a reflection on my friend, Allan Wiley, who left this good earth a few years ago and far too soon. In the Beginning Was The Word is, as the title suggests, about the mystical and tangible power of language.
An Old Woman Reflects is one of a few COVID-influenced poems that I've written recently.
August 2020 update. Five poems accepted for publication by two journals. Sixfold Magazine selected three of my poems in a contest. They are “At Your Birth These Hopes Ate My Heart", a variation on the sestina form that you might call a pentina, "Young Odysseus", which grew out of lore from my father's tumultuous youth, and "Easter/Passover 2020", another reflection on the age of Covid. “The Crooked Lines of the Cartographers”, which relates to human dominion over/ rape of the natural world, has been accepted for publication under an earlier title of “Google Earth,” by Wrath-Bearing Tree in its October 2020 issue. W-BT is also publishing in that issue “Three Snapshots of Superman’s Mother”, sort of a counterpart to "Young Odysseus" in that it grew out of my mother's complicated and tortured girlhood.
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Here is the complete list of published works:
“A Sense of Balance” was first published in Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue.
“American November” was first published in Sincerely Magazine, Spring 2018 issue.
“An Old Woman Reflects” was first published by West Trade Review, spring 2020 issue.
“At Your Birth These Hopes Ate My Heart” has been accepted for publication in the May 2020 issue of Sixfold Magazine.
“Benediction for a Graduate” was first published in Torrid Literary Journal, July 2018 issue.
“By the Tap Root” was first published in Better Than Starbucks, Summer 2018 issue.
“Cavity” was first published in Red Savina Review, Fall 2018 issue.
“Hospice Policy:” was first published in Torrid Literary Journal, April 2019 issue.
“In the Beginning Was the Word” has been accepted for publication by Map Literary in one of its 2020 issues.
“Let Us Take This” has been accepted for publication by Map Literary in one of its 2020 issues.
“Passover/Easter 2020” has been accepted for publication in the May 2020 issue of Sixfold Magazine.
“Pegasus Broken” was first published in Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue.
“Siblings” was first published as “Dark Orb” in Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue.
“The Crooked Lines of the Cartographers” has been accepted for publication, under an earlier title of “Google Earth,” by Wrath-Bearing Tree in its October 2020 issue.
“Three Snapshots of Superman’s Mother” has been accepted for publication by Wrath-Bearing Tree in its October 2020 issue.
“Written By Window Light” was a finalist in the Atlanta Review 2018 International Poetry Competition, and published in the Atlanta Review Fall 2018 issue.
“Young Odysseus” has been accepted for publication by Sixfold Magazine in its May 2020 issue.
I hold copyright on all of the works listed here. If you are interested in republishing or reproducing any of these, or learning about other poems not listed here, contact me at blueguitar58@gmail.com
-- George R. Kramer
A Sense of Balance.
Feeling the brisk November breeze,
I checked the faucets before the freeze.
Bundle your parka and stand on the patio.
Wait. Breathe.
Thinking about the years slipping,
you may not notice the nozzle dripping,
but on the cement a damp stain spreads,
a petri dish disease.
I lay my tools on the bench --
washers, mallet, monkey wrench,
Soft-jawed pliers, ratchet, c clamps.
Hold them. I feel you tense.
Thinking about what the job requires,
does that leave room for your desires?
Brown recluse spiders are somewhere near.
Unkillable, entrenched.
In the cellar’s luminescence
the valve turned to stop the cadence
to the point past which it seemed it might break.
A sense of balance.
The Radio Head song on my headphones ends,
and I’m flooded with a feeling that portends
the lupine eyes of pain, peering
at us in absence.
As I toil so poorly prepped,
that oily water is adept
at playing plumbing’s weakest points.
Around me something creeps.
Under pipes cold as aged adders,
I almost tip my teetering ladder,
into the dream where we fell together
into blooms of timeless sleep.
(Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
American November
“The Decembrist uprising of 1825 was the first attempt in modern Russian history to overthrow the absolute power of the Tsars, to bring about a constitutional monarchy, and to abolish serfdom.”
Christine Sutherland, the Princess of Siberia (2001, Quartet Books).
1.
Uncounted ballots for a different future,
a few thin leaves cling to their sutures
on that one tall maple across the fence
as others pile in sublime decadence.
Across our lawns our shadows’ outline
meet in union, yours, yours and mine.
Under the tea brown sky I rake the dusk
while wind scatters piles of empty husks.
Recently these leaves sat up high, holy green celestials
fused in the sky with cumulus clouds and kestrels.
Their chlorophylls, carotene, fine netted veins
gave weight to our days and welcomed the rains.
Those verdant trees felt solemn and cromulent
like the green painted skies of Springfield so somnolent,
where the ancient Greeks laughed at Homer’s flatulent manner
while Bart hand painted an obscene homecoming banner.
2.
Then fall came. In our yard sits a man with a gourd for a head
made from straw and old clothes, left from the Day of the Dead.
He sits now embellished with red and gold leaf,
The King of the Fall, our Commander in Chief.
Does this amuse you? Well, Marx had it wrong.
Farce and tragedy are part of the same tangled song.
It is a duet sung off-key by a chanteuse and an undertaker.
Those lovely lyrics – é Portugues? Onde é translator?
So fling open your door to face autumn’s flame,
and see snakes in leaves stirring, ready to maim.
Many feet tread carelessly into venomous bites
while the rest of us grow blind to what now lies in the light.
3.
I dreamt of the Decembrists, scattered by the Kremlin,
the dust of their memory fell on Tolstoy, on Lenin,
and across the Siberian cosmos, from star to dark star,
till it trembled the triumphal gates of the Tsar.
In the end their blood swept to the Arctic Ocean
saw the fall of serfdom, and gave Pushkin his notions.
Are they now lost fossils beneath Lake Baikal?
Were they the end of dreams, or their beginning cycle?
Decembrists fall off like leaves, but ideas barely decay.
Buried petrifactions grow roots that in an eon will blaze
new leaves rupturing out of bile and blood
then nurturing thickets of holly oak and red bud.
4.
We live in a country that was invented, not made,
by thinkers and tinkerers and owners of slaves.
They half held this truth, that power derives from the people,
like green buds of spring and a new flower’s sepal.
Their ingenuous old machine grinds on with coruscating sounds,
the colorful screeching of its drivers, a posse of clowns.
Under the evening arbor of leaves tightly hemmed,
the contraption accordions itself into a craptacular end.
Throw the lights away and take our vision in the dark,
mingling with the torch lit mob that gathers in the park.
Snakes writhe within the naked herd’s somnambulation.
A parade of devils chants for mental conflagration.
Now up above the supreme American mammalia
twitter of the greatness of their royal genitalia.
As the Republic dissolves, here sits a murder of crows
while the People vote for clickbait in the comments below.
5.
I turn back to the leaves and their colorful canker
being strangled and strewn by the autumn air’s rancor.
Falling from hemlock, black walnut and American beech
into jumbles of crenated corpses and tannin leach.
Photosynthesis and the breath of stomata decay
on withered faces of veined rivers, parched, flayed,
and falling from empyreal height, effulgent and separated
borne onto the grass, crumbled, dead and dessicated.
Yet give thanks for this:
the somber trees will again have their regeneration,
and the world will live on past this unholy desecration.
New things happen, the plot writes its own absurd retcon,
and life wobbles drunkenly between ruin and bad sitcom.
But right now, numbing in hard face and fingers
I rake newly wet leaves with a fierceness that lingers.
In lumps of decay dreams ferment and randomly meet
swaying to the coming Decembrists’ crackled drum beat.
(Sincerely Magazine, Spring 2018 issue).
An Old Woman Reflects
The empty street sings
a cold song under
a silent spring sky
that coils my soul
in the same pale sadness
that I felt after
my husband’s death.
Grape hyacinth and narcissus
call to my eyes
with colors that racket in my head.
Yet a part of me is numb.
No poem has ever witnessed more
than what I see
out the kitchen window.
Yet some part of me is numb.
My son sent me a video
of Italians serenading
their neighbors
in locked-down cities.
From apartment balconies
music draped
the streets in garlands.
Later I dreamt of
a ringing Milanese street
where I reached
to touch boughs
of dry flowers.
Wrapped in the oleanders
and asters I wished
to set my heart aflame
and sleep in its ashes.
(West Trade Review, Spring 2020)
At Your Birth These Hopes Ate My Heart
At your birth these hopes ate my heart.
Against a fetal monitor’s anxious beat of passion
your red ear emerged yearning to wander,
sprouting like a mollusk from a glassy shell,
arising from a sea floor, alive to the limpid world.
If ever a toddler swaddled the limping world,
it was you, your lips pursed like a heart
kissing then pinched to a hermit crab’s shell,
and your faith that your tidal passion
will wash out grief to find other seas to wander.
Did I think then that you would one day wander
your way as you choose, spinning the wild world
into your dreams, throwing your passion
beyond the farthest territories of your heart,
kicking out of your cavernous shell?
Then we will mend and refill this shell,
your fading parents, and wander,
two shadows cast by one aging heart.
In a whelk beneath the wobbly world
we bathe in your conch blast’s passion.
I lie awake mulling these days of ill passion,
prelude to tattering seas and artillery shells,
or perhaps a broken fever and a patched up world,
where you can remember me while you wander
across maps marked by the travels of your heart.
I wish your heart a moment’s rest from its passion, a morning
to wander the beach for shells, at peace in this implausible world.
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)
Benediction for a Graduate.
The May sun warms
on awakened skin.
Proud kites punctuate pathways
onto delft blue porcelain.
This day is good.
May the breeze favor you.
May the sun light on your shoulder,
kindling every step.
May your voracious mind
mark the wisdom scattered in the vortex
like vivid pebbles in dust and shadow.
May your passage
be guided by those stones,
and may your brave thread
unspool far across the horizon,
entangling, entwining
in warp and weft
of line and tail
many unknown, unnamed things.
(Torrid Literary Journal, July 2018 issue).
By The Tap Root
Dawn leaks like a curtain crack.
A depthless gray shadows
the house in the flatland.
My sisters and I keep
out of the way.
Stubs of cold candle wicks
line the kitchen window ledge.
Love stacks in packing crates.
The frosty grass crunches
under boot soles.
The compost pile holds
each frozen weed yanked
by the tap root
from last summer’s soil.
Headed south the car traces the scar
of highway for hours
across the pale prairie snow.
My sisters bicker, then sleep.
I remember dandelions,
watching their feathery teeth
scatter like last spring’s promises
lost in the wicker and the heath.
(Better Than Starbucks, Summer 2018 issue).
Cavity
Your blind dentist, cruel, kind one true dentist,
will see you at ten o’clock.
Let her fingers feel the deep recesses,
sorting good from rot,
let her gracey curette pick inside the lip of your angry gingiva.
Let her help you find where you begin and where you end.
When the shadow of pain falls across,
let a mask seal in your breathing thoughts,
the thin nitrous oxide barrier all that divides
what is and what is not.
The x rays will miss them, but let your blind dentist see
all the forgotten truths about you.
Let your dentist not be dead.
Let her live inside, playing you in her imagination,
as you imagine her hands playing over her ivory work.
If you do not know if she lives in you,
just know that she knows nothing unknown also to you,
but she overwhelms your nothingness,
light mixing in darkness and darkness in light.
Later, let her billing office go unpaid.
The dunning letter will sit before you,
its cancelled forever stamps
and outstanding deductible clamoring, clamoring
for the cunning emptiness of your cavity.
Every moment is a mystery, a tangle of then, now and when,
according to her diploma above the porcelain spittoon
silently watching over you, forever agape and helpless,
mourning your extinct cavity,
amen.
(Red Savina Review, Fall 2018 issue).
Hospice Policy:
“No Jokes After 8 PM.”
After I cracked wise your laughter
floated above us like a blessing.
The tears came later,
finally and zealously
As I nuzzled your dying head.
How lovely when
the glacier within thaws
drip by dear drop,
leaving newly carved landscape
and us only this day
to explore it all.
(Torrid Literary Journal, April 2019 issue).
In the Beginning was the Word
In the beginning was heard the brilliant word,
The scream of light rail ridden by Einstein’s mind.
Sunbeam spotlighting mote of yellow dust
Landing on my futon or
Streaming across a prison cell.
A chilly little light of a life lived small.
Then the sentence clattered an entrance,
Drunk metronome, locomotive of mangled parts,
Clacking on untrusted tracks
Snake straight but shifted in their rusty bolts,
Molting rolling thoughts.
A thing that gets lost trying to explain itself.
This sentence,
Born in the mind to die in meaning,
Lumbering locution, a headlamp and a whistle
Crosses a spectrum bridging darknesses,
Blind to much.
It leaves us still blind in the bright night.
Every sentence is failure,
Deluded dust speck
Thinking it contains the world.
It does not see how the noun decays in its womb
Or the verb conjugates toward flowers,
Riding this line to the next station.
There it may change to westbound, but never
slip off the page, meandering for a newspaper and coffee.
I remember a sentence like a hooded head,
lucent and lost,
lurching down unlit tracks.
What is a poem
What is this line
What.
(Map Literary, Spring 2020 issue)
Let Us Take This
In memory of AW.
Let us take this.
If not the tendrils of the garden vine.
If not this park’s great oak tree.
If not our rambles roped like planets
into ellipses of that tree.
Or the moon winching
up the coarse twine of oak limbs,
a spidery lattice under ivory lunar light.
Let us take this.
If not the tippling wind plucking the woods.
If not the rustling laundry of winter leaves.
If not the sole blue balloon
lofting unbound on your children’s laughter,
Or the liquid guitar chords that you loved
trickling through magnetic pickups,
dreaming us gods pretending we are not.
Let us take more than the slack casings of regret:
that your light cut just a bit into the disenchanting dusk,
that the trail washes out at water’s edge,
that you left your name on bottles of bitter pills
churning in the swell of your nightstand’s tides.
Let us take knowing that others may be cured
of the comfort of hiding inside the longing to be known.
Let them take what they need to rebuild
their battered lighthouse
where the doubtful think that only they can clearly see.
Let us take grief as a planting, a seed of faith,
even if we only spin like mayflies
round a light we saw go out.
Then take with you the things not left behind.
Strap them to the great heart
that you carry lightly from this world.
We are stronger
laden with absent weight.
(Map Literary, Spring 2020 issue)
Passover/ Easter 2020
Since Eden never such a sanguine night.
After the slaughter in Goshen of all the flocks,
their cries abate in the last limb of light.
Against slave hut doors a blood tide knocks.
Moses chafes for the risen sun god’s eye
then the furious flight to silent Sinai.
Contagions and devils stalk this spring
as willets and warblers ring and rage
over this and that malicious king,
over these just deserts, that minor plague,
over those years of Egypt grown tired and fat
and the hungers haunting Judea after that.
Another prophet offers up feeble explanations
for each lost child and blood-let lamb.
Fear lumbers today through divided nations
and down the snaking streets of tired Jerusalem
stumbles the risen son, a savior, an enemy
falling from this weedy Garden of Gethsemane.
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)
Pegasus Broken
We check our email for the thing that matters
while waiting for a funeral to begin.
A memory rises of a child’s tale,
a winged stallion, storm cavalry for the gods,
once foaled from wild Medusa
and her hair of snakes,
which turned all who saw her
to stone,
except Perseus her executioner, with his mirror trick.
Aim the bow blindly,
still the dying heart.
A thousand snakes struggle for my head
in the bath room mirror,
as in the water glass a million reflections of Perseus
stand paralyzed
before the thing the matters.
Look Mommy, butterfly horses.
The ugly statue is stapled like a tail
on the rump of Memorial Bridge.
With coltish grace the myth prances,
A circus pony arrowing down millennia,
to ricochet
off my young son’s old soul.
My wife once told me this with glistening eyes.
Her weariness after months of moil,
ground down by the long illness of her mother,
by her death, and by other mournings,
slung like lightning bolts from Zeus,
was for a breath
in the breeze of brisk new butterfly wings.
The thing that matters goes unseen
into the spam folder, between love and fear.
The fluid muses of archaic gods seed
the frozen stone before us.
Only the agile mind of a fool or a kid
would try to tip
the turning mass of this tired rock.
If they would come to us, those butterfly horses,
and guide us to their oasis,
then we could lap the water
before the empty eyes of desiccated gods,
gods at peace sensing how our children hold
the quivering hearts
of the things that matter.
(Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
Sibling Rivalry
What if the shadow of the loud Earth
is a whisper to the deaf moon
about urges and erasures over eons
on continental canvasses, half-forgotten
Memories of volcanic torments
that could tease syzygy to lunacy?
That shading of the sun across
the beaten lunar face
silhouettes the infant poem
of a palimpsest.
Sister Earth is nursed
on obliviating rain and wind,
smoothed and swaddled in tectonic blankets.
The weightless Earth looms over
airless ageless cities of craters and pocks.
The near-dead Moon,
worn down even by starlight,
heavy and sad with metaphoric gravity,
feels every tedious meteor splat.
Tired, cold and without too much hate
for that one agate blue brown eye
and its selfish unrequited love,
that too intimate orbital embrace.
After receiving a billion spring tides,
gifting a few Apollo footprints.
Such a mark is the Moon.
A warm-hearted amnesiac,
innocent enabler,
the Earth turns over fresh soil.
Does each new day beget
extinction and birth
of a new sun?
Every moment a fresh river
runs into a new sea.
Is there a flash of scales in water?
On coastal cliffs
do tiny shadows grow long
exalting the new Moon?
(published as Dark Orb, Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
The Crooked Lines of the Cartographers
Somewhere Gerardus Mercator
met on an old equator
the prehistoric hunter who first drew
from warm pitch and raw whisk
the rugged path she found
to the mastodon grazing grounds.
Their compasses agreed:
on friable parchment
mapmakers must have
their maniacal dragons, their
flawed seas, and their ranges
of rumpling blunders.
An old wall was woken by
a flattened paper globe,
a remnant copy etched
by an ancient calligrapher
with a cliff grip
chiseling a copper plate.
Google Earth, see what you lack:
a map’s crinkle, or its volcanic dimples,
green alpine frock, sweat of ocean.
No chance for glass-headed pins.
Lands not thick nor lean pliably lying
on a polarized screen.
Swipe past the displaced perspective
and its warning of the asphalt assault,
sharp canines snapping
at the ribs of gated jungles,
as the electric sky thunders
down boundless data.
In this pale monitor light I read
about the first arrow, its tale
of the bloody hand that held it
and the slaughters that it stopped.
We daily stride newly into changeless air
on an old journey to pixel from dot.
(published as Google Earth, Wrath-Bearing Tree, October 2020 issue)
Three Snapshots of Superman's Mother
In memory of my mother, Felice Kramer.
The Battle of Budapest, December 1944.
This stagnant end squats over its vile start
Faster than a speeding bullet!
from the slag pile, the louse waste
More powerful than a locomotive!
the fecal secretions of war
Leaps tall buildings in a single bound!
the girl’s father was sought for
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its Superman!
the column of Jews being
Truth, justice and the American Way.
marched to the river.
This is a job for Superman.
It was then that God stole her belief
but left her fraught wonder.
Superman Acting Out. Colorado, November 1963.
The vertical hold hop-skips,
horses drawing hearses
plod inside the droning box, fusing
to the vitreous reflection
of his mother’s tear-streaked face.
Preschool Superman stews.
No president calls Him to Dallas.
He was not consulted
on preempting His TV show for this
dull parade.
His caped powers, though mighty,
are no match for the elegiac bagpipes or
the morose Kennedys on this untuned Magnavox.
After Kryptonite. Virginia, April 2016.
Floating in my feeble galaxy of lost atoms,
I peer at an old picture frame.
Behind glass the girl’s silver halide half smile
issues a cautious greeting across
this light year of longing.
I orbit that smile’s twilight glow --
a planet where love has nowhere to go.
(Wrath-Bearing Tree, October 2020).
Written by Window Light
On “Woman Writing a Letter”
by Johannes Vermeer, circa 1670.
This momentary world
is washed pure
of timeless savageries.
The slanted beam draws
your pen forward,
as you, bent over verse,
bow to this oracular light
and to words’ random rhythm.
But your maid is her own muse,
moored in the flow of time.
Her radiant gibbous moon
looks to dangers far past
the harbored masts of Rotterdam,
or the glistening fields around Delft.
Her serenity as to crimes
done to her, or to her family,
or as witness to the taint of empire,
or to household scandals concealed
behind that looming tapestry,
or some such secret makes her
powerful, wise and kind.
Her dark form erect and vigilant
is the cloaking lens
for your orb of internal focus.
All depends on her confidence –
her watchfulness,
her placing your poem
into the hands of your lover,
her sealed lips, her prudence.
The picture says you are a servant
To how you feel in this moment
And your maid is time’s patient mistress.
(Finalist in Atlanta Review 2018 International Poetry Competition, Atlanta Review Fall 2018 issue)
Young Odysseus
You sprang from the old story
Boys lined along a gully
Soldiers belting up a gun
Arguing in a strange tongue
Whether to shoot or not
Each boy half in terror half sailing away
Someone was always nosing to know
Where you were from though long
from fresh off the boat your patois
peppered words like wave
cresting crashing long after
Father feel my skin wrap over your old ribs
Drag your battered oars far from sea
Winnowing fan kindled for heat
Tread your shadow across the Canadian steppe
Horizon is border of the sailor’s knowing
But my mind is shallow against relentless ocean
All I think is borne in light breeze
Carrying this thin vessel to the edge of the world
Dividing ourselves in our dreams
We chart many headings
This sail slooping below a bright horizon
That body not dropping in a red ditch
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)