Poetry Cloud Boulevard & Other Poems By Doug Tanoury - May 2002 Sleeper When you return, come unnoticed, Steal back silently late at night, and Let your entrance be mostly unseen, Without a trumpet voluntary To mark the moment And no grand polonaise, But return like a tired worker At the end of the midnight shift, Moving slowly in the darkness, Quiet, as not to awaken those who slumber And dream deeply in metered respiration. When you come back again, Let your footsteps fall in the hallway, pianissimo, Your shadow moving through the bedroom doorway Just a bit ahead of you. The nocturne of silhouetted movements as you undress And clothes fall to the floor With the muffled rustling of a bird taking flight, The half-step inversion of you Peeling back the bedspread and sheet And your weight shifting on the mattress. Tender And I saw today with some surprise How beauty is the cosmic currency, A universal tender, that will valet park me Near the main entrance of a higher consciousness, That swings open doors wide And buys Sunday brunch at 10:00 a.m. At outdoor cafés opposite the beach, Under a Catalina sky of blue silk, Draped like a canopy over the green sea. And I have come to know well That some lessons are best learned slow, The result of repeated study. I have worked long like a dullard, Drilled each detail into memory as an imbecile And trained my eye on each liquid movement, Graceful and poised, of bare arm and naked thigh, How the mere hint of a wiggle in the ass Is like a wad of cold hard cash. Trio I. Ode To April And I recalled the opening line Of Elliott's Wasteland: "April is the cruelest month" And I think that somehow the same Could be said of any month, May, June, July, August, September And not to forget November and December. Indeed things green and things yellow Are growing quite irrepressibly And soon a hint of color will crawl up The bare willows and upon the ash and maple New foliage will sprout, modest at first, But growing toward green crescendos. I remember my grandfather Was a modernist in his old age. He would slip into spells of incoherence, Utter words in odd tongues, not of European origin But more exotic. On summer afternoons, He would sit in the shade beneath a tree And rest his back upon its bark and trunk And sometimes in fragments, More often in the gibberish of delirium, Speak to me like Sybil. I believe that Spring is strong And April is not fragile but merely subtle. Sprouts peek most shyly from the earth, Green shafts against the black soil, Tendril roots twisting down. There is no cruelty in Of modest beginnings Or in the small starting of things. He has closed his eyes and Oh that I could awaken him, Just grab his arm and say: "Grandpa, wake up. You walked in the sun too long." He would open his eyes and look at me, And mumble something in Arabic That sounded slightly slurred And wave his arm for me to go way, To let him sleep. The days grow longer and the light Now streams in the big window Just after sunrise, and April is the month Of things sleeping and slow awakenings, Of fragments that grow Toward the fullness of meaning. II. At Lake St. Clair Fishing at Lake St. Clair today, Alone on a long pier, Just north of the power plant Where the line of steel smokestacks, The "Seven Sisters" dominate the sky, And I always think them The perfect classical form, Tall and slender as they are, Ionic columns left standing upright Amid the rubble of some ruins The water-tinted orange In the first light after sunrise, Its surface choppy and textured As if painted on a canvas, pasted on thick With the short pointed strokes of a palette knife, And I recalled a fragment from long ago: "White-caped waves sweep the lake-- My father's dreams" And me picking out with such care Painted spoons of speckled green, And a feathered jig with a chartreuse head. For you know my grandfather was a modernist, My father was a neo-romantic, but I, I am a fisherman. For the measure of a man I know Is in pike and pickerel and perch. III. Piano Sonata Things are most pure in their beginnings, As if time somehow tarnishes Innocence and stains The sweetest intentions. It is the April of things, rather than their August, That is most lovely, Tendrils of hope With roots that grip tenacious and deep, The watercolor that seeps across A sketch of charcoal landscape. In the rain today I found a faint trace of music, A fragment of melody That is the sound of a piano sonata, Notes that resonated softly And make me remember Black and white summers When I crossed the river on Macarthur Bridge, The sunlight On the surface of the water shining brightly, The waves gleaming Like schools of chrome minnows. It is raining and I hear my grandfather's footsteps On each wooden step as he walks up the front porch, I hear him stop to cough and then continue. Memory is a fragmentary thing. And I cannot simply decide And struggle a great deal And muse endlessly upon the troubling question: Is it the April within us that God loves? Or is the April within us God's love itself? Confession Of A Pedophile Priest "Forgive me Father for I have sinned" And broken the sanctity of holy vows With a single kiss Of a sleeping hermaphrodite. Oh, I have traced with my mouth The pink crescent shade on one perfect cheek. I brushed my lips across radiating warmth And inhaled the strangely sweet scent of sin, A mere trace of odor, A slight smell of ripeness Like the last fruits of late summer. "Well, Aqua Velva my genitalia" My voice is the song of the castrati. The Jubilate Domino of my tongue That touches and shapes each word And mingles with the moistness of each new note. Within the dimness of dark boundaries And in the of fogginess of faded demarcations I am hopeless to help myself Or fight off the gnawing temptations That grow so irresistibly Into the fullness of compulsion. "The sin of Sodom" In the quiet of the sacristy And in the twilight of the corridor That leads to a bedroom I suffer the burning flagellation Of angel feather kisses, In a litany of misguided desires That is the limpness of a eunuch's lust And can never be satisfied By the most solemn benediction Of yet another young boy's body. Building It sometimes feels as if each word is a brick And the space between each line, a layer of mortar, That will dry slowly and harden with time, For it is the simple rules of symmetry that apply And a certain one up the other construction That brings to lines a lightness and geometric grace And to angles the sharp contrast of light and shadow That is the secret of the pediment and pilaster And the articulated magic of the cornice. It is the one line written by Theodore Dreiser "Who shall interpret the language of stones?" That somehow endeared me to the man. And I recall it often and whisper the question, Sometimes half silent, Often out loud, As I stand facing each new façade or run my hand Against the cool smoothness of granite and The sandy roughness of hewn limestone. It is with shape and form, the building blocks Of structure, that I speak to you now, With plumb lines and yard long levels, With rock cut and laid with precision, With pigment mixed with plaster, And with stone that is somehow budding New foliage, flowering and beginning to bloom And to grow to span the distance from earth to heaven. Cloud Boulevard In Pennsylvania coal country, Near the Pocono's, Where far horizons rise to the sky, I know that today the town of Hazelton Is oddly still in the sunlight Like a cat sitting on the window sill, And Cloud Boulevard stretches greenly lush With long lawns that lay before tall wood frame homes, And it seems to me That time advances with a lazy reluctance On afternoons such as this in mid-May. I have come to walk on Cloud Boulevard And to remember my life here as a stranger, A life lived At what now seems a great distance away Words On The Road On the road leading from town today, My thoughts ranging on a rural landscape Of barns in varying degrees of dereliction And lean slightly to one side Next to the perfect vertical of solos, Some with domes and others without, Against a background green of newly planted fields, I thought of her, quite suddenly she came to mind, Just the way she always does, with no more foreshadowing Than a sunlit afternoon in late May, And just barely, I heard the words, so silent, They teetered on the threshold Of audible perception, And echoed in that nether region That is not quite reality, where one would call it Perhaps an aural hallucination, A momentary confusion of the senses, An illusion of a fleeting nature That makes the wind seem to Whisper, or the breeze That would bend the tree limbs to Mimic human speech and say To me in a single breath, No, more a hoarse exhale: "Quo Vadis?" And remember the introspections and Revelations that occur to a sole traveler Upon a lonely stretch of road, That makes even the most determined and resolute Slow their pace or perhaps fully stop And reflect on their destination and Question for a moment their mission. © 2002 Doug Tanoury Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the Internet with the majority of his work never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and journals across the world, including funkydogpublishing.com/ The greatest influence on Doug's work was his 7th grade poetry anthology from Sister Debra's English class: Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966 by Scott Foresman & Company) He still keeps a copy of it at his writing desk.
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