Old Poems

Here are a couple of old poems from more than ten years ago. I spent a year studying in Vienna and spent the first eighteen years of my life in South Florida. I tried to mesh the two in "Fugue" and the Cafe Sperl was a place I spent many, many hours drinking coffee and writing in a journal. I can't remember what I was trying to say in either, but I think they hold up well.


Fugue

Here, there should be music.
There should be preludes and
fast-slow-fast. But any music
is all in my head.
I am in the Everglades.
Great white birds take flight overhead,
kites broken from their strings, while
I search for snook and redfish.
I cast into shallow mangroves
and beneath shadows of logs.
I hear the first allegro movement
of branches in the wind, this music.
My arm rises and falls, the scherzo
of fishing, keeps three-quarter time
with dragonflies, the way they
hover and bounce. This music
is all. There is the
splash of bait, occasional cry
of a heron, the sound of water
as it sways my boat, a clop of air
trapped under the hull.
All this music! The wind
and periodic thrashing of fins,
hum of the reel as line
squeals out, imitation and
counterpoint, difference solely
in the way I hook and land them.
Smell of minnows, hot sun, a lull.
My head. This music. The joy
in these hushed canals,
floating alone all day, fearing
it will end, releasing each iridescent fish,
feeling, somehow, it will never end.
The water-- like nothing but water--



Cafe Sperl

The cafes in Vienna are orchestrated by men
in tight vests and bow ties who order
the movements of waiters with the precision
of great conductors. Being directed to sit
feels like being asked to play fifth violin
and with the musical sense of Handel lingering,
a man sits at a small corner table.
He hums to himself as he waits to order
and watches two women out the sides of his eyes.

His hands lay folded in his lap and his coat
is rumpled. He has circles of sweat
under his arms and his balding head shines
with that about-to-perspire summer-day glisten.
In another booth, young men crowded together
laugh at each others' stories. Their laughter
sounds like horns.

His coffee arrives, he drops two sugars in
and doesn't know what to do with his left hand.
Clanking saucers and cups are percussion and
the maestro cuts short the telephone's ring.
The man lifts the cup to his lips,
blowing on the surface. He stares intently
into the coffee, searching the bottom. We know,
because of this, he is lonely, not just alone.

We know the man lives in a small apartment
because his shoulders look pinched as he hunches
in his seat, folding the sugar wrapper neatly,
unfolding it, rolling and folding it again.
He doesn't read a paper; that would only
emphasize the idea of absence.

He watches those coming in.
The cuff on his pants is a little too short.
We want the afternoon to reach an andante,
some sort of climactic grace in closure.
A scarved student joins the laughing others.
It is dark outside when the man leaves,
the streetlights still not warm. The two women
order pieces of cake, celebrating something.