After a Tractor

I am the earth
I wear the proud beret
Given to different greens
Each season

The Conformist

Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist set new standards for how we deal with and respond to the demands of a tyrant.  Bertolucci seems to be equating the rise and fall of Italian Fascism, from the early 1920s until 1943, with the short, dreadful, very romantic life of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a young man for whom conformity becomes a kind of obsession after a traumatic encounter in his youth.  Bertolucci appears to be aware the fact that the equation of politics with sex is extremely complex.  He has changed Moravia’s ending in such a way that the entire film is steeped in ambiguity.

For an Unborn Child

This is the room
Where our child will sleep
Where alphabets will be digested
Alongside first teeth
Training wheels
And mercurochrome

Gone For Me Now

(for David Hockney)

The high notes fade
Their shrill frequencies
Left for the birds, the breeze
And the occasional air raid siren

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Not too many folks remember James M. Cain, the hard-boiled novelist who had a string of best-sellers in the 1930s.  His stories featured ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances.  There was always a subtext of a moral in his fiction.  For example, in the celebrated novel,The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain is hinting at the moral cost of our choices.

God Save The Trees!

Even in an age so bold
As to serve up solutions
For problems yet to be named
The children trip
Circuits drip
Memories slip
And our drop box has nothing to hold

Remember the Night

Lots of folks try to ease the burdens of their busy day with a meal on the town or a stiff drink at the local tavern.  Not many would find a way to harken back to the good ole days (whenever they were!) to either do a good deed, run a scam or rig the outcome of an athletic competition.

Well, Preston Sturges would!  This erstwhile son of a cosmetic heiress spent much of his precocious youth  as a world traveler of sorts.  His mother developed a cosmetics business in the period after World War I and was, apparently, very adept at not only selling her line, but also of hobnobbing her way into the most elegant of European circles.

Conjugating Our Purpose

Out walking this morning
The sun shows me where to step
When to stop
And why we remember fears
And how forgotten feelings fall
From conscious thought like careless cat tails
Caught in the threat of a dog’s brisk bark