A Sort Of European Point Of View

~ A collection of short "observation poems" that I actually wrote a few months ago and lost...but I found them!! Yay!! Lol...anyway, here they are...~

1.
Do they still think back
To what if or that we
Never did I wish that
I could be part of it,
Something--that lost--

Always coming thru'
On the winning end-
: WASP :
To think they may make an insect out of it
And they outlast evolution
I wonder if some part
Of them--Well a drawback
Because

I tend to hate everything that I
Should be "for"
There can be no depth
If nothing is gauged out
And I think some old men
Still trace over maps and realize:
What Went Wrong

And tell the young how to fix it


2.
The Germans
Inherited Europe when Rome
Fell. Sort of back then, it seems--
English--
And German; almost the same.
It is in our joined blood,
To conquer.
Continents--well it becomes us--
Empires, bred in.
Why do we revile?
We are not Romans--
Tho' the Southern Italians
May be so
We are the Germanic horde:
But Rome fell to us


3.
There is no roughness
There is no--lurking Vandal
He stands, take any boy
Nearing the Age, they
Flap thru' the hallways
Straddling books and wielding--
You expect them,
Those boys,
To be Vandals, but no most
Tale Italian or Spanish or French.
A Romantic anathema


4.
Set the timer: twenty
Minutes and each following
Sixtieth is subtracted in
Brazenly apparent green--
It is almost like
Boiling cracked eggs:
Well--I said almost
Don McClean is on in the background
My brother chasing the dogs
And I divide my attention:
My left shoulder
Warmed by the Egg-
Colored Gas-fire,
My right hand:
Working, my eyes between a
Soft-cover photo of Frank O'Hara
And Prussian Blue.
It always comes to That
I would be just as home in Berlin
Boiling eggs, but not Don McClean
Or Frank O'Hara or you even
Really: you are here.
Well, I suppose it is
All for a reason


5.
Even back then, it was always a German:
No.
Well; what is the difference
Really? You vilify anything
Long enough, and something is
To come of it.
The moments
You know things on your own
Often bring about
Stronger epiphanies:
Religious---or otherwise.
Well here:
I decided to believe in the Confederacy
And all of a sudden you cannot be a Liberal:
I decided to believe in Germany and
You can no longer be a person.
In theory everything works,
Trust me.
We were all in the classroom,
John was crying,
Jason was laughing
And I pretended not to be part
Of it all:
Even that far back
I knew the difference--I had to.


6.
Tell me--how the Sun was,
Floating gingerly over the
Somme--Wagner's
Dutchman, tell me--
As they attacked the Gates
The Czar;
His face, tell me--
What those blackbirds over
Verdun hunted for; among
The Cannon Fodder,
Tell me: You know, you can
Grab at the Raven shirking
Blue-black along the lines,
Tell me how they balanced power:
How to wage a European War how
To raise
The Old Empires tell me--
To find myself among the fading
Marble,
Picking along the sun-bleached bones
By the Marne


7.
For all the Austrians who
Knelt, to Auden's "psychopathic god"--one
Created whether or not generally
Acceptable, but is: nothing
Else. Fight in all ways,
All ways; hide in the garden:
The lacy white flowers
And a hint of song--shafting
Overhead ocean-color:
For those Austrians.
You.
Well, I could not say
But to suddenly find an edelweiss
And realize the sky may be blue thru-out:
You. Life happens, Austria bends
To stop falling, people fight
Look: suddenly, I am
Confusing you with
The Word:
Ore world--whichever reflects
Prussian-Habsburg
Blue


8.
We flinch:
No, not a reason, Reich:
Can be a beautiful word. Meanings.
Like Bismarck, uniting--
There is a balance struck:
We accept it.
Aside from sweeping
Generalizations, it is
Only to say that as the
Door is opened, a shaft
Of blue sun
Echoes, and it all is a
Beautiful world.
Captured: not the grayness, nor
The marching-angry Empire--
Sunlight
Or simply blue:
Prussian-blue--comfortable
Metaphors we accept it at least--
I do.


9.
The Czar stood,
Cloaked in the gray-headed
Dawn, blowing in
His hands as the
White troops:
Upright and attentive.
Meanwhile:
The Kaiser sent another
Desperate telegraph to
"Nicky."
You and I: waltzed
In Berlin in Saint Petersburg
We waltzed
To the marches, the royals
Shining silken-silver, the Armies,
Imperial soldiers, freshly
In the winter--
August is a bayonet,
Far off, the snow falls
We dance
In the gardens, you and I--
Flowers, summer-dried
Crumbling underfoot:


10.
The way the sun looked
Oddly purple and glinting:
Insignia, on Nick's* face--
Stifling: now regular shades
Of colors; light, playing off
Everything with angle:
But then it was
Like a game, breath-clots
Forming closeness and ducking
To blind the rounded
Violet,
Nick juggling his papers
Splaying military preciseness
Light.
Windows painted Prussian-thru'
Spell-bound angry-heat, scuffling--
And the
Blue-eyed light, distant, every-so-often
Shards,
Heavy breathing as Nick and I turn
Underneath the light for one sun-violet
Moment


11.
(This poem inspired my longer, rhyming poem 'To A Stuka Pilot')
Jaegar--
Suddenly like snow and glass
The night hailed by Stukas
The world--
Snow and glass
The eight-o' clock sky: dirty
And ridden--even without the flak:
Shadow-Stukas
Trailing the ghost of
Every Luftwaffe Messerschmidt
Ever spiraling
Downward
As many dreams:
As a Spitfire or Mustang
The sky
Allows for objectivity
The pitch-shriek over Europe,
Of every Stuka.
Jaegar--
Jaegar-sky
Shedding flak, every Luftwaffe
Dream every blue-eyed boy
Could have been--
Well: trace out the trail
Of the falling Messerschmidt--
Jaegar-Stuka


12.
Look to the dictators
For your understand, therein--
Look to them:
Unbroken humanity,
How foolish to think it
Less so.
Not celebrate,
Well--nor should it be--
But recognized
Who is more human
Then one who shirks not from brutality:
Uses pretenses,
At least:
Knowing what is wanted.
Look to the dictators--
We can only know what it is
If we are not afraid
What it is--to be we--
What we would be
If fully loosed upon a
Human world


13,
The last mile is
Downhill--whether or not
The road slants that way.
It is drawing night--the
Winter is fusing to a last
Few gray baubles, the
Transcendentalist sky, faintly
Reminiscent: the last
Mile falls just slightly
It seems: the World wants to
Make a difference in us--give us
Something favorable about toil--
We all go so far only to come home again,
And only to want to go home--
Make it winter:
The sickly-raw tearing of the dusky breeze,
Make it hurt just a bit and make it
Downhill, the last mile, a
Preparation to take away
The momentum of the journey
But add to the singing cold and therefore the dulling orange.
Home


14.
I closed the book One Line
Before I was to find out
Whether or not I would Happy.
I am better off not knowing.
Might as well enjoy
The imaginative misery
While he (it) he lasts.
I have to wash my hair but
Who will see? I am modest in front
Of photographs.
I am thinking of my father
(the one who died)
Or the one who asked me
What I was dreaming.
One fell down the stairs;
The other goes home to
Another woman while I sit here
Wanting to smoke and open the book again...
I am only 16.
Damn it.
Nevertheless, life is perfect.
Of course it is.


15.
He won a war then
Went on nearly to destroy
A world.
Well, we cannot expect
Too much of one man--
I would rather teach history
Than write it: I do not want
All that responsibility--
Besides that, history
Is nothing like investigative reporting,
For example:

"Investigative Reporting On Russian History:"
Stalin takes power!
Purged millions--
Germans invade!
Russia wins!!
Stalin dies--
Not up-to-the-minute. More the century
And no chance of any live interviews.
I would much rather have us figure it out for ourselves--
Russians, mostly, I
Can draw some conclusions


15.
A row of blue-smoke pines casting
Guarded shadows the field
Shrinking under the
Early-sun
And the carefully-lined
Jackpines,
Shadow-smoking
Green--
Dance across his face
And suddenly the grass
Shrinks and the room
Is larger--it is all winter and
Early-spring, the lilting
Breeze combing thru'
Bluish pines
His eyes gleam brown
Against the equinox tilt and suddenly--
Balance an egg in his open
Hand, watch it stand
On its own, smooth and carefully white
Like children, wondering.