John Macker

season’s greetings sonnet

sometimes it feels like half of the world is dead
to the world the other half in light, the hive mind
behind hate still finds its way in the dark but I love
how a peaceful blue borderlands day has a pulse,
gives birth to the language of favorite vermin
starry starry nights of jaguar, scorpion suspended in
a bottle of Mezcal Joven⸺
allows me to retrieve the years if only for a moment
to live the day backwards for once starting with the erotic
pyrotechnics of midnight high on some Mazatec shaman’s
diviner’s sage until I’ve crawled into bed at noon, last year’s
narcissistic magma of petty angers extinguished while the
first half-sober poem of January pretends it’s a phoenix,
rising with vigor from the ashes of its last words.

 

Birds in the Americas
“Bereft of gods we imitate eternity with Dada prayers.”
⸺John Knoll        

They say birds in the Americas
will no longer be named
after people, because Rilke wrote:
               nothing belongs to us

not Swainson’s hawk, not Lincoln’s sparrow

just occasional prayers to demarcate
the horizon with like Mexican wolves
or to kneel next to the Rio Grande and not
get swept away and the only rivers we belong to
are those moments of prayer, the flow of years
and companionship, an old friend’s spirit language⸺

his poem about Diablo Canyon:
               he entered it,
never returned, finished it and became a shaman.
Says his poems will no longer be named after people.

Jazz is his four-letter world
that accompanies him on long likes,
Bill Evans demarcates the horizon with music
that locates the river’s wisdom, the river’s edge, its sound.

A couple of friends, buzzard elders,
an almost endless series of dusks terraforming
our faces right in front of us,
now on the shore, barely submerged,
the close proximity
               of song
                    rooted deep.

 

Sixteen Directions to my House

“You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now.”
Juan Felipe Herrera

1.
Find true north on your compass and locate the crossroads
where you’ve shredded the most debilitating of your regrets.

2.
If you’re coming from the south, turn right at the Painted
Desert and let the scorpions light your way.

3.
If you run into the ghost of Charlie Starkweather,
you’ve gone too far.

4.
Retrace your steps.

5.
Lao Tzu said to do your work and then step back⸺
the true path to serenity. Serenity can be a ghost town.
Use the traffic circle.

6.
Follow the theory and practice of regenerative rivers.

7.
Ignore the chaos magic sign and proceed north by
northwest into the heart of the heart of your temporary madness.

8.
If you find me hibernating, you’ve come to the wrong cave.

9.
If you discover that the American Experiment as performed by
alchemists, hysterics, pseudo-shamans, slumlords, politicians
and polluters is terrifying, that climate change is the Moloch
of our lives and that happiness is not a warm gun,
you’ve come to the right neighborhood.

 10.
If you’ve reached the point where the Rio Grande disappears
into the desert and feisty Aprils of wind impress the sun with
their effortless dust, you’ve gone too far.

 11.
Give the trompe l’oeil mural on the corner in Winslow,
Arizona my best.

 12.
Pass Hopi land : place is spirit, place is power, place is
landform. I try to live off the grid in one or all of these
places in my mind.

13.
My address is impossible to discern after dark.

14.
A power-that-be wants to implant a microchip in my
brain so I can communicate my maladies to a computer.
No middle man. I won’t need an address.

 15.
Pass the incandescence of youth: every bar a star,
every entrance an event, every sentence a chorale, every
word gospel, there’s always a somewhere ruptured by war,
if you have to be sure don’t write, Berryman told Merwin
one day in the dry heat of eternity.

 16.
A blessing of kiva smoke on a far rise. Snow     distance    
moon     calliope hummingbird     desert tortoise    
are cosmic apertures that expose the darkness
around them. I’m the house with the stacked cordwood
and wind chill. Follow the blue sky up the driveway.
I hope you like spirits. Welcome.

                                            

After Lew Welch

I think I’ll build a “shack simple”
just like what you lived in
under the Sierra summer’s fire lookout  
skies------
     every day wept for ritual,
for sacrifice, for liberation,
poems danced in the electrified virga. 
          You didn’t have to be the extreme
version of anything, you could finesse the
indefensible, be rapturously anonymous,
a pilgrim, the muse’s day laborer, a brazen
maestro of soar! Where introverted lapsed
Catholics from the city could go to couch surf.

Where every morning I’m given my
walking papers by some hardened
over-heated horizon that sings itself
to me beneath the dregs of the wind.
Where I can hear
your non-alcoholic ghost sweep
the cabin floor and give high soaring
turkey vultures the time of day. 

                                         

John Macker lives in Santa Fe, NM. His latest books are The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away Selected Poems 1983-2018, Belated Mornings and Desert Threnody.