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Recent Poems by E. Russell Smith
Selection last changed October 7, 2013
Recent Poems by E. Russell Smith
Selection last changed October 7, 2013
As sure as rolling seasons hot and cold, leaf fall, comfort of snow and greening spring, partisans elections are coming, Oscars, competitions and debates, revivals, parliaments and councils of disputing nations, all occasions where charisma counts. In undistinguished actors it can swell box-office sales to squealing fans. Preachers having it ispire deluded faith, and politicians rely on it to render voters purblind and amnesiac. As sure as creeping glaciers, regrettable as stealthy frost, it seaches out the G-spot ofevery promising affinity, evoking wanton rapture in defenseless individuals and simpleminded multitudes. Catch-22, for we are safe from such deduction only in chaste and cloistered solitude, withdrawn from flesh and blood, from legislature, church, and all imperfect institutions we have built for our protection. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Long ago I saw a summit far away and briefly clear, and it became my lodestone. Now, with every night's eclipse I run into a wall of shadow whether I have progressed or not, and I retire to plead that love song once again. But morning always offers some untested way to turn, which I must follow, given that my life goes on at all. The new path rarely seems, with my myopic vision, to approach the goal. Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" How should I presume? The daily despot points to left, or right, or face-about, and I proceed regardless. © E. Russell Smith 2012
The congregation will please rise (as you are able) and sing, then sit and read the passages prescribed and printed out in bold. Abide the weekly lectionary readings from both testaments, old and older, our appeals for godly intervention, and a homily of appropriate length. Leave your offering on the plate. Come forth by rows to have the sacramental elements (returning by the other aisle.) Keep moving. Do not pause to hear a still small voice. After the benediction and Amen you may, if you wish, withdraw quietly, during the organ postlude. Please take the bulletin with you. There's tea or coffee in the hall. © E. Russell Smith 2012
The big cheese rises, roundly optimistic over languid sloughs of water weed1 and frogbit2, promising abundant harvest, though the fields are parched. You risk an early moonstroke, swimming naked in the failing pool. A swallow touches down and launches one last ripple to the waiting shore. Urgency and awkwardness prevail, but lead to only injury and chaos. Rip-saw and conflict initiate a rift; Portentous signs are out of kilter. A turkey vulture passes, seeking dead meat where the milk is spilt. On the high road you've been given, you dislike perplexities that sour the cream of God's disinterest. Sledge and suspicion drive the wedge; cat's paw and jealousy pull the nails. Blowtorch and anger fuse the links; crowbar and cruelty complete the breach. The breath of daylight fails; air chimes are mute, and silent gravity accomplishes the inevitable fall. © E. Russell Smith 2012
The white-brick church and parsonage (its sparse and greying congregation merged now into another charge) have been converted into condos. Shuttles to and from the airport stop there twice a day, and also at the town-house subdivision built on Hogan's forty-acre pasture. Quaint curiosity herself, Aunt Mae is shutting down the fine antiquities emporium and ice-cream parlour in her limestone home, beside the disused railway station-house. Twenty-five percent off everything that's older than she claims to be (and there is nothing younger.) We buy a hand-embroidered doily for a dollar, and cross town to the Chinese for a lazy lunch. But it is also history. We are forced to use the fast-food truck-stop on the four-lane by-pass, where the foundry was, before a foreign cartel bought it out. © E. Russell Smith 2012
We pack out to the two-rut track, hump the four-by-four to the depot after flour, spuds and bacon, pay a social visit to the banker, and return to camp by sundown possible if the rain holds off and the fickle river doesn't rise. Or, with a following wind. we paddle to the narrows, planing on the surf that rises on the funneling current, drift down to the status dam where man and beaver vie to rig the level of the lake. We make such trips together a time to hash through issues. All being well, the float is in the black, if only just, the water higher in the lake than in the swamp below, and other matters laid to rest. © E. Russell Smith 2012
I climb the canyon to the sign, dodging Lexus and Mercedes Benz commuter traffic heading down, aiming to escape, in parched and introspective solitude, the counterpoint, the spectacle and clamour of the city of the angels. But timid hares and rude coyotes share the chaparral less easily than we can touch each other in our gated, guarded neighbourhoods. Here adolescent blackbird chicks chase weary parents who would just as soon abandon them. Even dry-land blooms are sinister — tarweed a last resort in famine, Jimson weed that brings delirium, deadly purple nightshade, only Spanish broom to ward off gall and rattlesnakes. A city hiker might prefer to walk an urban mall. © E. Russell Smith 2012
He hardly ever wears that suit, hanging in his closet since his high school graduation. For his wedding he's required to buy new shoes to go with it. White runners are unsuitable, the fat girl says, as are his sandals, even with his Argyle socks. He's found a twenty-dollar pair of classy penny-loafers, black. His only tie will have to do, despite the greasy gravy stain, reminder of a tasty brisket months ago. He loves a pot roast. Hopes that she can also cook. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Not Malibu, its massy multitudes... We share the sunbaked sea with petrels, cormorants and black-backed gulls, with mussels, barnacles and winkles. Remainders of Pacific rollers creep around the barrier boulders on the threshold of the shifting sand, to tease our castle-building children. We take the little shade there is to sit and watch the passing pelicans, as curious as we are indifferent, like dolphins capering in the bay. © E. Russell Smith 2012
As in Adam, all die. 1 Corinthians 15:22 Pleading guilty in the end, he stands convicted by the court, and so it must be true He did abuse his power and violate a weaker person's trust. But he continues one of us, while he evolves, we hope, through bitter shame, self-loathing, true contrition, penitence, and reconciliation with his fallen Adam. He cannot atone, and that remains his lifelong sorrow. His victim can't forgive; and that is hers. © E. Russell Smith 2012
...they changed their minds and began to say he was a god.
Acts of the Apostles 28:6
A park bench turns our backs
toward that barren island where
one old saint and his biographer
broke ship and washed ashore.
Friendly heathens lit their fire,
and were seduced by propaganda
of a novel oriental deity
that cured their gripe and fever,
even warded off a viper's bite.
An image of the derelict apostle
rises elevated on a plinth,
just visible on the offshore rock.
His marble temple stands nearby,
where devotees recall his visit.
Other gods have come and gone.
We sit and watch them pass,
conveyed on wheels or wings,
full of attitude and property,
and with the coming of the dark,
leaving only global lighting
to direct our footsteps home.
© E. Russell Smith 2012
Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610 A baroque ensemble accompanied, competed with, and even overwhelmed the forty voices. Sackbutts and cornettas only play fortissimo, and often out of tune, perhaps attesting to their aging insufficiency. Thankfully, for most of it the horns departed. Only long-necked archduke, theorbo, 'cello and box organ were employed. And the voices! elegant ariosi, harmonies rich in tierces de Picardie; the rhythms oddly, perfectly adjusted to the text, evoking the reluctant virgin, another who prevailed beyond the clamour of her day. © E. Russell Smith 2012
By our benighted lights,
there is no winter here;
autumn overlaps with spring.
Months pass, and one by one,
the outsized leaves of sycamore
clatter through the branches
to the yards and pavements,
till there are no more, while
scrambling Bougainvillea blooms
red, white and thorny everywhere.
In the sun the gum trees burn
to maple red above the daffodils.
Rain falls; the arid chaparral
bursts into grassy green.
Oranges and lemons ripen,
organ pipe in berry too,
and local holly, just in time.
Hopped-up robins gorge on fruit
fermenting on the firethorn,
while they, and monarch butterflies,
and we the other snowbirds wait
to hear a signal to return.
SoCal, December 2012
© E. Russell Smith 2012
Vivaldi's Gloria provides
full chamber combo in the pit
even so, the rex clestis
for soprano solo asks for only
reedy oboe and bassoon.
A solitary 'cello backs
an alto and her agnus dei.
Bach's Magnificat prescribes
another alto should accept
one pizzicato 'cello
and a pastel flute duet
for her entire support.
Beyond that company,
the silence of the hall
is fully eloquent,
and so the hall obliges.
Master Chorale, Disney Hall,
Los Angeles, 16 December 2012.
© E. Russell Smith 2012
Notices are in the social weeklies, full accounts of guest lists, dignitaries present, presiding clergy on the site, and ladies' gowns and flowers. One reporter has composed a short transparent myth to ascribe divinity to a guest who wanted only to become the saviour of a wedding feast that had confronted judgement and the searing fires of obloquy. A mystery persists as to the origin of one superior post-prandial vintage cabernet that was uncorked quite tardy in the process of the celebration. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. Exodus 20:4-5. If we think about it, once a week, we try inventing our inventor, sculpting thought and cerebration, fashioning an anthropomorphic entity not large, nor wise, nor more creative than our own presumptuous selves, to worship, praise and supplicate. What sort of other forges us, and every everlasting else as well? One voiceless Word, transcending every bourn of time and space, responsive, as we briefly pass, to neither Sunday exaltation nor some casual acknowledgement. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Relying on flyblown mythologies to answer for refractory nature, and for rituals now irrelevant that lose them in a labyrinth of smoke and crumpled steel, survivors of the wars creep out of their sequestered valleys, cross deserted plains to perish in tsunamis of a tepid sea... provided that their jackboots don't break through the crust of this primordial magma. New prophets with new tales will possibly direct a sapient few to start a new anthropocene. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Today he's short of bread. As a child, he was secure with love and bed and board, and family outings after church into the city's wild ravines learning the names of trees and flowers and butterflies, bird-watching, minnowing. He also learned to trust in order, a loyalty that stuck, although in adolescence order fell away wildflowers suddenly were only weeds, and feckless migrants failed to reappear, dismayed when springs became uncertain. Now he's walking on his own. Hungry, homeless, he omitted going to church today. He ought, in Rome, to do as Romans do, perhaps, but to pretend to walk in this or that conflicting faith offends his intellect. He wants, at most, an awkward peace across the spectrum of belief. Simply, if he has no bread, his empty body suffers, but another's blameless hunger wounds his empty soul. His ordered way informs him of an easy remedy for that: sharing the little that he has keeps his humanity intact. © E. Russell Smith 2012
Turning all the switches in our modern pre-fab igloo only starts replacing heat lost during six long weeks while we were gone up south. An empty larder we will order in some seal-fin stir-fry from the take-out at the dock. Ice-water in the faucet means no shower before tomorrow. We retire at last, into a bed of furs and frigid flannel. Best sleep back to belly. Rotate at half-hour intervals for medium-rare and tender. Pangnirtung, Nunavut 2013 © E. Russell Smith 2012
White noise and white wine, five miles above the near north, straight into the lowering sun winter light spreads rainbows on the rippled undercast. Dark valleys in the cotton, shadows of far cumulus tell of trouble underneath. The horizon rises. We begin the long and bumpy glide toward a six-point touchdown. The red cap of the fuel-tank on the portside wing is loose. © E. Russell Smith 2012
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