Adaptions

This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that men can own plantations and commute every night and ride in cars to live in millionaire’s mansions on Lake Shore Drive; where men rent farms and live on shares and live like animals; where fare is planted and grows man-tall in very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares… 

Ultimate Innocence


When was the last farmer
wholly in love with his milk cows?

1860’s, you think?

Perhaps 1914,
or thereabouts?

Or it could’ve
been during the dustbowl years
just before FDR’s sympathetic
intervention.

Too bad Gene Wilder’s taxi
circling the moon once too many times
finally tossed him onto cold skid row
to slake his impossible lust
with a single, trembling drop
of Woolite.

Sorry about that!

Too bad the Confederate train
snaking the Blue Ridge mountains
didn’t pause
long enough for its boxcar
of genetic mules
to slake
themselves
on tourist ticket-stubs.

So, how do we climb
like gardenias
the sultry torso of present-day
civilization
during a primordial hurricane
named Katrina, or George W. Bush?

How, indeed, do we skate
the innocent length
of this melancholy ironing board
stretched yoga-like before us?

And how do we know
that white polo balls
flattened into retirement
won’t grow extinct
like dingy cauliflowers
routinely ignored by our diminutive
selves along the produce aisle?

Who knows?

So, I mounted
that black and white pinto
I’d been dreaming about
these past six months.

He said, Let’s go to the caves
of the outlaws
from Wyoming
or Kerouac;
I’d like that.

But, instead, I reached for Saturn,
barely recognized
these past 50 years,
only to find her rings squashed
in an ashtray,
only to witness
the demise
of briefly
what once was
the ultimate innocence
of raucous crows
now oozing tiny drops
of insidious ink
from my adult imagination.

Alan Britt

 

 The Buddha's Last Instruction

by Mary Oliver (1935 - ) Timeline

“Make of yourself a light,”

said the Buddha,

before he died.

I think of this every morning

as the east begins

to tear off its many clouds

of darkness, to send up the first

signal — a white fan

streaked with pink and violet,

even green.

An old man, he lay down

between two sala trees,

and he might have said anything,

knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,

it thickens and settles over the fields.

Around him, the villagers gathered

and stretched forward to listen.

Even before the sun itself

hangs, disattached, in the blue air,

I am touched everywhere

by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything

that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself

as it blazes over the hills,

like a million flowers on fire --

clearly I'm not needed,

yet I feel myself turning

into something of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,

he raised his head.

He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

I remember years of grief
before when joy began
As one who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

Long before moon dug her
very horn,
into dawn’s sultry thighs
spread-eagled across the rooftops.

Candy cane bell-bottoms
outlined by misty fog,
don’t even begin
to tell the whole truth.

Too many after-hours appetites,
I suppose,
at favorite restaurants
with warm fires ablaze.

Time to resign my life
over to the tuft of fox fur,
stretched across
the livingroom's Burgandy floor.

But, god, as we travel
below these clouds,
fueled by lithium evanessence
we pass desperately close.

To hippo tooth
or lion claw,
limbs scattering like grass
in the garden of a great wind.

Then to vanish
Tormented into nothingness,
a trickled sonnet
melded into a branching ode.

CdB 2011