Poems of Daniel Zane, Featured Poet, October 26, 2009

Glass Ball Ornament

Snow falls in its familiar pattern
just as we do,
down
and to the side-
up and to the other side around,
as if the gray skies would part for an instant
to let two massive hands of a child in wonderment
shake the world,
like fizz inside an unopened soda can,
wandering the semi urban streets
for the highway
or closest bridge to another existence,
passing the rattle of dragging bike chains
or the Christmas carol clinks of a hobo’s treasure chest,
symphonic, like red and white light screaming
fire engines, headed back inward
toward the rosy, death colored smell
of my American Pompeii,
once perfect in its creation,
now perfect in its destruction,
the ash settles decoratively
in the stillness of another clear night.

You, a true smile

Come from the belly, with a breath
before senses stir the consciousness
away from sleeps lazy clutch.
as your lips part effortlessly,
like when a breeze pushes open a door ajar
or a wounded stomach spreads for blood
a row of white teeth,
stacks of loose leaf paper
marked with smoke tainted imperfections
like the etchings of a sentence,
appear as a Horation ode
written for time and time alone,
are fixed in your gums
like a stake in my heart
before vanishing
only into the memory
of a brand new morning.


Dinner

I
Sitting across from you at the dinner table
dimly lit like an old Roman temple,
your eyes squint through plastic framed glasses
set atop a wrinkled nose,
your skin holding the sorrows of all of Eastern Europe
and I, driving myself crazy
wonder if your face, or any face, should ever be cast
in the blue fluorescent light created by your cell phone.
Blue as the ocean that came up to flood the humanity of your face,
and wash away your history.
II
So tell me father,
is this the same light that woke your every Red Hungarian morning as you went to school for Communist indoctrination,
shoveling up pieces of bodies along the Danube,
that left you awake each night inside a refugee home beside fifty of your friends and family, screaming for a new world
unimagined,
that sat tightly on the wing of your airplane to Montreal, blazing new trails through the sky and never once looking back,
that burned in your mind as you, a seven year old boy, read the New York Times with a pocket dictionary in hand, chin in the other, elbow on your knee, like a young incarnation of Rodin’s creation,
that you saw spinning in your head when every punch from an American boy, afraid of change, landed you square between the eyes and knocked you on your ass,
that took a shot in the dark as you took out your scared member, lying in bed, smiling and wondering if you’d just lost your virginity, 
that lit your textbooks up in a small Columbia University dorm room as your pondered the future of the world in the realm of nuclear engineering,
that abandoned nuclear engineering and forced you to march up to the Lincoln Memorial to fight for what you knew was true American honesty,
that exploded within you as you sat motionless and twisted in your room, listening to the Rolling Stones as if you were the metal buildings misshaped after the bombings of Hiroshima,
that scraped the sidewalks for pennies in New York City and came back with bread,
that stared into the eyes of my mother, both of you shy and nervous when you told her you were really in love,
and led your every footstep from the chains of your Hungarian past into the wild blue imagination of your American present?

III
And now your face lit again,
staring endlessly into a small sea
of numbers and words,
the ghost of my generation,
new and shining haunts
your carefully designed face,
a face etched by hand, by dust, by wit.
and thinking of my own future,
is this the face your father had,
as he sat old, lonely and dying,
while you dreamt of a world itching to blossom?