Steve Frost
POEMS
First Poem
Bengali
During
Two Parts
Revival
***
First Poem
1.
A Before A student is made of black and holds a chain of keys
He lives in a paneled room of smoke and gray with boxes of light and a few fresh air windows.
He’s known of Mallory and the Wife of Bath.
He’s felt the Wasteland and Michael’s ecstasy
Yet, he cries for an unfelt light seen through the smoke
He’s combined the biting Glory of a New England
Frost and the loam and width of a middleman writing in love of a Prairie and The People, Yes and he wonders about a California dock man Who wonders more
Still, he strains
Then, with a mind confused and bleary wide-open eyes he falls up the rabbit hole and finds morning.
2.
A Beginning
After the dark, a cold, cold coming
A stream wanders through a riverbed and cottonwoods watch from the edge
The rosy metallic light of a morning to begin
rises like quiet thunder
A boy in a sleeping bag waits, cold after a night of cold
first a tip of light, the shadows jump, then more
are established
Get up, Get going
It’s warm now and you have eyes to see.
–A forest, the tree, the hard wood straight
once the stream was clear but now it’s too late
In a night city people don’t care so much who was good and died or lived. The moment, that’s all.
And I like a lemming to the sea ran my upwards fall
They laugh, there’s drink look to see what isn’t there on fungi floating in the air
Still, I ran my upwards fall
Until, every body my mind had created was thought laughed at.
What was left, but that Purity within and with God?
I cried for that and at their pity and my lie. Wall, idols, symbols of good. one’s face has no halo, only a hood for a moment the unclean stream is lamented
But this world’s the place to taste and say no or… yes
Taking the chance of starting again
III. A Continuing
A clump of grass on the side of a dirt road contains individual blades that are clean for an instant after they are unsheathed.
Then a car, a cloud of dust and– knowledge
But that’s not all the apple provides
Rain comes too, as assuredly as morning, cleaning, regenerating
With drops that glisten,
themselves
formed on particles of dust
Stephen Frost 1970
Highland Guatemala
***
BENGALI
Take the compassion felt for one.
Multiply that by seven million storm ravaged Bengali.
How could we stand it?
Somewhere, the eye closes.
Stephen Frost 1971
***
DURING
During the last eight minuets of sunlight,
- light travels from a giving body already passed. There is a view along house front, a cement porch, and geranium garden across the porch from the house. Green depths dark and light green heights poke up rounds of salmon petals. Almost horizontal light rays catch up minute particles of water. Millions of them radiate halos around everything. Plants are shaped by darkened colors. A warm south breeze wiggles the leaves of an umbrella tree. Hill across the canyon, hills without detail, hill of the house, gathered with fields into a unified community while unreiterated light travels to meet gaseous water. It makes a chortle below the breast rise between the lungs, up to raised extended nostrils, wide-open eyes. Then, the crows caw, neighbors feed their horses, grain pans knock against the sides of a grain bin, fences are stooped under, mangers receive oats barley bran. Horses fat and flax seed glossy search out the last grains with soft prickly lips. People shovel and talk, flick on electric lights, extinguish a sunset.
Stephen Frost 1971
San Francisquito Canyon, California
***
TWO PARTS
1. Muffled ladies
chant for grace
leave the flesh bared
can
forget the pounding, pounding days
that suck back defeated waste to well again the rage.
With visions of high sparkling plains lit by starless light
even in hidden cloister rooms need we so lose the day?
Rather ride the wave with salt and sand
foam crash the rock to gravel and float the prism light boat high
to sink and rise from a sea that sparkles
beneath the sun.
2.
Desperate bridge falling people
half buried in the sand by the crash of a pounding day
drag themselves to sea line caves and chant for peace.
Some hear only echoes
then lulled by the Fragrance of quiet lotus ponds
roots set in black decay
ride on cushions to shaded rooms
where, in the pillow softness, lose the grasping grappling
hook, face the wall and are gently smothered.
Revival
1.
After a day of doing
and having done so little
After a day of being a young man
becoming an old man
like a spider re-spinning its web in the wind
When nerve has become an enormous scab of self-induced lacerations
When faith teaches in the seed of today’s happiness
lives the sperm of tomorrow’s failures
Who says the day was worth singing
blow away the bubbles
rainbows never last
2.
Across a road is a field of vanishing length,
lit by the light of a surrounding suburbia. The grass forms are made of
neon and silver
divided only by dark and lines of chain-link fence.
From behind the dark, a black athlete jogs and under a
white light street lamp stops to rest
her hand on her hip
her head hanging limply
her head bent back
straightening the tube to her deprived aspiring lungs-
stops to rest for a moment in the dim neon light, then runs again.
3.
An old lady on a rural mail run gives a hitchhiker a ride
she’s spectacled and high pitched
“Afraid to pick up a hitchhiker? No– I’ve still got a pretty good left.”
A wanderer stops at a country house to ask for a drink of water.
The same woman built like a bird ready to fight a snake,
kicks open the door
“Come on in, I’ve got soda pop and ice, if you want that.”
Afraid?
“I’ve seen my husband dropped dead on this kitchen floor.
Three days later I took over his mail route.
My son was killed by a bulldozer that I gave him.
My father tried to kill me when he was half crazy from
a head wound given him by thieves in his blacksmith shop.
You can’t be afraid
not in this life
I’m not
The last few years have been bad for me
but next week I’m getting married and moving away from this place.
You want some cookies, ice cream?”
4.
A philosopher hangs on the wall and laments because he can’t
turn lead into gold.
But after a day of doing and doing
comes a moment when a glittering mind sees promise
even in leaden bubbles.
Stephen Frost 1971
San Francisquito Canyon, California
Stephen Frost © 2010