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Poetry Offerings From Doug Tanoury | Poem

 
 
 

Trio

I. Ode To April

And I recalled the opening line
Of Elliott's  Wasteland:
"April is the cruelest month"
And I think that somehow the  same
Could be said of any month,
May, June, July,
August,  September
And not to forget
November and December. 

Indeed things green and things yellow
Are  growing quite irrepressibly
And soon a hint of color will crawl up
The  bare willows and upon the ash and maple
New foliage will sprout, modest at  first,
But growing toward green crescendos. 

I remember my grandfather
Was a modernist in  his old age.
He would slip into spells of incoherence,
Utter words in odd  tongues, not of European origin
On summer  afternoons,
He would sit in the shade beneath a tree
And rest his back  upon its bark and trunk
And sometimes in fragments,
More often in the  gibberish of delirium,
Speak to me like Sybil. 

I believe that Spring is strong
And April is  not fragile but merely subtle.
Sprouts peek most shyly from the  earth,
Green shafts against the black soil,
Tendril roots twisting  down.
There is no cruelty in
Of modest beginnings
Or in the small  starting of things. 

He has closed his eyes and
Oh that I could  awaken him,
Just grab his arm and say:
"Grandpa wake up! You walked  in the sun too long."
He would open his eyes and look at me,
And mumble  something in Arabic
That sounded slightly slurred
And wave his arm for me  to go way,
To let him sleep. 

The days grow longer and the light
Now streams  in the big window
Just after sunrise, and April is the month
Of things  sleeping and slow awakenings,
Of fragments that grow
Toward the fullness  of meaning.

II. At Lake St. Clair 

Fishing at Lake St. Clair today,
Alone on a long pier,
Just north of  the power plant
Where the line of steel smokestacks,
The "Seven Sisters"  dominate the sky,
And I always think them
The perfect classical  form,
Tall and slender as they are,
Ionic columns left standing upright
Amid the rubble of some ruins 

The water-tinted orange
In the first light after sunrise,
Its surface  choppy and textured
As if painted on a canvas, pasted on thick
With the  short pointed strokes of a palette knife,
And I recalled a fragment from long  ago: 

"White-caped waves sweep the lake--
My father's dreams" 

And me picking out with such care
Painted spoons of speckled green,
And  a feathered jig with a chartreuse head.
For you know my grandfather was a  modernist,
My father was a neo-romantic, but I,
I am a fisherman. 

For the measure of a man I know
Is in pike and pickerel and perch.

III. Piano Sonata 

Things are most pure in their beginnings,
As if time somehow  tarnishes
Innocence and stains
The sweetest intentions.
It is the  April of things, rather than their August,
That is most lovely,
Tendrils  of hope
With roots that grip tenacious and deep,
The watercolor that  seeps across
A sketch of charcoal landscape. 

In the rain today
I found a faint trace of music,
A fragment of  melody
That is the sound of a piano sonata,
Notes that resonated  softly
And make me remember
Black and white summers
When I crossed the  river on Macarthur Bridge,
The sunlight
On the surface of the water  shining brightly,
The waves gleaming
Like schools of chrome minnows. 

It is raining and I hear my grandfather's footsteps
On each wooden step as  he walks up the front porch,
I hear him stop to cough and then  continue.
Memory is a fragmentary thing.
And I cannot simply decide
And struggle a great deal
And muse endlessly upon the troubling  question:
Is it the April within us that God loves?
Or is the April within  us God's love  itself?

(c) 2002 Doug Tanoury

Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the Internet with the majority of his work. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and journals across the world. The greatest influence on Doug's work was his 7th grade poetry anthology from  Sister Debra's English class: Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966  & Company) He still keeps a copy of it at his writing  desk.

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