The Literary Review
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Austin Alexis Featured Poet
Issue 10 Page 2
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The Vacation
Three weeks off from work
and I bathe in a luxury of time.
Hours now grow plentiful as the beard
streaming from Michelangelo’s Moses.
I am a prophet of leisure,
extolling its benefits and cures.
My job-life was a virus. Currently, I’m cured
of the tedium of long-lingering fevers.
My workweek was a disease I’m free from–
sigh!–even if only temporarily.
The novelty of stretched-out aimless bus rides
has become the norm of my days.
Peering out bus windows, I contemplate
life’s calm unspooling of activity.
Active at doing nothing, I’ve become
an expert extravagant procrastinator.
Procrastination gives me a chance
to watch lightbulbs attract busy gnats.
I’ve grown so used to the cloister
of my snug, solitude-filled life
I might never journey all the way
back to the world I’ve escaped from,
its jumble, muck and noise,
its girdle of obligations, constrictions.
And if I retire from all responsibilities,
will the world weep for my absence,
or will it neglect to even notice I’ve gone?
The Stream
cut through bush,
rumbled over rocks,
slendered itself
as it lunged
downward
among leafy odors,
over slight inclines
before forming
a pool
where a man
stripped off his shirt,
undid his jeans,
peeling into nudity
before he dived
into the spot
where the stream
waterfalled
into the pond-pool,
that watery motion,
the weed-fringed basin,
this whole scene
teaching him
the stark power,
the unselfconscious authority
of the elemental.
Mind’s Eye
Ephemeral, haunting,
hovering in my heated thoughts:
the dream I can’t remember
yet won’t forget.
Teasing, animated in my mind’s stillness,
the chattering images glow
like wavy patterns of light
iridescent on wire mesh.
For three hours I tried
to lure the dream into focus.
Alert to my memory lapse,
even alarmed by it,
I attempted to resuscitate
the reverie that had died
the moment I shook myself
out of my sleep mode.
How could I pivot
back to that timeless realm
of valuable messages?–
those filmic slivers being mischievous
while also serious.
The dream was sealed, enveloped
in the aura of the unconscious.
The envelope of wakefulness blinded me.
Finally, I quit my attempt,
my futile floundering,
let my mind meander
back to mundane reality:
a bedroom with smudged windows
overlooking a fire escape
soiled by squirrel droppings.
Defeated, I let the dream
trot, promenade, sashay
to where souls migrate
after we die.
Solitude
I.
Solitude unfolds, luxurious, like the universe.
Days of it follow days, unspooled from a source,
a mysterious core at the heart of time.
Exquisite is the word for this aloneness.
We can teach ourselves to revel in it,
the way ivy is trained
to thrive on a wall’s smooth stones.
II.
The people I miss in my solitude
are the persons I never got around to meeting.
I picture them peering through mist
to get a glimpse of me,
the way cherubs in Raphael, languidly attentive,
gaze through off-white clouds.
I sense them, my non-friend friends,
my non-lover lovers,
and wonder if I’m better off without them.
III.
No visitors today to the long horizontal
heaven of my apartment.
IV.
Silence soothes me like the aroma of eucalyptus,
heated, brewing–a tea for the soul.
Eucalyptus, dandelion, slippery elm:
they all speak to me
in quiet dialects.
At the moment, they’re the only company I want.
V.
Time to stare inward.
Sometimes this weighty introspection is just a job;
sometimes it’s a calling.
Detaching from life in order to track life down,
letting go of the world
in order to grasp its essence
is a task, as well as a joy.
Can I do it?
Can I endure this trek in the desert?
Forty days, forty nights:
the hours expect at least a dab of resistance.
I pull away.
An hour later, I lean into it.
I’m curious to discover
what hides in solitude’s corner.
What will be my first find? My second?
What turbulence will I stumble upon?
What easefulness?
Will there be warm, animal-fuzzy curatives?
I hope the healing I need will reside there,
the restfulness.
Maybe I’m afraid I’ll never pinpoint
what I’m searching for in this quiet:
not there, never was, never will be:
that diamond I try to conjure from epic silence.
On the other hand, that might not be true at all.
The jewel may very well exist in reclusiveness,
glittering in its rightness.
VI.
Something will click in introspection,
some thing, precious and nearly visible
like a bodily joint making its releasing sound.
Like a hidden sentiment.
Like a solution crashing in the distance
yet jolting my consciousness.
Hearing it, I’ll experience relief.
VII.
Oh, embrace aloneness.
Even limit the radio as company.
Like earless insects, be deaf to the world’s chatter.
Exhilaration exists in intimacy with one’s self.
VIII.
The moon is aware of willed loneliness,
being that it travels solo in the night sky.
Granted, it needs the sun
to help it keep sailing in its orbit.
But its best attribute is displayed
when it seems to glow from its own spotlight,
so that a viewer forgets all about
the other heavenly bodies
and concentrates on the single moon,
humming in luminous tranquility.
IX.
One lone hair from my eyebrow
falls to the bathroom basin,
stands out against the spotless porcelain–
a hermit separated from a tribe
and glad for his circumstances.
X.
Solitude, like friendship, deserves to be observed,
but beyond that: worshipped,
the way the sun was once bowed down to
by smart tribes
who knew its life-giving value,
sensed how it nourished and renewed.
To a Pandemic
I miss those beefy yelps
wafting through my window
from the daily nearby judo class.
The view from that same window
at another time of day
offered languid elegance of yoga limbs.
That treat, too, has gone;
I taste the bleakness of the blank studio.
O pandemic, O austere one,
you have spread a glacier,
have rocketed away abundance.
Keep your subway cars with reduced ridership;
their novel cleanliness unnerves me.
Nowadays, department stores display
desert expanses; cinemas’ blanks screens
show a pandemic’s true essence.
These I take as your global lessons.
Except, there’s a chance you hope we’ve learned
no dangers reside in reports
from the noiseless land within.
The hazard is to neglect the splendor of the self
for the heaping brouhaha of news, noise and sights
we knuckleheads have taught ourselves
to mourn and miss.