(I write one of these every year, and why should turning forty be any different?)
Forty Crows in Paris
1.
Walking the streets of Paris,
I run into Picasso.
Sun-burnt
Wind-burnt
sandy-dusty
fidgety-edgy
and charcoal-eyed.
He smiles.
I worship a god with a bull head, he says.
Pigeon-wing arms
Crucified over an altar of satin-covered wood.
Huh, I say.
The heart is a ventricle labyrinth, he says.
We are often lost in its chambers.
There is a bull in all men.
The bull-man shares my face.
And at night, he says,
I dream of the minotaur.
Okay, I say.
I have some wisdom for you, he says.
Please, I say.
Love thyself first of all.
No, Pablo.
Then you’ve failed, he says.
Okay, I say.
But never marry.
Too late, I say.
This makes him angry.
Doe-eyed women.
Wolf-bitches in heat.
Kali, destroyer of artists.
Astarte, breaker of men.
His mouth is foaming.
I wave him away.
And off he goes.
2.
Picasso.
Impossible at restaurants.
Lover of bullfighting, brothels, women.
Hater of entanglements.
Despiser of interruptions.
Painter of Christs, myths, nude women.
Painter, sculptor, cruel genius.
Bull face half-hidden from the world.
Bulls are wild creatures
of pure id
snorting charging
holy in many lands.
Energy,
Often unfocused,
Goring others with sharp horns.
A symbol of creative destruction.
Picasso:
Pagan hero
praying to broken stones.
3.
I leave Pablo behind,
And move along the boulevards of Paris.
Cobalt skies
Sun with perfect heat
sculpted faces radiated
streaks of self-righteous indignation.
The French obsession:
How to be good in a godless world?
I meander through the royal gardens.
I stroll past the Seine.
I trot over to the Left Bank.
I see Simone de Beauvoir sitting under a tree.
She waves me over.
Bespectacled, raven-haired
Thin lipped, high cheek-boned.
Hands sharp like knitting needles.
I worship the first crow, she says.
Creator of all existence.
Midnight wings covering the cosmos with speckled night.
Metaphor? I ask.
She shakes her head.
Don’t worship anyone but yourself, she says.
I don’t know how to do that.
All men do it, she says.
I was speaking through you to your daughters.
Hairy-cheeked men.
Simple-minded and direct.
Zeus and Odin.
Rapers of earth and sky.
Imprisoners of women.
Always misunderstanding everything.
I’m a man, I say.
She shoos me along.
4.
Simone the unheralded.
Namesake of my eldest.
Philosopher-queen
Writer of great novels
Existentialist par excellence.
She saw the strictures of the father-world.
The demands that partition a woman’s consciousness.
In bondage to child-rearing,
Home-making
Cooking cleaning
Belittled or ignored.
Entombed in invisible prisons.
Simone!
Lover of life and men.
Neither bull nor wolf.
A being of pure mind.
Wise and wonderful
But worshiper of nothing
Empty voices dissipating into cold, sterile air.
5.
I walk on,
My shoes touching the streets of Paris,
But my thoughts anchored in the past year.
2016.
Eater of the great.
Jim Harrison died.
David Bowie died.
Debbie Reynolds died.
Prince and goddamn George Michael.
Died and died and goddamn died.
Amidst the political grotesqueries of my home country.
What the fuck is happening?
In Luxembourg Gardens,
A single crow picks grubs and worms
While my daughters run amok.
Crow the wise.
Crow the lonely.
Crow the portentous.
Dark omen of
Death war mystery
6.
Crows were thought to ferry the souls of the dead.
Black bird wings
Cosmic undulations
Souls tiny pebbles in the crows’ beaks.
The pebbles tossed into a giant heap
Melted in a vast smelter
And cooling in an endless semi-conscious sea.
I liken crows to a single year.
They appear,
They make a little noise
Then they fly away.
I am now forty.
Forty years.
Forty crows.
In Paris.
7.
I watch too many movies.
Tis a sickness.
No substitute for wisdom.
Just a tired, bleary-eyed deity,
That is almost self-aware.
The other day,
A character asked:
What is your spirit animal?
What is mine?
I feel a magic connection to wolves.
An affinity with crows.
A psychic corkscrew with bulls.
I feel love for elephants.
And, sometimes late at night,
I reverberate prayers to Ganesha,
The remover of obstacles.
He of the elephant head.
Bulls, crows, wolves, elephants—
Totems of my cloudy mind.
I write and read and work,
Believing that it means something.
Trump says it doesn’t.
8.
Okay, politics and poetry
Not the friendliest combo.
But ask a wolf like Trump:
How to be good?
He has no answer.
Wolves don’t care about goodness.
Wolves don’t understand decency.
They hunger and thirst
And go about chomping on things with bloody mouths.
Trump inhabits the father-world.
Cynical and vile.
Billionaire pickpockets
Out to stripmine our very souls.
Prostrate before a dank cave,
Invisible coal dust
Filling their nostrils,
They worship a jade-green snake
Swallowing its own tail.
I don’t begrudge them their selfish
Shallow, superficial meanness.
But these ghouls don’t believe
In any kind of future.
They want to consume the present.
And that, I cannot forgive.
9.
From there to here.
I’ve left Paris behind.
Returned to the States.
I turned 10 in Florida.
20 in Alabama.
30 in Iowa.
Now 40 in Illinois.
Forty years.
Jesus Christo.
Twenty-two years of writing?
Carter Reagan Bush Clinton Obama
And now Trump.
I never know where a poem is going.
They zig.
They zag.
They sputter.
They spark.
My antennae cogitate in a zippered buzz.
My thoughts collide like loosed atoms.
Today it’s the bull.
Yesterday the crow.
Tomorrow the wolf.
Picasso and Beauvoir never go away.
Trump will.
Not fast enough.
Not without scarring.
Not without pain.
But he will go away.
Until then,
It’s the search for small gods
With totem heads.
A new decade begins.
Ganesha, I’m still here.
Let’s remove these obstacles.
Or a new god,
Crow-headed
Animist, small-scaled
Housebound, perhaps,
Listening only to my neurotic fears
Powerless but present
Here to vitiate the father-world’s powers
Until De Beauvoir can reincarnate
And lead us back to the Crow’s delight.
simoneandthesilversurfer 