Christopher Bernard

Vita Contemplativa

Not to act, not to move – to have done with doing –
    that is all:
very un-American. To sit it out, on the bench, under
    the maple trees,
and let the others run and glory,
sweating, while we pick out patterns in the gravel,
the tearing of the grass, devil twisters in the dust,
and nod smiling encouragement over a coke. It
    seems so easy.

Everybody at one time wants to be in on it – the
    secret,
we randomly reverie, must lie in there somewhere –
    it looks
wonderful to be out there, knocking them dead,
cynosure, observed of all observers,
admired by crowds, beating the tracks with
    quivering legs,
the heavy sweat dying in deflations of exhaustion.
That must hold the secret of happiness – it looks so
    grand.
Wouldn't it be fine to be out there, doing that –
    being loved
by everybody!
It would be – it is – it's wonderful to be loved by
    thousands –
what am I saying, by millions –
by everybody.

If only the affair did not end in mutual
    recrimination
and love shimmering away into glare,
what one did in the lasting brightness
burn, charring the mind with shame,

and one could get back into the stands again,
climbing stair on stair, back up, back back
to watching, in all innocence,
from the shadows of the trees
and, shy, only dream of glory.
But how to see after you have been seen – well!
Do we ever quite see after that again
without seeing a reflected scar?
Or is that a mountain

unlocated on any chart – sloping up always away,

not to act, after acting,
the deed, after all, of all, without
equal or parallel?	

A Paradox

The poem –
a very strange form of pleasure to write,
with an even stranger, unearned prestige
(what is the point of it, beyond a few minutes’ 
    indulgence
and a truly ridiculous pride it fosters
in the absurd practitioner and the overpaid
    professor,
who takes the most innocent, unsuspecting verses
and rapes them with a thesis and fucks them with
    bullshit?) –
truly, it’s a vicious, ludicrous thing,
with a mangy heritage it boasts of ad nauseam
like a dowager duchess to a bored, profoundly
     unimpressed
company, a pretension to truthfulness and
– listen to this! – integrity
that is, let’s face it, absolutely laughable –
and it is not even very amusing anymore!
Why bother with it! Why, indeed? Shut up! Go
     away!
Do something useful, like deconstructing an English
     department.
If you must versify, keep it to yourself.
If you must read the stuff, hide it with shame.
It is not heart or flesh, it is not man or woman:
you waste your love on the cold heart of a poem.

Winter Sunlight

In the waters of the bay lies the winter sun
fallen through clouds of blackened tin –
stains of corroded light that hold
the shadows of the ships in a brightness shifting
to dimness, dazzling,
fading to appear
like shards of beacons,
great gull wings,
angel cries,
the taste of milk from a metal can,
and then to vanish,
flutter of a dress,
soft closing of a bedroom door,
tasted kiss given without thought or care –
there, oh, over there –

and here,

scratchings,
…
stammerings,

knurls of tongue, camera, pen,
the hunter with his broken nets, 
the child crying in the unaccountable morning,
the obsessive recorder,
twisting as you dream,
reaching to catch the sun with your eye,
the crazed herds of the sky in a little trap of signs,
scratching sand whitened by the ocean surrounding,
following to reflection's bottom the sun,
in the quiet room not knowing you are drowning.	

Wrestling the Umbrella

The sky's shattered like tears, she says.
And you curse the flimsy roof
flailing like a windmill above your heads
as the wind makes a fool 
of both of you.
		
____

Christopher Bernard is a founding editor of Caveat Lector. His novel A Spy in the Ruins is available from Regent Press.