A Neighbor Upstairs
James speaks to me
About the locks, or the holes in the steps.
That is as much as we know.
Both of us walk through our days arranging
Objects, or cleaning,
And it is better to speak of broken locks,
Than gray lunar dust.
But a human could visit the drifts
Of those places and touch
Undisturbed ridges of aged shapes
In the same way that he
Sifts in the backyard of Nebraska,
No farther away from it,
And no closer as he walks in the cold,
Of granite ridges,
Within the equation inhuman,
But seeing silver life.
The evening moves past nine o’clock,
And upstairs it is quiet,
Both of us maybe finding our ways
Into a house, or warmth,
Or impoverished ways of seeing
Distant, old friends,
Scattered ashes of sacred bodies,
Words of ancestors,
Like lines written in memory
Of the blood they knew.
It is the holiness,
Of repeated words, or syllables,
Binding us to lunar dust,
Or those who wrote in the seasons of our
Changes past August,
And travel in the autumns.
Mottled Afternoon
In the characteristics of this
Lethal winter
Where the growth upon the land cares only
For its exquisite
Changes that move slightly across us
As we watch its
Earth become trees; its trees become
Forest loam,
As we understand that we also
Will meet with this
Transformation in the inflection
Of its phrases, we
Must return to its hazardous places,
As they occur
Around us gathering us in another
Destination, maybe
Like the sense of what begins to live
In April or its
Impoverished riverbanks met
With a certain sound
Like older maidens who walk among
Another growth or
Merge with what they may cherish,
Like violets,
As we are the earth returning to us,
Yet the sign of some
Perfect thought emerging in the brush
Is carried into us.
The scattered leaves drifted through Caesar’s
Villa like signs
Of an uncertain end to the movement
Of sparrows lost
In migration across landscapes of slightly
Misted hills where he
Never really understood the tonal
Qualities of autumn,
Like us moving in the broken countryside
Across rivers. So,
I watch the electric lamp fluoresce
And consider
Dusty pathways in forests or meadows,
And their evanescence.
The computer screen has recorded
This day in autumn,
And it has transpired in the slightest motion
Of typing hands,
As occasional autos pass the house,
Yet all that I know
Is their memory or their image in this
Fragmented thing,
As the evening moves on into its most
Indiscernible
Revolutions and the computer is
Accepting the words.
I speak to it and the evening is farther
Into memory,
Or like the creatures of the forest it
Draws upon my soul.
A Hitchhiker in the Desert
Three shrubs float beside him silently
In rough textures,
And they speak of the seriousness
Of whom they are,
Or where they have been, as they tell
Of one night as it
Merges into others, or barren
Regions where they
Watched the desert as it approached them
As all nights, while they
Converged before a more shadowed image
Of gravity
Like a black impression of a man
As a carpenter
Caught on the axis of the wood and floated
In the desert night,
Where hitchhikers seek to elucidate
The textures of this
Body and its dwelling among the bushes,
Its severity,
In lunar landscapes of the winter.
*****
Author Statement
Charles Mann is an older man who spends his time in verse. As a youth, he graduated with an Engineering degree, but spent most of his working life as maintenance at a school in the Midwest. He is now retired, and he is still adjusting to the changes.