Enlightenment Is a Bitch
At first it isn’t so bad—a taste of ecstasy,
the world covered in honey. Even snails
scrawl the names of Buddhas with their silvery trails.
But then, too much. Pears become unbearable,
wet white flesh so tender one could perish
contemplating the first taste.
Meditation becomes oddly redundant,
attention now like water, absorbed in tree-root,
plumbing; even fire hydrants with their red
stubby arms become mandalas, and worse,
the police siren revving its wail behind
my slow-moving car sounds like a mantra.
Even my wife’s complaints about me finally
sound true. I just bow. Kiss her slender hands.
Carry the garbage outside, but damn! The moon!
**First appeared in The SUN Magazine
How Therapists Dance
Washington DC after a conference,
we head into the urban night
led by the jive-talking white ghetto boy
raised in black foster homes
bent on showing us the town. We
wander from night club to bar,
a mix of Black, Asian, Latino, White
earnest saviors eager to party, to strip
the mind of diagnostic prognostication,
to revel. Eventually, one by one, our group
slips back to the hotel till I am alone
with a young black woman who says
I want to show you one more place.
Down an alley, she leads me to a club
where I am the only white face in the joint,
and while she is gone to the bathroom,
the owner saunters over, asks how I’m doing,
says if you have any trouble here, come find me.
And I am suddenly more alone
than ever, till my young friend returns,
looks at my anxious face, smiles, says
this is what I wanted to show you.
**First appeared in The SUN Magazine
Accordions & Shotguns
Opal stands with an accordion at twenty-one years of age,
on the steps of the family’s 49th Street house in Los Angeles.
It is 1934, and the land of angels breathes in then out
like the ribs of her instrument. My father poses next,
little brother, all of six years old, shoeless, grinning,
the world spread out in front of him like an endless field
through which he runs. The back alleys and parks,
strewn with beaten trash can lid shields and stick swords,
Chinese boys behind the market tossing rocks like grenades,
the sand at Venice Beach where black kids would wrestle
with brown and the white of his skin didn’t matter
because the city was his, he didn’t need much,
was protected from harm, from the want there was by dashing older brothers
who’d appear as right out of a movie screen,
with their polished white shoes and slicked back Hollywood hair,
letting him reach deep into pocket to fish out fistfuls of coin,
who’d show up the very day the electricity was to be turned off,
lay a few grey-green bills in mother’s calloused hands,
the ones that had been up all night wringing and folding
in hard-bitten prayer, the miracles that always seemed to follow:
a pair of shoes, a bag of groceries. A young boy,
he had no word for depression,
neither the 30’s, nor his own that would come later.
There was no such thing as not enough, only the wonder
of what you had, the house where so many relatives came
and went, his bed a couch, this bevy of siblings,
lovers and wives old as uncles and aunts,
being the youngest of twelve, the tag-a-long,
and always the next miracle they brought.
Like shotguns in the desert, Opal and Lloyd and brother Leslie
out in the Mohave, cooking eggs and bacon at dawn,
cocking their huge, long rifles loaded with shells--
hunting rabbit, hunting what you can still find when you’re young,
and your country’s young, and the war is still a ways off,
and the world’s a swirling dream you can shoot at
in the hugeness of sky and not worry
about a thing. Later,
those things would happen: accordion lost with its music;
shotguns emptied, buried in the basement; a war or two
working their way through onto Hollywood screen,
and you’d barely recognize anything--
what your life was to become, what it actually became,
the miracle that it is still somehow yours,
that you love it anyway—how you carry the violence
like a spent shell in your pocket to remember,
your ribs expanding and contracting
with each breath as though you are an instrument
life is still learning how to play.
**First appeared in Sycamore Review, chosen for Honorable Mention by Tony Hoagland
The Jeweled Net of Indra
Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology--
Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting
every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see
the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt,
hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean
for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold
their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking
pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble
when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war,
would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio
recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm
that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars
I send to rebuild a village—minted with the Rosicrucian-eye
above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders
as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls
that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it,
if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity
from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box
that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every
gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes
made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood
and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future--
while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle
drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt
into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls
from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing
its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking
the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure
for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded
on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world
whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough
to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected
vision of it all off.
** First appeared in Poetry Flash, and, The SUN Magazine – chosen by Adrienne Rich as NWU Winning Poem
Dane Cervine lives in Santa Cruz, California, a small university town along the Monterey Bay coast just south of San Francisco. In addition to being a poet, Dane is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice, and Emeritus Chief of Children's Mental Health for the Santa Cruz County Mental Health & Substance Abuse Department. Dane is the father of two grown children--daughter Kelsey, who teaches AP History, and son Gabriel who is a spoken-word poet & activist. Dane's wife Linda, directs an internal consulting firm at the University of California, San Francisco.
At first it isn’t so bad—a taste of ecstasy,
the world covered in honey. Even snails
scrawl the names of Buddhas with their silvery trails.
But then, too much. Pears become unbearable,
wet white flesh so tender one could perish
contemplating the first taste.
Meditation becomes oddly redundant,
attention now like water, absorbed in tree-root,
plumbing; even fire hydrants with their red
stubby arms become mandalas, and worse,
the police siren revving its wail behind
my slow-moving car sounds like a mantra.
Even my wife’s complaints about me finally
sound true. I just bow. Kiss her slender hands.
Carry the garbage outside, but damn! The moon!
**First appeared in The SUN Magazine
How Therapists Dance
Washington DC after a conference,
we head into the urban night
led by the jive-talking white ghetto boy
raised in black foster homes
bent on showing us the town. We
wander from night club to bar,
a mix of Black, Asian, Latino, White
earnest saviors eager to party, to strip
the mind of diagnostic prognostication,
to revel. Eventually, one by one, our group
slips back to the hotel till I am alone
with a young black woman who says
I want to show you one more place.
Down an alley, she leads me to a club
where I am the only white face in the joint,
and while she is gone to the bathroom,
the owner saunters over, asks how I’m doing,
says if you have any trouble here, come find me.
And I am suddenly more alone
than ever, till my young friend returns,
looks at my anxious face, smiles, says
this is what I wanted to show you.
**First appeared in The SUN Magazine
Accordions & Shotguns
Opal stands with an accordion at twenty-one years of age,
on the steps of the family’s 49th Street house in Los Angeles.
It is 1934, and the land of angels breathes in then out
like the ribs of her instrument. My father poses next,
little brother, all of six years old, shoeless, grinning,
the world spread out in front of him like an endless field
through which he runs. The back alleys and parks,
strewn with beaten trash can lid shields and stick swords,
Chinese boys behind the market tossing rocks like grenades,
the sand at Venice Beach where black kids would wrestle
with brown and the white of his skin didn’t matter
because the city was his, he didn’t need much,
was protected from harm, from the want there was by dashing older brothers
who’d appear as right out of a movie screen,
with their polished white shoes and slicked back Hollywood hair,
letting him reach deep into pocket to fish out fistfuls of coin,
who’d show up the very day the electricity was to be turned off,
lay a few grey-green bills in mother’s calloused hands,
the ones that had been up all night wringing and folding
in hard-bitten prayer, the miracles that always seemed to follow:
a pair of shoes, a bag of groceries. A young boy,
he had no word for depression,
neither the 30’s, nor his own that would come later.
There was no such thing as not enough, only the wonder
of what you had, the house where so many relatives came
and went, his bed a couch, this bevy of siblings,
lovers and wives old as uncles and aunts,
being the youngest of twelve, the tag-a-long,
and always the next miracle they brought.
Like shotguns in the desert, Opal and Lloyd and brother Leslie
out in the Mohave, cooking eggs and bacon at dawn,
cocking their huge, long rifles loaded with shells--
hunting rabbit, hunting what you can still find when you’re young,
and your country’s young, and the war is still a ways off,
and the world’s a swirling dream you can shoot at
in the hugeness of sky and not worry
about a thing. Later,
those things would happen: accordion lost with its music;
shotguns emptied, buried in the basement; a war or two
working their way through onto Hollywood screen,
and you’d barely recognize anything--
what your life was to become, what it actually became,
the miracle that it is still somehow yours,
that you love it anyway—how you carry the violence
like a spent shell in your pocket to remember,
your ribs expanding and contracting
with each breath as though you are an instrument
life is still learning how to play.
**First appeared in Sycamore Review, chosen for Honorable Mention by Tony Hoagland
The Jeweled Net of Indra
Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology--
Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting
every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see
the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt,
hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean
for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold
their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking
pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble
when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war,
would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio
recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm
that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars
I send to rebuild a village—minted with the Rosicrucian-eye
above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders
as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls
that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it,
if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity
from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box
that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every
gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes
made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood
and iPod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future--
while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle
drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt
into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls
from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing
its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking
the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure
for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded
on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world
whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough
to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected
vision of it all off.
** First appeared in Poetry Flash, and, The SUN Magazine – chosen by Adrienne Rich as NWU Winning Poem
Dane Cervine lives in Santa Cruz, California, a small university town along the Monterey Bay coast just south of San Francisco. In addition to being a poet, Dane is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice, and Emeritus Chief of Children's Mental Health for the Santa Cruz County Mental Health & Substance Abuse Department. Dane is the father of two grown children--daughter Kelsey, who teaches AP History, and son Gabriel who is a spoken-word poet & activist. Dane's wife Linda, directs an internal consulting firm at the University of California, San Francisco.