SELECTED POETRY

by
John Vander

A BLAZE OF GLORY

Outside the hospital, the autumn leaves
were going out in a blaze of glory,
bursts of searing yellow
against the cloudless sky;
something to do, they said,
with the fine summer -
all of that sunshine stored up in a colour.

The Old Man was in ward seven,
'the liver ward'.
The people there were yellow too;
but not a good yellow like the leaves;
these were alcoholics, junkies, cancer patients,
all of them reaping the sad rewards
of bad habit,
and of even worse luck.

When we got there he was propped up in bed.
He was scared; I could see it in his eyes.
I didn't blame him;
they had stuck him with the big needle,
and now he was waiting -
waiting to find out
if he was going to die.

When we were young he would come home drunk.
Death, he would say, is inevitable.
It was just another one of his catch phrases,
Like I've never said a wrong word in my life,
or Goodnight and fuck you all,
and it would make us laugh -
me and my bothers and sisters.
But it was true, of course.

He made it through the next year
and died the following February,
on a beautiful Sunday morning
with sunlight coming in through the window.
No glory here.
Unless maybe there is some glory
in the end of pain,
and in the love stored up in a son's heart.

© John Vander

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THE CAROUSEL

Revolving each day
by the walls of the town,
its wooden horses bobbing
in slow time
to grinding waltzes,
it was a relic of summer,
miraculous still as the year grew old
and the tourists fell away like leaves.
When the sun went down
its lights came out like stars,
bright constellations
blazing in circles
while happy children laughed,
safe under the sign of the tea-cup
and the nodding donkey.

Janey and I worked as watchmen.
Shepherding our dumb charges
through the dark hours,
we sat each night on a bench
by the ticket hut
and drank and sang songs
as the giant September winds
sent clouds galloping over the rooftops
and the sleeping towers.

Sometimes we made love,
and once I chased her, naked,
to the fountain by the city gate.

Will you always love me?
She asked me then,
Even when I'm old and grey?
Promise that you'll love me, love,
that you'll never go away.

So I promised I would stay with her,
and beside us the water murmured
and whispered its approval.
But the world is stronger than promises,
stronger even than love;
dreams spun upon the turning years unwind,
and hearts get broken on the wheel.
And fate?
Fate is just a fancy word for whatever comes to pass.

© John Vander

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A SERENADE

Once on a street in southern France
I sang a serenade,
strumming away on an old guitar,
accompanied by crickets
and by moths who beat their heads
against a nearby lamp.

Only maybe 'serenade'
gives the wrong idea,
because the words I sang
were not of love
but of lost love,
and they flew from my lips
like panicked birds
startled by the sound of their own meaning.

The girl did not appear,
and when the song was done,
I walked alone across the old bridge
and looked up at the night sky and thought:
The moon is a dead flower
pressed between the weight of days,
and on those days is written
the sad story of my own life.

But in the place Gambetta
I stood by Bringer's bust
and his murdered ghost spoke to me and said:

To shave their heads was not enough,
these women who gave
their good French cunts
to the invader while their men
were hunted like beasts
and tortured in the cells of the Gestapo.

And with these words in my ears
I shouldered my guitar
and marched on into the night.


(Jean Bringer was a leader of the French Resistance in World War II. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1944.)

© John Vander

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EINSTEIN AND THE GNOSTICS

The Manicheans believed
that the world is hell,
an evil place
where fragments of holy light
are trapped in matter
like bright pearls
sunk in a dark ocean,
awaiting liberation
through purification.

Einstein believed
that the atom could be split,
and that the energy released
would be directly related
to mass and the speed of light,
that huge amounts of power
could be set free
by destroying tiny amounts of matter.

In 1945 a nuclear device
was detonated over the Japanese
town of Hiroshima.
In the resultant explosion
0.6 grams of matter
were converted to energy
and tens of thousands of people
were instantly burned alive.

Was it holy light that reduced them to shadows?

It's difficult to say.
But the Manicheans were definitely
right about one thing:
this world can be one hellish fucking place.

© John Vander

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THIS DEATH THING

I don't like it at all, this death thing,
this never eating or sleeping
or drinking of fucking again thing.
I mean, no more ham and eggs?
No more sweet dreams in soft linen?
No more cold beer on a warm evening?
No more sticking your stiff cock
into the soft belly of a woman?

I've heard it said that death is part of life,
but that's only true for the living.
Death is not part of life;
it's something outside of life.
In fact it's not even something. It's nothing.

It scares the shit out of me,
and no sculpted wreath of words will ever console me.

© John Vander

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VAN GOGH'S VINEYARD

We had been working all morning:
snipping off the grapes,
dropping them into buckets,
following rows till we reached the end,
moving to new rows, starting back again.

Not long before lunch
we walked to a hill high above the village.
There was a field there
where special fruit grew.
Work slowly and gently,
the farmer's son said in French.

To work slowly was a blessing.

The vines were small
and delicate,
their roots dark
and gnarled as the hands
of ancient peasants.
The leaves were
saffron coloured,
intricately veined.
In their midst,
the grapes hung
in purple clusters.

I worked for a while
then straightened up
and looked around me:
a rolling landscape
ribbed with emerald,
smudged with
black conifers,
a sky of perfect blue
where banks of cloud
hung in a frozen
avalanche of silver.

I picked some grapes,
put them into my mouth
and chewed until
the sweet flesh was gone
and all that remained
were the seeds
and the dry and bitter skin.

I swallowed everything.

© John Vander

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A DISAPPOINTMENT

How hard it must have been for you
to watch your hopes for me dissolve,
to see my bright potential tarnish
like an unfilled silver cup,
how hard to watch your lord of days
yield to every moment's passing,
your captain of the wine-dark seas
shipwrecked in a glass.

Like I say,
all of this must have been hard,
so hard that, in the end,
it must have been easy enough to walk away.

© John Vander

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