Poem For The Family

Painting and poetry by Rick Mobbs.
Linebreaks by Glenn Buttkus


Poem for the Family

What so deeply underlies our baseline conceptions
that fathom weights
turn in circles and loops,
like one who seeks hope in the ocean,
swimming in waters
far beyond waters we know?
What overarches our thinking
from such a far distance
we can only guess.
Maybe…. as above, so below?
What holds us here
like the unknown unseeable holds the mosaic total?

Father swings through the trees,
he wrestles crocodiles, white men, personal demons.
I see a small jewel -
green hills and blue ocean -
rotating inside the compass of heaven.
Fine silver threads
in circles and spirals,
fractured pinpoints of gold, ruby and emerald hang
in a canopy of velvet.
The absence of light
does not equal darkness,
sight shatters on far-away anvils
and leaves hammer shards,
finally silent.

Through transparent eyelids
I watch a sandstorm cover the sun.
Twilight rides not on light
but whips around from darkness,
a rude wind marshaling vast killing wings.
Between sight and knowing
are clear jelly curtains
and outside,
the mean blur of teeth.

The wind is an iron-framed plow;
a rusty, steaming, oil -flecked stallion
with shoes of blue steel,
throwing up sand,
clacking, spitting and clattering;
it is a torn accordion,
wheezing and whistling,
entropy compressed
and then tortured
through ripped leather fittings.

The wind hits the dunes
with cutting fists of diamond.
It is here that my mother nurses her husband.
She waits down the wind,
the triumph of darkness,
the blowing sand peeling skin,
carving bones.
The wind grinds the rocks down.
Mother swings Father onto the wind
and leaps on behind him.
She seizes a good night not to go

gentle in
and leans to the stallion’s ear hissing:
is this the worst you can do, evil thing?
A maniac riding a maniac wind,
heels hard in his ribcage,
fists in his mane,
holding a man who is dying.
She drives her heels in
and spurs the wind on,
into the well of souls
that they came from.
The wind sends it’s unrest,
it’s hornets and locusts
but nothing remains here
to kill or consume
except death,
and death is dying.
Time has unrolled

to its end
over nothing
and no new myth comes.
No milk streams through space
from her breasts,
no planets or galaxies spring
from her forehead or anus
and he’s just crazy,
with crazy thoughts, like:
the son beside the elephant is so small,
yet the elephant obeys him.
Higher now than she has ever been,
she holds her husband
through the driest time.
The black wings of another wind
sweep down around them.

The ground vanishes
and turns upside down.
The stars take their place
in the sand.
Silence and stillness
replace sound and movement
and now the unteaching,
in earnest,
begins.

Rick Mobbs

Rick said last night: I wrote this poem when my father was dying. I am posting it now because it came to mind as I was thinking about the recent passing of my friend, Marcia Ryder.

I said early this morning: Death swirls around me at this moment. We had to put our 15 year old Taffy down last night, she of the cocker ears and shelty coat, she of the beautiful face and adoring eyes, she who has become lame and deaf and disease-ridden, she who needed to take the long nap, to awaken somewhere warm, somewhere without pain, full of brightness and cheerful sounds of children, of other dogs, of birds. We held her head as she drifted off to eternity, and placed it gently on the floor. She never made a sound, not even a whimper. Somehow she knew it was her time. God bless the animals who love us unconditionally.

Glenn Buttkus