Moody Nonsense: Redeux

Poem and Painting by Rick Mobbs


You all have read A MOODY LITTLE PIECE OF NONSENSE as written by Rick Mobbs, because that form is how it appears on his site, MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER. But his painting, his words, would not let things be, nor me--be, so I tweeked it, as I am prone to do, with Rick's permission, astonishment, and gratitude.

Moody Nonsense: Redeux

Water is the sound
of small boys
throwing stones
and chunks of iron
and old bones
into the ocean.
Water is the sound
of bones dissolving.
Water is a black sound.
Is there a blacker sound?

“Who goes there?”
asks the moon.
The moon had been
sleeping in the sun,
just the crescent
of its eye
is open.

“We do,”
say the neck bones.
“We do,”
say the vertebra
along the upper spine.
“We do,”
say the plates and blades
and sticks of bones,
the ligaments,
the balls and sockets
of the shoulders.

“Hold us up,”
they say to the moon.

“I can’t,”
the moon replies.
“Your strings are broken.”

The swish
and swirling chuckle
of the ocean
as it sucks
the marrow
from the bones
and grinds them down
and pulverizes them?

A distant sound,
like church bells ringing
from the sandy cones
of anthills.
A pure sound,
with tiny undertones
of gravity,
and rain approaching?

Rain through fig trees,
rain through broad leaves,
rain through palm trees,
rain through sand,
washing nutrients
from tired bones.

“What of our addition?”
say the old ones,
“Our subtraction?
Our multiplication?
Our division?”

“Your calculus is sand,
your sand is glass,
your glass is time,
your time is mine,”
the wind hisses
through teeth closed
against the rain.
”I am coming for you now.
Are you ready?
Get ready then.”

The old guys
hoot and cackle
so as the wind
removes
their arms and legs,
their livers
and at last,
their heads--
Without heads
they can’t remember
anything.

“Begin again,”
the moon suggests.
“Start with a rocking motion.
One starfish from the ocean,
two starfishes on the sand,
three turtles
and a house of glass,
an hourglass,
a box of time.
A zero moving in a stream.
A little thing.
A rose.
A rose is missing.”

“Where is my rose?”
I asked the moon.

I was with the other kids
tossing things into the ocean.
I had found a piece of bone.
Raised threads across
an etched surface.
Minute breaks and cracks,
star patterns.
One end sheared.
Inside were hidden chambers,
hollow rooms,
supporting columns.

I felt something.
The wind laughed.
I knew the moon
winked at the wind.
I chucked the thing
into the ocean
and heard the sound
a grain of sand makes
when it separates
and falls,
featherless
and mostly round,
through the hourglass
when the glass
is opening.

“Where is my Rose?”
I ask again.

The moon says
nothing;
it seems saddened.
The wind puts bow
to string
nd turns.
His audience
is the universe
that I am standing in.
I cover my ears
but I still hear
the sound.
Sad notes run down
the string
and I am crying.

“Why am I crying?”
I ask the moon.
“Your Rose,”
the moon prompts kindly.
“Hush,”
says the wind.
The wind
is always hushing
someone.

Now the scene has
changed.
The boys are gone.
Gone the ocean, beaches, sand.
Water is a black sound
where creation was.
Water is an opening
in the wind.
Water is a mindless thing.
The wind is endless repetition.
Water is oblivion,
my hearts longing.

“Chide me, then.”
I say to the wind.
“Say something.”

Willows weep around me
but they are water trees,
like cypress.
They were meant to weep
and go on weeping.

I can’t ask the moon
for answers.
The moon won’t answer
direct questions.
Focus
on the crashing breakers
and the star
above the sound.

“I want to know who you are.”
I say to the star.

It danced
with rose and amber
through horizons
layered without end,
mists--the final breath
of friends, enemies, lovers and companions.
Endless generations
and that single point
which burned so fine
an opening
through every one.
For a second
the dots connect
and then the mist rolls in
again.
I reach
and see my hand
dissolve.

“Dissolve the rest of me,”
I demand,
but the wind refuses
to hold coherent sound.
I have my thoughts,
my emotions.
I have my sense
of dread
and my well-honed sense
of longing.
I have air
but it will not carry
words.
I was upset.
It is so hard,
using prayers
when I want
to tear words
out of the sky.

Every new horizon
brings a concerto
of popping strings,
and each time
I return
I see my star
and I say,
“Come here,
come home to me.”

“I am home,”
the star sings.
“I light a world.
I can’t leave.”

“You are a coward”,
I whispered
into my tin can.
“You are not brave.
You should not
do this to me.”

She did not answer.
She did not leave,
she drew no closer,
nor did
the pattern of stars
around her
change.

“Leave them!”
I cried.
No answer.
I turned to the moon.
I explained my situation.
I said,
“No power here,
I have no power.”

“Neither you,
nor any other,”
said moon
to flower.

“And I don’t feel much
like a flower.”
“You are,”
the moon said.
“You are.”

Tell me,
how can I believe
I am a flower
when the life
I breathed for
is such a dim star,
so far away,
over so much water?

Rick Mobbs

***Gently rearranged by Glenn Buttkus