Four for Mario

photo: ralph murre

Four for Mario

by Karl Elder

I.

Suddenly a poem seems dumb.

Maybe like you I’d rather perform:

I rehearsed a week to tell my son

of your death.  I learned by heart

how not to speak, to trust my tongue.

He waited till I was done.

He stared at me across the room

as I cradled my younger one.

He loves you, he said.

Even dead.

II.

The pictures didn’t turn out,

Though I can picture each frame:

Seth, your understudy, your “main

man” in your lap.

What a team of dreamers!

If only we had a script, you said,

there’d be money enough to keep him in Underoos

and us in booze

till hell froze over.

III.

It’s been a bitter winter.

We play the planet Hoth.

Seth is Luke, I’m Vader.

Once through my mask

I heard hint of your voice,

and once, stung by a gust,

I spun, sensing your form, your shadow

near snow packed high by the plows,

iced all over, glistening

like a huge granite boulder.

IV.

A man enters the shadow of rock

and the shadows are one.

Black is our shadow on the moon,

the shadow of earth,

which is the shadow of rock.

Black, which is the color

of every man’s shadow.

Black am I there who here am white.

Black like my brother,

you, who called me Brother.

~ previously published in A Man in Pieces (Prickly Pear Press)

A Life

artwork: ralph murre

A Life

by Karl Elder

With both hands a small boy holds a ball of string so big it

doesn’t occur to him there are two ends, so far from him is the

center.  It is only after the string is tied to the kite, the ball growing

smaller—yet, with each glance, more vivid—that he can predict

a beginning, the nothing the sphere is wound around.

So it is that somewhere between boy and man he is made

to understand that the atom, too, is hollow, and therefore the

universe.  He comes to see that this is how his life will go, that

the string, unwinding so fast, which at the very last he was unable

to hold, had nothing to do with a beginning or an end, but—like

the makings of the sphere—everything to do with both.

~ previously published in Wisconsin Poetry Transactions

An Idea of Happiness

An Idea of Happiness

by Karl Elder

           Clear horizon; no clouds; no shadows; nothing.

                                                        —Alfred Hitchcock

It starts off innocent as hell.

You’re in a mall shopping for a razor

when in the bottom right corner

of a plate glass window

the transparent reflection

of a distant profile

steps into the picture.

The protruding abdomen and lower lip

are reminiscent maybe

of a Picasso line drawing

which causes you to turn

to find the man has disappeared.

You turn back and find

the phantom has disappeared.

Wind chimes across the way

play a melodramatic theme.

Now you are nervous and handle your pipe

the way you might wield a revolver.

There is the little girl who saw it all,

the one you’ve got by the collar

while her mother mumbles,

“For goodness sake let her go.”

You don’t know what’s come over you;

you’re truly sorry, you didn’t mean it,

it wasn’t entirely your idea,

and you tell her so.

Next thing you know you’re running;

your lungs are tattered sponges;

your heart is hitting its head against a wall.

From the beginning

you’ve been looking over your shoulder.

You take steps two at a time

weaving among these zombies

on an endless escalator.

Once you pass, their arms rise like a somnambulist’s,

their forefingers point in your direction.

Your scent is on the air.

The hordes are gathering at the bottom stair

and coming up.

They want satisfaction.

You turn on them.

They’re taken aback

and growl and scrap among themselves

for shreds of your leather jacket

you have shed in a brilliant diversionary tactic.

Your mind is a lens

which slowly ascends above it all,

through the skylight, past the low

overhanging clouds, while the scene

recedes, the city shrinks,

the continent grows small—

all contracts into a blue

and slightly oblong ball

falling into a wall-less well.

It is the inaudible plop

of the little girl’s penny in water

which echoes

your idea of happiness.

~ first published in the Cottonwood Review.  

(Sciophobia)

artwork: ralph murre

(Sciophobia)

by Karl Elder

Ha, shade!  Euphemism for

shadow, part of the dark

dank tunnel you’ve traveled

since your boyhood room where

the mirror might as well’ve

faced the wall,

so awful it was

to look upon glass

that seemed, like Dracula’s,

unable to reflect.  There

a shadow lurked in the shadows

cast by the streetlight

a B∙B shot out

every other night

that time you felt mean,

man, real mean−

the very same shadow

you lie on now

like the ghost of somebody else

in this two-bit rented room

in the cool of an awning

where you are bored,

boy, bored beyond yawning,

having been tailed,

targeted from the beginning

victim of nothing,

your self the weapon

of its would-be assassin.

~ previously published in Phobophobia (Prickly Pear Press)

MY MORTALITY

artwork: ralph murre

My Mortality
by Karl Elder

I see where the mean (meaning average)
American adult sits ten years
in front of a TV set. I subtract
from the remainder a pack-a-day
habit, a quarter-century of sleep,
several months more for drunkenness,
and figure I’d better make this quick:

Like a cricket, the refrigerator
motor’s fan belt has sung off and on
way into dawn. My thought, which now—if it
chose—might focus upon the light, is
frozen instead on how wrong (or right all
along) has been the theory of my
own mortality. I sniffle and

pout. I wring a dry Kleenex out. I learn
a drop of sorrow cannot quench grief’s
thirst; it’s merely the mind’s means of bleeding
to cleanse the wound, reminding me of
the worst: the hurt’s solely self-inflicted.
But I’m still alive. This being that is
perception fusing memory to

the moment: “It’s my life,” the song says; I
own it, but I can’t quite con the heart
into it—a notion of dominion
as crazy as erecting a flag
in a river—splash—and for an instant
(a flash of insight sweeping me with
the current) I watch an imagined,

mute, and evaporating reflection
progressively reveal the real me,
a fine residue of brine remaining.
It hits me where I live: my life’s not
mine, but in earth’s bloodstream a soluble
clot. So I feed me another line—
“Art’s immortality’s only means”—

and stand at the vanity, my Pentax
in hand. I nearly trip the shutter,
but it dawns on me that such a portrait
is only an inverted version.
What about reality? Would the old
masters use pairs of mirrors? I give
up. I render myself in the one

mode I claim to know; I write of Washoe
the chimp, her use of Ameslan to
name herself in the glass. (And I once felt
since Man alone spoke to integrate
thought, we were in fact more angel than ape!)
There; I’ve got it. Perfect! Now—how to
preserve it? Ink will fade, the paper

dissolve; even stone disappears in the
end—there’s no vacuum secure enough
to endure The Great Duration. Yet—
though not the parts, their sum might still be
seen—unobstructed light, a spark touched to
the future’s taut and unending fuse.
I dream, having ignited that beam.

~ first published in Mississippi Valley Review
and subsequently in The Celibate (Prickly Pear Press)