King Grossman

 

 

THE NOTHING BEHIND HENRY MILLER LIBRARY’S OLD WOODEN FENCE

1.
Lost Boy, not from himself
or the expanse of brushstrokes,
I pray no longer waits
on an art satchel never sent;
one must be borne
with moveable hands & a starburst,
dissolve resistance into revolution;
the silk scarf around your neck vanishes;
spirit of Crazy Horse runs on bare feet
faster than buffalo ghosts
into the Santa Lucia mountains.

2.
Slip on a jade ring and Big Sur
supplicates your entire body;
Henry Miller at one hundred
opens the sky;
Guineveres everywhere
journey to his side;
the “essential task of love”
dancing along
glowingly ripe oranges,

which means Hieronymus Bosch
still can laugh
with a pale Jesus,
light iridescent
once you finally see it.

3.
On the tabletop sits
the seven deadly sins
gently nudged over cliffside
into Oceana.

4.
While redwoods sing
through a hole
in the forest,
chill of air quickens
the blood
into held hands
beneath a blanket,
and your feet tap out
a Mirah rhythm.

5.
For a season,
you count on
to quadrille,
back round
forever,
slip away
with birds of paradise
to your little cabin
built in seclusion;

now the wordless poet
writes like a feast,
stanzas of lentils and garlic
and saffron cauliflower
roasting in cast-iron skillets
over a spit.

6.
Down the road,
they shuttered
the nuclear plant
nine years into the future,
and gamma rays in tin cans
follow Ichabod home
in the dark of every night,
him envisioning
a massive earthquake;

you walk the thin line
of the horizon anyway,
drink the roar of the sea
like a blue rune,
naked yet fully clothed,
forgetting everything else
to remember for the first time
the grain of sand
in your shoe
is as lovely as
waves crashing
against the shoreline
at Monastery Beach.

7.
She snubs my boy,
and he has the devil
reaching her
so his dog may go homeless
while he travels,
and this must not be so;
give every mutt
much more than three squares
and a little bed to lie down on.

8.
If I’ve done my work at all well,
you may just hear
the whispery aria
of Robinson and Una
when they stole away
along the bramble-lined pathway
above craggy coastline;
most times, visitors came
to knock at their door—
that hand-painted note
on a small piece of driftwood
already strung
beneath the banger read:
“Gone after 4:00.”

 


King Grossman is a spiritual sojourner, social justice activist, nonviolent revolutionary, novelist, poet, and writer of short prose and a children’s story. He creates art for the mind and heart of the beholder to experience and be changed by, not ever in competition but a collaboration that he can only call divine; nevertheless, there’s the dominant culture’s way of it, and, his novel, Letters To Alice, indeed, received The Independent Press Award as the Distinguished Favorite in Visionary Fiction, was a Finalist for Literary Fiction in the National Indie Excellence Awards, received the Gold Medal for Inspirational/Visionary Fiction from the Global Ebook Awards, and won two Royal Dragonfly Book awards, for Literary Fiction and Cover Design. His poems and short prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Bear Review, Delmarva Review, The Round, Licking River Review, Crack the Spine, Forge, Tiger’s Eye, Burningword, Flights, The Ignatian, Drunk Monkeys, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, El Portal, Whistling Shade, and many others. He lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with his wife, Lisa, and sun conure parrot, Sunny.