Greed Suite

This cycle of poems looks at greed from a number of sides. Does it exist? Has it been seen? Where is it?

The Statue of Greed

A statue of greed, if it could be made,
Might be of a fisherman, when the fish are
Biting, after the second and third have come in,
Or the seventh is on the line.

It could be of the fisherman at the pier,
Looking for takers, the village that might redeem
His insane catch as an act of Providence.

A statue of greed would have a human face
Of glee, the boy who has scored a hat-trick,
The girl with three boyfriends, or just the old
Man with three gloves, none of which match.

John Sevcik

What is Beyond Greed?

If greed is an addiction, what is success?
After success comes greed. Or come before?
Is the present-day economic system founded on addiction, conformity, or the sense of insurance? Assurance? Perhaps all. Fictions function as conduits for money. Write your business plan. If it makes a movie, all the better. Numbers don’t lie.
The numb move en masse. Greed is another’s problem, not mine.
There is a vortex in the sun. Other stars, too.
Stars earn more than their keep. In the keep of their un-use.
I would like to buy and sell, what to sell? Sell-out.
The position of everything is worth, even not recognized.
How is this perception of recognition? How is it to open
its eyes? Nothing can shock, if only a movie.
We are standing in front of the television.
Both sides. The mirror is wide-screen, high definition.
Nothing of truth seems to matter with those tattoos on the screen,
tattoos on the skin, the Dow Jones, the Davy Jones, the Jones’n.
Low-high, high-low. To the woodshed we go.
Something doesn’t believe we are in this jam.
Winning is forward to fail. Flail if you must.
Somebody serve the few. Everybody. Make yourselves useless.
Scurry out of the way. The giant is near and the mouse must away.
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-away.

John Sevcik

Greed:

Psychotic God of gold abound with me,
Inspire me to plant my Lobby fees
Behind the doors of power in the vestibules of war;
High five hundred billion dollars overtime my palms;
Cross me with the crucifix of no reform;
Believe in me and not the others who must pay;
By death and killing mutilate their souls;
By poverty arrange their apathy and vote-less No.
I am for the rush of everything turning into my
Possession, into me, replacing me,
Into the vacuum of the universe blown up
So long ago and lonely and so filled with dark
It absorbs the lightness of absurdity and woe.

John Sevcik

Mendicant Blues:

Emolumental truths align against me, envious
And disturbing as I’m driven, in my window-tinted car,
My jet of private overflight, my private stateroom,
And my private glee. No one to associate with,
Except to scorn from my own height of heights.
Buddha of the broken marriage, Buddha deadbeat-dad,
I pray you be the Buddha of banking nirvana.
Fiscally sound, middle-brow mendicant-lite popularizer
Of enlightenment and compassion: Feel sorry for me,
Until I begin to feel it, too, and then in a universalizing
Instant, feel the same for every one of you. Instead of greed,
I read the truth of each of you, needing more than me,
Needing while I while away my time at the mill of money
You can’t have. Oh, how I feel above the common need.
Needing only to feel and be felt about, I need community
Of spirit, and not only property. How much does compassion cost?
“Everything they own,” the Buddha whispers in my ear.
“And if they own nothing, it is free.”
Freedom is in the spending of everything,
The granting of everything, the everything of life.
I have made the masses free. I am the robber Buddha.
I am their enlightenment from greed.

John Sevcik

The Beggar’s Sonata:

If you support me in my 501(c)3 non-profit tax bracket,
And I come on-air to interrupt your favorite underwritten shows,
Can’t you see compassion in my eyes for you alone?
I am executive so as not to offend you with rags. Square
In the square of public opinion. Please let me have pennies,
Or if you want this mug, and tote-bag, and a handsome calendar,
AND a DVD of this show, all for 29.95, you can help underwrite
With your compassion my compassion, and all I care about is you,
Even though I again make a nice six-figure salary, it is begging
That is earning, all of us begging and earning. This is the truth,
Whomsoever we serve the opportunity for compassionate giving.

John Sevcik

And So, What Is Greed, After All?

When we die we are rich and then poor, or is it
Poor and then rich? When we are no more, we can’t take it
With us, yet some did, in their pyramids of wealth, and yet,
Power stayed behind on earth and went to others, so what is
Wealth, or the feeling of greed that has it, or wants it, or goads
One to get it? Over and out. Candles at the dinner table go out
Once the meal is feasted in their golden light. Away
It goes and what is left behind is grief – before or because of,
It doesn’t matter. Grief is neurotic that way, as crying at weddings
Shows the grief of waiting, or losing, or mistaken choices, or what?
Back to the story of greed and why it forgets to become immortal.
It is because anyone paying attention to it will probably not have
A better idea for anything else. It keeps one busy with nothing that lasts.
The telephone wasn’t discovered for greed, nor the wheel, nor the car,
Though fortunes were certainly made at some point, by someone.
Greed, simply put, is boring.

John Sevcik

Imagination

Envy imagines greed.
Greed imagines envy.
Together they tie the world in knots of injustice.
This injustice is both real and imagined.
Thinking a free thought, you can escape it,
Even invent your place in the sun.
May you have good visions.

John Sevcik

Thanks to a past art teacher

This is a poem about an old instructor of ours at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He was a remarkable and wonderful painter. Mr. Remenick often comes up in conversations among his past students. We remember his humanity and teaching with fondness.

And Then, Seymour Remenick

And then he wandered through the Louvre
Putting out a cigarette in Paul DuSold’s studio
And then lighting another, and then remembering
Walking up to a Rembrandt and wanting to know
How the other did it; how did he make those paintings
Like pure feelings and humanity fused?
And then he had also gone to the Academie
Des Beaux-Arts on the GI Bill
Right after his unit’s demobilization in Europe,
And then he told me in my studio
Of how he wouldn’t go to classes, only walk
In Paris in Spring and in Summer and Autumn
And in the Louvre, and then he would inhale
As he did then, to pull life into him,
Its very life and spirit, he would intoxicate
Himself and need a cigarette, and then
He would light another. We weighed crits
By the empty shells of Lucky Strikes
He left in a row, from the bandolier of pleasure,
And then Paul thought of Seymour in an American uniform
Getting girls in Paris, and I didn’t think so,
And then I said he was one of the soldiers
Eisenhower sent through Birkenwald or Auschwitz
To witness and remember, and then Seymour
Only told most of us of living, and then living,
And then painting the living of that time he paints
And notices, with the rapture of the world of the living,
Living even more, perhaps, for those refused their lives.

John Sevcik

How Is the Eye to See?

How is the eye to see, or hand to move,
Charcoal burning into what is mind
As cave painters long ago brushed
The ends of their lit torches into line?
How does the hand walk into the eye,
Talk to the ear, dance for the heart?
What is the timing of pure art?

In academies, since the Renaissance,
Refining measures were the near objective,
Discovery of nature further on.
Later in Rococo time, how was the prim
To be addressed, or the melancholy,
Or how to draw the person who has flown
By psyche to another place and time?

Or after Realism and Courbet,
Renoir, Eakins and Monet?
First the masses: how to weigh
Their slim recumbency, or say
How is the model older this week –
Can you tell? – or younger to an Age
You will not know? And how to draw
The blithe completeness of her form
In times both analytic and assured?

Along with central heating, and
Fluorescent lights
Skin is not pallor, only temperature.
So much about us medicine
And ill, we have to draw beyond,
Or long ago. Empirically we know,
Subjectively we draw – though how we think
Is too much only us.

To feel the other standing in a space,
Waiting to be seen and understood,
Remains a vestibule of intimates;
How the vulnerable model charms
By her quiet surprise of grace –
These are some infinities of space.

John Sevcik

Nobility and Civilization

Two poems concerning civilization and the notion of self-sacrifice, which forest and human communities rely on for their furtherance.

The Nobility of Trees

The nobility of trees
Is something we imagine,
If they were us. We think
Their stillness order and their stands
An army at attention;
Or, in the breeze their costumes
Turn to skirts, or summer dresses;
Or the forelock of a bough
Seems the happiness of gentle play;
Or, if they green through snow, immortal,
Or if they shed their glory unto death’s
Brief sleep, or if they show their limbs
And fingers raising up the sky like host,
Or if they cast a shadow in the heat,
Or loom above as living monuments,
Or hide us in our childhood climbings
As the nesting birds,
Or if they wait for miles along the road,
Boring to us in their endless sloth
Of vegetation milling out the air,
And we forget them long enough:
If this were not enough and they
Some spark of revolution find,
They set the air to burning with their hair
And standing still advance upon our homes
Breathing into one combusted sun
Their stolen joists and timbers,
Plywood, pulp and paper, trim and molding,
Into one consumption with our books
And curling even photographs for fuel
Implode in great cremations
Like a war for oxygen,
Which it inhales
After all its giving out of human breath.
How we, surprised, proceed
Through its charred expanse,
The cinders and the spokes of its nobility
A ruin as magnificent as Rome.
So to this we turn in our great stillness,
In our life, our sweetness and the rage
That settles everything by sacrificing all.
The nobility of trees
Imagines us.

John Sevcik


Civilization

We, the custodians of nature,
Who weave together parts of her,
Elaborating on her fragile arts
The aquaduct, the cloverleaf,
The spires of St-Michel;

We, who found our natures hers,
Who gardened patterns on the lawn,
Who studied deer and planned our jousts,
Who livened life by costumage and plume,
And heraldry and shield and home;

We, whom the carapace and fort defend
In our most magical prayers
Of love and service and our brotherhood;
We, who entrusted trust,
We road-builders on the errand of trade,

Who met across the oceans on the winds,
Who made our own, our order and our graves;
We who kept to tenderness our own
And fought to raise a temple to the light
Of inspiration, courage and God-dread;

Who feared the acts and rages of blind chance
And on the marbled palace floor
Inlaid our fragmentary and mosaic sense
Of a room fenced off by waves,
A trance of blue, and dolphins

At the center, in the happiness of play;
And from the yards of plenty there returns
A nature so transfigured by our own
That we and nature clearly do embraid
The trellis and wisteria,

The painter and the subject,
The farmer’s arm inside the apple tree,
And the round, sweet fruit
They both know and hold.

John Sevcik

Eternal Truth

Part I

Lost, as under a heavy sea,
We glide, aware of others in the dark.

The platform to a train is like a reef,
And noise – and noise of steel
Resounds from subways, as if man
Were being mined from darker depths,
Deeper still than oceans. We go down in them;
And up in space we boil ourselves away.

And all these things, transparent and opaque
To eye and ear, to hand, to heart, to sense.


Part II

I was born in Brag, New Jersey.

Wait.

Held twenty lines of red-eye
To the forehead of a muse.

Wait.

She had a fever
And she could not speak.

Wait.

Patience, counseled she,
And

Wait.

When I am ready I shall write
Again.

Wait.


Part III

Breath is consonant to voice –
Invisible word.
Breath speaks nothing,
Yet says all.

Wait.

Before the kiss, the breath.
After one’s first cry.
The breath.

Wait.

After everything is over
Heaves and falls
The breath.

Wait.

It is absent.
It is found in spring.

Wait.

In summer’s breeze
I take the pulse
Of breath.
I lay to rest.
Breath as of ocean
Salt.
Breath as of lilacs
Sweet.

(Wait.)

Wait that you hear me,
Soft on your ear.


Part IV

Longing is like billiards.
A bet rides on it.
Someone bumps into you;
Somewhere you are touching.

Why are they like that – the gods?
They poke at us with sticks;
They know how we reflect
Across the village green.
Chance to us, design to them.
And then dispensed of into dust,
In rattling boards,
In silent pews.

Longing is the bet I have,
Strong enough to bend the world,
To bleed the cow as white of milk,
As I shall be bled white as snow.
And for the bones that wheel and click
Down some long eternal row
I have their promise they shall raise
The whole lot up to live again:
Longing unto, after, death,
Like billiards,
Like an unpaid debt.

The velvet green as though brand new
Waits for children fresh from school.
For what I wait, they wait anew.
Eternal truth eternity renews.


John Sevcik

Love

Snow doesn’t cover it,
Nor water, nor the land masses,
Nor half the world in sunlight, half in night.
It isn’t rumbling by in the great wagon of stars,
Nor singing in the birds’ throats when it’s warm
And they can sing. Nothing ails it
When the world’s a plague,
Nor is it poor, it just doesn’t have money.
It is the thing that chooses what will happen,
Of who with whom will spend the sweetest hours,
And weave a store of memories together,
All the better for their lucky struggle.
Neither news nor poems cover it, nor books,
Nor dancing, or the movies, or a children’s tale.
It isn’t sayable, like joy and gravity,
Like holding together when the world holds apart.
Only it can hold the sweet regard we seek
And satisfy us in the prospect of demise.

John Sevcik

The Neighboring State

Today Vermont came to visit.
Sometime in the morning, when all was dark,
it took over from Maine, which was here
yesterday afternoon. Today I think
of going into the village for a cider or hot soup,
of sitting with friends in flannel coats
who know the woods and when the maple
gives, and have a friendship with the world
around a stove. I would go there today,
if only I had gone before. They do not know me
in the village; I do not know the village.
And yet it visits in the cold its warmth
of cloud, its humid gray of snow.
Tomorrow maybe Maryland will come,
with secret lore of clamming and of crabs.
I will adjust my sail to dream of that.
Wandering is what the weather maps.

John Sevcik