Thursday, June 21, 2012

Blame the Sun: an Ode


Oh, Sun, you fickle star,
Not even star, but coin of gold-shine,
Now near, now far,
A season-maker as you climb the sky,
Or drop Dow-Jones-like
Into your depression.
What’s with you, Sun?
Van Gogh and you:
Who else likes to stare
So wildly at the world?
Give me an intensity break.
Soft, and pray you:
Meditate and find
The moderate path.
Not everyone has air conditioning,
Or heat when you’re
Philandering at night.
Where’s your mom
In all of this?
I mean, God –
Who do you think
You are?

John Sevcik

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

There Is News of the World to Tell


Kind Voices in Evening Light

January 6, 52°, evening in my front yard garden
Looks down the hill of Wingohocking Terrace,
A good place to plant terrace,
According to its native pre-Columbian namers,
And I am hoeing a row for winter arugula, the ground soft
And dark, under the waning blue glow of the sky, in the
Shadow of a rising waxing gibbous, when up the hill
Climb two figures, one in the roadway, one on our sidewalk,
Who calls “Hello, John” in a kind voice – my neighbor Olivia,
A young grandmother, who leans over the fence and asks
Whether I am turning the soil over to help it fallow,
And I explain my purpose, and she goes in like starlight
Passing by through trees as one passes,
And after a while, as I dig, and sprinkle out the tiny seeds
From husk envelopes that look like tiny, crisp, pale bananas,
I hear “Hey, John” from the downhill side, closer, as Nate, Jr.,
Rises up his steps across his yard to home, even talking on
A cell phone, and these kind voices that know my name,
Even in the shade of a warm, winter evening, and whose names
I can feel as well in that situational way,
In that sensing of the voice and its timbre,
And the kindness of it neighbor to my heart. Then
I go out back and cry at the moon’s sweet light, and how
It reminds me also of my old mother’s hair, as did
The bunch of Queen Anne’s lace that leaned over our table
And sat with us for a few meals after she died, and which I
Stroked as kindly as her hair, thinking it was her
In another form, the form of soft soul kindness, as are these,
My neighbors, still with me.

John Sevcik


Happy Birthday Morning

There is news of the world to tell, at 6:00 a.m.,
After wind has lashed the rain against the house for hours
And the moon looks out at last through torn clouds,
The silence raising me from sleep alongside you,
To find why this silence, why the stillness of the dark?
I enter your studio and watch at the windows
How street lights pour their apricot hue
On your unfinished art,
And the finished pieces,
And how blue the moonlit clouds are above,
And how yellow the all-night living room lamp is at Karma’s,
When one car nudges darkly down the road,
Looking for a parking space,
Backs up the hill with reverse lights gleaming. Then a train
Passes though the yard space next to Mr. Boyd’s,
Gleaming green windows like the frequency of an oarfish,
Then slows on the line of Wingohocking Station to a rest.
The black auto tries another impossible space, comes to rest
Tight next to the parked cars below Carina’s.
Its amber emergency lights begin a silent alarm,
Be careful, be careful, don’t hit us,
And a figure unfolds from the door,
Circles behind the trunk, opens the back door, raises
Something invisible and climbs the stairs
Toward a porch light colder than the moon,
Cold as a refrigerator light, and it appears
To be a mother delivering her child in a blanket,
To a nanny, or relative,
In the midst of sleep, while the car waits warning, warning,
In the lonely, silent street.
The high moon looks down from the heavens.
The quiet street waits with the flashing car. The sky
Moans a low note of wind somewhere just above our roofs,
But careful not to ruffle a hair in the street,
Nor wake rudely a little person left
and looked back toward, as the mother
Descends to the waiting car, turns,
And waves goodbye to someone
In the window or door, in the hesitating guise of someone
Sweetly missing already the one borne into the world,
Before driving on. The car calms its lights, just once
Shining red at the corner, like two partners, two hearts.

John Sevcik

Monday, January 23, 2012

The solidarity of freedom

In Chinatown, once Little Italy,
Until Marco Polo brought all things foreign
To New York City, I had on its periphery,
Say, Lower Anatolia, an unfurnished
Apartment share with some other editors, actors, and writers,
Not quite a cold-water flat, just a refrigerator (empty)
And a mattress I dragged in off the street
And a pillow I bought and carried across the Village
In winter or something cold like that
And barren – well, the sun wasn’t near.
There were roaches that ran on the lips,
Wide-awake noticing of hurried shapes
Darting, horrid self-slapping, un-sleep.
Follow that without dawn like February,
Cloudy and dark like Dr. Zhivago
During the Revolution, and no palace
Or snow in sunlight, but I was
Hungry and cold and found
A hovel of a Chinese restaurant:
One small room filled with men
In Red Chinese uniforms, slate gray,
Cold, huddling round the few
Connected tables in Amish seating,
In other words, arranged regardless of
Group, one group, all of us having soup.
I settled into one bench, accepted
Without glance or comment, between
Small men whose bodies held their
Warmth on either side to me, and I
To them, and as I hunched closer to the
Leveling table we shared, I felt myself
Resorting to that Peasant memory my father
Transmitted into me from long ago in Europe,
Even as I ate with hurried relish
In the steam of our mingling breath,
It felt like some painting of suffering,
Though all around me there was more
Of it than mine, and more comfort
Because we were all there was of it, together.
For this I thank all of China,
Marco Polo, and the Revolution,
Including mine, in my green Army coat,
And my father, who climbed
From scholarship to engineer, then married
My mother, a landowner and landowner’s daughter,
Then dispossessed by Communists
As these lunch companions in my circle
Perhaps lost their own farm, or freedom,
To the want of history and its resentments.

John Sevcik

Monday, December 19, 2011

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

Saturday, December 17, 2011

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

Friday, December 2, 2011

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

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

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