Nine Poems by Dick Westheimer

The Plane Tree

There was nothing much to distinguish the single tree
which stood like a trim little sycamore dressed in olive drab.
Now alone in the park, its sisters lay nearby, their limbs crabbed
as if felled by firing squad, each bleeding sawdust at its feet.

An woman in a housecoat wrapped her arms around
the survivor, held it as she would a child to protect
it from men in slick suits, red ties knotted at their necks.
But these princes who always get their way had aroused

a mighty She who would not relent, held tight
until a judge, like Solomon, decreed: The Tree
Will live.      Somewhere else.      The bourgeoisie
will pay to get their way. If the tree could reply

it would be with a heartwood wail, like a refugee whose
roots torn loose scrabble in a distant place, alone, dispossessed.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

What is the name of that moon she says
it is called ‘the moon’ he says
no I mean its name - what is it called?
waning gibbous he says and soon it will the third quarter and then
     waning crescent. But you know even then, when it appears smallest,
     the moon is half illuminated.
Oh, she says. I thought it might have a name - something like
     ‘the Mama Moon’ – pregnant, swelling at the belly. And see
      how she gazes back, over her shoulder at the sun, rising –
     as if she awaits the day.
One should never look directly into the sun, he says, except
     during a total eclipse – right at the moment of totality
     when you can see the luminous corona – which is always there but lost
     in the sun’s brilliant radiance.
Last week, she says, there was a beautiful full moon,
     the ‘Strawberry Moon,’ I heard it called, the smallest, sweetest moon...
It was at apogee, he says, when it is farthest away...
And near it, she says, as it rose, was the brightest star I'd ever seen,
     enchanting in the evening sky.
‘Venus,’ he says. You've seen it before. And it is a planet not a star.
     And like the moon, it has phases. It seems inconstant as seen from here,
     but it too is always half illuminated.
His hand in hers, they drift home. He scuffs at stones
     surfaced on their packed gravel lane. They enter from the rising day
     to the kitchen smelling of chamomile and fry butter.
She looks to the calendar, checks her watch, sees the day before her. His gaze
     is caught by the luminous skin at her neckline, her strawberry lips,
     her full moon hips, her hair brushing her shoulder. He sighs inside:
     you are the sun the moon and the stars.

Becoming Native to this Place
               (For Debbie)

I handed her a box, crude built
of wood scraps. In it, I’d placed rocks
found down in the creek bed, one polished,
one sharp-edged, a slice of shale, fragile.
Another – a worn, gray granite stone
layered tight with bands settled
together a billion years ago.

​Marry me. Marry this place, I said.
I already have, she replied. And we
set to ordering seed for the next
year’s garden.

The Unbearable Seduction of Flowing Lava

​On the island of La Palma
where the mountain erupts,
rock flows from the mouth
of the earth – red, raw, a lure
of hope, a burning promise
that beneath our feet
a new world waits
to be formed and we
of the brittle-thin
here and now are witness
to its beginning.

My Small Daughter Quiets the Storm

...a great and strong wind tore the mountains ... but the Lord was not in the wind... after
the wind, an earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in these.
And after the fire the sound of a still small voice...
                                                                    from 1 Kings 19:10-13

I stood astride you like a lion over prey
glowered down and growled (about something lost to memory),
me, angry over some ordinary injury that
seven year-olds and their harried parents feel–

and you, through you tears, terror really,
looked up at menacing me, spit words at me
that hit like bricks: “Would you do this if your friends
were watching?” and, of course, I would not.

Your fierceness saved you, raised me from waving
my rage like some flag of fatherhood, made me
determined to nurture your courage – you, already an alchemist of hope
transmuting anger into change – me grieving all the more
​
for those other parents deafened by the clanger of pain they’ve carried,
who cannot be stilled by the small voice calling up to them
through the raging ire, who succumb to the earthquake, the wind, the fire–
who beat and banish the blossoming prophets given to them.

Implicating You in the Crime of the Last Half Eon

Did you know that bleeding
horseshoe crabs is a thing,
that half-a-million a year
are captured on racks,
strapped in by black bungees
as their milky-blue blood is
drained from them, that this
is no abstraction like love or
antiquity, that these creatures
lived before plants began on land,
before Gondwana met Pangaea,
before the five great extinctions,
(which were not abstractions)
and now we scrape them from
the sea for a liquid more dear
than mercury or Chanel No. 5
(which I read was the only thing
Marilyn Monroe wore to bed,
which led JFK to abandon
Camelot) and that Jesus had
5 scars and Moses 5 books
and Coco Chanel thought
women shouldn't smell like
flowers, that they should smell like
women, which is an abstraction,
or like laundry - which is not -
and that without horseshoe crab blood,
you might be dead of E. coli,
or of some contaminated drug?
But you’re not. And the crabs are,
or at least they will be, dead, that is–
this arthropod having survived
the Ordovician, but likely not
homo medicandus which is just
fine so long as they live long enough
to be of help for me, which is not
an abstraction, don’t you agree?

Mother Fletcher Gives Me a Talking To

                     "I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I
                      cannot. I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendants do not.”
                                           Viola Fletcher, survivor of the 1921 “Tulsa Race Massacre.”

​I watch her tell of a little girl who sleeps snug
curled up with her tattered doll: It’s a warm night
and Viola’s kicked her thin linens to the floor.
She dreams of centaurs, The Golden Fleece open
on her bedstead to a picture of brave Jason.

Dreaming, she wakes. Her father wraps
her in the castoff bedclothes. Her brothers,
frantic, lead the family out the back
of their house. Fire rages

cracking in attics, roofs crash, collapse around them,
a scream – like a strangled cat – her friend
next door (who was dragged by the mob
naked from her bed). Vi ducks spasms of gunfire,

sporadic as she stumbles through hummocks
of black men’s bodies. Biplanes buzz like
a from smashed hornets’ nest. Fireballs rain
from the sky, streets reek of burning turpentine.

I loose sight of the girl but she reminds me
100 years later that she’s not lost sight
that day when the spittle-driven mob
ran her family from town.

I am not good at this, seeing horror
in the face of a survivor. Mother Fletcher
looks right at me through the TV,
right as a vee of geese circles over my home, lands

in a bawling of honks, leaves a slime of goose poop
I’ll have to scrub from everywhere – just as
Mother Fletcher dares us not to turn away, says:
"I have lived through the massacre. Every Day.
​
You may forget this history, but I cannot.”
I shuffle my feet, stare at my hands, am ashamed
that I’d rather clean up after the geese
than look Mother Fletcher in the eye
as she gives me a talking to.

Maybe the Ballot Counters Read “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”

                           Arizona Republicans hunt for bamboo-laced China ballots in 2020 ‘audit’ effort
                                        Headline, The Guardian May, 5, 2021

Empty mountains,
                                            We ballot counters examine each
no one to be seen
                                            with a fancy 5k camera
Yet–hear
                                            because we've heard
human sounds.
                                            the Chinese stuffed the boxes.
Returning sunlight
                                            We’re looking for bamboo fibers
enters the dark woods;
                                            in the paper.
Again shining
                                           I think we need to know
on the green moss,
                                           don’t you?**
above.*

Perhaps the men of Maricopa
had questions without answers,
cast the I Ching, blank ballots
like yarrow stalks, divining
Thunder Over Water,
delivery from misdeeds.

But I think they saw what they were looking for–
much like stuffy translators of Wang Wei’s woods
who read them merely as verse, words
to be rhymed, tamed on a page,
locked into lines, soldiers
demanding to be heard.

But, what if in those fibers the counters found
– empty mountains – where they sat, still,
listened for echos, watched as the fading
sun shone on moss hanging from the trees.
They could go home, and breathe
free from their fevered dreams.

​* Gary Snyder’s translation of Wang Wei’s “Deer Park.”
** from the words of the consultant recounting
Maricopa County Presidential ballots

Bang

I cannot get away from the day’s news and this poem is no refuge
though the title was revealed to me in a dream, me having
gone to bed, obsessed, refreshing my browser again and again
lusting for news of which streets in my city were trashed,
which cop took which man to his knees, which black clad
provocateur ball-peened which glass window.

Whoever thought a wall of glass was a good idea anyway?
That man didn’t understand: we don’t want to see
what goes on inside.

Do you really want to know which synapses are connected
to the trigger finger, which to the clenched fist, or which
to the sigh of one who is so tired of being seen
as something other, wearied when we-the-people only see

him through the plasma screen which is showing some obscene
scene of a black body sacrificed, knowing he is seen
as some sort of phylactery containing our fears.
You get it. You don’t want to see inside, so why

glass walls? Is it because when they shatter,
the shards ring like a thousand broken bells
or that seeing ourselves reflected
in a shop window is the closest

we come to being luminous,
even though we are stuck –
here – on the other side?
Perhaps we make such walls,

               transparent

because we really don’t want
to be with you over there.
We just want to seem
like we are seeing you.

---

Dick Westheimer has - in the company of his wife Debbie - lived, gardened and raised five children on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio. He has taken up with poets and the writing of poetry to make sense of the world. In the past year he has been a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and his poems have appeared in Rattle, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, Sheila Na-Gig, The New Verse News, and upcoming in Aethlon, Sparklit, and Pendemics Journal, among others. dickwestheimer.com