All text and images copyright Tim Myers 2008
Tim Myers: Four poems
To the Great Blue Heron
Heron, why
should I find myself remembering you
at odd times of the day?
Washing dishes I pause
and suddenly look
into your imperturbable eyes.
Starting the car, I see again
how lake winds lift
your gray-brown feathers.
The shape of your beak
is a fine thing, I remember it,
the tapering lines.
Standing in shallows
beneath the willow, you are
somehow the same mirror to me
that my birth is, my death is,
you who are so deliberate, so
quiet, your eyes always
watching
The Fire-Bombing of Tokyo
There's little doubt that human beings
are easily distracted
by all that's new, breathless as
some novelty's enacted:
to wit: In March of '45,
incendiary bombs,
almost two thousand tons of them,
left Tokyo a tomb.
But this was nothing new--
just the same old stuff.
As far as making history,
not original enough.
As many died that day as later,
when the Big Ones fell,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki
newer forms of Hell.
We talk about the A-bomb now
but not old-fashioned flames
incinerating equal numbers,
leaving only names,
for even Terror has its styles,
and new forms win attention
while we consign to footnote those
we slaughtered by convention.
Inelegant Confession
I thought myself a cultured man
with art and taste together,
until that ad there in the Times
for loafers of pale blue leather.
Regally posed, a full-page spread,
subtle and tastefully clever,
they were to me a reprimand,
those loafers of pale blue leather.
Ah, the slender Italian design,
the heels' slight cantilever,
the Apollonian buckles of gold
such artful stitching tethered!
It was a keen chastisement, bound
to pique my pride forever--
for something in those loafers' soul
from my soul is dissevered.
If heartless gods had granted me
great wealth, or named me Trevor,
perhaps I might be worthy of
loafers of pale blue leather.
But such sartorial heights are not
for me; I shan't endeavor
to overreach myself. Alas!
No loafers of pale blue leather.
Somewhere there are men whose shoes
are light as putti's feathers,
bright as cerulean skies,
dainty as May weather--
but I'm a rube, an oaf, a boor,
and won't be classy ever--
I cannot wear these opalescent
loafers of pale blue leather.
A Discovery of Ancient Flutes in China
They dug them up and put them
in a glass museum-case,
six slender bones from the wings of cranes,
hollow shafts marked by augers
with small holes for the players' fingertips.
So old, nine thousand years in the lightless earth,
the elegant lengths of bone are scored and yellowed--
but still the perfectly spaced fingerholes
that open onto nothing,
and shattered yellow-brown fragments
of other flutes nearby.
One of the six could still be played.
To command the notes--
like water from a pool behind some prehistoric weir,
trickling obediently into crude furrows
we dug across a riverside field,
soaking our roots in their muddy lines--
so long ago we learned that trick too,
still use it--
to command the notes--
and seeing these flutes we remember
how the planet-wandering wind,
its mindless, shifting, sea-driving force,
was made particular and ordered here
under hands no different from our own--
pursed lips to the bone-flutes,
wind made small and good out of our own mouths,
new creature we call song,
something to help us go on living
in a hard world,
one more of the food-like mysteries
we eat from without understanding.
Like cranes against the sky,
notes still come from the ancient bone-piece--
we borrow them from death, from that leap to flight.