Best Tansey Poems
With the boy’s room, draped in white sheets
This whole year, like a cocoon, preserved in amber,
She closes another album: The fossil record of their marriage,
Steeped, in the earthen layers of clay.
Then turning to face him, two huge land masses:
He, the old world, she is of the new,
And with thirty years of continental drift
Having poured an ocean in between them,
They live, now, in different time zones,
Sleep, eat and speak in different tongues…
11.15.7 John Tansey
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey,
Form:
Couplet
Evening sets with self-delusion
stirring the synapses
with a steaming
cup of coffee.
A dimly lit oil lamp
shrouded in Saffron
casts the room in an amber hue
where words meld like gold
onto the page
in an alchemic blaze.
Morning rises, dispelling dreams
out of every fold of darkness
to a sterile whiteness
that turning back
such ingots
into leaden blocks of stone
I wake, both bleary eyed
and blood shot, into this failed,
pale bleak
truth of morning
John Tansey
Categories:
tansey, dream,
Form:
Free verse
THE MORTAL DILEMMA OF FAIRY TALES AND FIRE FLIES
(Brandon, the world
depends on the existence of fairy tales and fire flies,
the simple kindness towards lesser things,
the magnanimity, the compassion
of not taking life simply because you can.)
Out playing with my son
in the day-dwindled dark
among the autumn leaves,
an enshrined firefly
cupped in the apse of my palm,
I stoop closer to show him
its brief luminosity like an halo,
a prayer candle in the breeze
its flame, flickering
in the grotto of my hands.
Suddenly, a swipe of the hand,
and the fall begins
with a child's first cruelty
and here we stand, guilty
by the depth of your stroke
that felled a star and made the sky dark
but for the full moons of your eyes
What shall I say to you now,
that you are only two
and your years thus far
have been but the calculation
of constants
like your parents, fixed planets,
fingering the flora of your golden hair
as they revolved about you.
This is the father’s dilemma,
whether to dispel as rumour
the faith in fairy tales and fire flies
to head off the terror
of learning on your own
that the world has no morals,
nature no ethics
steel you for a life of brutality
make you a bully,
Or nurture that spark of gentlenesss
as your jaw drops
at the that last spot of phosphor on your shoe,
and the glow of a firefly
dissapearing beneath the blades
like the sun going down on us both.
It is the end of the day, summer,
and the innocence of your ways.
John Tansey
Categories:
tansey, allegory, angst,
Form:
It is in the subtlety
And not the blunt insult,
The threat and not the onslaught;
The implied and not the explicit.
It is in the first gleaning,
remembered scents of Spring
And not the direct,
Overhead heat of Summer.
The autumnal dread
And not the dead of Winter;
The sweet dream of sleep
And not the bleak morning after.
When somewhere between the gift,
And it’s crumpled paper wrapping,
Lie an infinity
Of finite things to be chosen:
But of a thousand choices
if I must choose one,
I would settle, instead,
For the choice and forego the choosing…
John Tansey 11.25 07
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, childhood,
Form:
Free verse
I Fear the Day
I fear the day
the sheer length of it.
It's call to actions
and not words.
Fearing it while it is
and loving it when it is gone,
right or wrong.
Evening beckons...
It's soft, amber hues of lamplight.
As I peruse a book,
another day passes
into fables of mythic storytelling.
Swaddled in the womb of light
in an eternity of night;
Until sunrise and the dread of morning,
I wake, trembling, at the start of the new day
John Tansey
Categories:
tansey, angst, autumn,
Form:
Free verse
Nobility
Scouring for something to read
Someone else to be,
I am lost in this dark sparse room
With nothing to do.
Stuck in a neuronal loop
Of the neurotic mind.
I want to be noble.
Fight with a crowd of rebels
For a righteous cause
Or die
Saving some small child.
Then rising from this clamor
To a state of bliss,
Die with the truth
Still safe on my lips.
John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, child,
Form:
Free verse
Primal Language
Speaking gutturally in the fractured
Fragments of a foreign language,
A tongue unknown to her
She is come from another country
gesturing with her hands
Between the islands of broken English
Within her hesitations are the silent
Stutters of clarity
Using her body as a language
I know what she is asking
Between the atolls of words
Are oceans of sterling imagery
John Tansey
Categories:
tansey, confidence,
Form:
Free verse
Broken
Like a wild stallion,
that will not be saddled, spitting the bit,
I bucked and threw every rider
galloping toward the infinite open...
With nostrils flaring, mane blowing,
it was a brief sprint of being harnessed to no one;
Until, as all dreams, I was stopped at the fence
only to be led back, by a lead, bridled and broken.
John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, dark, depression,
Form:
Free verse
AUTUMN BIRDS
Heading home, toward the sun;
its long drawn-in breath of twilight,
sucking the last gasps of birds
toward its mouth,
I glimpse a flock of sparrows,
gathered up in squalls
to forage the last bruised fruits of summer,
and know winter is approaching.
Waves of starlings and ocean spray
sparrows,
splashing across the sky,
gust like the rib of a wind sock,
a white sheet falling
upon winged chairs,
saying time has come to head South.
Seeking comfort among circles,
when the weather turns
and daylight dwindles,
they gather at dusk,
With cropped wings, bank the air
then swoop down to roost
like the evening’s frost
condensing on the trees.
It is the ebb of Summer, its last glimmer;
The sweeping undertow of geese
carrying shells
disappear in the dusk
and are swallowed by the sun, like a river,
drowning every echo from our mouths.
John Tansey
Categories:
tansey, autumn,
Form:
Free verse
A child
put to bed,
In a large, dark room;
At first, frightened
But then, the door creaks,
slightly ajar,
Where a skant slant of light,
carrying booms of laughter
floods the room
From its narrow wedge
The warm familial sounds
Of aunts and uncles
from a party next door,
Where old friends and family are
So the child rises up,
out of bed
And walks toward its light…
This is how we should enter Death.
John T Tansey
Categories:
tansey, angel,
Form:
THE DEPTH AND THE DISTANCE
A story of Divorce
Because you would plumb only so deep Final
Before returning, too soon, back to the top,
Breathing in air
And your preference to swim,
Skimming along the surface
Like a flat-edged rock.
While I continued, delving deeper down,
Beyond, where even, the Sun’s light
Stopped, broke rank and dispersed,
In a rout back to the top.
I continued, alone, in utter darkness
Descending into the depths.
Until, crashing here,
At the turgid, bed-rock bottom
Where only the limestone bones of the dead
can be found
Like the mystical Elephant Graveyards.
You had gone for the distance
Where I settled for the depths
Both diametrically opposed
And at constant right-angles
to each other,
Thus, destined, to never
See things the same way
And that we even met at all
John T Tansey
Categories:
tansey, allegory,
Form:
Sacrifice
My love has no edges
it is like a great ripe fruit,
both, sustaining and life giving
Your love is a sword
its' hilt as a cross
both, protective but life taking.
As you cuts me in half
sucking the juice I provide
in willing sacrifice
To sustain you
John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, allegory, allusion,
Form:
Free verse
White Weddings and Wet Funerals Final
When I was young,
And the world crisp,
Through the crystalline cold
Of November Morning
At the parade
And we were all caught in the sacred gear grit,
Grinding motion
Of life in abundance,
Pushing crowds out of bounds
It was always Thursday morning
and the endless invitations
in the mail spoke of
carousel steeds
and white weddings
Laughter does not carry like it did,
When we were children
we are grown old, now,
into our parents and grandparents
No cause for gathering
but for the formality
Of informing
On the sick and the dying
All the white weddings have ended
And now, walking with a cane,
I grow tired
of being mired in the mud
Of wet funeals…
John tansey
Categories:
tansey, absence, angst,
Form:
Depression
My depression
is steep
It is as a deep back lhole in space
From which neither the
light of dreams
Nor a loud thunderous
scream
can escape.
John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, angst,
Form:
Free verse
I have had my Fill with the Lifelessness of Winter
I have had my fill of this winter,
The lifelessness in its frost;
Fingers stiff, face pale.
It’s cold pain in the bone
To the black and blue bruise
Of a cracked thumbnail.
Huddled in black overcoats
And breathing out smoke;
It must be hard for mourners
Lowering loved one’s
into the bone white earth
In the dead of winter,
in wooden coffins, arms folded,
As if they could still feel the cold...
John Tansey
Copyright ©2007 John Thomas Tansey
Categories:
tansey, angst,
Form:
Free verse