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Mark Conte Poem
WALKING ON WATER
Saint of the Golden Gate Bridge
they called her, blessing the
crowd with her tears, performing
to the cheers of the enchanted,
flinging, first her pink raincoat,
her high heeled shoes, fluttering
down like doves, dancing, twisting
out of her red satin dress, a naked
Magdalene on her way to heaven.
The distance for walking the water
is always two feet, suspended in
mid-air before the dive, hands
whirling over her head, gracefully,
then the splash, the blue on blue
of water. The scream; a long
stretch of scar. This is the way
it ends, Sister, your knees jacked
up around your chin. A wild eyed
woman walking on water. Yes,
Sister, yes. You were floating,
safe above the water, like egrets
hovering against the sky.
We saw the confusion of flesh on
water. A dark-haired woman who
knew she had found the ocean,
spread-eagled on her unhealed
promises, imperfectly still, her
feet out of running room, hands
out of time, and the silence
always loses the beat.
She lived dying, waiting on the
edge of life, an end of meaning.
I’m brave, she was known to have
said once. I have courage. Be
my liar, as she would say. But
she was only brave on water. Only
that. Yet, there aren’t many who
could face this, who could look
into the eyes of death like a lover.
Surely she caressed his eyes.
Surely she twice sang his name,
a woman of sorrows drowning in
sin. She whirled and twisted.
The watchers were confused. They
didn’t know this act. They didn’t
even know themselves anymore.
We all became strangers.
She won finally. She heard the
cries, saw the vision. The night
came sooner that day. In a different
month, she would have turned to us,
appearing from doorways, a five
and dime hooker who lost all her
johns. They won’t be your liars,
Sister. Life stacks emptiness
with soberness, saving up the
numbered days of your life that
cover you like water, wave by
wave, until the dreams become
visions. They say men are
more sensible. They not only
listen to the wisdom of
mathematics, they learn not to be
hysterical. In spite of this, they
fail discipline. They have a love
of falling too. A love of water.
We pulled her out, the water
washing over us. The sand gritting
our way back to shore, back to reason,
back to all ways of living. Two
old players questioning the silence,
caressing the heaven in her.
Mark Randolph Conte
Copyright Poem magazine, 2000
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
How to Find Your Way Home
Wear your tweed coat and checked hat.
The bus stops at the edge of the bridge.
It is a drawbridge and the ships are passing.
An old peddler pushes his cart along the
edge and sings his fruits. There are stars
in the water. Newsboys will shout their
headlines. “Red skies bleed to yellow.”
Ignore them and count your change because it
is a green day and the colors always change
at dusk. This is the way the street opens, but
the cobblestones defy interpretations. Treasonous
taxis sit back under street lamps, doors slightly
ajar. The young women are dancing with
reflections, their heads ringed with beads. The
men are no longer interested in dreams. The
restaurants will be almost empty. No one orders
in English. Pinpricks of light will appear in the
north sky. Hobos will stand with their hats in
their hands, waiting for Venus to appear in the sky.
You will know you are there when the last ship passes.
Do not look back. The bridge is a clock.
Mark Conte Copyright, Yankee magazine, 1982
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
The Generals
You have seen them
nodding benevolently like
plump German butchers in small
shoppes, carelessly stripping pink
flesh from the bones of sheep.
They smile, a polite bow,
courteous generals in a civilized
war of rules, displaying their
purple hearts, adorned with the parsley
slogans of God and country.
Have you noticed that they
keep the faces of the butchered
ones covered up with star spangled
sheets, while mad bands play their
songs of brave innocence?
Perhaps so we will not see their
eyes staring back at us, or hear
their cries in the chill dawn, or
worse still, that we know
whose children they are.
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
The Judas Scroll
Sometimes the night is laden with
guilt. The nails curse me. The
mob applauds like children
scrambling for the safety of
their lies. Your eyes curse me,
follow me to hell, hold you to
a lie that never lets go. You,
out of the night, trapped and
free. A twin edged dream of
glory with twelve foundations,
always staying outside the
bones of life, preferring the
ghosts of things past.
Take this mystery, the body
and the blood, for ignorance.
The priests have prayed everything
away, hiding your face, your
Words, but not the keys. From
the heart of their denial, they
built walls, discarded your
brain and learned from riddles,
pure rules for the ages, yet
that didn’t save your
hands, your eyes. Nothing
will last but your heart.
Always after you slept, you
ignored the visions stalled near
the cluttered mornings. When
you were near these fragments
and heard the clap of history,
you heard it as different
sounds. No man could shake
these notions. A place without
end or beginning. Nor could
it avoid the dream that survived
from sleep, a ghost from the
cosmos calmly walking through
stone, soaring over our minds,
a true sadness blowing out
of the past. Sometimes
when you’re tired of this,
take your bones, gather
in the whim of gypsies and
throw different dice from
different hands. Take fate,
the planets, pure chance. A
new skin primarily. Change
everything. Take your luck
and mine. Change everything.
On firmer ground, you could
climb or sing, or follow the
raging wind. Yet here you
lie in an uncovered grave,
what riddle can we make of
that? Spend your heart, you can
replace that. Use your tongue
as a sword, Destroying what is
different in all of us. Spend your eyes.
Curse me once. Spend your dreams
and your songs. Run like the wind,
like the night. Hide from the beginning
and the end. This is the hell you said
we’d never see. Hide from the sound
of my voice, the sight of my eyes.
Forget the sheep. They will only
remember the riddles, Not your
laugh and your heart. But You
wouldn’t listen, and I could not
stop. The earth trembled in our hands.
History spun on a cross and fed on your
carcass. Yet, it did not free my soul.
Somehow you ended inside me. I
was you dying. My blood spilled
with your blood. My flesh rotted
with your flesh. Outside, snow
white mountains blackened the
earth. Flowers died, deserted the
gardens, dissolved the rivers.
A brittle skeleton the ended
ignobly, vulgar and condemned.
Mark Conte, CCC, 1986
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
Kathy’s Songs
It’s six years after forever,
Day-clipped weeks,
Years stacked neatly together
Season by season,
Like outdated library books
No one sees,
Unthumbed,
Unturned,
Unread.
And you gave more
Kathy,
Much more than the
Pages and pages of
Worn out words
I have strung together,
Grasping at phantoms
In the air,
You gave more.
I gave what I could,
But it was
never quite enough,
never enough,
trying to catch a song
by its breath.
No one could sing
Your sonatas.
No one could laugh
The colors you spoke.
No, it was never
Quite enough.
So I turned out my dreams,
Burning your songs,
Lighting torches,
Mad
With burning.
Writing checks on sorrows
I would have to pay.
I turned out my dreams;
Burning,
Burning,
Kathy’s songs are
Burning.
And I have paid
Kathy,
I have paid.
But songs never really
Die.
Their sighs
Lurk in shadows like
Stalking panthers
Waiting for
Wide-eyed nights.
And there are
places
where your songs
have turned
to hymns,
and words whose sounds
will always ring
like hushed echoes
of your name.
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
Mermaids
I have seen them in
the gray, untimely dusks,
gleefully playing with lost ships
among coral rock,
golden hair tossing about
like mad witches,
as they flit in and out of
barnacled portholes.
They ride on autumn tides
near sun bleached inlets
sailing with north winds,
humming absentmindedly like
star fairies,
flinging sea shells about,
filling them with wind songs
to capture little boy’s hearts.
Mariners have come upon them
sitting on driftwood,
threading pearls with loose
strands of hair,
singing of treasures beneath the sea
in an aquamarine world,
charming them with sea horses
and starfish,
and sand castles, adorned with gold
and silver from Spanish galleons.
Hoary fishermen,
half blind from the merciless sun
have spoken of them in whispers.
Old men with tormented dreams
of nymph melodies played on sea harps,
carried by the wind
from distant horizons where
dolphins play.
Oh they are beautiful,
with their sculptured breasts
and poignant turtle eyes,
riding on white pillowed waves
under child moons,
and the songs they sing have
dashed sleek ships on barren reefs,
and driven brave men mad.
And once you have seem them,
you will roam from beach to beach,
every autumn in the
cerulean dawns searching for them,
gathering sea shells
to take back to your room,
in the hope you may hear their song
just once more.
Mark Conte, copyright, Poem magazine 2000
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
SIX DAYS
Sleep in that short summer
drifted like sweeps of bleached sand.
Stone rooted with age. Florida.
The lone cry of a dolphin. Men
reaping folds of the sea. Herons
falling out of the sky like
white rain.
Before six days, she closed the
brief letters against the last
arguments. Here were her fragments;
some words she had not said, the
shirt she had not mended for him,
the sleep she had not lain in.
He was the man that words would
kill. He had held on to them
too long. Too many ways. The new
words came. They always did, and he
was left to sit and measure suns.
Before three years, his body was
done with it. She gathered her sighs
and ignored the answers. No, she could
not put away his picture; the green
stucco house in the background,
the sky smothered with clouds,
so she slept.
When she awoke, they would drop
hints. She would not even
go there. Even as the same woman.
Not arms empty, away from her
bone. Even as her touch, numb
from the loving, could not reach
him. One minute changing the
soiled linen. The other watching
birds caught in mid flight on the
kitchen wall. The breakfast forks
ready on the place mats. Rain
singing over the din of the
loneliest mornings.
Mark R. Conte
Copyright Southern Poetry Review, 1978
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
The April Fools
Later,
when they had done with the
business of hurting each other,
the accusers would blame the stars
with their incessant gossiping
of immortal loves
when gods had walked the earth.
She
was sitting by a moon lake,
gathering lilacs,
questioning moonbeams,
teaching them how to laugh
flirting with wind echoes.
He
was stumbling through the days
composing poetry,
balancing words on sounds
constructing half forgotten moments
into little stick houses,
drunk with visions.
It’s not as if they
did not see this happening, could
not see this happening. They could
touch, see and hear, But so could
the love witches, As stars are sometimes
called, and what amulets can you use
on stars.
So they slipped
into each other’s eyes
and together
they found hidden wants
and familiar sorrows
lost ages ago, when they were
too brash to save things,
and wore each other’s sorrow
in new and different ways.
And as if that were not enough,
they built majestic shrines
in their images,
for early dawn worships
before they had taken food or drink,
like dedicated monks
testing their vows
with the days of devotion.
And they lived in those
old rented sighs
as if they had owned them,
gathering lilacs,
chanting forevers,
babbling of rainbows and fireflies
Like April Fools.
Mark Conte, copyright Cross Cultural Press, 1986
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
An Answer
You ask me
how to be a poet,
and I tell you
to climb into yourself,
into the bitter parts,
into the wells of hurt
so deep
that the light frightens you
and you scramble back out
in fear of your
sanity.
Sleep with witches,
the ones who can slip
in and out of
madness at will;
the wild eyed ones
who frighten the people
with their songs,
the dull flat people
who cannot read
seas
nor hear stars.
Go ask the gypsies
who wear rings on their tongues.
Go ask the children
who carry dreams in their eyes.
Go ask the moon,
the candy moon.
You ask me
how to be a poet.
I tell you
marry a fool
and walk
in her dances.
Mark Conte, copyright, Cross Cultural Press, 1986
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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Mark Conte Poem
. Vigil For Dominic
Dominic,
I saw you the night they carried
you down the cat walk
to the clinic.
We were shouting and yelling,
Get him to a hospital,
and we banged our shoes
against the bars until
they came with tear-gas and hoses
to drive us back to silence.
All week long
we kept waiting for them
to bring you back,
or at least give us word
of your healing,
but they would not even
acknowledge our existence
behind the bars,
and one of the inmates
began to pray.
Saturday,
they came and took
your clothes.
We started shouting again,
Leave his damn clothes alone
You bastards.
Dominic’s coming back,
but they looked at us
as if we were crazy.
Dominic,
it’s been ten days
since they took you away.
I have counted two hundred
shadows across my wall.
Some of the men are whispering
you won’t be back, and this morning
I heard one of them crying
as if someone
was listening to him.
The men are praying
that you have escaped
Dominic.
Lord have mercy.
All day long
we have heard convicts
digging and shoveling
outside our windows.
We hear they are
Building more graves.
Dominic,
make them bring back
your clothes.
Make them bring me
your shoes and your books.
I want to read your diaries.
I want to steady my soul
with your poems.
Dominic, tell me again
how they can never kill you.
Copyright, 2016, Kathy's Songs, Crimson Cloak Publishing
Copyright © Mark Conte | Year Posted 2016
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