I have a blog, in which I post poetry and criticism and experiences of manic-depression. As a poet and critic and essayist I have near 1000 publications, many online. My website is http://www.cechaffin.com/; my blog is http://www.cechaffin.blogspot.com/. I founded and edited The Melic Review www.melicreview.com for eight years.
Below, a few poems of which I'm proud:
To Kathleen, after Neruda
As the salmon seeks its mother gravel
through the lying ions of the sea, I seek you.
Without your body my blankets are cold,
the ground hard, my joints uneasy.
Apart, I am a mold for your bronze--
halved, discarded. Do you know this hollow?
There is no shame in love. Daily
I embarrass myself, collar strangers,
weary my children. I am the beached mariner
condemned to speak of you wherever I go.
Have you suffered this? Who am I to compare us?
You are smooth as agate, I am ripsawn wood.
My heart seeks you like a cyclone.
I would swallow your farmhouse whole.
ie
Without you I am a one-handed magician
cheating at solitaire, hoarding coppers.
II
When will you come to me? It is already late
and my father has closed the drapes.
I listen for your stride; I could never
confuse it with another.
Your back is strong as a barge,
your legs were sculpted in Greece,
your hips formed in India, your face
envied by Raphael.
Your eyes threaten green lightning
from the Atlantic. You could crush me
with a word, like a mussel at low tide.
Why do I trust you so utterly?
American Zen
I lay on a railroad track
to feel the thrum
of approaching engines
until the near shiver
nudged me down
the gravel skirt to safety.
I was not suicidal,
just possessed of a beingness
so elementary
I wouldn't know
if you chiseled out my eyes.
Like the meniscus
of an abandoned well
walled from wind
by a chimney of stone,
not even a bucket could disturb
my black transparency.
I am beyond boredom,
so occupied with nothing
I have no patience with sentience.
At the Vietnam War Memorial
Black granite stretches its harsh, tapering wings
up to pedestrian-level grass
but sucks me down, here, at the intersection of names.
I forgive, I must, though I wish something
could heal this wound in the earth.
Behold, all theorists, the price of theory:
extreme unction by napalm and blood,
vets shipped home whole or in pieces.
The VA grants prostheses
but not minds free of horror.
In jungles tumescent, through villages
of straw, by the Mekong where catfish
sleep in mud-heaven, we tramped,
disarming mines and flushing tunnels,
killing women and children
for potential collaboration,
smoking Thai-stick until stuporous-
still, the sound of Charlie
played on every frond.
Beat against this polished rock, America,
this vast projective surface for your sins,
wear your bloody heart out.
It's not how many died
but that they died in vain, achieving
nothing except our grief for them.
It's said you cannot write a good poem
until recollected in tranquility.
Let this then be a bad poem, bad as the war,
dividing author from reader and reader from page.
Let it drive a wedge between fathers and sons.
Let fathers mistake rebellion for disloyalty,
let sons mistake honor for stupidity,
let senators mistake appropriation for commitment,
let mothers confuse waste with sacrifice,
let sisters turn to prostitution to forget.
Let teachers suicide in public in partial recompense,
let preachers castrate themselves for passive assent,
let everything in America that breathes
hang its head in irrefragable shame.
Here is the legacy of your assumptions,
here the necropolis of your dark-suited wisdom:
A city set in a pit cannot be hid..
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