DAY CAMP'S LENS, 1982

She’s 10, watching the thin girl’s wagging lips
chide her about her plump tum, but hearing
the bomb she’d love to shove between her hips,
turning Spaghetti Betty to burnt string
bits. Sweating more than the June day calls for,
she stifles tears, stuffs in the apple pie
in reverse revenge, slumps out the side door,
stumbles under misty Long Island sky,
forcing a vision of Blackfriar’s Bridge
she saw in a travel book at home, its
piers with stone carvings of freshwater birds
freeing her from these neighborhood browbeats,
unaware under Blackfriars this day
Calvi’s hanging body twists with wind’s sway.


Roger Armbrust
October 31, 2007

LEFTOVER CRUMBS

I’ve just seen “Crumb,” Zwigoff’s record of art
rising from a father, raging Marine
who’d break small sons’ collarbones while their hearts
shriveled to dried fruit as amphetamines
crazed their mother, leaving them no fortress
to fall back on. Charles Jr. turned recluse,
then to suicide. Maxon, the youngest,
fondled women, charred childhood his excuse,
then sat on nails for penance while tossing
a bullet in his hands; now sells paintings
in San Fran. Robert found fame by crossing
mainstream to underground comics, feinting
love at every chance. All three sons, obsessed
with sex, used their art to scalpel their chests.




Roger Armbrust
May 14, 2007

SUDOKU AND SODOKU

Define one as a number puzzle played
by half the nation—a Latin square marked
as nine regions, their nine spaces displayed
with digits ranging 1 to 9. It sparks
backtracking by rapid-style solvers who
crave logic. Term the other as fever
from a rat bite or scratch, the victim screwed
for months or years, healthy cycles severed
by pyrexia and meningitis.
Though both Japanese words appear brothers,
in truth, they’re more like strangers. Still, each fits
translation: the puzzle, “single number,”
the disease, “rat bite fever.” You can bet
they’re often confused on the Internet.


Roger Armbrust
October 29, 2007

BATTER UP

for Steve Barnes


Anna Nicole’s corpse, the Broward County
medical examiner confided,
fades like honey in mud, a poor bounty
for voices claiming love, yet divided
over where to send her: mausoleum
on a Bahama beach? Set adrift off
the Pacific coast, jeweled museum
aboard a fiery yacht? Why do we scoff,
we fellow humans, our own forms burning
inside out, wasting like old newspapers
in week-long rain? Our smirking heads turning
toward the TV, watching our nights taper
as baseball again beats morbid winter,
thoughts void of our frozen Splendid Splinter.




Roger Armbrust
February 21, 2007

PARANORMAL PARANOIA

They appear everywhere as I dash through
town. The Yeti glares and growls, snarling mouth
large as a cave entrance, red hair askew,
slashed by a cross-eyed barber. “Why come south
when you need snow!?!” I shout. No answer. As
I cross the bridge, the Great Sea Centipede
slithers onto shore. Shaking, I speed past
screaming, “Scat, you cryptic cryptid!” I need
a cross or bible, but scurry unarmed.
On Main Street, ghosts and zombies lounge smiling
at sidewalk cafes. Spaceships portend harm,
levitating at traffic lights. I fling
my body into an empty doorway.
I’ll hide here till dark. Keep watch. Kneel and pray.


Roger Armbrust
October 28, 2007

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT

Internet radio’s playing Beatles’
greatest from “A Hard Day’s Night,” sweeping me
back to ’64, pop movie’s title
blazing on Center Theatre’s marquee,
pal Lee Rogers cuddling with Lesley Smith,
me maneuvering my arm around her
friend Janella Howell, Fab Four’s mythic
smiles and harmony swirling their power
throughout the house. Back in Lesley’s dark den,
we quiet down with Mathis’s soft sound.
I fall into Janella’s eyes, golden
in candlelight; respond to muffled pound
of her heart. Her liquid lips bring such bliss,
I adore how her jaw pops with each kiss.




Roger Armbrust
July 10, 2007

SURVIVOR

What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
--Friedrich Nietzsche


Sometimes after midnight, when mad silence
mortars the dark, flashing fragments of her
face before me, shredding all sane defense
to memory’s shrapnel, my lone offer
of prayer dissolving in blackened air
like bone powder in ink, my body sways
from the bed barely more than a corpse, flare
of my Dell’s monitor burning away
those black devils deriding me to die
in my sleep as I dream of her lying
beside me, listening as I reply
to her soft, sad, sighing prelude, trying
to grasp her meaning: “I must leave my friends,”
she whispered. She should have said, “It’s the end.”


Roger Armbrust
October 26, 2007

BONDS

I’m waiting in Section 148
down AT&T Park’s right-field line (just
in front of McCovey Cove) for my date
with The Record as ol’ Barry—Muscle
Mass Mammoth Man, baseball’s Dinger Despot—
cranks a Florida pitcher’s hanging curve
off his black maple bat, a searing shot
flying straight at us. It takes killer’s nerves
to fight off fanatics. My long arms flash
up; pained hands snag the white, whirling pellet.
I hear my pal screaming, “Go for the cash!
You’ll be a millionaire when you sell it!”
I spew flames: “Dirty money!” Lips grow sealed
as I hurl the ball back onto the field.



Roger Armbrust
July 27, 2007

THE ARMCHAIR ASSASSIN XIII

I’m losing hair from this Kurdish quagmire.
Their P.K.K. guerillas fight Turkey.
The Chief calls them terrorists. We’re to fire
at them on sight, but only secretly,
with missiles. Blow them off the friggin’ map.
But their brothers, the P.J.A.K., blast
Iran. The Company helps. It’s all crap.
These warriors deny Islam. They’re Marxists,
“scientific socialists.” They even
support women’s rights. I monitor their
movements by satellite, warning them when
the Revolutionary Guard comes near
enough to attack. I help these Commies
fight Muslims. I can just smell World War III.


Roger Armbrust
October 23, 2007

WAS JESUS A FUNNY GUY?

Did he play with the blessed Big Twelve, cracking
inside jokes? Riding through Jerusalem,
did he lean to John and whisper (smacking
of low humor), “I’m on my ass again.”
Had Luke dined at the Last Supper, would J.
have groaned, “This is my body, and, hey, doc,
I got this pain in my lower back.” Say
he joined Magdalene in bed: Would he shock
his mistress, aping that line to his mom
at Cana (his first miracle, I’ve no doubt)
moaning, “Woman, my time has not yet come?”
On the cross, did he quip, “I’m just hanging out?”
D’you ever read whether some critics felt
he’d have proved a huge hit on the Borscht Belt?




Roger Armbrust
May 28, 2007

BOSS FLOSS

“How’s it going?” the first boss asks, as if
he didn’t know the company’s budget
and inventory; thinks it’s your motif
of life. You want to tell him (but fudge it),
“It’s all downhill, like your hairline, you [bleep].”
Then jerk his gum from his gums, jam it up
his nose, hurtle him down that staircase steep.
“You’ve lost weight,” second boss chimes, like a slup
in a bad Subway spot, blind to his blurb
connoting, “Hey, you’re not as fat as last
month!” “Boss man,” your mind growls, “would it disturb
you to know your savoir faire’s like a fast
fart?” Maybe one day he will discover
beauty’s deeper than magazine covers.


Roger Armbrust
October 22, 2007

WORDSWORTH AND I

dangle legs over these steep and lofty
cliffs above Tintern Abbey. He’s writing
in a parchment notebook, sips Twinings tea,
taps rhythms with his pen. I’m reciting
his “Intimations” ode. He loudly clears
his throat. Snaps, “Do you mind. I’m trying to
craft a sonnet.” “Your first work to appear
in print was a sonnet,” I recall. “True,”
he scowls, “and I’d like to pen another
before sunset.” But I’m feeling impish.
I lean toward him. Smile. “Bill, would it bother
you to discuss your past?” He frowns: “Go fish.”
“Tell me about that French girl you knocked up…”
My skull catches his shattering teacup.



Roger Armbrust
July 28, 2007

GOD AS VERB

Watching you pirouette to Tchaikovsky,
I see glistening moon orbiting earth,
sense brilliant igniting in distant sky—
art-inspiring eye of a new star’s birth—
feel timeless melding of universe’s
caress as your body spins, ascending
with violin’s vibrato, my verses
rising with you, our dimensions bending
like liquid glass, each will melting into
one will, energy swirling, creating
fire of voices swelling as angels’ do,
embraced by cosmos’s endless mating.
Suddenly you and music stop. We kneel,
holding still inside the eternal wheel.


Roger Armbrust
October 22, 2007

KLIMT

He kept away from those fin-de-siecle
cafes, their world-weary gossip; preferred
private dinners with dear friends. At his peak,
age forty-five, he finished Bloch-Bauer’s
portrait, heaping her in silver and gold
which still couldn’t match jewels of her eyes,
while Egyptian eyes on her gown seemed cold
set beside that face his brush idolized.
Raising the bar far beyond realism,
he also lifted Vienna’s vision,
seeming to find his own innate prism
to project color: master’s precision.
Never self-portraits, or so he’d insist.
But how he revealed his soul in The Kiss.



Roger Armbrust
September 6, 2001
from "The Aesthetic Astronaut: Sonnets"
published by Parkhurst Brothers Publishers
 

ALLISON CORNELL

In her Astor House apartment just up
from Juilliard School, sunlight from window
beaming at her feet, with viola cupped
between clavicle and chin, she played. Bow
rose and fell like subtle lightning, striking
the soul with classic melody. Strong as
a slender weightlifter, back to me, ring
of haze haloing firm legs, pinched buttocks,
straight spine, curved horizon of broad shoulders.
Short-cropped hair shining. I thought of Jeanne d’Arc.
That was long ago. Now we’re both older,
on far roads. But her email touched my heart,
and I’m haunted by her recent CD,
recalling that day she played just for me.


Roger Armbrust
September 9, 2007
.

OLIVIER READS DAVID'S PSALMS

Birthday sonnet
for William Packard




I hear your clear voice these five years later:
“David’s psalms are the greatest collection
of verses.” As if on elevators,
we huddled in silence, blank reflections
on faces, left mute by your legend.
Stout-bodied, heavy-bearded, unoffended,
you with searchlight eyes refused to pretend
we had heard: “I’ll repeat that.” And you did.
Now, listening alone to Olivier’s
sharp consonants crack like crisp lettuce,
I wonder how you’d respond to his ways
of altering tone from lisping softness
to shouts. Still, I pray for what David sees:
“…he shall give his angels charge over thee…”



Roger Armbrust
September 2, 1999

"FOOL THAT I AM"

The Ravens’ rich harmony flows from my
Dell, mellow rhythm and blues massaging
my heart like DeBakey in surgery.
I gaze at the snapshot where she’s blogging.
Gaze for hours, fool that I am, addicted
to those sad eyes, or is that my sadness
mirrored through, fool that I am, predicted
by my angels to wallow in madness
of her present and our past she’s folded
away in a cedar chest or tossed out
with the kitty litter years ago. Ted
will have to deal with my pouting or shouts
at lunch, fool that I am. Wait. Will I bleat?
Or should I kiss her pix, then click Delete?

Roger Armbrust
October 17, 2007

INVITATION

As you sit by the crib reading this book
aloud to the child, awake or asleep,
look upon this life as Wordsworth would look:
a soul before birth with knowledge so deep
the Great Spirit chose to wipe memory
of heaven away, except for some sense
of “trailing clouds of glory.” Poetry,
Wordsworth would say, is the child’s renaissance:
rhythms aligned with the mother’s heartbeat
starting the process of learning again
the soul’s purpose. Poems tend to complete
this role through rhyme and images like rain,
sun, tree, wind—sound and sight forming a view
of nature and time, and love for what’s true.




Roger Armbrust
2002

NUNNA DAUL TSUNY

Shoved from Georgia homes like old dogs over
to Tennessee, now the death march begins.
Our brave men, women, small children cover
a thousand miles by foot, horses, wagons
and boats. Soldiers eat meat as we forage
for fruit and nuts on the Mississippi’s
and Arkansas’s shores. Invisible cage
of a false treaty offers no release
from our fate. Our four routes see our slow crawl
past Memphis, Little Rock, Fayetteville and
Springfield; stumble our way to Tahlequah
and Fort Smith. Four thousand within our band
will die. White roses will grow wild beside
Nunna daul Tsuny, The Trail Where They Cried.


Roger Armbrust
October 16, 2007

LOVING TO WATCH YOUR VOICE

You don’t know this. I’ve linked my new spectrum
analyzer and Windows XP to
my phone. I gaze at your voice as you hum
then breathe your love song, sensual sotto
voce. Horizontal rippling rises
to full screen, creating dancing rainbows
in glistening waterfalls; disguises
your brief laugh as firefly confetti. Rows
of quivering colors flash then vanish
as you ask me what I’m feeling. Did you
know your phonemes’ formants flow, so high-pitched,
twice as fast as mine—waveforms like bright blue
lightning? I’m recording this. You’ll smile so
gently, viewing the email video.




Roger Armbrust
August 7, 2007


.

CHLAMYDIA TRACHOMATIS

This cell culture resembles off-white cake
icing stamped with myriad micro-seals,
like embossed mini-moon surfaces. Take
a closer look at what the screen reveals.
See those three dark-auburn flakes, lying like
rust flecks on an old linen cloth. Yes, they’re
grainy like small anthills. They live and strike
only in human cells, cause the water
discharge like weak milk from your penis, your
swollen testicles. We’re lucky to find
it before eight weeks, your safety tenure
before going sterile, or even blind.
And you possess symptoms, for men endemic.
Most women? No. The “Silent Epidemic.”


Roger Armbrust
October 15, 2007

SUBWAY STRIKE

My old girlfriend would never ride subways,
terrified it would crack thick scars, release
visions of her mother running away
just as the car door wrenched shut, a wild, pleased
flare to her eyes, glaring back at her child,
five years old and screaming, face and hands pressed
like fresh batter against the window, wild
herself with panic, fear-serrated chest
heaving to spews of vomit as the car
lurched away. The bitch would always relent,
grab a cab to two stops uptown, just far
enough to meet the train, weep and repent
as she’d lift my future love in her arms,
rasping lies of how she really meant no harm.



Roger Armbrust
July 6, 2002

LOGIC

What is my nature? What is my value?
If my quarks and leptons formed from ocean
and earth—an exploding star’s residue,
particles of universal motion—
if my matter’s mass mirrors all else in
the cosmos, am I not only part of
the heavens but heaven itself? Essence
of life everywhere? If I fall in love
on clear nights when stars chorus eyes and song
flowing through me, my body imploding
and exploding at once, is that not strong
and weak uniting, gravity’s prodding,
electromagnetic charging? Each force
fundamental to each particle’s course?

Roger Armbrust
October 14, 2007

FOXGLOVE

At distance, they seem a field of beehives
huddled in groups of lily white, soft pink
of roses. Now near: “You kept me alive,
your family here,” I whisper. Then sink
hands softly into a chosen cluster,
caress their silk-like flutes. Move my face close
to observe their mouths, tongues holding luster
of dusk, each interior stained with flows
dark red, like blood droplets. I kneel to tell:
“You see, my heart had stopped. The hospital’s
emergency room revived the limp shell
of me with digitalis. So I called
the drug firm days later to learn who grew
the crop, then came in love to thank you.”





Roger Armbrust
June 8, 2002

LIGHTNING

Our cloud structure forms, your pilot streamer
flows toward me, my stepped leader following,
your atom and my electron dreamers
bonding, our shaking arms and legs glowing,
then flesh flashing in jagged limbs of white
fire—Thor’s laughing ire—as we bolt the bed
with passion’s searing volts, our savage rite
of passage lifting us like angels’ heads,
vast-current return streamer leaping toward
some whirling heaven only vincible
souls risk and reach, slashing like flaming swords
through massive clouds, forming a crucible
of celestial sprites, elves, even blue jets
reflecting in our eyes like amulets.


Roger Armbrust
October 11, 2007

THE HOLIEST LIGHT

Galileo, his telescope the new
extended eye mapping orbits of stars,
must have whispered to himself, “Dear sir, you
now, both scientist and poet, rise far
too close to heaven. What do you think popes
will say to this sacrilege? Rewrite Church
law for your sake? This curved glass is a rope
they’ll use to noose your neck. But let my search
kill both me and their terrifying faith,
strangle their shouts with truth of heaven’s face.
Let this universe, as one, form the lathe
which tools all fear into a sacred space
where we speak from hearts: the holiest light.”
Our eyes traject our deepest love tonight.




Roger Armbrust
February 12, 2000

YELLOW IRISES

A quartet with Kelly green stalks standing
four feet high draw me off course from my walk
down Beechwood Street and into this sun-ringed
backyard to gaze like awe-struck lover, talk
softly as if wooing delicate blond
beauties posing for my camera, praise
their skin’s silken texture as they respond
by shivering in breeze, each mid-rib braised
brown by some great Chinese artist’s brushstroke
forming wing of a sleeping butterfly.
I lean close, whispering, “If you awoke
now to see me, would you lift to the sky,
carry fertile pollen to her garden,
surprise her with gifts of golden maidens?”


Roger Armbrust
October 9, 2007

JABIR IBN HAYYAN AND I

lounge in his lab sipping canned lemonade.
I probe, “Scholars call you the father of
chemistry.” He puckers his lips. “I made
experimenting alchemy’s key. Loved
inventing processes still used today,”
he slurs in between slurps. “Like what?” I pry.
“Distillation,” he snaps. “Ugh. Booze,” I say.
“Crystallizing,” the Arab sneers. I sigh,
“Table salt. Promotes stroke.” I hear teeth grind.
“I synthesized nitric acid,” Jab growls.
“Acid rain,” I frown. His wild eyes grow blind.
“I improved on Aristotle!” he howls.
“I refined dyeing, and pigments in paint!”
“Lead poisoning,” I whisper. Jabir faints.



Roger Armbrust
July 18, 2007

SNIPER PRODIGY

The preteen boy steadies his M40
rifle, clear blue eye centering distant
target—a Vietcong bivouac’s sentry
fifty meters away—in an instant
through his telescopic sight. Calculates
minute of angle to assure he’ll rip
the skull. Wishes he could insure such fate
for Jenny Warner’s boyfriend as he flips
the trigger. Feels blood’s hot rush—his first kill
of the day. He hunts this way after school
each weekday for hours…Hears a sound…grows still.
Someone’s in the hallway. He plays it cool,
eyes fixed on the screen. Hears his mom exclaim
to friends, “He loves his new video game!”


Roger Armbrust
October 7, 2007

HAYDN AND I

are walking in Greenwich Village, and I’m
wearing my Sony Walkman; he’s sporting
his powdered wig, recalling when he climbed
a wall to see the empress cavorting
in Vienna’s court. “I was only twelve,”
he chuckles. But I can’t hear him because
the volume from my earphones only shelves
any chance I have. Still, I sense him pause
in his stride. I look up and watch him frown
like a teacher seeing a pupil sleep.
I know my buddy feels I’ve let him down.
I hand him my earphones: “Here, yours to keep.”
He slips them over his wig...Eyes grow wild.
I know he hears Die Schopfung. And he smiles.



Roger Armbrust
June 14, 2002

THE ARMCHAIR ASSASSIN XII

I’m monitoring Company agents
interrogating this Qaeda suspect.
Amazing his head’s unbruised from the stint
of slaps with a rolled phone book. You’d expect
that assault and the ripped-out fingernails
to be called torture. But Justice says no.
Or stripping him naked, feet in ice pails—
his unheated cell able to store snow—
blindfolded, pushed backward on a flat board,
flooding his gagged mouth and nose with water.
Makes him feel he’s suffocating. A hoard
of heavy metal CDs will batter
his eardrums for five straight hours. We’ll bare,
not what he knows, but what we want to hear.


Roger Armbrust
October 6, 2007

RAZGLEDNICAS*

for Miklós Radnóti




Fall 1944: I, an infant
crawling on the warm floor in Little Rock,
know nothing of you—shot dead near Abda,
six hundred strides from the Raba. Hemlocks,
huddled bareboned, hide the clumsy mass grave
your fellow Hungarians will find two
years later. In the pocket of your slave-
camp jacket, a palm-sized notebook soaked through
with blood, urine and fertile loam. Poems
somehow survive, taut script of visual
postcards describing your final days: Grim,
dark-rubied visions of your wife, fearful
peasants smoking pipes, captives pissing blood,
Lorsi shot dead, and you soon, in the woods.




*Picture postcards in Serbo-Croatian




Roger Armbrust
September 14, 2003

GEORGE TRIBOU

Years later, the great priest lay in coma,
light of St. Vincent’s private room dimming
as it must, result of weak heart's trauma.
Sitting at his bedside—remembering
how the monsignor liked John Knowles—Mike read
from A Separate Peace, hoping spoken
rhythms flowed, easing journey to sacred
space where body cannot go. Leg broken,
denying war, Finny recovered while
Gene wallowed in guilt. Pausing for respite,
Mike watched our mentor sleep, then whispered, “I’ll
stop. Guess you’re tired as I of hearing it.”
The old man barely shook his head “no” twice.
A teacher’s bit of last loving advice.


Roger Armbrust
October 1, 2007

FREE TIBET

Kansas City winter night, my daughter
sits knitting a wool scarf for her business,
softly singing of Tibetans slaughtered
in Lhasa, of their artisans impressed
into textile mills, of a nun dying
in Drapchi Prison just last month. She leans
her head back, eyes closed, now nearly crying,
voice almost a whisper while revealing
the reprise: “Free Tibet, oh, free Tibet.”
Knitting needles pause in their nodding dance.
Her hands raise the scarf, study wool ringlets
for any flaw. Then her earth-deep eyes glance
at me. “What would you do,” they seem to say,
“if soldiers came here and took me away?”



Roger Armbrust
March 13, 2002

DREAM FLIGHT

In my recurring dream, I am walking
in a strange neighborhood when I begin
to fly, spreading wide my arms, welcoming
sunlight, my body lifted by soft wind,
gliding in a glowing, soaring ballet,
pause of arabesque, dipping like sparrow,
whip of pirouette, arms in playful sway
as I sweep over rooftops, over rows
of stuffed freeway traffic, joggers gazing
as I hover above tree-lined park trails,
watch lovers who break their clenches, praising
my pas du cheval, then my aerial
adagio. As I reach a lake in
the wood, I awaken, feel forsaken.


Roger Armbrust
October 2, 2007

DREAM SONNET

I dreamed about a woman I don’t know.
It was last night, after watching a walk
through of Henry VI, Part III. She showed
up at a place I don’t know, little talk
as she flowed over me, sudden as wind,
but softer somehow, whispering how she
had missed me. Kissed me. I felt my knee bend
against her rippling thigh, tried to part seas
of her eyes to find their color, but could
not. And suddenly she was gone. No cast
member from the play, no character would
fit her role. No loving face from my past.
I slowly woke to find my room the same.
But I was not this man before she came.




Roger Armbrust
September 1, 2001