EILEAN DONAN

for E.



Somewhere among Son of the Fair One’s genes
is your gene as he walks the castle grounds,
feeling surrounding hills, how their green
risings cause his blood to rise, how the sounds
from godwits sweeping across Loch Duich sweep
him to song: melodies his grandmother
taught him, Gaelic lyrics which made her weep
as she sang, stroking his sunrise hair, her
rocking chair keeping rhythm with her voice.
He recalls stories of her emerald home,
how her husband made this island his choice.
How his own choice led Alexander to come
in thanks, hand him this highland fortress. He
reaches a crest, gazes west toward the sea.



Roger Armbrust
March 23, 2001

WAS MUSIC PLAYING

for C.



Caught up in your eyes’ glow, your honest words,
and my own yakking away, I just can’t
recall: Was music playing while we heard
each other sing our histories, our chants
of fear, hope and care? Did melody fill
the relaxed, cool air flowing through Loca
Luna? Our close, deep conversation thrilled
me, each rhythm its own life. Our local
tour of old homes creaked open memory,
brought faces to doors I never knew stayed
there. Did you tune the radio as we
drove down those streets? What composition played
with such deep passion, I still feel near it,
much like my chest’s heartbeat. Did you hear it?



Roger Armbrust
June 27, 2007

VIRGIN BIRTH

(Or, Komodo My House)

for Jack Browne




Only eight years old, Flora shocked her elders
when she bore the five little bastards,
having never seen a guy of her breed,
much less cuddled, or shared a slinking seed.
Yet the staff saw no reason for clergies
to panic and blame it on allergies,
swearing no blood relation to Mary
and the Child with power to be buried
and then rise again. Still, it brought the press,
though Flora and her fivesome could care less.



Roger Armbrust
January 29, 2007

MY PIMPETTE, MY LOVE

I close my eyes and see you still, strolling
the Herengracht’s bank that first day we met.
Sun caressed your curls. Fishermen trolling
called out, praising your smile. I won’t forget
how you blushed when I bowed, saluting you
as William’s stadtholderette, your laughter
ringing like Zuiderkerk’s bells. Your friend, who
frowned like a moistened prune, stalked off after
you kissed my cheek. Wandering Amsterdam,
we pledged love outside Rembrandthuis. Oh, how
you glowed in moonlight. I call you madame
still, despite my father nulling our vow,
your mother cursing my life. Now you’re free
of me, but not my heart. François-Marie

Roger Armbrust
December 27, 2007

JOHN ASHBERY AT NY'S 1995 SMALL PRESS FAIR

Rising from the audience, slumped in slim
sweater, he responded to George Plimpton’s
intro: “I’m afraid I left my poems
where I stopped for lunch.” Scratching stirred ashen
hair, Plimpton, log-long and limber, replied,
“Well, John, perhaps you should quickly retrieve
them.” Monk-mute, shy John with slow shuffle-slide
left the room. Calm George laughed softly, relieved
the stunned, muffled crowd with literary
vignettes, prestoing a half hour into
five minutes. Back at last, papers buried
under left arm, quietly slipping through
his faithful and shaking the emcee’s hand,
the poet uncrimped his work, and began.

Roger Armbrust
December 27, 2007

ONLY THE LITTLE CHILD KNOWS

for Maggie Cavanaugh


What did Joseph say?
“I could find only this stable.”

What did Mary say?
“Then here we will stay.”

Where did they sleep?
They placed hay in a corner
to make a mattress
and covered themselves
with their only blanket.

And that night Jesus was born!
Yes, that very night.

Can we go see the stable one day?
It’s not there any more.

Can we go see where it was?
No one knows where it stood…
Wait…yes, there is someone:
In a little apartment…

A little apartment like ours?
Yes, on an old street in Bethlehem,
a small child…just about your age…
wakes up every Christmas Eve
to see a glowing light
in a corner of the room
and angels descending
like gentle rain through moonbeams.
They kneel and kiss the light
then rise like shining mist
into the starry night.
The light fades to dark
and the child goes back to sleep
to dream glowing dreams.

And only the little child knows.
Yes. Only the little child.


Roger Armbrust
December 20, 1995

FEAST OF LIGHTS

I have dug out this small fir
these roots from earth
to carry to you
to share with you
gentle touch
of wrapping limbs
with ribbons of bright cloth
slender rain of icicles
topped with my last dollar’s compromise:
a frail and wrinkled star
cut out of a Budweiser can.
We have dressed the tree
and now undress:
You drop waitress’s skirt and cap
your thick dark hair
cascading to shoulders
like night
over slender horizon of snow.
You lift my rumpled jeans
from the floor
brush sawdust and dirt
away with care
and move my open textbook
from your side of the bed
setting it on our only chair
as a scholar genuflects to thought.
You slide under our lone cover.
Push next to me.
Our heads rest on an old coat.
We hold one another like roots.
Gaze at the tree
alight from pulse of neon
flowing through shadeless window
reflecting your deep brown eyes
falling into mine of blue.

Never mind those eyes far from us
who turned away
when we spoke of love.
(Why did they stalk to ancient altars
vowing to never forgive?)
We have this tree
this bed to bind us
with something stronger
than rings or words
from slit-eyed rabbis and priests.
Our bodies glow.
We nod in silence
our eyes aflame
blazing in our feast of lights.


Roger Armbrust

OUR LATE MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY

for Joan and Frank

Today we celebrate our late mother’s
birthday, December 23rd. I smile,
recalling her pose for photographers,
feigning a coquettish cover-girl style
on our couch or front doorstep. We three kids
would laugh as she turned family snapshots
into five-second fashion shoots, eyelids
fluttering, hazel eyes wide like in plots
of silent movies, lips pursed like Lily
Damita. She never complained, that I
recall, of her long days and nights. Early
mornings she prepped breakfasts and ham on rye
for school; managed the Prospect each evening,
locking the movie-house doors when leaving.

Roger Armbrust
December 23, 2007

A GLIMPSE OF STAR

Lying on my futon
I opened your homemade Christmas card.
Loose gold glitter sprinkled
across my black-jerseyed chest,
my navy-blue comforter.
You had turned my bed
to starlight sky
and made me a part of it.
For days
I left the cosmos in tact,
slipping carefully under covers
alone
feeling like a god
enfolded in firmament.

You won’t believe it.
This spring
I cleaned the apartment:
Files lining the cream-colored cabinet,
clothes stacked in the corner
as straight as the books
in unpainted shelves,
audio and video cassettes
columned like giant, surreal teeth
beneath the VCR.
Even the doorway’s Indian rug
now smiles in small loops of pearl white.
Still, sometimes when the light falls right,
I discover a glimpse of star
gleaming on the clean-swept
dark tile bathroom floor
or cradled in cracked pages
of old poetry books
I last read at Christmas.


Roger Armbrust

SONG: CHRISTMAS MAKES ME CRY

Christmas makes me cry
Need I tell you why

I miss her like wine
we aged over time
to drink when we dined
at Christmas

I miss her like light
vast starscape at night
She made my life bright
at Christmas

I used to believe
you spent Christmas Eve
with a lover
a partner
a friend
but this year I’ve learned
Christmas candles won’t burn
You discover
you’re lonely
again

I miss her like air
see her everywhere
although she’s not there
at Christmas

Christmas makes me cry
Need I tell you why




Roger Armbrust

I SIT NEXT TO MY DAUGHTER'S ARTWORK

I sit next to my daughter’s artwork, white
canvas hosting shaded loam, clear ocean:
rectangles of bright blue flowing with slight
ferns, splashed with patches of tanbark terrain,
and above this paradigm that’s most us
smooth tinted texture—semblance of soft fur
you want to stroke with cautious fingertips,
or cave painting embedded with tincture
water-blue, like aqua protozoa
magnified, breathing at ease on moist beach—
bordered continuum of land and sea
inviting imagination to reach
skyward: the first eagle viewing slow birth
of deep-sea islands, rippling lakes of earth.


Roger Armbrust
December 17, 2007

ABDEEL

Having dimmed his inn’s lights, he walked through chilled
night to check the stable, holding warm soup
chest-close, fresh vegetables to help fill
the soft-spoken couple; glanced through slight loop
of curtain to avoid disrupting her
breast-feeding the child, now a week old. How
surprised he was. Three stylish men knelt there
at the manger, bright robes draping damp straw
and soil. One lifted a small, carved chest
of gold coins; one held the medicine
myrrh; the third waved putrid incense, a pest
repellant to Abdeel’s nose. Cause a scene?
Not him. He’d enter, bow, faking a cough,
hoping his charity at last paid off.

Roger Armbrust
December 20, 2007

GREAT BREATHING

Oh, Ibn al-Nafis, tell me how pulse
measures heart absorbing cooling spirit,
expelling its warm waste, body’s repulse
of imbalance forced by reflex. Hear it?
Shhh. Surely you do. No, not the heartbeat,
but the pulse. Soft as memory of wind.
Tell me you hear it, then let me repeat
how, thanks to you, my deep breathing portends
Great Breathing—evolving spirit revives
body exhaling to renew lily
and oak leaf in turn restoring our lives.
Hint how arterioles, venules rely
on capillaries, then heed my whisper:
how my pulse feels Great Breathing flow through her.

Roger Armbrust
December 20, 2007

AFTER THE ICE STORM

for Catherine and Eric


Riding the Super Shuttle from Kansas
City International Airport’s like
gliding shopping carts through a Steuben Glass
superstore. Trees’ crystal-cluster limbs strike
the eye—a museum of giant gems
hovering under smoke-gray clouds—their dull
glaze, patient as faith in old sculptor’s whim,
awaiting the break in haze, steady pull
of sun’s glow flowing over and through each
branch, frosted trunk, turning crusted fields
of grass into brazen, bright blaze, its reach
grasping slithered highway curbs, risk revealed
in ice-scarred signs warning of dark, dull-gold
flesh—hidden, slick-spot temptress in the road.

Roger Armbrust
December 12, 2007

LADYBUG

On the far edge of Damgoode Pizza’s black
table, it seemed a minute, distant world
orbiting space, elytra varnished dark-
auburn gold, like curved fleck from a Bradford
pear tree’s autumn leaf. I ripped a romaine’s
tip, blocking its sure path, followed by torn
corner of paper towel. Playing vain,
it ignored the plant scrap—a guest who scorns
leftovers—then embraced snow-white, refined
fragment as if treasuring home, circling
the towel scrap’s embossed core like a blind
trapper in snow. Thumb and finger curling
the fiber flake, I joined outdoors’ crisp air,
set the small life in grass. It disappeared.

Roger Armbrust
December 10, 2007

LEONARDO'S STREAM

for Eric Sweet
after his 30th birthday


Now in sunlight rather than darkened morgue,
he pulls from his pouch a child’s artery,
dips it in clear stream, watching clotted blood
weaken, loosen, then wash away. His heart
racing like the stream, he gently squeezes
the frost-gray tubing, marvels at its soft
structure, recalls how last week he had eased
from an old man’s cadaver a like piece
nearly hard as a stick. Now night. His loft
dark as a morgue, he lies alone, his eyes
watching the dead child alive, running and
halting by the stream, then kneeling a while.
He breaks the current in two with small hands.
He sees a man with wings, a woman’s smile.




Roger Armbrust

DERACINATION

By ’79, parched from booze and scum
spirit—my stale statoliths ripped away
from my mycorrhiza mycelium
called home—I tumbled northeast. Frigid spray,
incessant wind of the Atlantic tossed
me across Jersey Shore’s edge, up mired coast
to Greenwich Village, nearly brain-dead, lost
as mite in beehive, gnarled meristem frost-
bitten, sapped of will, then strangely anchored
in church basements, libraries, museums,
soft, sober voices replacing rancor,
invisible power—psychic phloem—
nurturing all, my creative rebirth
lifting me back to native Southern earth.


Roger Armbrust
December 7, 2007

THE BILDERBERG BOYS AND I

are chomping caviar, sipping champagne,
and growing blisters rubbing elbows here
in the plush Istanbul Ritz-Carlton’s main
ballroom. Folks keep bending Don Rumsfeld’s ear,
offering support: “You got a bad rap
on Iraq, D.R.,” mumbles Goldman Sach’s
exec. “Good show,” Bank of England’s head chap
adds, “closing in on world order. Relax,
I’ll refill your glass.” “You’ve helped our corrupt
effort to rule global markets,” the Czar
of Pharmaceutics smiles. I interrupt,
“Why aren’t China and Russia here?” They snarl.
“Europe and U.S. only!” Rumsfeld shouts.
“Be gone, Satan!” Two guards escort me out.



Roger Armbrust
June 22, 2007

GABRIEL

Sitting above Beit Sahour, the hill’s peak
letting him see Bethlehem’s distant lights
merely two kilometers away—meek
shepherds walking there once he’d rocked their night
of calm in the cave, announcing the birth—
he decides to serenade their sheep, his
voice soft and pure, like spring wind kissing earth,
deep peace filling all touched by gentle kiss.
He recalls how, months earlier, he had
startled the shy, young virgin, waking her
from sleep. How she seemed frightened, even sad
at first to learn wondrous seed had entered,
void of passion. How she knelt whispering,
eyes closed. He studies the far star’s flaring.


Roger Armbrust
December 2, 2007

JUST DOIN' MY JOB

for Frank Wills


In North Augusta, they still recall how,
till the brain tumor took you at fifty-two,
you’d tug your worn jeans, light a candle
in your wireless shack at dusk, and smile that
tolerant smile they call your ‘sweet spirit’
when Bo Trimble would nudge you: “Frank, tell ‘em
‘bout Watergate, how you found the door they
unlocked with tape, and you took down Nixon
and his whole crew.” How you’d look far away
for an eyeblink (maybe seeing yourself
in security-guard suit at twenty-four),
tongue ground snackcake from between your teeth,
then breathe out in half-growl, half-sigh, as you’d
half-whisper, “I ‘uz just doin’ my job.”




Roger Armbrust
September 30, 2000

I'M LONELY AS

a lost firefly trapped in capped mason jar,
my luciferin fading like embers
untended, confinement crushing bright star
of hope. Ebony wings seem dismembered
by despair, wires of legs and antennae
curl in despondent concession to this
transparent cell with its taunting display
of earth and air that must lure yet dismiss
my life posed in glass like shriveled raisin
in clear gelatin, framed on this window
sill, longing to be free in wind rising
through leaves of distant oaks, my body’s glow
signaling to some lover in nearby
garden I’ll touch her soon or surely die.

Roger Armbrust
December 2, 2007

INTERIOR DESIGN

A birthday poem
for Catherine, my daughter


Our first thought, of course, flows to brilliant rooms
which glow of craft, or, if we’re lucky, art.
But, being artists of earth, let’s assume
how our simple phrase relates to the heart,
its atriums and ventricles--each space
laid out to house just what we humans need
in blood supply. And how the muscle’s pace
responds to other muscles. When we bleed,
how the heart knows, before the mind, our plight.
How the same goes for sensing wrong or right.
How its landscape’s flexible symmetry
leads us beyond our original view
to discover a host of imagery:
Mostly the heart as love, like mine for you.




Roger Armbrust
August 21, 2000