BEING WITH YOU

For awhile you are chartreuse, a mixture

of green and yellow, fertile earth and sun

mingling as one, your laughter a fixture

in space-time continuum. We’ve begun

to know each other’s tones because we pay

attention. Do you honor how alone

I feel after you’ve stood and stepped away,

having enclosed me, kissed my cheek, and shown

that grateful happiness in your smile? Bright

blue and magenta you, real and surreal

like a Beatles ballad, delicate light.

This must be how our blessed archangels feel

having seen All, their voices a vast choir.

As we’ll feel at night: ebony and fire.

Roger Armbrust

March 4, 2013

JOHN FLAMSTEED

Sick when a bright teen, so kept from Cambridge

for years, you lie by bed’s window at night,

study Venus, ponder Horrocks, his bridge

from earth to sun. Faith keeps college in sight;

at nineteen, you write of astronomy.

A starred decade later, impressed King Charles

names you first Astronomer Royal, sees

you found Greenwich Observatory. Stars

seem to treble. Before your telescope

grows dark, you’ll catalogue 3,000 more.

What did your rare journey tell you of hope,

of longing for light deep in your own core?

Before you gazed at heavens, artists show

you—a boy tracing a sun dial’s shadow.

Roger Armbrust

March 4, 2013

PORTRAIT

How the camera loves you even when

you suffer, face shockingly beautiful,

head resting on left shoulder, (yes even

with intense lines between brows) and your full

lips so passionately kissable. Those

eyes with their dusk-sky irises explain

how, when I first saw you ages ago,

my breath seemed to disappear, intense pain

and care for dire plight my heart discovered

in those eyes, my eyes studying tight twists

of your body just holding on, covered

in light blue, as though your home might exist

outside, above us. You’d fallen off track.

I watched and prayed we could help you get back.

Roger Armbrust

March 3, 2013

"CARMEN"

On this day in 1875,

our fiery gypsy first appears on stage

in Paris to poor reviews. His heart gives

way too quickly, and Bizet dies at age

36 in June. Sensing failure, how

could he have heard our applause centuries

later, feel us suffering with José

as she hurls his ring in the mud; our wheeze

in low agony as he thrusts his knife

in her gut, weeps to her corpse, ma Carmen

adorée! that luscious music a life

in itself.  How could he have envisioned

Tchaikovsky in November writing these

words of praise to von Meck: …a masterpiece…

Roger Armbrust

March 3, 2013

OVERLOADED

I feel trapped like Osiris in a tree

trunk, yet still alive, bark-scaled skin wrapping

my frame, my legs rooted underworld, free

only to descend in search of deep springs,

my arms paralyzed in prayer toward heaven,

my head a nodule of lost thoughts, mute screams.

Condemned to this prison by my seven

deadly sins, did my will or fearful dreams

of some greater menace force me here? When

did waking and sleep become one? What course

for my release but renaissance within,

blessed by higher power I fled, divorced

my psyche from in futile defiance?

Oh, spirit, love, unleash me. Let me dance.

Roger Armbrust

March 2, 2013