M. A. Schorr

Fives Poems and a Sonnet

TO BE (OR NOT)

Soon I'll move to Denmark
Whether I can say

Nothing is rotten
in the state today

Where even from a small hotel
I can see the sea

Or find shelter behind a berm
Against a winter wind

MY mind's made up
I will settle in

And write hokko
until peace comes

and again I can walk
the long lane with Bashō

and going home again
to a smaller pond

where adventure no longer
calls me—meaning

i can no longer be—
or bear to be—a Dane

RIP-RAP

This morning
made the same tracks
I made yesterday

Love was
not an easy game to play
but followed anyway

Parenting no easier
but put one foot
ahead of the other

Illness marched me
up the hill and down again
until almost free

of the great trek
that now holds me
in its ever-loving arms

NARROW PATH

On the first trek
what was lacking
was meaning

But put
one step ahead
of another

And soon
you’re there
at the shrine

with several
in your wake
and many

ahead and
at the ready
for the harder trek

BASHŌ

all those
miles in paper

underwear
now a

matter of
public record

at the
Bashō museum

Every place
he stopped

found a circle
that opened out

and found lines
that found

their narrow
path

VOICE

My God, it sounds
like me

Who else?
Could end a line this way

and breathe
through this line

and make this choice
to make this noise

sometimes with rime,
and end this line,

that resembles
his own voice

SONNET FOR WATERTOWN

A new day, it seems, at New Town Diner
that lies before us like a land of dreams
Though leftover nightmares intervene
Despite the comforting families pictured there

Yesterday the black hats and the white lit up the sky
of a neighborhood that wondered about the end here
no one expecting abject surrender
and every one wanting to know why

Today the correspondent returns to the crime zone
to follow the blood trail of the perpetrator
who was plucked from the belly of the whaler
in the place they had to take him in

But despite the best veggie hash so easy up
Recurring nightmares linger in my cup.

M. A. SCHORR recently moved to Watertown, Massachusetts. His newest book of poems, Aliens, consists of jazz and nature haiku co-authored with Niels Kjær, and will appear in Denmark this summer.