The moon was a memory
long since burned away.
I hadn’t seen her for nights.

The traffic had mostly died down.
It was quiet when I woke up.

Like some great mechanized fog on some far off glen or countryside is burned away by the night, the fog of quiet that had befallen the city lifted and just dissipated like the night.

fleeting and feeting one more poet for the night,
the stars had slipped away unnoticed,
as cheeks were washed with music
and music with good spirits
the thought of you..

I was standing near an open window taking pictures of the sunrise when the city seemed to gain consciousness.

I did too.

Catching a lucky bus up Third Avenue, the blue of the morn hasn’t even been born and I think I catch a glimpse of you sleeping, New York. As I cross the street and round the corner I crash through drunken pigeons who coo and flutter about, making quite the fanfare of my walk’s commencement.

Like the sun’s morning trail, I stalk westward down the street, she takes the high road while I stay on my feet. And before I know it, there’s a coffee in my hand and a bagel from the man’s stand on the west-hand side of Park and 31st. My last two dollars slide in and out of daylight while my bag gets heavier and I have breakfast to look forward to later.

I walk and strum along to some new song, deep within my heart, but I can’t make out the words just yet and I can’t quite seem to start.  The city is now alive and I picnic south of Madison Square Garden. The spire of the building of The Empire State points way up to the heavens and I see the Pearly Gates. I see my Grandma walking along the avenues of Manhattan, and crossing town with the delicate footwork of a featherweight fighter, but the tenderness and vocal aesthetics of something more beautiful and lighter.  She clenches her pocketbook closely to her side and she only turns around when she’s stopped on the corner to double check her grandson is still by her side. A smile cracks on my face.

Yes I am leaving today but I’ll be back soon, for an audition or two and certainly to swoon. For there’s a few more days of holiday left and much work to be done before my next project. There’s a fire in my stomach while my hand’s receive no warmth, I gotta hold on or they’ll just freeze out here. What if I let go? Not to flail aimlessly or to hurt somebody, but to catch anything to come to catch anything that goes; to be ready for what’s ahead, nobody ever knows. I let go of my bags and I settle back in my seat, I take a deep breath stretching my crown to my feet, I’m near the back of this sleek black bus and I’m surprisingly not very tired.

So, New York, I day dream a bit, wishing I was still asleep with you. But I doubt you closed your eyes as I feel like I couldn’t either last night, we both watched for the moon vainly hoping to capture her for ourselves, to keep the night going to keep the day at bay. But the dawn did break and she got away again. Someone must have tipped her off. It’s alright, because I’m ready.

Smoke from stacks just south of Hackensack, dissipates and imitates their darker grey rivals, who hold black briefcases of diamonds and burning rain. But before they sink off into nothing, they collect and connect into large amorphous mountain ranges suspended in the air, almost proud to be birthed pumping hard through the crystaline, the morning’s chill puts up a fight and they collide in a ball of smoke, like in a cartoon battle royale. A fire breathing dragon slowly emerges from the war-cloud-conglomerate, sliding towards her prey, opening her mouth and angling her head in just the right way (like when going in for a kiss) but this dragon’s kiss reaches beyond fatal longings and she seems to take a breath to prepare herself for the devour.. and she dissapears. Just like that. Scales fangs and all. But something tells me dragons don’t disappear that easily.

The sun bleeds through a thickly blanketed morning sky, and a simple sphere of the entire sprectrum comes aglow behind the wash of white and grey.

Streaks of grey with rectangular patches of celeste,
Streets of grey and black painted all the rest..

Centurion Gents made of Cement reach up to the sky
With the help of steel and fire I wonder how they’d fly..

The bare trees silohuetted against the white hot sky look like upside down lungs in an xray negative, while the Evergreens seem to play in and out vew.
Every once in a while.

On the road. Again.
But moving forward all the while..

Friday, February 20, 2009

Standing in the center of the first of
Two rooms my eyes scan pieces that have been
A part of my memory for only
A few days but still somehow seem almost
..Recognizably memorable.
Familiar.

Like an uncle you’ve only met once or
Twice, like the drive to an old girlfriend’s house…
You know how to get there by sight, pretty
Much turn by turn, but this time a row of
Trees and houses, once called suburbia,
Become flecks of human life among all
Nature’s oaken marvels; and the trees aren’t
Green and brown anymore, no, they appear
Auburn, chocolate umber and deep orange
Brown, sliced by delicate flashes of white
And refractive solar warmth of daylight.

Islands of separate nuclei, yolks of
forgetful longing seemed to have taken
on lines, if not shapes, of their own. What was
once a lot of yoke has morphed/developed
into states or heads of states, like photo
negatives of a skewed caricature
portrait from the early Twentieth Sea.

Nailed to the wall on a painted circle
skillet I see the facades of monkey
bourgeois loveliness or a two-faced Holmes.
Sherlock and old man Janus sit side by
Side, the latter with the mask of the stage
Peering from his railroad windows that he
Cannot hide. Seriocomic bliss rests
On either side of his white clay coin face.

Mental Vacations of indeterminate wavelengths.

And now I recline in this hourglass
Fiberglass encased bandage. I recall
A linen tablecloth smudged with tea and
Marmalade stains. Teaspoons are weapons and
Breakfast’s simple footprints of no one there
To clean up after ol’ me. With yawning
Fat men and snickering tourists I turn
Away and I see my old stand-byes have
Resulted and also resolved themselves
Deep into ado, to do with my love
Of cooking for you and also my love
Of singing for food.

All these holes in the grain of my existence live on without me, with or without my resistance.

The birds still sing though I recline bounded
Half women half-dance in these confounded
White lacquered walls that plague me with color
That hang up my insides y todo mi
Silencio y dolor solo pueden
Oír y oler, ver y sentir el
Olor de mi sangre que
Ruega para vos… ensima me pege
Como la mano de Dios.

Raw and unfettered and leaving nothing behind, I stand and I wait holding onto my mind.

Six hidden heartbeats that drip off these pics
Have eluded all the others because
Their mind’s all play tricks.

Their minds who are closed, their souls who are cold
Pacing through life till they all are just old.

I had to search I had to listen but
That’s what I do, just share all that glistens
Take from the gold and yes even the rain
Whatever I can so that nothing’s the
Same, and no one’s to blame if you stand to
Gain all that is here in front of you: The
Colours all hidden in green, red, and blue.

I can’t ever make my way deeper in.
There is something that pins me right here deep
Within. My center is alone, and I
Feel like an egg whose time is all but up,
With the passers all by knocking over
My cup, but with each person going I enjoy
The waves of silence and the private show
For if you want and truly see there’s more
To everything in your life’s gallery.

Half eaten or just a slice or two
This banana cream toast-infused
Pancake buttered red and blue.
Dancing legs on white walls vanish
While other legs just freeze and wonder
Sitting in decrepit blunder
Shadowing far away from you.
Mirror image and dashed-line shadows
Glow a bit from their grey-soaked hue
While stolid steely angle flirting
Is diffracted from one to two…

Fallen chances and beaten egg yolks
Crack into the black space now
In a tri-colored invasion
Of green and white and blue.

Salt and pepper spoons
That have been used and used
Stain a linen agéd cloth.
Choked and tied in herbal wonder
Something’s fused me to this chair
Designed by Alighieri’s sloth.
Leaning back and tied forever
Bound into this place and time.
I remain here now and forever
Convalescing in the land of rhyme.

Plastered to a skillet pan
On a vertical kitchen stove
Someplace south of my tomorrow
Did my mind begin to rove.

Pinned and tacked like island continents escaping into nothingness,
A yoke-al center part of Whiteville seems to hold this nucleus
Tight to themselves but not each other, away from one another still
Like some ward of black construction waiting by the window sill.

Looking off, off into nowhere,
Nowhere’s in particular it seems
I travel here and there and go where
My mind rips to and fro my seems.
Waiting for some sort of order
A sentence to the frying pan
My voice is monotone recorder
I stand alone facing the man.

Licking plates clean
Neck and ankles straining still
Bound and gagged
A Bugsy silhouette
Hides something ragged
To the eyes of those who will
See something ‘neath this black silk screen.

If you only look down and deeper
If you look past all my color
You will see yourself
Across the table in the mirror.
Seek and you shall find the reeper.
Half a chair and half a window
Cooling blades cut through my walls
Seismographic mirror forests
Birds that chirp but never fall.

And here stands a step by step instruction manual of sorts
Turning you, a human deduction, to a furniture cohort.

But all around I am rescinded by my fellow man who’ve tried,
Mossy mirror glassy floor-rid this is how they all just died.

Stepping through the creaky caverns
Of someplace deep inside my mind,
Hearing stolid wingéd messengers
Warning me just what I’ll find.

Glass infused
And light diffracted
Dancing women
By night distracted
Tearing ticker tape in two
Cardboard crayon
Convalescing
Won’t ever bring me close to you.

Won’t ever make a whole so messing
When the scheme of things
Leaves me resting and caressing
Those that at least I can see.

For the warning singing fowls
Left me all alone tonight,
And with pentagonal statues
I cannot recall to fight
My way through…
They’ve taken me from you.

I sit and am bound.

In the corner do I sit, waiting hearing you
Endearing me to stay a little longer
They won’t let me play with you
Why can’t they just take my word, my dear?
Why must you always run away to here?

Exhibition: January – March 2009

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, BANANAS
Vlatka Horvat, Or Some Other Time

i

i shot an elk last night
and i barely know what they look like,
majestic and brown
buckish and lazy?

they tread on this earth fattening up for winter,
preparing themselves for the onslaught of cold.
while i aimed my rifle through the safety of glass
and metal, wood, lead and a bit of fire,
he simply looked ahead and with desire
began to chew the grass at his feet.

ii

there i was down on bowery street
with a pair of rented gloves and a handmedown jacket
racing ‘cross town to my yeats reading club.

with some plath on my arm and a bit of mine own,
i tread into a world that for sometime has owned
me, yes deep in the day and always at night,
the drug that is verse and its piece that is prose,
takes me and wakes me like plucking a rose
from its warm yet sullen earth, its once and former home.

and so pollination or maturation were only yesterday,
but now you represent ‘love’ or at least a gift,
slowly dying always fleeting — life.. at short shrift.
and yet we pretend that everything is still alright,
while you’re a simple symbol that always whithers away,
something bound to fall like a lover or the sun
who crashes through your horizon every morning
and just like that they leave you again.
leaving you with nothing to show for yourself
‘cept maybe a tear or even a grin,
a smile or a glassed over stare,
maybe some ice and a bottle of gin
but no one’s waiting at the top of your stairs.

iii

i shot an elk last night
and took silent pride while i did it
it was so easy.
it was too easy.
God forgive me, i have done it.

there he stood, the sun froze manufacturedly
upon him like a stage spotlight,
and he chewed his grass so golden brown
that i wondered to myself with my usual frown
who’s aiming at me?  someone is assuredly.
upon my stage there must be a light
to show my doubts and all of my frights,
someone while i’m sleeping.
someone will pluck.  it.  out.

and no promethean heat will e’er enter my lungs
no more will my frigid alabaster heart beat,
but it shall stay frozen as it is now
like my toes that once treaded this ground.

iv

surrounded by poets on a street north of houston
i sit across from a liquid brooklyn,
while zombie-comedies flourish flatly
i laugh out loud like i haven’t in a while.

a john-goodman-in-the-big-lebowski-look-alike
reads from his book of anti-god rants and hilarious antics

everyone seems to know him, this sarcastic famous f***,
and this contemporary or at least modern-comic poet
goes on about angels and rednecks and god and cain and dinosaurs

insincerity runs rampant like woody allen on acid,
or maybe lenny bruce during a catatonic food coma
with the vocal prowess of jeff foxworthy and the charm of a stockcar race.

with metaphors as good as a word or two thrown together
(with the delicate fecundity of a trash collector on a frigid monday morning)
the oaf pontificates on humor, and other impossibilities of today.

as the laughs ensue and continue and continue
i keep writing in case something hits me or at least
until this is all over.

v

and so again and again,
i take aim with my pen,
such a beautiful calligriphic mess of some lines
just some random observational narrative rhymes,
but with each sip i take and each beat
i break.  him.  down.
I can’t believe the judgment the hatred or my pen
the high incestuous climbing of my clammy achy skin

i don’t sweat, i take aim.
i don’t fear, i take names.
and suddenly my forefather’s of thought
take me under their golden wings
fill me with words and other splendid things.
things i have never seen before
things that come to me in the night,
beats that keep me walking
keep me talking without fright.
it’s not easy for you and ain’t easy for me
so why did i get off on this voiceless killing spree?

they tread on this earth inspiring and desiring
just to talk a little truth, whatever there’s may be.
and there i was taking aim with my pen
through the safety of the empty glass just in front of me.
but something just tripped the wrong set of wires.
he simply looked ahead with artistic desires,
and began to chew and spit on the grass at his feet.

vi

(whether the green monster took hold of my heart beat,
or maybe the yellow belly of some wannabe hero
took me aside and said, “Here’s the match Nero!
All’s you gotta do is hold it close enough,
the heat of your weapon will do all the rest.”
and i choked down his fire and it burned in my breast
and…)

i shot an elk last night.
and he didn’t even know it.
buckish and majestic
the nature of expression.

i shot an elk last night.

but really…

he shot me.

The quivering Oak outside my window seems to droop today.  It may be the rain of a few days ago or the cool gray skies of today that make my tree shiver in place.  It may be it’s readiness for fall.  In the distance I see leaves turning, slowly turning from green to gold and brown.  I hear the shouts and smell the traffic and I even feel the sun trying to warm up the day.  Every Fall is something new and something ended and something blue, something chipping away at yesterday and plowing forward to tomorrow.

The path I have walked (or run, or driven, ridden, or even crawled) is slowly coming up behind me, being purged and replaced by Johnny Appleseeds and Susy Marigolds.  And up ahead, I use the stones of my past to concretize the future… but maybe a road doesn’t need concrete or even stone.  Maybe the urban reality of concrete forests and asphalt jungles is a sad one — the roads are already marked, the maps are already written, and the paths have all been traveled, trodden through and through.

Can you make your own way and blaze your own trail
While riding their trains and holding their rails?
What is it you search for, oh artist in me?
Can you play their games and be totally free?
Can you make your own art each and every day?
When politics and smiles just get in your way?
I refuse to be old and look back all wilted
To then be an artist with a past that’s been jilted.
Why can’t I sing of new found beauty and lost love?
Must I wait like a heavy cloud to cry up above?
“We too feel pain and must be respected!”
Cried the Little Prince upon being dissected.
You think my world is small, you think you know me well,
But this Steppenwolf inside has oh so much to tell…

(But let me save this for the ring, those five minutes of artistic grandeur.  The comical conversable laughable criable liable to make every actor scream, those things that get you out of bed in the morning, and those things that keep you up at night:  the audition.)

So for now I will leave the stones – the aforementioned stones of the quickly-fleeting past – I will leave them all behind or at least share them with someone else, for you may need but a few to cross a little creek, or you may need quite a lot to slow a raging river.  “But I am quite finished with neatness!”  cried the little boy to his teacher.  And she looked on in horror, and also jealous amazement, as he took his blue crayon and drew all over the lines… All across them and around them with all of his colours.  “I don’t want to be messy, or careless, or ‘free’… (that false freedom to act however one pleases, without recompense, remorse, or even thought for your fellow mates)  I want to be happy and I want to be me!”  So let the waters come and let the rivers rage, I will swim and drown if that be my quest, or I will ford the river in time because EVERYTHING is fordable.  Fighting and working hard everyday is an affordable investment, because it inspires me and gives me more energy to deal with every challenge in the road ahead.

And very soon the road will be covered, blanketed over in umber — raw and burnt.  But as the leaves change and before they all fall, I will take a lesson from the urgent Oak and steadfast Pine, I will stay in my place and work for a better tomorrow because I know if I plant the roots now, and I mean really plant them, I can survive the winter wherever I am and whatever it is that she may bring.

And through the thick clouds the sun shines on barely, barely letting us know that she is there, through some gray and dull florescence she shines on in vain.  Come fall, come what may.

I will shine as brightly as I can
‘Till I burn your clouds all through,
‘Till I melt her snowy-whitness
And, Master Art, I am with you.

But that time has not yet come
And I’m ahead of myself, I am.
For the morning has left and left us the afternoon,
And before I walk along the birch-lined lyrics of my past
I hear the voice of Sandoz cry out to me at last,
”And now, back to work!”

Michael Vitaly Sazonov as Dr. Bernard Rieux
photo by Ian Armstrong

I had a great time delving deep into the clinical mind and scientific heart of Albert Camus’s Dr. Bernard Rieux.  He was a lot of fun to play — as much fun as one can have on stage dealing with things like the plague… the blind brutality of incurable diseases, the frustration of a crippling bureaucracy, the Absurdity of tragedies that present itself when people, surrounded by death, quarantine themselves from the rest of the world to contain the pestilence that’s killing them all.  Life and Death.  Faith and Fate.  And “Man.”  The show really started cooking as the run progressed, so I’m sorry to see it end so quickly.  I want to heartily thank Robert and Elle and the whole cast and crew at Scena Theatre.

Now as I read the stories about cyclones, earthquakes, fires, and floods taking lives by the thousands, I can only hope that Camus (through his cast of complex characters and arguments) is both wrong and right.  As much as I hope that there will not “always be victims, because that is the order of things,” I too hope that tragedies like these can “help men to rise above themselves” because after all, I hope there are always “those who, while unable to be saints, refuse to bow down to the plague…”  Those who, in the time of true testing, strive not for lofty answers or reasons, but work for cures.  “Their actions and desires are limited to ‘Man’ and his humble, yet awe-inspiring love, and they shall have their reward.  It’s only right.”

And from the relative comfort of my computer, I can sit here and type this as (a hope for) truth.  Yet amidst these recent tragedies, I can only think through the paradigm of Camus’s characters…  Is it out of my hands to help everyone? Maybe.  After all, Dr. Rieux sent his own wife away to die alone in a sanatarium because he knew he was incapable of curing her.  Is it always out of our hands? Maybe not.  Is tragedy always so far away and so well reported on? Never.  As a former professor of mine once said, “the whole world needs the whole world.”  So I pray for those dealing with these tragedies every day just as I hope others pray for me.  Because, as the town of Oran finds out in the midst of the Plague, “it can’t do any harm.”

I’m looking forward to jumping into MARIELA IN THE DESERT with director Nick Olcott… The first time I read this play, written by Karen Zacarías, it held on to me and didn’t let go. It had the sad, imagery rich prose reminiscent of Federico Garcia Lorca’s family tragedies and a contemporary pace, comedy, and heart that just pulled at my Latin heartstrings! (Now if only someone will do some Chekhov, my Russian soul will be appeased as well!) We start rehearsals on May 13th and open on June 12th. Click here for more details…

El toro y el cóndor (The Bull and the Condor), 1957
Oil on burlap (jute)
72″ x 51-1/4″

Art Exhibit not to be missed! Oswaldo Guayasamín!

One of my favorite artists, Oswaldo Guayasamín, is being presented at the Art Museum of the America’s at the Organization of American States. I had the pleasure of seeing his work at his former home-turned museum in Quito, Ecuador this summer and his paintings are viciously potent and wonderfully touching…

El grito I–III (The Cry I–III), 1983
Oil on canvas
Triptych, 51-1/4″ x 35-7/16″;41-5/16″ x 68-7/8″;51-1/4″ x 35-7/16″

April 5-May 29, 2008

art museum of the americas

201 18th street, nw
(just south of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
washington, dc 20006
tuesday-sunday 10am-5pm

Sir Derek Jacobi and Michael Vitaly Sazonov (sporting my Clark Gable look)
(many thanks to Antoinette for this picture!)

I had the honor of chatting with Sir Derek Jacobi at the 2008 Helen Hayes Awards, where he graciously received this year’s Helen Hayes Tribute in recognition of his illustrious career on stage and screen. He spoke beautifully and earnestly about his love of theatre and at the end of his speech he smiled and said, “I hope this lifetime achievement award isn’t…the end, but a new beginning.” — Hear, Hear! I say!