CAPTIVITY
I was welcomed here.
This room, clear, golden
And dark as a medieval chamber,
Is love on an autumn night.
The fresh perfume of some lotion,
The dark hair and pale and
Hardly visible face,
And the lace of reflected street lamps
Across the ceiling
Scored by window frames
And the folds of curtains.
The perfect unburdening of disappointment
Into tenderness. The perfect response
Of one body answering the other,
And the slow journey
Toward that captivation of our senses,
Into that country
Whose mountains seem alien and overwhelming
Tinted peach at sunset
Vast presences seen and unseen.
And then,
Sweet sleep.
CARPATHIANS
There are countries of the spirit,
Where the villages are lit by torches
And the bears weigh 700 pounds.
The clocks are sad
And strike the wrong hours
While park benches are as empty as the sky.
The tyrannical government
Lies about the weather,
Lies about the sun, moon, stars,
Sex and the mists off the river. The
streets are named Liberation Avenue,
Redemption Boulevard, and Square of
The Sixteenth of January.
This is the world we ran to from the world
While storms of cursing exiles fled the other way
And a father loomed above us all—
Loomed like a mountain range.
A Carpathian father ready to drink the blood of humans.
Seeking counsel I ask,
“Can my father really
Be mastered through
The interpretation of dreams?”
The therapist replies,
“According to Cornell Medical School’s
Malaise Inventory, someone who is disturbed
May also have a genuine complaint.”
The doctor has a pleasant if inexpressive face
And a disarming manner.
You can see
A fine lucid intelligence in his eyes.
“You must be very confused,” the doctor says.
You nod.
“How lonely it must be having your condition.
How baffling and troublesome and unfair.”
You bow your head silently in acknowledgment.
Like most educated people,
You are conversant with the basic
Tenets of the therapeutic relationship,
Issues of transference and countertransference
And so forth,
So you do not wish to acknowledge
The fact that you wish with all your heart
To embrace the man, to clamber up
The cliffs of his soaring Carpathian lap,
And remain there
LINES COMPOSED UPON
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
AFTER AN ALL-NIGHTER
Wind peels waves off the river
and heaps them against the pilings.
Gulls cry and dip low,
then shoot straight up again.
We wonder, why don’t doormen
ever go to sea? Why don’t nuns
pray before the great stone Buddha
up in the Bronx?
“Deliver us from the heavenly
beauty of the sunrise over Queens,”
Our hearts are armored
with booze and grass,
and we ask the prayerful nuns
to intercede,
“Spare them the knowledge
of where they are going
when the bridge they cross
disappears in a thick rain.”
New Child
From the teeming sky he falls
Sizzling past the spacemen.
This infant is a house on fire,
Burning into our spirits.
We close our eyes and hear the blaze rage,
Catch the rooftop’s crackle.
Soon he’ll lift his empty spoon
To catch the embers.
He came from far away, trillions of light years,
Before he came hurtling into our kitchen like a comet.
Eternity is endless even in a universe as young
As our newborn.
Until you are healed.
Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published over 260 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the US, the UK, France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Check his website, www.dickbentley.com.