A CLEAN WHITE PAGE

We all begin here:
the silent enormity of
eternity’s bored stare;
the wish before the candles
are lit,
the pointy hat,
the elastic cutting your chin.
One morning you stand before the mirror
fogged with steam
a rainbow of clarity
rubbed in with a towel
and the familiar face
you’ve been attending to for years
hands you a note from your father.

The clean white page
is the measure of the universe
it is E=MC2
it is every pair of socks you packed
and carried from place to place
and never needed.
You are as inconsequential
between the margins and the faint blue lines.
Your pen is filled with smoke.
The angels will fly through the words you write
blowing them apart
like the wise gray heads of dandelions
muttering their little pronouncements
straight from the mouth of God.

Copyright: Charles Oberkehr

Parentheses

When my wife left for work this morning
I bolted the door,
(a dead bolt it just occurred to me)
because out of the blue
(or maybe not)
the click of the cylinder
reminded me of dying.
I went back to the kitchen
to finish my breakfast and coffee
considering that maybe my life ends
just this easily
a flick of the wrist
and eternity is as inconsequential
as a bowl of half warm oats
and a newspaper forever waiting to be read.
And then my father
(dead eight years)
sat down in his checkered robe and slippers
his hair going in a thousand directions at once
and took the Sports page.
I started to object
but who knows when forever
actually starts
everything immutable is in parentheses
the rest is up for grabs.
Tonight my wife
will turn her key in the lock
with a flick of the wrist
and (God willing) announce “I’m home”
(at least that’s what I’m expecting)

Copyright Charles Oberkehr, 2009

PUTTING THE BLOCKS AWAY

I used the word confused
With my grandson
While we put the blocks away
Sorting the yellow triangles,
The blue circles and the red squares
Through the corresponding outlines
In the container lid
Like a crime scene on Sesame Street.
He repeated the word
Not knowing what it meant.
In love with the sound I suppose
Rolling the syllables joyfully
With the soft dexterity of the tongue,
Ka-foooosdid
Again and again
Until it grew large enough
To contain his delight.
This is how we learned
Before we stepped back from our lives
and stood before consciousness’s long mirror
Adjusting our collars and smoothing down our hair
Before what we loved
Became complicated with meaning
And eclipsed by our own reflection.
Back in those sweet days
When one thing followed another
As easily as these blocks
Slip through the empty space
Made especially
With them in mind

COPYRIGHT: Charles Oberkehr 2009

A Journal entry

I am lost. It makes no sense to pretend otherwise. I have been walking in circles for weeks. My mouth is full of bitterness. My eyes burn. The ground gives way under my feet.

I don’t know how to get my bearings. All the old tricks have been exposed. I try to read, but the book in my hands is a mirage, the words shimmer and dance with neither meaning nor nourishment.

I have nothing to say for myself. It all sounds like the muttering of derelicts wandering the fluorescent-lit grocery aisles among the bright boxes of oatmeal and detergent at midnight.

I have no baptism to account for this. The heavens have not opened. There has been no heavenly voice. There has been no wild man with reservations. No devil to grant permission; no stones and no bread.

There is no justification for any of it. No ransom note, no telltale sign.

There is only the clock unwinding on the mantle, one thundering tick at a time, and this long scarf of smoke outside my window, unraveling in the crimson January sky.

A FAMILY PORTRAIT

My father is singing
in the photo on the refrigerator.
It’s an impromptu portrait,
the last time the family was together
and, as is almost always the case,
no one knew it at the time,
but you know it now
so you feel like God
when you look at it
on your way to a midnight snack.

There are dishes waiting to be cleared
from the table in front of them
empty glasses, glittering forks.
My father’s hand rests on the shoulder
of the sister who took him in at 14.
She is not singing,
she is almost smiling
gazing off to the left.

My father’s younger brother
and an older sister
are singing with him.
Their arms are linked
at the elbows,
mouths in perfect O’s.

My mother and my aunt are smiling
standing by their husbands
as though they’d just decided
at that very moment
their lives had been good.

Rudy is dead now,
Lois (the one smiling) is dead,
Uncle Chickie is dead,
two of the sisters
dissolving into laughter; dead
and the one still singing; dead.

My father is dead too.

There is this terrible line between
is and was
and it moves so swiftly
you can barely see it
and maybe that’s why
we love photos like this
why we plaster them on our refrigerators
and invent ingenious things with magnets
to hold them there.
They are emblems of what could not be spoken
and what should not be forgotten
they are talismans of the sacred
wadded in the pocket of an old coat.

A family
standing shoulder to shoulder
side by side
hands tentatively resting on each other
like small blessings,
singing a German song
from the immigrant childhood
that marked each of them
in different ways
and there is a sense of reconciliation
you come to see in time
that thing which comes after hope
the moment someone sings the first bar
of something
and the rest join in.
In photos
as in the heart that cherishes them
they do not stop singing
until the song is finally done.

I am not ready...

I am not ready for this:
the cold
the dark at 4:30
exaggerating the sense of refuge
in this room where I write this.
I have gone through this entire day
tailed by something like sorrow.
In the twilight it crosses the threshold.
The wavy glass in the window
drifts closer without the light behind it
to hold it back.
Soon there will be nothing
but HERE.
The clock ticking on the wall
is final and unforgiving
NOW, NOW, NOW,
The lamp on my desk
burns brighter
with each thunderous stroke.

copyright Charles Oberkehr

ADVENT POEM

Our writer sits lost
Late one afternoon
There is a blue sky outside
Filled with cold and bitterness.
Inside an old clock ticks drunkenly.
He remembered to wind it
Right after he hung up his coat
That was hours ago
When he was filled with hope
He’s started many poems since then
And rejected all of them
Or had they rejected him?
It’s hard to tell anymore
tick TOCK TICK tock tick TOCK
He sees a lame horse
Racing down a broken hill
Its rider carrying an urgent letter
Or maybe a note
of belated thanks
For many small favors.


© Charles Oberkehr

On the Day You Were Born

for Solomon Elisha Evans

The trouble with stories
about the day we were born
is how much gets left out of them.
Like the hopeless, loose snowflakes
that fell on the morning you were born,
melting as soon as they hit the ground.
I was having breakfast
in a Gaithersburg McDonalds,
and the flakes that landed
on my shoulders and back
survived an extra 20 seconds
until I got inside.
They are as much a part
of the day you were born
as your mother diligently climbing stairs at the mall
ten days past her due date,
or the check up she almost didn’t go back for,
but did,
or the ambulance, the emergency C-section,
and the cord that was
wrapped around your neck.
Those extra 20 seconds
no one could have predicted,
drifting unbidden from the sky
are the binding that holds
the pages of a life together.


So let me add then,
that I ordered a Number 2 meal that morning,
splurging with both coffee and juice
and sat among the regulars,
a random community of retired men
with no where better to be,
who gather in places like this
to discuss the aches and pains of history.
I took a table by a window,
waiting for news of you,
wondering if today would finally be the day
and watched the brief, furious snow
draw a gray curtain over the parking lot.


When you are waiting for someone to be born
you can sense things shifting
around inside you like loose change
in a pocket of your heart.
The snow is sticking now
all around the edge of things
and quickly losing interest in itself.
I’m enjoying eavesdropping on these men
while I eat.
They will sit here all morning
nursing coffees, sharing the same newspaper,
telling the same stories,
stories meant to set a lost world straight
and these stories too
in their own way
are all about the day you were born.

copyright charles oberkehr 2006