Golden Age, poem by Timothy Steele

GOLDEN AGE
by Timothy Steele

Even in fortunate times,
The nectar is spiked with woe.
Gods are incorrigibly
Capricious, and the needy
Beg in Nineveh or sleep
In paper-gusting plazas
Of the New World’s shopping malls.

Meantime, the tyrant battens
On conquest, while advisers,
Angling for preferment, seek
Expedient paths. Heartbroken,
The faithful advocate looks
Back on cities of the plain
And trudges into exile.

And if any era thrives,
It’s only because, somewhere,
In a plane tree’s shade, friends sketch
The dust with theorems and proofs,
Or because, instinctively,
A man puts his arm around
The shoulder of grief and walks
It (for an hour or an age)
Through all its tears and telling.
***
“Golden Age” appears in Timothy Steele’s collection Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 (University of Arkansas Press, 1995), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Timothy Steele’s first collection of poems, Uncertainties and Rest, published in 1979, attracted attention for its colloquial charm and its allegiance to meter and rhyme at a time when free verse was the predominant style, especially among younger poets. Steele has published three additional collections: Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and Toward the Winter Solstice (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006). Steele’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Award for Poetry, a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has held teaching appointments at Stanford, and the University of California, in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Since 1987, he has served as professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. (Read more at poets.org.)

Painting: “Connect” by Photodream Art. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

Toward the Winter Solstice, poem by Timothy Steele

TOWARD THE WINTER SOLSTICE
by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUV’s.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow , blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

“Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele, from Toward the Winter Solstice © Swallow Press, 2005, available at Amazon.com.

Photo: Jenny Spadafora, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Toward the Winter Solstice, Poem by Timothy Steele

TOWARD THE WINTER SOLSTICE

by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUV’s.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow , blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

“Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele, from Toward the Winter Solstice © Swallow Press, 2005, available at Amazon.com.

Photo: Jenny Spadafora, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Fae, Poem by Timothy Steele

FAE 
Poem by Timothy Steele

I bring Fae flowers. When I cross the street, 
She meets and gives me lemons from her tree. 
As if competitors in a Grand Prix, 
The cars that speed past threaten to defeat 
The sharing of our gardens and our labors. 
Their automotive moral seems to be 
That hell-for-leather traffic makes good neighbors. 

Ten years a widow, standing at her gate, 
She speaks of friends, her cat’s trip to the vet, 
A grandchild’s struggle with the alphabet. 
I conversationally reciprocate 
With talk of work at school, not deep, not meaty. 
Before I leave we study and regret 
Her alley’s newest samples of graffiti.

Then back across with caution: to enjoy 
Fae’s lemons, it’s essential I survive 
Lemons that fellow-Angelenos drive. 
She’s eighty-two; at forty, I’m a boy. 
She waves goodbye to me with her bouquet. 
This place was beanfields back in ’35 
When she moved with her husband to L.A.

Photo: Maine Coon Maniac, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED