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Midnight At The ATM Machine & Other Poems by Doug Tanoury Midnight At The ATM Machine It greets me by name And asks quite to the point Deposit or withdrawal As I begin my starlight banking To secure some cash A collection of crisp twenties That smell of ink On new paper and Dead presidents Stare at me sternly in moonlight Their images engraved With serious rococo themes New currency Being bent or crinkled Sounds like insects In the night And bills folded tight Like mantis wings Or the torso of a katydid Bearing marks of the late baroque 
My Ethereal Love My Love is incorporeal and virtual Like a vapor Without substance and form And I often think That this is what the dead must feel For each other and how spirits Must love when touch has passed away Into the distance of dark impossibility And all sensuous trace is wrapped In cold repose I love you purely like a ghost With mind and heart but mostly words Not formed in throat or shaped on tongue And launched from lips Nor propelled on the warmth Of my every breath But silent they come to you Like a midnight apparition That hangs before your eyes Untouchable and ethereal From the underworld My words reach you now Where these lines appear Inchoate on the page And my voice that moves invisibly From this nether realm Is the sound of wind in the leaves And is the ice-cold moonlight Of a summer night
Magnificat Anima Mea Dominum (A Song For St. Mary's) At Old St. Mary's there is pipe organ that is A vertical fantasy that fills the choir loft It sometime plays while I study The light filled faces of stained glass saints Animated with sunrise high in the clerestory And I feel each note in the wooden pew The hair on my arms vibrates to a tingle As candle flames tremble and sway with the music That showers down from vaulted ceilings And I am touched where sound meets light When bass rattles the glass and shakes these walls And passes through me like the Spirit of God I place poetry in the collection plate And watch it carried to the altar surrounded With bread and wine and music and light
Conversation And somehow there has grown An icy silence between us That expands to fill the empty space Between our words and transform them Into awkward pauses And there is a tightness slipping about us Like a snake that slowly winds and constricts With ever increasing pressure Around its prey cutting off movement Until neither inhale nor exhale can escape Our sentences are laborsome And talk tends to lapse as time goes by Into periods of nervous quiet That populate and punctuate the conversations Of those long parted and seldom seen And there is graceless effort about us Like a broken wing bird Unable to fly That repeatedly tries but always fails To get airborne once again
Icarus Flying The skies cold blue against white wings As I fly above the clouds Waxen arm extended Feathers dancing in the wind As I ride the jetstream Corkscrewing up In ever growing spirals Leaving my past life The normal and ordinary To crawl about the ground And all my earth bound friends Leaning back their heads to watch Squinting and shielding their eyes Until I vanish and wink from site Alone and invisible I am reborn In the ice cold reaches Of the upper atmosphere And if my wings fail now I know I can only fall upward Into the far deep blue of heaven
At The Lake Down at the lake today At sunrise As I watch the light Reflected on the waves I hear music Not a little fugue or cantata Neither a short prelude Nor minuet But a grand polonaise by Chopin The one in A flat major Playing in my head The silver motion Of water and wind Choreographed and synchronized So finely that the notes That resonate golden and clear Are the power Giving rise to each wave And the force that drives The giant black hulls Of the ore freighters Slowly down the horizon Where movement is melody In the swaying elms and willows Along the shore And harmony rises On the wings of geese And flies graceful like the gulls Across a summer sky Above waters graduating From green to blue to gray Accompanied by the soft piano Of a new day © 2002 by Doug Tanoury |
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