.....

3 Poems by Albert Geiser

Old Cliche Like Silver Spoon

spoon is a utilitarian thing, a cliche because of what it does
doing what it does methodically and dully,
it holds your hand as it does
the color silver does what it does just as dully,
just as methodically; it's the color of aluminum
and chrome, it's on things for dullness to set off.
My grandmother Katherine, born Gardner, fit
that cliche, born with a silver spoon. Her father
did one working task sort of thing that I heard of:
On debutante balls. Katherine and her sister
went to Vassar. Back in my Twenties I convinced
a program director at Vassar to let me in a couple
of English classes as a way to prove I could be
an older undergraduate there, and I never entered
a class; agoraphobic fear of the classroom stopped
me at the classroom door. So spent a great deal
of time in the cloisterly Vassar library, gorgeous
library, read lots of books there. I first read Mandel-
stam's Stone in English there. Borrowed a few books
that I never returned to the Vassar Library.
Katherine's sister my Great Aunt Ruth was
etymology editor for
Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary, and they say,
had been close to the Algonquin Round Table,
one of the first women in the Who's Who for
women, Who's Who of American Women, in
the early 70s, and her son, my second cousin
Alan is an editor for academic books, weighty
books that I might be carrying around in my
knapsack; Chomsky is one of his authors.
That cousin not a part of my life for reason
of nature and nurture. On my mother's side,
straight back along the female line, myt
great grandmother Wilhelmina was Sinti
Gypsy, called by her boss with no nicety
intended Schwarze Hex "Black Witch" said
to have been for her temper, she had coal black
eyes and hair. That temper has come to me via
my mother. I guess I picked up all the cliches;
I like to be a snob, I like to be in a fiery
argument, I like to be spoiled, I like to pilfer wisely
I like to live for stories, and apocrypha, myth
and poetry, and superstition, for
those ghosts that live on after my mother
isn't around for them, and worry, worrying words
into tangles worrying out the utilitarian in words
and angrily ripping the utilitarian out, and worrying
tropes into utilitarian things like spoons,
worrying iambs, ripping into lamb bones,
reflecting with cucumber coolness on the French Laundry....


.......

At The Dushanbe Teahouse Seeing My Time In Boulder Coming to A Completion

 

 

 

Devonshire clotted cream,

white cream

the coated scone, now double

coated
sugar coated, cream clotted

with the claw tea's pointed
leaves that jump out from their sopping

in hot water the alotted
time, a time marked by the tiny

hour glass provided, put by
a teahouse tender on the bar

that I watched, waiting

as if for long, and then I sipped

not slowly, it was good,

yes subtly steeped

as a fine green should
then after indecision I ordered

choosing the scone of sugar coat
and a cream cheese filling

 

Poem With My Mind on Gaza



An easy cause when there is breathtaking

suffering in a foreign state
that one cannot smell or taste.

Photos depict a horror.

There are governments that by obnoxious world
dominance, can take breaths

deciding how the final waste
will be left, and in what state.

A cause when there are breaths to take....