Dane Cervine Writes

Two New Poems in the Monterey Poetry Review

The Chapel in the Heart's Bureaucracy, and Justice Is Not Blind, are two poems of mine related to my work as a therapist, and serving as a Child/Youth Mental Health director for Santa Cruz County in California. Both poems appear in the Summer 2008 edition of The Monterey Poetry Review, on page 9. Click on the link below, then on the Index on left click on Page 9:

http://www.hartnell.edu/mpr/issues/index.php?vol=3&num=3&page=09&backissue=3_3

Every year there is a great conference held at the Asilomar conference grounds in Pacific Grove in Monterey County...a gorgeous sand-swept Monterey Pine retreat. Children's mental health professionals, advocates, parents, youth, legislators all gather to learn and network together. The grounds include an old wooden chapel, which helps remind me that social change is rooted in more than policy and bills, but in the heart.

I've included copies of the poems below, in addition to the link above:

 

Justice Is Not Blind

 

The proud girl from Oakland

sits on-stage at the conference,

describes her normal day—

boyfriends shot at, one killed,

purse stolen, cell phone stomped,

avoiding drugs at the party. It is

the only life she has known.

It is why all the therapists are here.

Her life, a light flickering

across the bay, a golden gate, a bridge

America must cross to find

its blind heart.

 

 

The Chapel in the Heart’s Bureaucracy

 

At Asilomar, sand-swept Monterey pine retreat,

I enter the conference hall as I’ve done the past two mornings,

sit in my chair to hear a judge, or state official, or professor

discuss the despair of families, the toll of poverty,

the statistics of decay. By the second sip of coffee, I notice

that I recognize no-one around me, that the speaker is dressed

in robes with a purple sash, a black preacher

just warming up his sermon—the power of love, the way of sin—

and I sheepishly look at my program to locate

my own plenary. But really, I don’t want to leave,

don’t want to hear legislative analysts discuss

the latest school funding crisis, or suicide’s stain,

or how prison’s gobble up disaffected youth

as the only university we afford them.

I want to feel the word sin seep across every budget cut,

the word love lilt its way into the vocabulary

of every director, every politician, each voting citizen.

So when at last I find my own conference 

in Asilomar’s original chapel, hear a state director

say his own son was denied health insurance

because of depression, I wonder about the heart

of this country, if it is the wrong liturgy we chant—

one of policy and politics rather than love’s bare sound.

Hear the bell ringing twelve tones in the chapel’s steeple

as it ushers us out as secret missionaries

to a world weary of love’s absence, 

of sin’s bureaucracy, a world waiting

as a lover once abandoned listens

for the door to open.

 

Love At The Gun Runner, new prose piece in The SUN Magazine

My third piece in Sy Safransky's The SUN Magazine came out in the June 2008 edition, a short prose piece entitled LOVE AT THE GUN RUNNER. Here's a link to my author page on The SUN website, which includes the editions in which my previous two poems appeared: Engine, and, The Jeweled Net of Indra:

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/author/902

LOVE AT THE GUN RUNNER is listed in the Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories section of the June 2008 edition, because it is indeed a true story of a long-time family friend who happens to be a psychic, and works in a gun shop where I grew up. It is a story, finally, about love in curious places:

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/390

While the story is formatted differently in The SUN, here's the text as a short-short story:

Love At The Gun Runner

by Dane Cervine

 

At the edge of town in Merced, California, sits a pale building whose sign says, “The Gun Runner.” A shooting range and retail outlet for rifles, pistols, and any kind of bullet you might need, it is owned and operated by Sandy, a friend of my family’s and the only true psychic I know. Her husband, Gary, whom I’ve never met, helps her run the place. I haven’t seen Sandy for years, not since my father died and she came to the funeral to tell us what Dad wanted her to communicate: that he had passed over and was filled with love for us and awe at life’s immensity and regret over whatever hurt his depression might have caused everyone. We trusted Sandy and always welcomed her glimpses into the soul and the “other side.”

Shortly after that, Sandy stopped giving psychic readings. Too many people asked the same questions: Will I find love? Is my spouse cheating? Am I going to win the lottery? Then there were those who were looking for some purpose or meaning in life, but they all wanted someone to give them the Answer. Sandy was more interested in helping people find their own answers within. So she retired and opened a gun shop with Gary.

For years my mother has been saying I should stop by the Gun Runner sometime to say hello to Sandy. So I pull into the shop’s parking lot as dusk descends. The lights are on inside, and I venture through the double glass doors, still wearing my shirt and tie from a state mental-health meeting in Sacramento. I’m nervous and unfamiliar with how to behave in a gun store, and the bearded man behind the front counter eyes me suspiciously. Then I spy Sandy behind the cash register in back.

She grins and acts surprised to see me. (You never know with psychics.) We embrace and look each other over and catch up on our lives: the big dreams we have, the small ways in which we live them out. I tell her about the tragedy of a relative’s drug addiction. She tells me about the suicide of a stranger on the shooting range and the time a stray bullet ricocheted up a ventilation shaft and went through a wall Sandy had been standing next to seconds before. (Her intuition had told her to move just then.) And she describes her new joy: a small group that gathers on Wednesdays at her home to discuss their psychological and spiritual development. In this life, she says, it all boils down to love.  

The bearded man who eyed me as I entered the store saunters over and puts his arm around Sandy. “This is Gary,” Sandy says, and he and I shake hands before he’s called away to help a customer who has a question about bullets. Sandy tells me Gary is the most loving soul she knows. Each morning before they open the gun shop, they hold hands and pray to provide a small oasis of light for every customer who comes through their doors. Sandy leans close to me and whispers, “Gary looks right at each person who walks in and silently says to them: I love you.” What more could you ask for in this world?

Two Poems in RUMINATE: Faith in Literature and Art

RUMINATE is a poetry journal that provides an arena for faith, literature and art to meet and mix. Two poems of mine appear in issue #8, referenced in the following link: http://www.ruminate-online.org/issue-8/

Here are the two poems: A New Science of Prayer; and, In The Beginning:

A New Science Of Prayer

 

We were curled by the fire, six of us ruminating

on lives still in mid-sentence. No-one went to church,

most of us wandering into therapy, meditation, support groups

for anonymous wounds. The world loomed large,

a mysterious tabernacle—the jagged contour of war & want

long ago eviscerating faith from each chest—six red hearts

pulsing under black sky, a kind of confession, what remained

of song. It had become clear no-one would save us, but

the double-blind Russian studies turned our conversation

to prayer, nonetheless—

 

how they’d mailed envelopes around the globe to believers,

circles of prayer from every tradition—Muslim, Christian,

Buddhist—asked to linger on each name, savor it as a seed,

a point of light to grow inside the sick. How the other lists

lay guarded—plenty of names to go around—idling

on a researcher’s clipboard: no prayer, no song.

The results, while no miracle, spoke the language

of science: that numbers don’t lie, that those murmured

on the lips of the faithful showed statistical improvement—

the kind any god would be jealous of. 

 

The fire flitted in our eyes, six pair of rubies—

forgotten verse forming again in our throats,

wondering what we’d fallen into, these dark years,

flailing, ensnared as prey in sticky web,

a kind of martyrdom. Maybe we lived 

caught in the invisible threads of our own design,

blind—that these strands of luminous reciprocity

also connect us when touched—rhythmical waves

arcing as magnetic currents through gray matter,

the miracle of bone, of nerve-ending, of muscle—

what we are, what we do, vibrating

uncontained by skin, swaying the world

one way, then another, this

 

we could believe. This we could pray—

that the coiled syllables of our lives

would emerge: aural, palpable,           

undeniable.

 

 

In the beginning

 

it must have been like this:

a small boy sitting on the floor, hunched over

his new electric football set, unwrapped in all its glory,

rapt attention fused, timeless, as one miniature football player

after another is placed halfway between two opposite goals,

the polarities inherent in any game, squaring off in pairs,

a jolt of electricity every few seconds vibrating the board,

the subtle dynamics of each player’s plastic feet

a kind of evolutionary determinism: which one

will be stronger, faster, move straight ahead or curve

endlessly in circles—and the boy,

 

a god, lingering over the nuances of combination:

which ones, together, make the best team, the worst,

or perfectly paired as equal adversaries in the yin & yang of struggle,

the eloquent teamwork, the kaleidoscope of competition more addictive

than its opposite: this dull calm of knowing, everyday,

that your life is empty, the vast spaces of suburbia stretching

like endless dark matter in a vacuum with no boundary—

the universe, the  young child delighting in the joyous clash

of every unknown: what will happen next?

the possibility of creation its own balm,

so intimate, these twinned struggles—

 

galactic enterprise in the personal, this to be or not to be

haunting the vacant seconds ticking in the catacombs of DNA,

each synapse a nerve-bridge between spirit & matter,

the world a hologram, the board, the boy, the plastic limbs

with kneepad & cleat, the helmeted heads, the contrary goals

at either end of this spectrum of progress or regression,

this whole damn thing (blessed beyond mere joy)

the reason

that each morning a sun rises in the vastness, coloring

the black sky purple, then orange, finally blue—and the boy

lazes from his bed, still in pajamas, and it’s Sunday, and today

just like yesterday, just like any other eon, anything could happen,

the reason for his smile—his Cheshire cat grin shimmering

in the ethers, what remains as everything else disappears.

Three Poems in PORTER GULCH REVIEW 2008

Another year of great poetry in the 2008 Porter Gulch Review, published by David Sullivan and company at Cabrillo College in Aptos California. You can view the entire edition on-line at: http://www.cabrillo.edu/publications/portergulch/PGR%202008%20reviews%20critiques%20final.pdf

Three of my poems appear this year: Kamikaze Diaries on page 98; The Gulf on page 102; and, American Jihad on page 105. All three poems address the vagaries of war, misplaced passion, and human longing. I've included them below, too, for easy reading:

 

Kamikaze Diaries

  Reflections of Japanese pilots on suicide missions in World War II

---by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

 

Some wrote poetry, the only way to approach such feeling.

Knowing the moment of one’s death, its purpose

however terrible, brings a lucidity few know.

Most were students, familiar with Western literature.

One carried Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death,

along with the Bible on his final mission. Passion

is an unlocked gun-room—a life a bullet,

resting in its box, aimless, waiting.

 

 

 

The Gulf

 

On a cruise ship in the Caribbean

sailing from Miami towards Jamaica,

I watch news of the war in a bar.

It is a long way from my small town America

as I traverse the edge of a vast Atlantic

touching Middle Eastern shores while

teasing this Gulf of Mexico, heat-lightening

in the air, electric, mysterious.

Here, the threat of hurricanes is growing,

stirring from the sea as giant men turning

in their steaming tubs, waves spilling over

shore in that violent way that holds no malice.

It is only the way of things disturbed, vented,

released. Even the smallest shrug

of a country, of a planet’s weather,

brings an unexpected new age

to the plasma screens of a shrinking

middle class—shrinking polar ice,

shrinking shores, our shrinking

moral fiber, our bereft will.

 

It may be that storm will come,

that the innumerable small ways

one abandons a first love—

such petty betrayals—

will leave us ever after

looking backwards

at the time that now is,

when this ravaged garden globe

awaited simple tending.

It may be a storm of wind and heat,

of ice and flood—or our own Armageddon,

a storm of giant men with tiny hearts

pummeling the earth with their fists,

mumbling the dull dark of war.

A storm to break the levees

of our modest privilege, flooding

the front-yards of America—

leaving us in the superdomes

of our broken faith, without light,

without one excuse.

 

 

The following poem, American Jihad, deserves a short preface, which I gave at the poetry reading for the 2008 Porter Gulch Review release:

 

"I wrote the poem American Jihad not out of disrespect for this country I
love so much, but because I love the world more. This planet has seen so
many empires come and go, always claiming the moral right to dominate,
always blind in this regard. I was raised to believe that America was
different, that everything we did in the world was based on not only our
best interest as a country, but in doing the right thing towards others.
Rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II so that they could re-enter
the world stage as partners rather than enemies. But  I've become
painfully aware that our country far too often acts just like any other
empire: selfishly and destructively. For me, to be an American today carries
such conflicted feelings of pride, shame, and a desire to wake us up to the
fact that we risk becoming what we fight against; in essence, we have become
our own American Jihad.

The voice in the poem is meant to be at once proud, rageful, ironic,
conflicted...really an amalgam of many voices from the baby boomer
generation I am a part of. The offensive language at the end of the poem is
meant to be offensive, because it is the only language I know of capable of
conveying the depth of blind anger inherent in our stance towards those we
fight and fear as a country. I wrote it in a prose poem format, because the
square frame of the poem helps contain the many conflicted feelings within
the rant."

 

American Jihad

 

I love this country, the wide span of it, the airport planes lined up like expectant brides waiting to fly, to go get it all, the wheat fields, the growing urban suburban sprawls, the melting pot melting, melting, the vast steam of it, the churning stir of it. I love this American arrogance that, yes, you and me baby, yes Mr. White Man like me, the Korean refugee, the black bro in the ghetto, the Latin in the barrio, Bill Gates, Rush and his redneck mates, the politicos waving like pampas grass in wind, that we’re all gonna get it all—that somehow our shrinking churches, our bulging credit, every new war, every scandal, every pork-barreled waste, is just another bump in the fast road to this American Dream. That despite the signs of the times, fuck it, it doesn’t matter—I saw that doe-eyed hippie girl stick that flower in the soldier’s rifle too, and yea there was Kent State and Vietnam, and yea we said we’d never go there again, and yea here we are again sniffing oil like a crackhead in the Middle East, the poppy fields of the Taliban funding guns and heroin for whatever diddly squat dictator lets us intravenously mainline our growing habit—shit, I’m proud anyway, there’s still room from sea to shining sea for every goddamn one of us. Ain’t no way this empire’s gonna fall. Fuck Rome, fuck Alexander and Napoleon, fuck the Aztec, the Incas, the Maya, the Chinese emperors, fuck the British empire, no matter what we do, no matter how we do it, no matter where we go, this world’s gonna love us, this world’s gonna become us, this ride, baby, is gonna goddamn last forever.

Second Christmas Absent My Father, in the Tule Review

The Tule Review heralds from Sacramento, California, and published my poem Second Christmas Absent My Father in the Winter 2008 edition. You can check out the journal and my poem on page 11: http://www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org/tr_pdf/TuleWinter2008.pdf

and the Sacramento Poetry Center, at their website: www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org

Here's the poem:

Second Christmas Absent My Father

  Santa Cruz, California 2003

 

Palm trees in the grey drizzle, looking sheepish.

Beach volleyball courts circled round by mounds of sand

bulldozed against the coming storm. Across the street,

stores advertise bikinis, sunglasses, sandals, shorts—

the blue lifeguard towers stand just as vacant, staring out to sea.

There is an allure to emptiness, making room.

 

Yesterday, the Pacific tectonic plate pushed under

the North American again, raising the coastal mountains

almost a foot. In Paso Robles, another clock tower,

another historic brick building fell, killing two.

One thing shifts into another, pushing continents,

pushing time forward. I feel myself exhale, impatient

to get home, let my children tumble me to the floor

before we forget such things are possible.

 

Tonight, my sister arrives from Hawaii for the holidays,

joining mother, my two brothers. Sometimes there is so much

longing: tangled, rooted, hungry. I will take them downtown,

show them restored buildings from our own quake,

the new mixed with the old, sturdier. Show them

the ceramic surf-Santa that looks like dad—

how he whispered to me, cruising in the Woody,

surfboard stuck out the top, whistling a tune

impossible to name.