Dane Cervine Writes

HOW THERAPISTS DANCE in The SUN Magazine, February 2011

My favorite magazine of writing, The SUN, just published another poem of mine called How Therapists Dance in their February 2011 edition. It's a great edition focusing on social justice issues. This poem hints at learning to dance with culture, privilege, isolation, and belonging.

Check out the full listing of my SUN Magazine contributions at:

Dane Cervine in The SUN Magazine

 

How Therapists Dance

Washington DC after a conference,

we head into the urban night

led by the jive-talking white ghetto boy

raised in black foster homes

bent on showing us the town. We

wander from night club to bar,

a mix of Black, Asian, Latino, White

earnest saviors eager to party, to strip

the mind of diagnostic prognostication,

to revel. Eventually, one by one, our group

slips back to the hotel till I am alone

with a young black woman who says

I want to show you one more place.

Down an alley, she leads me to a club

where I am the only white face in the joint,

and while she is gone to the bathroom,

the owner saunters over, asks how I’m doing,

says if you have any trouble here, come find me.

And I am suddenly more alone

than ever, till my young friend returns,

looks at my anxious face, smiles, says

this is what I wanted to show you.

"The Ukelele" is Finalist in Atlanta Review 2011 Contest

My poem The Ukelele was a finalist for the Atlanta Review's 2011 International Poetry Competition, appearing in the Fall 2010 edition.

It is a poem about family and memory, inspired by a conversation I had with the poet Robert Sward.

 

The Ukulele

I was talking about family with Robert over lunch,

how I had traveled to Oklahoma to be the minister

at Aunt Opal’s funeral, sing old hymns

like my family did in the Church of the Nazarene—

the six of us next to the pulpit while mom played

the ukulele, which she learned in Hawaii as a young teacher.

Robert, with his eye for keeping family alive in verse

said you should put that in a poem, the ukulele,

you know, how odd in a church, and this was the way

of my family, always a little odd but with a kind of music.

Four strings of siblings, my father the wood, my mother

the one strumming us into sound. I remember

swaying on the raised platform adjacent the pulpit,

my mother plucking the ukulele while we sang

they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings as eagles which,

with a ukulele sounded almost heretical.

But this was our beauty: a string, a person, a chord,

a family twining the exotic, the novel,

into new tradition. Years later, making Opal

a family video, we gathered in the Japanese hexagon

my father built, singing the old hymn again

with mom’s ukulele, but humorously,

dancing Mexican puppets punctuating

the air with raised fists as we sang,

our lives resonant with quirky joy.

This is what I was thinking,

looking at Robert over tea, the way family

endures, quivering as a plucked string—

the ukulele almost tangible, humming

in the air between us.

 

 

 

 

Three Poems in The RED WHEELBARROW

Ken Weisner's beautiful 2010 edition of The Red Wheelbarrow includes three poems of mine, available from DeAnza College: Prince of Disks; A Taste of Light; What It Means To Be A Hero

 

Prince of Disks

 Across the small wooden table between us

I spread the Tarot cards she has chosen randomly

from the pile, turn them over one by one. She reveals

her family lineage, many generations in Mariposa,

once proud, now poor: my mother wasn’t a drunk,

just unlucky. Now it’s her turn to be strong,

raising two children, waitressing at Miner’s Inn,

saving tips to buy the broken-down house

she was raised in, caring for her boyfriend’s son

with cerebral palsy. She is young—almost worldly,

almost angelic—and for a moment, turning over

the Prince of Disks, not looking as she removes her sweater,

reveals her elegant collarbone, hint of breast, I want

to marry her, to save her, some lost part of me. Instead,

we look at the prince’s steel chariot drawn by his snorting bull,

rippling flanks obstinate, unflinching to pain, and I say

this is you, nothing can stop you, not the fatigue,

not the man who takes and never gives, not the endless hours

of serving eggs, beer—endless hours. Because this

is how strong she has to be. And when we are done,

her twenty-dollar bill laid on the table, her lips curve

into a smile, saying Yes!

 

　The Taste of Light 

Last night, on a balcony just north of Venice,

I could almost believe the world was becoming

light. Four glasses, a decanter, Italian wine—

dinner with our former nanny Jen, her new husband Andrea.

They met in Germany speaking Spanish together

over beer steins, settling here in Jesolo, Italy,

speaking with us now in a mix of Italian, English—

Jen pregnant, Andrea a master chef yearning for America,

to start a restaurant, raise a family. They are so young,

have little idea of the dark underbelly of dream.

But tonight, the warmth of the night,

the Italian hospitality, the food, the wine,

the balcony pointing towards a Venice you can’t see

but know is there—I can almost believe the world,

its inventive mix of pigment and language,

this volatile fermenting of dream and despair,

the aged flavor of my wife’s eyes,

the nip of decades, exuberant, mournful, pleasing.

I can almost taste in the bottom of my glass

this hidden light emanating from our bodies.

How we are sipped, savored, sung by darkness

for our hint of aural radiance caught

between sad lip and ecstatic tongue.

 

What It Means to be A Hero

As a boy, superheroes were essential

to my survival, for without

Superman’s x-ray eyes,

who could see the truth

behind bleak walls; without

the Hulk’s naked brawn

one could only cower in the brain’s

hidden hallways. But

I loved the mysterious Watcher,

neither foe nor friend,

but a powerful being

who watched human-kind

in our glory and travail,

who knew, it seemed,

we could neither be tamed

nor saved without destroying

something essential in us,

but who vowed to witness

as a kind of alien-buddha.

I wondered, too, if I was a Watcher,

born in the body of a small boy,

sent to earth to determine

if human life was worth such

outrageous uncertainty.

 

Years later, turning fifty, I still feel

the tremendous weight of uncertainty,

reviewing my half-century,

feeling each heroic moment

hovering over a black hole,

the Omega point of acquiescence,

that yes, it should never have come

to only this. But

 

I remember, too, how it takes more

than witness, that Superman

in the face of kryptonite’s green torpor

was far more heroic suddenly human

than when he was speeding as a bullet,

a locomotive, flying over tall buildings

dimpling the ground below. It was

how he’d sweat like any one of us,

how he’d crawl to stay alive, fingernails

scratching in the dirt.

 

 

 

FIST, PALM, HAND appears in New Anthology

A poem about my mother's first stroke appears in the new anthology entitled When Last On The Mountain: The View from Writers over Fifty, a beautiful collection of poetry and prose...worth buying.

You can read the poem here:

Fist, Palm, Hand

 Your hand opens and closes and open and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.

                                    ---Rumi

 During my mother’s stroke, her left arm swung

suddenly at her side like a stranger. She called out,

was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. 

Now, recovering, her hand won’t unfold—fingers curled,

supple, but unable to fist or extend. I think of this,

standing alone outside St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno at night

by the stone statue of Jesus, at the end of a spiral stone path,

my palms extended in prayer or defense under the thousand blind eyes

of heaven, sparkling. I make a fist, then open each palm,

then fist each hand again and again, remembering.

 

The next morning, I wake in the Red Roof Inn’s pale room

next to the Korean Mart and the Jack-in-the-Box—the incessant

air conditioner already battling the incessant heat. I stare at a photo

of my father, dead four years now, but still speaking to me.

His hand on his tool belt, his heart full of fists, of waving palms,

the valves opening and closing, opening and closing, finally

closing. If he were always open, rather than mysterious, even dark,

I would never have questioned, never pushed into the depths,

would have been paralyzed by light.

 

Holding my mother’s arm as we walk now to the car, we pause

by a fountain, a statue of two young girls running to touch

six birds escaping into flight, hear the sound of falling water

on blue tile. The stone girls will never reach even one bird,

but my mother, already, begins to flex the fingers

of her stricken hand open, then closed, then open.