Frank Polite 1936-2005

to stagger ashore, free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself, a green bottle,

a message delivered, a sailor,

 like me

Today I looked up a poem by Frank Polite that I've been hauling around in my box of literary treasures for some 30 years. I met Frank at the Cafe Med in Berkeley back in 1975, and he gave me the poem in person, signed even. I've hauled out his little book, "Letters of Transit" many times since......."Lantern", "The Last House on Luna Pier" are old friends, travelling companions he introduced me to that day.  Now, so many years later, perhaps I even better understand them, I have become larger, or more transparent, and can see into them a bit more.  I'm glad of that.

In one of my many cross country rambles I was sad to learn that he had died in 2005, and I never knew him in those intervening years.  Yet I vividly remember  seeing his face over a cappuchino and the smoke from the espresso machines, defying both time and space, while driving on the  interstate from Michigan to Toledo.  

I saw the turnout for Luna Pier, made mythical in my mind and heart  for decades, a misty place of silent blue herons, standing like silent sentinals before the  the wounded presence of Lake Goddess Erie. 

Did I turn off? No.......I knew that the Luna Pier Frank seeded my imagination with was something I would never want to change. 

Thank you Frank, wherever you are now.  

Frank's writings have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, Yankee, Exquisite Corpse, The North American Review and Denver Quarterly. He lived in Ohio, and for more information or to purchase some of his books, visit: FALLEN CITY WRITERS. 

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES 

The black butterflies of night 

Clipped for sleep to nightshade and widow grief, 

Or in shaking luminous flight 

On paired and silver wings, are rare, 

And rarely seen by human sight. 

Yet, they are there, surfacing

Out of range of neons and streetlights,

Preferring under leaf

And the dark offshores of air 

To man and moth-maddening glare of things. 

Tonight, 

As crisis after crisis

Cracks our skies like lightning, 

I think of death, 

Of different ways of dying, 

And of Egypt and the myth 

That once held black butterflies 

Sacred to Isis.

They lived forever in flight

In her private groves, 

compelled like 

Flickering minutes 

Never to touch leaf nor stone, 

Never to rest, except upon her nakedness

When she turned to love.

And here is death to be envied; 

To be crushed to a personal breast 

Between goddess 

And whatever bird, beast, lover

Fell to her lips. 

We are something else. . . 

Myth and love will miss us 

When the night is suddenly turned on, 

Turned blank white, 

And the black butterflies 

Appear against that vellum sky 

As far, flitting, burnt-out stars.

GOOD ADVICE

1.

Do not rush to be disappointed with yourself. 

Rather, make a world drag you to it behind 24 mules of irrefutable proof,

& you still digging in your heels all the way before you say, 

"I'm disappointed with myself."

2.

 Trust only inauspicious beginnings, the modest seed. 

What comes dancing toward you tossing flowers, soon perishes.

3.

It is the weed of life that grips the garden to your need, 

that roots you deep into its soil 

which is immortal.

LUNA PIER 

A sea change leans against the pier in tumult. 

I know why I'm here. 

Cold streams, 

contending with the warm grip the rocks as never before in my life,

and hurl up salt at my door.

What drifts in now is mine, 

cut loose, thrown overboard,

or drowned: a wooden spar, a beached bone, 

a yard of torn sail like an indecipherable parchment. 

Even a shoe drifts in, 

kicked around out there God knows how long.

I listen now. I witness.

I do not touch or twist at the integrity of each survival.

It is enough to have arrived at all, 

embodying sea changes; 

to stagger ashore, free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself, 

a green bottle, 

a message delivered,

 a sailor, like me. 

LANTERN 

Next year I'm forty years old.

I don't know what hump I'm over. 

To have made it this far, 

what does that mean? 

Where am I? Where have I been? 

Like you, I've been places, 

New York, Asia,

Great fields uncut by wire or river,

mountains leaping up.

And O yes, oceans.

I felt my way deeply into each,

into the mind shafts permitted me, 

into a flower 

(perfect on mescaline, I laughed and wept for hours) 

into the tenderness of people... 

I've loved, worshipped stones, 

written poems to moon and stars, 

and depending on the deep and dark 

of my downheartedness, 

I lit a flame in my forehead like a toad, 

imagining myself, at various times, 

Lord of Earth, Light in the forest, 

even...God.

Down the road with my lantern, 

I lifted up the broken, the poor, the ignorant, the hopeless, 

only to come down to this: 

to be all of them myself, at once. 

So what's it all about? 

I don't ask anymore: 

I am one with the insect and cloud.

I beg my life to lay me down at last

gently if possible, or fast,

the way a horse,

plunging into darkness

kicks a stone out of its path.

Frank Polite