Five Poems

By Thomas Zimmerman

(Twitter: @bwr_tom and Instagram: tzman2012)

Bach’s First Cello Suite

We’ll wake tomorrow altered, recombined

with glues and acids of our dreams, the same

old carcasses, just older, hours closer

to a death. Not ours. The we that’s us

will fly or fall or whirl somewhere, some rare

dimension, deep within or far beyond

this space. It’s why we strive. Our deeds, they’re bound

within this page or screen, but ripple out

for anyone who sees them with attention

and compassion. Bach is on the playlist now:

first cello suite, the tones a human voice

that reaches us three centuries away,

and glowing sunset lights our shaggy backyard

spruces, candles burning green and growing.

Cartography

These hands that span the pastel lands of maps:

they’re veined with rivers, blue and red, and each

is christened Thomas, flow of doubt that laps

the shores of stolid fact, that grinds the beach,

that carves the mountain pass, that scoops and scours

the bays and lakes. It’s ambiguity

of which I speak, I think: the gods’ and ours,

complexity that shears fatuity.

We try to plot the known and unknown shapes

that crowd our dreams, our waking, racing minds,

our womb-time and the soundtrack trauma tapes

replaying while we measure, draw the blinds,

project our need and want, a craft and art

that tells a human story, cleaves the heart.

Essay on Frameworks

I love a frame: it measures and contains.

I also like a gap in it: a cell door,

exit (entrance) for the maze. I feel

this way with people too: give everyone

a safety net, an easy out. A framework

lets us dream of order we can know.

But there’s a larger, subtler order we

can’t see beyond the frame: imagined chaos.

Entropy: things fall apart. The putting-

back-together: that’s our pleasure and

salvation. These new frames can tell us where

to stop but also to go back, to add

the necessary brushstrokes, stoke the inner

light, to make the framework not a prison

but a portal searchers walk through freely:

and, if not reborn, at least refreshed.

Imagined Pathways

Our journeys much like books we know

we need to read: imagined pathways

smooth, or jumbled as a ruin.

Memories of weeks in Greece:

Olympia, Mycenae, Delphi,

the Acropolis, and Epidaurus.

Three blue seas, white sun and stones,

gray olive groves. And zooming in:

to Alfa beer and belly dancers,

Socrates on T-shirts, stray dogs

roaming Athens. Finding sandals

at the poet-sandalmaker’s,

chatting with two Aussies there.

The poet’s son (a poet too)

was in, and fitted me. We traded

books. Been fourteen years, time floating

on the waves of images and words.

William Blake and the Ephemeral

Strains in any marriage.

Even that of Heaven and Hell.

Ask Blake. His wife once said,

"I have very little

of Mr. Blake's company;

he is always in Paradise.”

A framed Blake print,

The Great Red Dragon and

the Woman Clothed with Sun,

is hanging in our powder room.

We’re hanging on.

I’ve told myself for years

to be in love with love.

And Blake might help:

“I do not consider either

the just, or the wicked,

to be in a supreme state,

but to be, every one of them,

states of the sleep

which the soul may fall into.”

Sweet dreams. Be patient, kind,

and soon we’ll wake.

About The Author:

Thomas Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. His poems have appeared recently in Interstellar Literary Review, Pages Literary Journal, and Sixpence Society. His latest book is the chapbook The House of Cerberus (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). Website: https:/thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com Twitter: @bwr_tom Instagram: tzman2012