What it Means to be Human
Poems about What it Means to be Human.
Going into Wilderness
If I set up on an unwitnessed rock
my showman soul would not do well.
Fresh air and privacy
would help in taking stock,
but I need someone looking in to see
how well I do, who going back can tell
which way my struggle with the angel goes.
Is such a witnessed privacy a pose?
Simeon Stylites on his post
could not get far enough above the host
that mortified him with acclaim:
mad to be rid of a mad-dog world
the block-and-tackle saint, creaking heavenward,
saw to his shame his name
become a household word,
and on a higher post than his his fame.
But think of a man whose privacy succeeds:
who quits the world uncompromised,
the corner grocer never guessing; who lives,
by an integrity that bleeds,
to be enunciated, formalized;
who dies, whose work—which argues genius—
is thrown out by impatient relatives.
How many of these men have been lost to us?
None, I suspect. We have a way
of leaving ways by which to be disclosed,
buried in backyards, tucked away
for lucky finders to exhume.
Even Jesus in the dry arroyos
could not suffer his work to stay with stone.
Go to the wilderness of your room
to get away, but not to be unknown.
John Barr, The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems
The Power & Light Company
Under the Used and Useful Principle
a public utility may charge customers
only for assets that are used and useful
in providing service to those who pay for it:
power plants, transmission lines, the sum total
of what it takes to deliver power and light.
Most of those with needs for power and light
in their lives work from a different principle.
Power—prerogative with impunity—is total
by nature, not a thing to sell to customers.
Those who gain it keep it. Having it
befits them, whether used or useful.
Light, on the other hand, is useful
when it gives illumination; think how light
reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it.
Whether gaining and keeping is the principle
or giving is, matters to customers.
The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total.
Can those receiving service unbundle the total,
choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful,
but not the power which is not for sale to customers
in any case? Does having the light
without the power offend some principle
of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it?
We know from history, which is replete with it,
that power abhors what it can’t control: total
antipathy portends the death of principle.
If we take only the light, can it be useful
without the power? If not, of what use is the light?
That is the quandary for customers.
And face it, our lot is to be customers:
Something received, things taken in return for it.
Light without power or power without light.
How do we keep the dark from turning total
when we ourselves would be the used and useful?
When giving our lives a purpose is the principle?
Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total,
your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful.
But as to power and light, let light be principal.
John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal
Chicago, Tell Me Who You Are
I’m a city with a past, a memory
of fire. No fear is like the fear
of a wooden city on a windy day.
Even the people were on fire. “Throw me in the river,”
she told her husband. “I’d rather drown than burn.”
I’m Lincoln when he stands for President.
I’m the City of Big Shoulders and the World’s Fair.
I’m Millennium Park and the long lakeshore,
the Magnificent Mile and tallest towers.
The Cubs and White Sox, Bulls and Bears.
I'm Baby Face, Capone, and Dillinger;
Sandburg, Gwen Brooks, Hemingway;
Disney, Orson Welles, and Tina Fey;
Oprah, Smashing Pumpkins, Nat King Cole;
Jack Benny, Belushi, and Steve Colbert.
I’m “Sunday in the Park” and George Seurat;
the Symphony of Reiner and Solti;
Sinatra and Chicago, Chicago,
they have the time, the time of their life.
I saw a man, he danced with his wife!
The world's planes converge on me.
Flaps extending, each one flowers as it lands.
Astronauts in space see
a city rising from an inland sea.
My hands are filled with phosphorescent dreams.
John Barr/The Poetry of US/National Geographic anthology
Match.com
She's sitting in the breakfast nook
reading the laptop's opened palm;
he's at his desk doing the same,
and fits the profile in her Notebook.
These two are not from ads but real,
and have not found each other because
the sky into which their queries rise
is thick with stars, and even the stars
are only a small part of the spectrum
of the noise of galaxies.
They open like the trumpets of lilies,
like Plato's halves yearning to be whole.
Between them a universe,
only a little of which is visible.
John Barr / from Dante in China
Body Language
Arms implying one another,
legs in alternation going south,
this swaying scaffold of bones
bears through fields
the head without a thought.
Blood floods the passageways,
the stomach grips its food,
the heart advances in darkness…
all while I walk,
shake hands, work the wash of events.
In seven years, they say, it is renewed:
each hair in its follicle,
each pore in its microbe dell.
Atom for atom, the valleys of my brain,
the long journey in my legs
suffer replacement.
A good occasion for improvement
you would think:
but no,
the same old scars,
all my mistakes preserved.
Once in his life
a man should know his body in its prime.
Dark drifts of hair,
the narrows of the waist,
the great junction of the thighs,
the torso lagged with muscle bronze.
The body's peak
on the long parabola from helplessness to helplessness.
At death
the soul flies out of the mouth,
all eyes on it, it
continues out of the room.
Then the body is declared
larval to the man.
Yet I live in a settlement of two hundred bones.
Of its own accord my body beats.
Unmemorized
the great whorls of my fingerprints
approach like storms.
John Barr/from The Hundred Fathom Curve: New and Collected Poems
Night Flight
–for Stephen Sandy
Into the last smoke blue of this day's light
the de Havilland lifts, trailing from each wing
the lights of the Capitol.
Except for the heat blur off each engine's cowl
the view is clear, out to the nebula of Lancaster,
so clear the wingtip strobes have nothing to print on.
The plane gains altitude like an extended praise.
In the cockpit richly blue gauges
keep track of our relationships to earth.
Having succeeded in leaving the earth
not nearly so well as the plane, this poem
discovers it is not about a plane but you.
John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
Commuter Moons
1.
Out of round, it ascends
the early air,
the window of the car
that takes me to LaGuardia.
As a stone skips on water,
it touches moments months apart.
2.
Have you, from 30,000’,
seen it at day's edge?
Out of its element, so pale
the blue of astronauts shows through,
you could well prefer the desert below
scored by roads, or how a river's folds
show water's sidelong slide to gravity,
the deep reversals of its getting there.
3.
I know it won't bear one more metaphor,
having been the thing in easy reach
of a thousand generations,
but it is high and bright and half
tonight. The stars we know as morning
dim in its government.
And here on the floor the very light.
John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
Chapter 11
Waiting for the marshal's men,
I can tell you the velocity
of money is faster out than in.
Squeezing nickels from cotton candy,
watching Dumbo chasing Dumbo,
the Ferris wheel coining sky
reminds me of the Northwest passage.
Questing for what does not exist,
like wrong views of God, can last
a life. (How else can a carni
of a tented city in a meadow
make the Greatest Little Show?)
The prowess of rubes, skill of swells,
the ardor of the drifter for
the runaway. The luck of the Born to Lose.
John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
