Sent from my iPhoneI Talk To My Hebrew God by Neeli Cherkovski

         For Alan Kaufman

I talk to my Hebrew God
Everyday now,
I tell him how sick it is
To see anti Semitism
On the rise in Europe

He says I must write
My poems
About butterflies and
Tulips, he tells me
I do good with pine trees
And my dog
On a
Leash at the beach –
He asks me to
Forge it, so a few
People are killed

He says he has
A universe to run
And it’s not easy
You never know
When a galaxy is
In trouble

I felt bad, I still feel
Bad, the world
Never learns its
Lesson, bad ass people
Step out of the
Shadows an murder
Thousands of work-a-day
People,  all ages, all sizes

One woman in France
Was 85, Holocaust
Survivor, slain to pay
For the sins of the Jews
2018 a civilized year
She is called me? No
She is many, she is endless

Damn.

DESTRUCTION by Neeli Cherkovski

For Leonard Cohen

I wish we didn’t have to kill
The sunlight and
The ocean tides
I wish we could walk
Alongside the animals
And build Cabins
In the mirror
But we’re drawn
To fair destruction,

I wish this trail
Led over the high peak
And narrowed
In the gorge
We would camp
Alongside the sequoia
And draw water birds
On our dream scenes
Like Goya in the
Dark paintings
But we’re drawn
To fair destruction

I wish those trees
Would stop talking
In cruel and ruthless
Voices and our
Language would return
To the tidal ponds
Before they are gone
We might build a carnival
Of handsome losers
Who live to lie in sand
But we’re drawn
To fair destruction

I wish Orion would
Come indoors and curl
His white and brown
Body here where we
Meditate between
Loss and pure praise
Under the moon of
Thieves and grand
Deceives who only
Rise to cut men down

We need loathe
Only those who cheapen
Light and curse night
But we’re drawn
To fair destruction

Nov 13, 2016

DIANE DI PRIMA by Neeli Cherkovski

 

1

Orbs of trees
Splendid Light patches
Pinwheels sunflower
Worn sunlight brazen tune
Stern strong shoreline
Empowering and thoughtful
So much night falls
Over the fence
Here tundra powerful grass
Of lower Manhattan
She sweeps the upper
Atmosphere and
Throws the moon
Into the Hudson

Atlantic swells
In realms of
Imagination’s proud island
When you loom down
Beyond the gate

Heroic sight in hand
Turns summer into fall
At midnight
After the storm
Past sleeping fathers
In the churchyard

Daughter for winter’s
Dreadnought
Handsome mirrors hung
Where white tips
Read trees on banks
Of a wild River
South of the
Roaring iron ribs
Midtown

2

When she was young
Diane makes her way
To Ezra Pound incarcerated

Under the shade
His voice a crackly jolt
Birds settle

Asylum’s stand
Of trees
so many birds
Two poets
In the land of brazen
doorsteps
And distant cat-calls

3

Ezra worn from
Traveling to
Where stubborn Bulls
Pace the odes

Young Di Prima
Sitting on a piano
In the niche, her
Smile rests
On my palm

Now the sad rain
Hits our window
Down Bernal Hill
We meet for lunch
With Landry on
24th Street sweet
Moment cherished
Read for your birthday
You kissed me when I said
She raised the bookshelves
Of the neighborhood library
and later found
Duncan and Olson
In the monolithic fable

Amiri:
We be fine

We live in this fire

4

On our island stronghold
Ships arrive

One fatal day mortality
Gloom rude tule grid
The shipyard struggles
A poet bleeds
Under light rain
Every drop
a momentary ocean

Your mind voyaging
Intimate rock forms
In the middle
Of a word
Over darkened slope
Of a hillside

Your voice of liberation
On granite plates

Watch out
Wall Street
The lady brings
Solitude and splendor
Through a door
To the redwoods

Diane I feel
Words riding clouded
So much precision
In right moves, window
Wide open
You were torn
For the poem

Born into traffic
Of sons and daughters
Your library brightens
Single letters words
Like wood finches
In a light snowfall

Back east, one eye
On Whitman’s ponderous
Stone a hand
In ecstatic silence
As seagulls measure
The footsteps
Of a fallen star

TALKING TO LI PO by Neeli Cherkovski

 

Dear Father
of drunkenness
and poesy
some of us
idolize you words
as they step into English
on a high wire
over raging rapids
of an anonymous river
that has cut a deep gorge
through the ceramic earth

we bow in reverence
to the gods of mercy
who lay us low in due time,

I want to ask you
if there is any reprieve
because the beams of death
do not fit
they seem so ill
with faint deception
and wild eyed delusion

mercy is
is a flower
you tickle on the trail

as you ascend
to the snow field
past the last
hearty pine tree

your jacket is
fine, you stop for water
from the canteen, your
leather-faced father
smiles, an elderly priest
hikes on past us
grinning
at the cosmic tear
in his complex
system of belief

he must be well over
one hundred and thirty
five years of age
by now in 2015, my father died
at ninety-five, an old
hobo, son of Russian Jews

we had no money
but we had plenty of
honey which he has passed on
for me

at thirteen thousand feet
above sea level he handed over
the tough sky and the hard slate
of the mountaintop

for the children I will
never have

BUENAS AIRES 1 by Neeli Cherkovski

we see how ugly the moon can be
frozen in place

these stars are not mine anymore
I abhor them

how sad a woman will be
when her son
is lost

we feel the incomprehensible nature
of the inner core and shake our manes
like horses

the old driver will save us
as we descend from the luminous
abyss

he takes us to the secret room
where love allows
a few silent moments

I live inside of you sometimes
as decades roar
and you turn your back

what I see are streets
and plazas
and the grand theater reborn

amor este es mi mano

I am tempted to impress
the shabby facades of these
big white buildings

what is more important
than my fear? I fear sitting
in a room full of inquisitors

who’ll examine paper
and ink and my entire toolbox
and make me pay for the chance

to be? up the dose
of day by day life
never give-in to the bees

without a struggle
pain and endurance love
and mistrust all the above

then rust nail
on the sidewalk
past the liquor store

the ruins
of a far off galaxy
in the tango bar

lithe Diana
loves to lead in the wind
again to pretend
she is not done
with childhood

the whores gather
and prevent the light
from entering

slow slowly the women
enter the funeral parlor
on a serene noon

in the cafeteria
miles of lonely men
sipping soup

Café Tortoni
opens at one p.m.
always

like the army
in a dead empire
we dream of now

WHEN THE CROW AND I ARE ALONE by Neeli Cherkovski

In memory of Miriam Patchen

when the crow and I are alone
life is much easier, he alights
onto my shoulder and listens
to the traffic as a crow must do
in order to survive

he keeps a list of other birds
on a tablet in his heart

I scream and the crow caws
I rage and the crow
ruffles his feathers

a people must understand
what is important
in the life of a crow

love is important
and thus I offer mine

a man and a crow

the crow and ceremonial song

come along and speak to the bird

he has a hallway of his own

he loves the gold chain
in his cage

he likes to come out and fly in his hall

one day he took me up to the sky

out of my window we soared

over the low fog

and the other crows gathered in flight

persistent

look into the mind of this universe
take your storage boxes and toss the souvenirs
into the sky

crow is not a god

crow is not a medallion

the crow is not a charm

he will look for seed on my open palm

he will roost on a branch of the cold tree

we sit around together

he wrote this poem in order to save himself

he looks for redemption

he says Miriam dear Miriam so long ago

now you are a plant in the window

the great talons of this crow

I feel his power when sleep comes
rushing into the room

the dark is like his feathers

I have seen the cruel white hand of night
and my forehead beaded in sweat

BE AWARE OF THE SOUND
WHEN THE FOG IS MOVING

you know he rests
alongside all the crows imaginable

and they are beautiful
and primitive
just as we are, primal
and dangerous, heading forever toward disaster
this is what the fire is for
not only for warmth

here in the cold
it is possible to believe
that one may die a better way
not suffer so much
make it easy to disappear

the crow comes into the room

he flies into the room and I shut the window

dear Miriam there is a reason
and I have held it in hand

the crow is alive

“I say the drums are going like mad”

when the crow and I are alone

–March, 31, 2013

Neeli Cherkovski

Back in 2008, I went in a book buying binge via Amazon and other online sellers.  I suspect during the 6 month period I purchased 125 poetry books.   Of that number at least four of those were written by Neeli Cherkovski.  Leaning Against Time has been in the basket by my chair for the last few years.  I keep the special books there—close at hand. Hell we even have the same hat (by coincidence).
You will see by his new poetry published here that he is a poet’s poet.  That may sound like a cliché but in a time when so many people who write poetry sound the same, try to be the next Bukowski or write what they don’t really know, his words are poetic by their very nature– by his mastery of the language.   He knows who came before him. He is a student of poetry and a teacher.  His poetry sings the welcomed song of a thinker, the song of a philosopher and the always  lyrical song from a lover of words.  Make no mistake, I didn’t do Cherkovski a favor by doing a feature/interview—as a fan he did me one.

Neeli Cherkovski–The Rusty Truck Interview

Scot:  As a child what did you want to grow up to be?

Neeli:  I’m not sure.  Childhood hardly exists.  Sam and Clare Cherry were loving parents, old bohemian souls.  But I was needy, alienated, muddled, easily angered, mistrustful, etc, etc.  To put a positive spin on it, I was sensitive.  My friends were outcasts.  Public school was horrific, fraught with psychic danger.  Often, I challenged my teachers, especially in junior high school.  Later, I held my breath because it wasn’t worth the effort.  Making an adult eat his or her words when you are twelve or thirteen is embarrassing all the way around.  The worst thing was play period.  Participatory sports was one of the dangers.  I did have a playmate, who I still see now and then, the Mormon kid from across Rosewood Avenue in MarVista, Los Angeles.  The latter half of childhood was spent in San Bernardino where my folks eventually opened a bookstore/art gallery that provided a constant source of books. It was Walt Whitman who spoke to me and for me.  I heard his secrets and cherished them.  I also came into possession of some haiku books that were in the family bookshelf and a book of Longfellow’s poetry.  My father occasionally recited The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, especially when he was drunk.

The Poetry of Neeli Cherkovski

FOR AGNETA

of late a sun
walks over the hill
and settles-in

bright light on
yellow facades
face the workroom

you’re singing in Swedish —
clear air whispers an elder
song so elderly
it defies humanity, we
must go, we need to
jump, no choice

you sing in the native
tongue, the sun
trickles through dawn’s
taut riggings and aligns with our
wily wounds, I imagine
you, across town,
another sun or a part
of this one by your window
looking out on the Bay

you’ve made coffee already,
you’re smoking a cigarette,
the nightingales are
somewhere else, all storms are
overseas, we are ever
on the Passage, day on day

____________

AN ODE FOR JACK KEROUAC

I learn to listen as you chop a stack
of wood for your fire, bodhisattva
beatific beautiful body
alone and finally dead as the grasshopper,
yet you sting the air and go from bush to bush
in Bixby Canyon’s lovely darkness

spontaneous father of the ancient
beat, cross country chronicler, chasing
Hemingway and Faulkner peeking
at Fitzgerald’s Gatsby prose, you
prattle on the road, home and away,
then home again, barge man, alive
and alone on Snow Mountain

so long ago at 47 you walked
into the fire and expired
like hot coals
on the morning air, dumb
with drink, numbed by the
whiskey. compassionate and
lost, now your light
bops up an down
like a melody from heaven
in the shadows by a stream

your essential mind hovers
in the pages of the book I read, you
and your buddies dining
on hamburgers, drinking Red Mountain
wine, haunting the rail yards
waiting on Whitman’s graybeard ghost
or Emily Dickinson’s reed pipe

we are sitting on a deck
by the pond of trees, your words
whisper slowly and climb
the cliffs, a swath of cloud clears
my muse, cold chill cold chilly eyes
of a demon from the mountains
of an old Buddhist poem
inhabits the drawing room

cool miraculous death, it is
fortunate to die, it is a happy
thing, it happens to a newborn
and to the grandmother
who turns the earth
in her garden, it is a ring
of gold you toss
onto the void, death, words,
your vision of a wild peace

the cool Kerouac world, those ancient
boy and girls, a memoir of Depression-Era
boyhood and the man in an iron mask and
those dark desires turned
into dust, the ashen horizon, I walk
in the woods, I awaken to
the drummer, one black bird turns
into a magnificent plumed bird

the luckiest men
know how to make love
in the wily wild, the happiest poet
is always mourning, each thing
is so true I wring out of your life,
the tales and tall Babylon
on your eyes, jazz songs and
leaping liquor to stalk and nail you
down, imperfect student on the way

____________

EROS, FLOWERS
For Eric Walker

ah my wild thin broken body
of a young man just eighteen
who won a poetry prize four years
earlier for a poem about flowers
dying in a vase, raising their arms
to hard sunlight, yes how broken down
and beaten, yes I turned you over
to one side and felt you
deep in my mouth, then a stream
of come all over my heart,
the veins of your poem
came rushing ‘long the side
of my room, four walls rocking
into the night, my bed soaked
in your poem, the flowers struggling
toward emancipation, ignorant
lovely petals of a bloom, cruel
afternoon heat, you said
your mother drove you to the
award ceremony, elderly women
who also wrote poetry and met
every month to talk about it
huddled round your wiry frame,
you must have given your small
hands to each of them, then,
in taking them back, you also
accepted one hundred dollars,
the prize, and a certificate, while
all the time you had Rimbaud
on your mind, you were thinking
of his dirty ass and his ILLUMINATIONS,
and of Verlaine, bald as can be,
sipping absinthe in an ill-lit
cafe, I wanted to keep you
near me, awkward, big-nose, tiny
lips and eager voice, I know, because
they tell me, you went north
and fell in love with a girl
who couldn’t have you, and
that you were medicated,
that you were thrown in jail
and died there, a suicide, not
yet twenty-five, but here’s
a flower and there’s
the sun I crawled
past your balls, pretty
wrinkles of time, our
bodies warm or cold,
the wilted vine, the
fallen stem, the colorless
petal

____________

SAMUEL

out of wastes Samuel comes
from memory’s choke-hold
Samuel, supreme actor
gentle, yet worn, contemplates a boulder
shadowing an ear of light that sounds
like a lyre played by a boy
with handsome thighs

Samuel crosses over as Autumn brings rain
the trail is ash
he moves forward, the air chained pillars of fire,
the old man pauses by a well
lambs bleat, a few trees
complete themselves in
Samuel’s eyes, the moon streams

Samuel takes water
to his lips, he sees the young shepherd,
he calls, but the youth
takes his time,
t;hen turns to face the prophet

out of dust and mute desert
the magician, archaic, sanctified.
unmasking hierarchies  his words go upside-down,
he divines, he understands
and would find the unruly youth

Samuel, like an archer,
David came running
and fell to his knees

the sun, already an ancient talisman
of justice, moved a bit toward the west

the boy wept

____________

KING KONG

that moment when he falls
off the Empire State Building
onto the street, his body lifeless
covered in celluloid, the little
wind up men who fall to pieces
in other ways, please help us
understand the primitive mind
of those forever unseeable angels
who cooperate with no one

in the green swamp, in the
tall grass, on a wet mountainside
the memories persist, I was a
savage, I was primitive,I was
a beast, I loved a woman
larger than the clouds covering
my island home, I was a king
and then a prisoner, finally
everything was lost, she never
loved me, I was an animal

Hollywood, Hollywood, a bit
of dust, a lot of sun, rows
of palm trees lining the road,
high sidewalks, a guidebook
to movie star homes, the
Farmer’s Market, an Assembly
of God Church, is there anything
worse than the stranger who
umps headlong into your brain?

and James Dean, he went to
fast, he drove dangerously, all
that talent, his handsome brows,
those sensitive lips, the way he
climbed into his characters and
zipped up, that’s the stuff we
want to hear, do you know him?
he was a young actor in the City
of Shushan, he died in an auto
accident out in the sticks

King Kong sleeps all day long
and only comes out to hear
the nightingales, his huge
hairy wrists are covered in
wires, he goes to the telephone
booth, but is doesn’t work
anymore, and if it did would
anyone answer? the answer
is no, no one is at home, King
King, I am with you on your
island where you reign

____________

AT THE CAFFE TRIESTE

now I sit in the cafe drinking espresso
thinking it’s got to be okay
me being contentious and ambitious and
vain, me being myself, an old man
but young when you consider that
somewhere in what is now Indonesia
we came of age, so some tell us,
when we chewed leaves and dug up roots
and hunted with stone

it has to be fine sitting here
while the earth burns and the population
spills into the sea which will soon boil over anyway

I worry about Mozart
and Bach, all those long hours
composing music for an ungrateful mob

that’s how it is as I awaken in a fever
every night fearful of losing it
and falling down in a brick
courtyard with no help in sight

I worry about the Louvre Museum
and all that art so vulnerable
to a sudden nuclear strike
or a major eruption on the sun

what’s going to happen to my little caffe
with its gossip and poetry?
the hissing espresso machine
echoes outside, I sip the fine dark scrim
and follow with cold water

it’s all I’ve got now, this Golden Age,
as an old friend described it
listening to Italian arias
on the caffe’s juke box and waiting for
a solution to arise

I close my eyes and take one final sip
tasting the soil on a faraway estate
and the interplay of sunlight
and cloud forest

the caffe has been here
since 1956, you’ll find it
when you want it, maybe,
and maybe not, in a proper
season, in this new age
of splendor on a crowded
planet, all I ask
is that you smile
and lean back
to taste the tenor of the sky

Neeli Cherkovski –The Bibliography

• Don’t Make a Move (Tecumseh Press, 1974)
• The Waters Reborn (Red Hill Press, 1975)
• Public Notice (Beatitude, 1975)
• Ferlinghetti, a biography (DoubleDay, 1979)
• Love Proof (Green Light Press, 1980)
• Juggler Within (Harwood Alley Monographs, 1983)
• Clear Wind (Avant Books, 1984)
• Whitman’s Wild Children (Lapis Press, 1989)
• Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)
• Animal (Pantograph Press, 1996)
• Elegy for Bob Kaufman (Sun Dog Press, 1996)
• Leaning Against Time (R.L. Crow Publications, 2004)
• Naming the Nameless (Sore Dove Press, 2004)
• From the Canyon Outward (R.L. Crow Publications, 2009)
• From The Middle Woods ( New Native Press, 2011)