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Robert Elzy Cogswell
Dimensions of My Love
For me loving goes way beyond habit.
The phrase compulsive/obsessive comes to mind.
Loving is like addiction to tobacco or morphine.
It hurts to give it up and even more to keep it.
I would steal to keep my love alive.
Loving is also like motherhood.
You’re willing to kill for anyone else’s child,
but only for your own would you eagerly die.
Loving shoves me all the way to commitment.
To that inconvenient level I love.
For the sake of harmlessness to you,
I swallow all my other loves
and pack inside their unexpended power.
Sometimes my eyes bug out,
but I feel no regret.
At first sight loving bangs my head against the wall,
but after the stars in my astonished mind clear up,
my love lasts till the final darkling ghosts
of immense nuclear sparklers in the sky fizzle
down to poignant candles.
That long I’m stuck with love.
The Power of Poetry
Let us sing that we exist.
Let us play a fierce, lyrical flute.
Let us celebrate uniting in a single body.
Let us harmonize in anthems to our wholeness.
Let us vibrate like strings on this grandmotherly cello.
Let this sound insinuate its power throughout the impotent.
Let our song infiltrate the silent sad ranks of meaninglessness.
Let us throw open the locked chambers of apathetic twilight minds.
Let us sing that our own minds possess this place — no one can take it away.
We have no dominion over anything, but we swim in the ecstasy of seeing it all.
Three Years
Some doctoral degrees take just three years.
You go to a university and do what you are told
and sometimes a little more to show initiative.
Then you are certified to be knowledgeable
about what you have learned and able to learn more.
In 1347 when those trading ships arrived
in Sicily bringing dead and dying men,
the black plague began. Pestilence stalked a continent.
Death scrabbled to England in less than twelve months.
In three years one third of the people of Europe died.
We were certain the plague was a Jewish plot.
In one day, the black plague of human ignorance
built a house on an island in Basle,
systematically herded all the Jews inside,
and burned them to death for “poisoning wells.”
It takes a day to quench several thousand years
of learning, to purify a city of all that history
and return us to what we all know is right.
Children were burned, our children watched,
and we cauterized their minds forever.
It takes three years to reach your third birthday.
During those three years you probably learn
more important things than if you were getting a doctorate.
At the end of that three years the lucky ones,
still alive, still innocent, blow out three candles.
Robert Elzy Cogswell, an Austin poet retired from librarianship, was a Poet of the Week on the Poetry Super Highway in February, 2007. He has poems either forthcoming or recently published in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts; Underground Voices; Lucidity; Lilliput Review; Farfelu, the Annual Anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival; Blowback Magazine; and The Texas Poetry Calendar, 2008. Earlier in life, he was a panhandler in Manhattan.
Copyright © 2007 by Robert Elzy Cogswell. All Rights Reserved.
This page was published in May 2007.
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