Five Poems by Duane Vorhees

 

AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

 

Innocence is the absence of experience,

while virtue is one’s nature but honed and nurtured.

So is sin: it starts within, grows through practicing.

Even Locke needed both chalk and a slate to mark.

 

CONFESSIONS

 

Everyone’s a politician

and everyone’s a journalist,

and none of us has inhibitions.

But we all have our tales to twist.

 

I went to see my physician

in her office inside my tomb.

For practice, she writes out prescriptions

just to kill the kids in their wombs.

 

My preacher makes his confession

to the girls who are blonde and young.

He lays on his hands, as his mission,

and exhibits his gift of tongues.

 

Professors write dissertations

in order to hide all the facts.

And if you want real information

--oh well, you needn’t even ask.

 

The lawyers brand themselves hired guns.

They court the richest criminals,

who transfer to them ill-gotten funds

to lie as far as laws allow.

 

I said I’d fill that thin co-ed

who said she hungered for new verse,

but she still starves though I’m her poet

and she’s swallowed my Complete Works.

 

Was Jesus tacked to an easel

so Romans could paint him later?

They staged the acts of the apostles

just to build wings for their theatres.

 

And everyone had truth to twist

til they convinced me I was cured.

But when I asked, my psychiatrist

sneered, “Why no, I’m not even bored.”

 

DOWSER

 

Once I was proudly regarded

as the foremost geographer of You:

I surveyed the careful typography

as I mapped your features anew,

measured each promontory

and charted every defile.

 

Many times I plumbed for your treasures

and glad continued my earthy research.

And I knew I could move

my stretched willow out

and discover sweet waters below.

 

But now I live in exile from You.

And now that your landscape is gone

I find – it was not your true geomancy

I’d learned. For though I’m sure

I discerned your well

I could never divine the source.

 

PROPERTIES

 

I wanted only a life unmortgaged--

how many stories I would furnish!

When I took hold of my time, my mansion,

I didn’t know how still I’d be transient.

 

PERSISTENT RELEVANCE OF ETYMOLOGY

 

When the bards composed a song,

did they know where duan came from,

what it meant in older tongues?

Sacrifice! Damage! And Cost!

--and one synonym for Feast!

Poetry, present and past,

synthesizes joy and loss.

Duane Vorhees is an American poet living in Thailand. Before that, he taught University of Maryland classes in Korea and Japan. Hog Press, of Ames, Iowa, has published three of his poetry collections and is preparing a fourth.