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Rochelle Hope Mehr

of

West Orange, NJ, US

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And the water shed...

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

You wanted the world to go back
to the way it was before Sept 11

When a boiler explosion
was merely that
and not an occasion to unearth
the Geiger counter
"just in case"

You watched the concert tonight on television
and marveled at how attentively
the audience listened

Schumann held them in the palm of his hand
and you, too, as you hummed along
the Kreisleriana theme

what hemmed in Schumann
what kept him from the cares of the world
what was his retreat

what made it so comforting
a cozy escape
in the convolutions of his brain

what refuge
from the insane
from the insane

These thoughts tossed themselves
like giddy signposts
you so desperately wanted to cling to
in the welter

Then the symphony ended
The people applauded
The credits aired on the screen

And the year was 1999
An eternity away in time
Before Sept 11 washed away the magic
And half of your mind

Laissez-Faire

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Hush, I don’t want to touch anything here.

The patient is so quiet, his breathing

so unforced

so much at ease.

He holds his hand protectively over the socket

which was his heart

And dies.

The Grog (on the first anniversary of 9/11)

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

We were floating on the ether
Of infinite expansion, oblivious to
The dust gathering at our feet.
Until the bubble burst
The fortress collapsed
And we were strewn across a grid
Of infinite complexity, a new grid,
One not of our own making.

And one year later, we are still laid waste
In this morass of confusion.
Not clearly discerning
The way out.
Still dazed from the planes’ impact
As well as from the grog
We swill to palliate the pain

After a Long Illness

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Blessed Solitude where have you gone?
Thrust into the world I am newly undone.

Too much to remember.
Too much left undone.

Thrust into the world.
Naked.
Undone.
Privy to nothing.
Naked.
Alone.
Scared.
Undone.
Raw
Flesh to be eaten
By a devouring world.
Heart exposed.

Flesh to be spat upon.
Heart to be shat upon.

Along the Information SuperHighway

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Is this Oz?
Which oracle have I tapped into?
I’m shimmying along, seeking a heart, a brain and the courage to find myself Home.
Is it stringing me along, like a deceitful lover?

I plug into search engines words of intense purpose.
If I can just keep this sense of purpose.
Be galvanized by bits of relevant information.
Ignore the tawdry, the ordinary.

But these digits, these 0’s and 1’s, can run you ragged along a pesky perimeter.
Which bit to choose?
Which is applicable?
Is the data pile infinite as it appears
Or do the digits ultimately converge and does wisdom emerge toward the limit of
Imagination?

How irrational.

I invoke memory.
My memory.
Memory will save me.
A sense of cohesion.
Something I can string the digits along.

The Oracle speaks:

"You can accumulate data forever
But never make up your mind."

This Wizard spouts sound advice
Even if he uses unusual means.

I shut off the machine.

Aural

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

How do you know you exist?
How do you trust the fire from your hand?
When it emanates does it blind you?
When it manifests does it bind you?

What is your connection with reality?
What is it you see that you fear?
Do you see what is missing?
Do you see what you hear?

Coping

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

What is left to me?
A crossword puzzle
I try to complete.
I try to distract
Myself from the throbbing.
Magnesium mutes
The pain.
And I try to remember
What it felt like to feel
Something other than steel
Bearing down on flesh.

The Scar

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Come what may
I shall always have this:
My foot poised over the abyss.

It shall steady me
As a solemn flame
Sears the fear of God

Within.
I shall never advance too far
Without this shadowy retreat.

Lest I forget
And lose the scar
In a heartbeat.

Anger

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

It’s not a happy way to live.
It’s not a joyous way to live.
But it keeps me alive.
It feeds me as it feeds upon me.
We have a symbiotic relationship.
We two.
Anger and me.

Every time I forget.
Every time I let down my guard
And am singed by ignorance, prejudice
Or malice
Its hungry tongue laps
Hard against my breast
And I am galvanized
Into pure ire.

I won’t melt a heart
But I will resonate through
The canyons of insensate resistance.

To Dvir and Noy Anter (The 14- and 12-year-old Israeli brothers killed in the hotel bombing in Mombasa, Kenya)

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I cannot write with undue horror
of the crush and grind of war anymore.
The novelty has worn off.
Terror no longer inspires
a kneejerk shock of pity.

Now the outrage fulminates in me
and everything is a blur.
Full fury unchecked
by the gross distinction I used to make
between the fine sand, the ripened wine,
the good life, paradise for a few precious days
And ground zero, your homeland
which now contains your burial plots as the plane lands
and your coffins retouch the earth
which your father floods with his tears.

Some thoughts on what to do with the WTC site

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I don’t think there should be tall buildings.
There is something here that can never be replaced.
At Pearl Harbor we have the Arizona, a morgue in which the bodies will never be
claimed.
There were few intact bodies here, mostly scattered remnants of pulsing lives.
Each one a rung in an echelon of commerce
Which was shattered so brutally one crisp September morn.

How do we convey the vigorousness
the wrenching away of life
the grotesque mask of death

What is to be reborn here?
A parody of the original form?

I don’t think there should be tall buildings.
We should memorialize what was torn from us
Squat to the ground.
Far enough down so we can touch the earth on which they crumpled
And gauge the height from which they fell.

Best Phone Rates EVER!

Outside

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

We duck into the movies.
Seal the duct tape
Round our windows.
Trying to escape the harsh light
Of reality.

The sun will sear
The celluloid.
We will remember the virtue in fighting evil.
We will remove the tape
And step outside.

Submit a poem for analysis.

After Listening to the Adagio of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Sometimes what is most glaring
is the omission.

You think you progress
by leaving off the last note
of a prominent theme,
blocking the theme

and then taking off in an entirely new direction.

But the flame
never stops flickering
despite all your anguished attempts
to extinguish it.

After Nietzsche

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

The ear is the organ of fear.

Crepuscular crescendos?

No, the bruted muted

brayings of a

foghorn bruiting

sinister insinuations

aloft the

numinous

nimbus

of the

yesteryear.

The ear is the origin of fear.

Saccharin

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

It all started when my mother said,
"I have a wonderful surprise for you."
I waited all day until she unwrapped the present at night
And put on Tchaikovsky’s "Swan Lake."

So disappointed was I by the saccharin sentimentality
I never realized my true affinity with the dark Russian soul.
I really should have - my grandfather-from-Odessa drank
His tea hot from a large glass.
We had a tin saccharin container which I used to open. I’d marvel at its contents
And watch him plop saccharin pills into his tea.
He’d crack walnuts open with his bare hands.
No nutcracker for him.
I never could get over it.
He seemed so strong.

What does this have to do with Tchaikovsky
Who loved Mozart but whose music sounds nothing
Like Mozart’s?
With Swan Lake, which ends as
Bitterly as saccharin?
With Beauty, which starts off with such promise
And, once dissipated, rings tinny in the ear?

brisance

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

words so inadequate
futile expression
ungainly compression

choke on the dust of your experience
the dust the wayward horse
has flipped in your face

turn a blind eye
to a blizzard of blither
rock the cradle

with verve
with brio
with brine
and fine wine

Disheveled

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

If you’re a failure at the amenities,
Write a poem and pour out your heart.
Can’t walk straight, joints stiffened with disease,
Can’t tote vegetables from the grocer,
Confidently wait in line
To pay cash or credit.
Let in the repairman to fix the phone
Or read the gas meter -
Can’t look him squarely in the eye.
Because you’re too ashamed of your shaggy hair,
Your mottled air and your limp.
Too stiff to unwind -
Ad valorem taxes on the charity of others
Drain your self-worth.
Try to redeem yourself
In a poem.

Bzzz

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I am content
with a moment -
no news
no CNN
no Bulletins of Immortality
interposing themselves -
traipsing across my
hyped-up brain -
Poetry and Current Events
have no interface -
I am a zombie
I want no sonic revelations
no electronic instant access
buzz
Let the bad news rest
I am far from the real world
Far from the virtual world
Far even from the mystic portals of the
Imagination
Let me sleep

Anguish

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

When I’m lonely I do much better alone.
A shadow’s a shadow, a stone is a stone.
Collapsible walls are the prison I’ve known.

A torrent of words is the grief of a thief.
Show her your anguish, then look beneath
And see nothing, nothing to bequeath.

Pass by the lake, eye yourself in the eye.
The current is chilling, a breath is a sigh.
A torrent of words and the night air is nigh.

Inflammation

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

In the dream I meet my fate.
Two fires burn. One is north,
The other south. I am in
Between. Mesmerized by one’s
White hot flame I stand there
Open and untamed. It
Never reaches me but its
Dusky counterpart creeps up
And singes my hair.

Hippocrene

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Small signs
and wonders
emboldened me
and made me think
there might be something there
beyond the ordinary

I peeked
through the crack
in the pavement
my plodding feet
had dug themselves
right into
Heaven’s abyss

What sort of
salvation
plants you
beside the wino
on a seedy street

Where is your winged Pegasus?
Have you only a winding-sheet?

Look away
Avert your gaze
Surely something good
Will arise
From Medusa

Nostalgia

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I looked at the crows
and envied them.
They stopped time
with a toss of glossy heads.
With a flap of graphite wings
they flew off.

Ground Zero: 3rd Anniversary

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Parents and grandparents
Enunciating names
Slow, deliberate articulation
Restitching together threads
Irrevocably severed
Gesticulating to heaven
Their souls above
Rest above
Flower's bloom
Uncontainable in soil
Remember flush of youth
Cry to open sky

terri schiavo

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

she lies there
negative space
reaching to respond
or just reflex?
random movement
or reaction to stimuli?
warm fuzzy family
link to humanity, the world she once knew
cold, steely clinicians
probing, analyzing, short-circuiting all connections
husband in a new world of his own
going through his
motions of sealing her off further
take out her feeding tube
nobody cares
"persistent vegetative state"
"already dead fifteen years"
the world at large writes her off
take out her feeding tube
remove the vestigial link between
her and us
forget about her tomorrow
but remember something
something about being dimly aware
about those reaching out to you
and those shutting you out
those shutting you out
and then, finally, shutting you down
down like an obsolete computer

Sanctum (To Ashley Smith)

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Grace I'll take
Wherever it comes -
In a North Atlanta suburb -
Seeking asylum -
Sharing holy thoughts
With a waitress chum
Serving real butter pancakes - yum-yum -
Something in me
Dark and glum -
Grace I'll take
Wherever it comes -

List

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

These are the things that belong to the night:
The coat rack, the lantern, the billowing flight,
The twist in the alley, the hissing floodlight,
The list into madness...
The face ashy-white

Passepied

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Obsession will haunt you.
You fear the thing you want.
You want the thing you fear.
You slink back to your old haunt -
A red bandanna,
Blood red disrupting the white light of day.

Why can't you stay away,
Let the waters flow gently,
Let the sands nuzzle you into oblivion?

Pass, pass, let it all pass,
Let it while itself away.
Pass, pass, like a passepied:
Eloquent and haunting,
Spirited and daunting,
Daunting and passé.

Tsunami

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

When to look, arms outstretched and free
At the receding and beckoning arms of the sea.
When to foam at the mouth
As the meters increase,
As the dry land opens up vistas between you and me.
When to flee
Before the wall of waves lashes its fury,
While you stand there dumbstruck
By its come-hither look.
By its treachery.
Miles and miles away, the earth shook.
The waves roiled
In the doomsday book.
But all you saw was a placid sea.

Current Events

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

The reality of imagination;
Its primacy in our lives.
The latest roadside bombing
Soon goes in the archives.

We focus on the glamour;
The veneer above the base.
What tension in the tenuous
Rivets us to the chase.

False Expectations

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I sat there trying to convince myself
it meant something to be published in the
poetry anthology along
with all of the eminent people who
wrote their own biographical sketches
in the back.

I sat there and tried and tried
to convince myself
it meant that I had arrived
but then I started reading the poems
and wondered
why they lied.

terri schiavo

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Sanctum (To Ashley Smith)

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

List

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

These are the things that belong to the night:
The coat rack, the lantern, the billowing flight,
The twist in the alley, the hissing floodlight,
The list into madness...
The face ashy-white

Passepied

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Tsunami

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

Current Events

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

False Expectations

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

The Invitation

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I received an invitation in the mail.
Was it an invitation or a summons?
It was for a party.
I forgot about it until the last minute
And then realized I had no transport there.
Clothes I hurriedly prepared.
Vague messages appeared on my answering machine.
Offers of transport or something entirely unrelated?
So nondescript
The cryptography of the unconscious
Derelict
Hopeful of salvation,
Desirous of perturbation.
Frantically searching for an egress
I realized that even if I found a ride
I had no way home.
That frightened me to no end.
I stopped dressing myself
For a party I'd never attend
But then awoke to the truth:

The dream was the party
The transport prearranged
The other guests the vestiges
Of other bygone dreams.

It seems I am awash in some Other's witting schemes.
Unremittingly ripped
From terra firma
With no transport Home.

Murmuring Brook

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

What do we crave?
A folderol
A cockatoo
A look askance -
That's nothing new.

What we forgave -
The parasol
The lockstep, too -
Mistook a dance
And so withdrew.

Unwritten stave
Do you gambol?
Are you a laughingstock, too?
What do you hook in abeyance
Far, far from view?

Fugue

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

I fade away
Light loses luster
How many lumens escape

Into lunar landscape?
What is this new shape?
I'd like to phosphoresce

Persistently at your feet
Neither borrowing nor lending light
Burgeoning no urge -

Secure from my flight.

Imponderable

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

The heaviness of things -
Their weightiness an abomination -
Their clinginess a postulation

I do not understand.

The moth upon the lamp -
The flitter of a wing -

If I Forget Thee

by

Rochelle Hope Mehr

It’s quiet here, it’s quiet now.
But who knows for how long?
Was there something I forgot
Long before the first Katyusha hit?
Was there somewhere I was meant to be
Unpummeled, unreticent -
Free?

So feeble, I hobble here -
I should stride cobblestones
Glistening.
The air here is sanitized and stale.
Yours reeks with the redolence of ages.
Each footfall a step, a break.
Each breath a leavening I make.