Michael Bennett



Here is Michael Bennett's bio, in his own words: Although I have lived in The South (Atlanta) for the past 17 years, I still feel rather out of sync with this part of the country, due, no doubt, to the fact that I am the last of the Roosevelt New Deal Liberal Democrats. Born in Chicago during the Middle Ages (January, 1942), I was fortunate to grow up in both an intellectual and a highly integrated neighborhood (Hyde Park) under the influence of my grandfather, a Ukrainian socialist émigré who fervently believed that true brotherhood and charity and love were the only things that would save the world from suicide. My childhood was the freedom to read everything and anything and all the time and the liberal and liberating educational attitudes fostered by the University of Chicago Lab School. Education followed through four college degrees from the University of Virginia, Northwestern, and the University of Iowa, all of whom contributed to my careers in education, law, business, and back to education. Additionally, I have driven a garbage truck, worked on a road repair crew, did a stint as a disk jockey, played piano in a number of Chicago piano bars and did stand-up comedy, managed a customer service department, and enjoyed other lucrative moments. My three daughters are independent women whose successes I take no credit for, since they are all bright and competent and self-sufficient. I started writing fiction in fifth grade, switched to poetry during high school at the insistence of some phenomenal English teachers, and finally, after thousands of false starts and ten thousand rejection slips, managed to get published. Now, at age 63, I can look back and say that my life has been fun as well as occasionally frustrating, and the next 63 years should provide even more fun. The joy of growing older is that I can be a raconteur, curmudgeon, bon vivant, and troll, and people are more accepting. And now, "excelsior."



Sonnet
for Narelle de l'Atalante

In darkness absolute we wander, blind:
The lack of light diminishing one sense
Compels the others' struggles: how to find
The means to make our meeting more intense.
The mind as well has limited domain,
For brain cells die by thousands every day;
And logic fights, though blindly, to attain
Some vision that will help us find our way.
As poetry creates the world anew,
Illuminating paths not seen before,
So love directs a Red Sea passage through
The whirlpools that protect the distant shore.
These thoughts recall again the old refrain:
Je meurs de soif aupres de la fontaine.




Sunday in Bettendorf: 6:30AM
A Birthday Poem for Allison Ann

So resting now, in one thin amber glow,
Your hair spilled gracefully about your neck,
Your breathing marks an all too gentle rhythm.
And in repose, your face reveals the strange
Old wonders of the excesses of love.
Never have you been more beautiful
Than you are now, defenseless in your sleep.
And never have you been more vulnerable.

There is a sadness in this room, a soft
Recall of that small death which follows love.
For life devours life, though love lives on,
And all the strong desires to possess
Are yearnings trying to design a way
To keep those things that are unkeepable.
Then, smiling at the thought that you, so young
And still a woman partially unknown,
Could yet evoke such sorrow and such fear,
I turned, and softly closed the door, and went
Downstairs to brew another cup of tea.



Les Images du Coeur

The mind is far too subtle to play tricks,
Too gentle not to placate most desires.
Thus, in July and August, softest months,
When often cold, unseasonable winds
Prelude the coming of a harder rain,
The heart sets its most secret artist free
To teach the mind the craft of drawing well
Those things that eyes alone cannot create,
The richness that exists within the lines.

Larissa and Zhivago set the scene:
In their ice-frosted house at Verrichino,
They thought, at first, they had so little time,
So much to say, so very much to do.
Their love was not enough to turn the cold
Or course of history. And yet, they took
Whatever moments that were left for them,
Lived fully in the briefest space of love
The Gods allowed; not frantically, but with
A thankful prayer for life just once complete:
Of time enough for him to write her poem;
Of time enough for her to gain his child.

But soon that set scene fades. A moment's dark,
Then newer sketches, more projections, fill
The screen as less symbolic thoughts demand
A chance to satisfy the restless eye.

When loneliness requires intense response,
These pictures never seem to find an end.
What serves to populate a given place,
The careless walk of long- and dark-haired girls,
The caring words of lovers' banterings,
The ravages of all-too-loving hands,
Develops old and unfulfilled desires:
As if the malleable mind were stretched
By faithful artist's touch so taut, so fine,
That all its varied multiplicity
Of memories could hang sequentially,
Like drying photographs on one thin wire.

The visions which the mind draws carefully,
So that the eyes are tortured with delight,
Are but the desperate secrets of the heart
Turned loose to illustrate a starless night.



Puppeteer

So skillfully he gathered all the wires,
Made arms and legs in wooden pantomime
Commit themselves to acts of his desires
Which he believed so artful, so sublime.

They moved in perfect counterpoint, as if
His music were the only minuet;
Yet never was their motion puppet-stiff,
And never was there more than their duet.

They whirled concentric circles, his designs,
As hand in hand they crystallized his dance;
They never dared to tangle any lines,
Although their hearts were grateful for the chance.

And when the dance and music soon were done,
He lifted his two puppets from the stage
And placed them in their boxes, each to one;
Then slept the sleep required by his age.

He dreamed without him they could never see,
That they, without his hands, could never live.
But they knew what they were was theirs to be,
And what they gave was theirs alone to give.



That Love Is A Heraclitian River
                      
This landscape is not unfamiliar territory.
But unlike Wordsworth and his five long years,
this is not Tintern Abbey or the miles above.
Though it has been a long time between visits,
I still recognize the nature of the place,
and know the feeling that this scenery engenders.
Heraclitus understood it all:
the way the river flows around the scene;
the sound the current makes across the rocks;
the movement of the beaver and the trout
that dam and breed and somehow bring new life
in spite of all attempts to render static
that which must evolve, grow, change, die, renew.
And thus the river is the same and not
the same; different because I am not the same,
you are not the same.  For everything that we have done,
have lived, have lost comes back to modify
that landscape, causing us, like the river,
to flow in different ways, to feel our current
cascade from different rocks to roar a different song
down the long valley.  And yet the same
because we are the same as nature is the same
as the river is always the same.  As is love.