David Rozelle

Raised in both a children's home and in foster homes, he somehow never made it to prison, disappointing both himself and those who still consign kids like the one he was to fates they inexplicably deserve by birth.  He holds degrees, held a Fulbright (Denmark) and made his way in the world as a jack-of-many-jobs, including teaching and writing.  A resident of a secluded hilltop south of Spring Green, he has now retired, although his wife, Judith, continues to work as a university plant scientist because she's so damn good at it.  Can you tell he's proud...and still, after 35 years, madly in love with her? 

 

Poems

On the Sound of One Hand Clapping

On the other hand,
I elect to use both hands ---
To applaud the moon.

 

This Morning’s Quiet

This morning’s quiet holds me in soft arms,
Midwife to my dying.
The house hums and gurgles.
Last night’s dreams purl against my throat.
Tomorrow’s death will stop my senses,
Stiffening shut the portals,
Hushing each nerve at its ending,
Blacking out the morning’s babbling.

 

What Would Be Green

Soil tilled dark, planted unseen,
feigns death at first light.
But punched below, new seeds riot
against the crown,
While earth, plowed topsy-turvy,
thrusts back, out of sight.
What would be green begins in blackness,
upside down.

 

Long Love

Long love will keep its own time.
The minute hand outplays the sun,
The hour outnaps the moon.
And love’s pendulum ticks true.

 

My Friend’s Father Walked in Fields

High-summer evenings
My friend’s father walked in ripening fields,
Among queues of adolescent corn
Headed hell-bent for the sun.
Skirting the silken rows,
He stopped here and there to churn the feverish soil
Over mutinous roots of
Wanton, woozy stalks.
But mostly he glided
Languidly over the darkening, green-studded earth,
Fading in and then out of
The prickly, heat-stricken air.
My friend told me this
As we sped his “88” through the fermenting night,
Eager with unwhetted corn knives
For the cutting to begin.

 

Unheard Anew

Time has brought us here. Time will take us back.
Not swallowed, shanghaied or cancelled on cue.
But called by the owl’s psalm, fifed softly in black…
Unheard. Then heard. Then unheard anew.

 

Sticks and Stubble

We put to the sword again this fall
Our resurgent ancient prairie.
The tractor’s clattering sickle-blade
Mowed the land to sticks and stubble
Native blue-stem and gramma grasses
Fell in innocence where they stood,
Alongside marauding cliques of
Dogwood, buffalo berry and buckthorn.
Snow now blankets our fallen prairie
But roots whisper pledges to reclaim,
In spring, more ancestral glory.
Nature forgives if man amends.

 

On My Latest Birthday

Pity me not…
Pity’s a funeral oration.
I’m still alive,
And prefer resuscitation.

 

You Might as Well

You might as well give Earth…
There bides in every stone,
The fire that forced its birth.
Its wild, willful head…
In every drop of blood,
The wind that dries it dead.

 

Is That You, Ophelia?

Is that you, sweet Ophelia? Is that really you?
Barefoot in a night grass moistened with dew,
not sopping-wet death.
(Self-slaughter seemed unbecoming in you.)
The moon catches you up, a vapor en pointe,
You dance as if grief never drowned you,
hand-woven in weeds.
(The pond had no stomach for granting your wish.)
Too late we have found you alive, dear Ophelia.
Hamlet would have fought for his life had he known,
the Prince of Your Love.
(Prince of Revenge did not fit him so well.)

 

A Boy Could Get Lost

A small boy could get lost there,
In a dying September,
In the frost-rattled cornfields below Taliesin.
A boy could go missing there.
A great artist could vanish there,
In a too-shining brow,
In the passageways of his masterpiece.
He could opt to be absent there.
But he chose to be present there,
In the black ice of September,
In the solace of Taliesin,
For a grandson lost in the fields there.

 

Unseen Seeds

Each harvest begins
In blank fields of unseen seeds.
From tilled earth we feast.

 

Sonnet for Mildred Harnack

(1902-1943)

On that frozen day at blood-soaked Plotzensee,
Before Herr Hitler severed your impertinent head,
You translated verses from von Goethe’s “Legacy,”
…or so your ambidextrous Nazi chaplain said.
After, I imagine your voiceless, vacant cell,
Where a Putzfrau mops to stare
At graffiti you left scrawled pell-mell
On walls, the floor, the stool toppled in your cut hair.
milwaukeepabstbeermitchellparkpolkabands
mayorhoenunionsturnerhallgummutlichkeit
madisonbascomhilllafolletewaltwhitman
millaypicnicpointmysweetarvidhumanrights
The sun spills itself black. The spent guillotine sleeps.
The headsman scuffs home, trousers dripping Deutschmarks.
The limp white smocks sprawl, like butchered roses in heaps.
Shivering hearses spew serpent-skin fumes in the dark.
In Wisconsin a schoolgirl makes angels in new snow.
A coed hums Gershwin at clouds balefully

*Mildred Fish-Harnack, a native of Milwaukee and alumna of the
University of Wisconsin, was beheaded at Berlin’s Plotzensee
Prison for resistance to the Nazis on February 16, 1943 -- the
only American citizen executed by the Third Reich. Her husband,
Arvid, a German she had met as a student, had been hanged at
the same prison in 1942 for his resistance to Hitler.

 

Dare To

(Haiku picked one July morning in a wild blackberry patch)
Seize the blackberry.
Fondle its sweet-seeded flesh
As thorns sip fresh blood.

 

Tell Them Stand Back

Tell them stand back. Let the wind have its way.
Their compasses point only too straight.
It goes where it goes. It stops where it stops.
Chance isn’t all. This wind chooses its fate.
Each ending begins with a start that’s grown older.
Each plot traces back to its own Chapter One.
Each page should be turned by its holder,
From first, until now, and what’s left to be done.
Your life’s story is yours, having lived it.
Why write it now in inks less exquisite?

 

Trust Me

Time collapses.
Softly, ceaselessly it crumbles
All round us.
“I don’t see it,” you say. “Show me.”
Trust me.
Like collapsing clouds of invisible snow,
Time’s collapsing….Right now.

 

Pitched Phosphorescent

Pitched phosphorescent from out a riddling darkness,
We spark across time’s spaces like skipped lightening,
Drawn together to form twinkling parabolas,
Pinpoints of arcing lives…burning out, reigniting,
burning out, reigniting.