The Poetry of Doug Tanoury

The Poetry of

Doug Tanoury

A Small Beaded Evening Purse

She stops,

opens a small beaded evening purse

that catches the light just right,

and standing quite still for a moment

I stare transfixed

at the reflective shimmer as it shakes

and glistens in her hands.

Head bent,

she earnestly looks

for something lost,

as if probing a dark universe

of infinite mystery

hidden within the midnight reliquary

of a small beaded evening purse.

At The Lake

At the lake,

These last days in June

Are like living inside of an opal,

For there is a golden fire

In the sunlight,

A strobe-like flash

Reflected on each wave,

A cool lushness in the trees

Growing slowly toward full foliage,

And there is a certain point

Way out the channel, where the freighters steam,

Where a thin band of milky white atmosphere

Separates the pale blue of sky

From the deep blue lake,

Out where the red beacon on the lighthouse

Seems to regulate the meeting of air and water

And marks that misty point where earth ends

And heaven begins.

Venus Rising

I have seen a vision of Venus

Standing statue-like on the escalator

And rising as if on the waves,

Wearing a summer garment of many colors,

A pagan goddess walking amid

The merchandise in the temple of commerce,

As a chorus sings and instrument strums

From invisible speakers, the melodies

Seeming to emanate from the very air,

And I am breathless before an image

Bottecheli would paint,

Of fresco smiles over wet plaster teeth,

And I understand now the judgment of Paris

Was a no win dilemma, an Olympian gottya

So inescapable and impossible.

This is the fickled goddess of bargain days,

The patron of retail sales that I kneel before

In abject genuflection

Awaken you Muse!

Arise you Greek Poets!

Rouse yourselves Playwrights!

For I have seen Aphrodite walking

Up the marble temple steps

Wearing only one leather sandal.

Lazy Geometry

Lying prone in the backyard hammock,

In the combined shadows of the maple and the ash

I study the invisible movement of the sun toward zenith

And the afternoon light that pushes back the shade,

And when the breeze blows, just so, in the trees

I occasionally feel the sunlight on my face,

Fulgurant and fleeting,

A brightness penetrating just for a moment

The sleepy darkness of closed eyelids.

I have observed for long hours,

The serrated edges of each maple leaf,

And the teardrop foliage of the ash,

The boughs and branches rising,

Like arms of the devout uplifted in worship

They reach to touch the soft circumference

Of a summer sky,

Found only in the lazy geometry

Of a July afternoon.

Ode To Feet

I have seen poetic feet so perfect,

The very smallest units

Of patterned stress,

Soft idioms of Iambic

And drum beats of Anapestic,

That march across the carpet

In measured meter toward full-length mirrors.

I am the bard of bare soles

And naked ankles,

Of fallen arches and

Swollen heels,

Of toenails

Pedicured and painted,

That catch the light

Like so many cut sapphires,

All arranged

In descending order of size.

I have crafted couplets in Trochaic,

And started the heartbeat of lines in Spondaic,

For I am the poet of feet,

Perfect and imperfect,

Poetic

And otherwise,

Of bunions, bumps and bent toes,

Carried within or laid upon

A pump, mule, sandal or thong.

The Physics of Tea

Sitting in the living room

Drinking tea with her and

Talking about special relativity

And the fact that the most distant

Galaxies are racing away from us

At 80% of the speed of light and

As she considers this

Pulling a wayward strand of hair

From her face, she begins to twirl it,

Worrying it between her fingers, and

I am touched by the girlishness

Of this gesture, as she asks very seriously:

"Gravity is a fear of being alone"

I laugh

Setting my tea down on the table

Hearing the percussion click

Of a china cup meeting the saucer and

As she smiles the freckles on her cheeks

Gravitate together in Newtonian fashion

And I know now

What holds everything together

Is simply deep attraction.

Sage With Umbrella

Watches The Collapse

Of The Modern Age

A Poem For Maria

I remember

It was a perfect summer sky

The kind that only seems to occur

In the early days of September,

With a sky so azure

It seemed to glow with some

Inner luminescence,

And the vivid color finish

They spray on new cars in Detroit,

The ice blue sports cars and

Peacock blue sedans.

A day so temperate that

The air feels perfect against the skin.

It is more an absence of temperature,

As if both hot and cold have somehow slipped

Below the point of perception and the air

Itself has become imperceptible.

Ah such a day of clearness and clarity,

Of blue placid beauty.

And then the rains began.

In ways fitting for our age,

In abstract and surreal images,

In some post modernistic vision,

With glass and concrete towers

Intertwined with airplanes,

Add to that the obligatory apocalyptic

Flames and smoke and you have a work that

Dali would paint, a Warhol or a Max

And the rain began.

It rained paper and desks,

Chairs and tables,

All the mundane debris

Of daily life. And it rained people,

Arm flailing, legs kicking,

It rained fire,

It rained rock,

It rained dust.

And I find myself in a Peter Max

Oil on canvass, entitled:

"Sage With Umbrella

Watches The Collapse

Of The Modern Age"

Schrodinger's Cat

Like Schrodinger's cat

I find myself in two different states at once.

You see,

It's all rather confused

And uncertain,

At the same moment

I love her,

And yet

I do not.

In the hard determinism

Of Saturday morning breakfast,

She sips her tea,

And I spread my jam slowly

Across a slice of toast,

Pondering

My choices

And reforming my past.

In the solipsism

Of my most solitary and selfish thoughts,

At the point

Where all possible histories

And futures meet,

There is another woman

With a different smile

Asking me to pass the cream.

The Song

On My 50th Birthday

This morning

In the feeble light

Just before sunrise,

I heard the first songbird of spring

In a tree branch still bare of leaves,

As its repeated

Its refrain,

I turned to her and said:

"It is singing for love."

And I think the power of procreation

Is more pervasive than all the dumb

And inanimate matter

And a universe

Full of mostly lifeless stuff.

"It is singing for love"

I repeat as if translating the refrain,

From the shadow on the winter branch

That proclaims

The seasons change

And new life in bare branches

That will soon sprout

The tenderest of green buds

That will grow to open

And magically move

In the faint breezes

Against the iridescent glow

Of the western sky

On summer evenings.

And to me

A student of seasons

And quiet transitions,

Of tulip blades

That stab green

Through the black

And softening earth,

"It is singing for love."

Alone on branch in a brand new day,

I stop my movement

For a moment

As I listen transfixed and silent

To the song, and finally turn toward her,

As she moves about the kitchen,

Oblivious and deaf,

To love's refrain.

Yesterday's Tomorrow

A Conversation Recalled

I often remember a conversation

from long ago and recall

the lines quoted to me

from Eliot's Four Quartets:

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past."

In thoughtful recital

from the wrinkled and dog-eared pages of the past,

that somehow has stayed with me,

strangely coming to mind

at the most critical junctions in my life,

and it seems to me now,

that our words carried more meaning

than we were aware of at the time,

just as prophecies

only gain recognition

in their realization and

magic in their manifestation.

Perhaps too, their staying with me

into the muddled forgetfulness of my maturity

somehow proves their point,

that time does not progress in the neatness

of linear correctness,

but in crazy tautologies

and odd backward eddies,

for I remember the Eliot quote

and sometimes I even recall

from that conversation long ago,

the Shakespeare lines that followed,

spoken like an actor,

full of strut and sound and fury:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..."

Tolstoy's Ghost

The snow-covered ground

on January morning

reminds me of a Tolstoy novel,

War and Peace or Anna Karenina

I can't quite remember which,

and if that white bearded icon appeared

like a holy apparition, some literary visitation,

if his ghost were here right now,

he would comment on the silent symbolism

of nature deeply asleep and life suspended

as if time itself were a river

frozen over into stillness.

Detroit River

When I was a boy

I spent summer afternoons

in a small fishing boat

on the river.

We'd fish deep

out by buoy #3,

a channel marker

with a large bell at it's peek

that peeled with each rolling wave.

We'd fish the rocky shallows

by the leaning lighthouse

that listed steeply toward

the westward shore.

All of our large imperfections

gathered within the too small confines

of our little boat, weighing it down

precariously low

in the water.

About Doug

Doug Tanoury was born in Detroit in 1954. Doug still lives in the Detroit area. He has three grown children, two cats and one wife. He is the founder of Funky Dog Publishing. Doug’s poetry has appeared worldwide in online and print periodicals including: The Denver Quarterly, Poetry Magazine.com, Zuzu’s Petals, Gargoyle, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Electric Acorn, Writer’s Digest, Alura Quarterly and others. He has recently published a wide selection of his work in electronic e-book form at: http://home.comcast.net/~dtanoury1/Tanoury.html

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