ROBERT H. BUNZEL
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Stones Across the Ocean
We are the messengers of common law
Come to the lakes where rebels bled
On stones and steps that silence Time,
Now all the Lions have been civilized.
The border guards in crossed red hats
Wave in sun-glassed Milanese, whose Lira
Deliquesce, dark blood to bank slips,
Black skis racked like trellised tubes
Of chocolate in Ticino's winter light.
Signs for "Banca" on each corner of the
Gray streets snake to gravid blue lake
Views, as crested banners strung to third
Floor railings medievalize Lugano's core.
A Roman pleads today this country false:
Its francs transpire over tears, and snow
Domed peaks are cushions for the costive vault.
Yet crumbled churches leap back to a
Past when Papal florins thralled the stage,
And Il Pretori's Court still coughs up
Boccaccio's descendants, rags to fume.
Barbarians we demand, sub-judice, to ask
Direct old questions via cross-exam, of what
Secrets bankers booked for years in entries
Slewed to gold, while burnished wristclocks
Ticked blunt homage to the kings of Cash.
March snow melts my morning footsteps,
Two-bit worn the hollowed stone.
We are the Circus come full circle,
Alien merchants, bleed up radical rules.
[181]
Shorebirds Flock at Christmastime
-- Richmond, California
December 2002
On a restored bay trail
ringed by gravel crunching
dead year reeds all pale
as spears. A chain mail
fence divides thick marshes
from industrial boils and fleeing
cars, glinting in an angled
sun's spent solstice light.
Beyond Richmond glowers
an azure sky above the
hegemony of townhouses.
And up and over the earth toned
oil storage tanks that look like
cakes and canisters, I spy the
oddest swirls of aerie blooms.
Constricting balls that build and
burst of dark specks choired.
Helixed schools are one moment
inside out then next are bent to
flux and fly like moving math
not just feathered birds in song.
When direction shifts, their wings
morph gold to gray to black,
the way wind lifts dark-sided leaves
en masse to change the tones of trees.
A woman the color of gunmetal
and her three-legged dog stand
tethered in the anteroom of dusk,
absorbing this avian fireworks.
Her face a sponge that eats soft
light reflected off the chain fence,
so that in time's stalling
I lose an instant of the distant
cars and boilers pause.
[182]
In a Time Without Spring
Will winter's gray remain like mold,
to Irish up poor cabbages and sloth?
The household fire is denied repose
and burning oak's a stand-in
for the sun in June.
Aleut winds in counter-spirals knock
the coastal coral trees to shards.
While snow refills the alpine verde
and weary bucks to lowlands
cast a hoof.
The climbing green stands down unflowered.
Hived bees sleep and do not pollen.
Man's black heart shaves its head to
fertilize in blood a viscous tangle,
shadows over heartland steer.
She guns the Rambler's bluesmoke sputum.
With pirates' cap that crosses sabres, over
cornrows boozy-blonde. Greased wipers
film her mean-lit eyes and lip-tucked fag.
She sneers across the lane at me.
In delta-swollen eddies, muffled black
men plug for bass. Been strafed by pale
riders' V-glass wakes and Mekong
emigres in sampan hats who cast the
reeds reliantly.
Jog city parks of fog-dripped grass,
where Thai team trios kick and head
a bamboo sphere across a net that's
shoulder-high: in back-flipped scissor
spikes, lithe ancients bringing Bandung
through the gates.
Sunless sight before the body falls.
Over clouds, my contact'd eyes can
squint the pigments of the slightest bird.
So leap the rail for the skeleton which
summer holds.
[183]
Robert Bunzel was born in 1955, and lives in Piedmont, California. He
is a practicing trial attorney in San Francisco, and is the managing partner
of his firm of 30 attorneys. His poems have appeared in Soundings East,
Block's Poetry Journal, Orphic Lute, Oxygen, Illya's
Honey and Poet Magazine. Bunzel graduated from Harvard College
in 1978 and the University of California Hastings College of the Law in
1981. He has been president of the board of the literary tri-quarterly
Zyzzyva, "the last word in West coast writers and artists," since 2002.
Bunzel is also a founding director for a non-profit board in Hana Maui
dedicated to the preservation of native Hawaiian culture, and is the president
of the San Francisco Lawyers' Club American Inn of Court 2003-2004.
Bunzel's legal practice has involved foreign appearances in Europe and
Asia, and domestically his practice focuses on white collar crime and business
torts, though he has also represented NFL owners and players, and one of
his trials was nationally televised.
"Stones Across the Ocean" and "In a Time Without Spring" first appeared
in Block's Magazine.
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