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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets A World Inhabited ROBERT H. BUNZEL _______________________ Northwest Sound Headwise south on a curved couch, window open west to March air oddly warm on my hotel robe, a balanced globe of Willamette gris withstands an empty bottle. Below the floor, outside the walls, midnight sounds of a public market closing down are sweet with clank and dolly, car ignitions signal workers home. Then a swell of voices lips below the window ledge to cozen wake for dream, is it a dozen talkers or maybe six? I cannot make a word, but hum and pitch is oral lubricant like standing under fruit tree blossoms sawing soft with honeyed bees. Hear the lift of girl laughter merge with male fuzz, and outbreath shrugs that trail deeper questions for several seconds' silence before blurred comments river back in eager mush. I put my book to lap, relax the light in favor of this cordant scriptless sound that warms, until I wake to chiller wind and the neon market sign's tall red imperium, a beacon over muted Puget Sound. [601]
Dog day Resurrection When did world and weather shift, that we walk friends about in fur? On scrabbled coast where Jeffers pined and Mission clay soaked native blood, I am on Easter Sunday in the back pew of Wayfarers' church, simpled green and white. Hear Father Norm bless all, as my blonde dog stretches under hymnals and the plate, with eyes forgiving human egoists who say God needs no pets in heaven. Norm sermons that life firsters of today would eagerly pluck Jesus off the cross and fix him to a feeding tube, so he'd never have died to wash our sins. At my ankles dog eyes stay level wide, pooled in deeper focal point than mine. It juts me: those unfallen need not bark to be redeemed. [602]
Robert H. 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 since 2002, and is a founding director for a non profit board in Hana Maui dedicated to the preservation of native Hawaiian culture. Bunzel's legal practice has involved foreign appearances in Europe and Asia; domestically his practice focuses on white collar crime and business torts. |
