GEORGE SCHNEIDER PLAYS HANDBALL- 1933
There is no creation I do not feel.
My dad, at sixteen, on a handball court,hunches to slap the hard rubbery sphere
against the wall. He is not smart enough
to know that he should be miserable.
This lousy place is a Brooklyn schoolyard,
and this time is a luck-forsaken year,
enjoyed by only those few who are tough
enough to forget the moment, but not
the moments, crannying between each crack,
of the black on fist, and those in concrete,
which can only grow. It is for these spots,
that the boys take their aim, that the ball seeks.
There is no feeling I do not create.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
The only word is Love. It is what binds
things more securely than the o and v,
which are bereft without the l and e
to give them structure, if not grand design.
Nothing is permanent, as Love proves this
so, as well the uselessness of Beauty,
without Love to engage it. Can you see
the parallel? Love is just what it is,
as well is Beauty, which mouths the full o,
which sounds like a u (the short vowel sound),
to become part of the structure that grounds
only what matters to those, in the know,
who see what is loosened by loveless minds
unable to ask: Where did Beauty go?
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
SAY HEY PSALM
1955
There is a beauty no summer can heighten,
nor any winter diminish. It is in
the cheers that rumble around the Polo Grounds,
from last September, and the searing fly ball,
cracked from Wertz’s bat, and the Kid in full flight,
and the crowd caught up in the screamin'-mimi,
of a moment, until he sticks up his glove,
over his head, corrals the ball, in a fall,
echoing through the months, and- maybe- the years,
of silence that is moment, and can only
be, until his spin-and-throw makes all of sound
resume, and thousands swoon, with a newfound love
of seeing. There is another kind of time
where death is unseen, and comes last to the ears.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
VINCENT PRICE IN THE DRAPERY FOLDS
An indignant resign resides in the box
that shapes his eyes within the frame of the world
windowed and decorated and fluttering
in the motions of motion you largely see
but choose to ignore: his earlier career
was a banal extravagance into here
where the flesh remembers no time he was not
creepy and old and decaying with silent
eyes that entwined you like the billowing cloth
which frames your gaze away from television
and into the real world or out into it
because all is tragic when one is without
as he in between the cloth and the glass or
the divine chaotics of wish and snowflake.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
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