ONIONS POEMS
BY
ROBERT WALLACE PAOLINELLI
DEDICATION
TO MY DEAR FRIEND, ROSS DEBOSKEY, M.D.
Wild Onions
If karmas could be redeemed by
the quantity of wild onions I
pulled up today, I would be the
the most perfect of humans.
Barrow load after barrow load I
hauled off to the dumping ground
under the redwood trees. Now I am
having some doubts:--
What would happen if (by some
quirk of botanical transmorgrification)
the wild onions would combine
with the genes
of the redwood trees?
While pulling up the pungent bulbs I
thought about my ancestors and
about
dying and birth and of the
connection we
all have to ancestors and
death.
the parabola of life from birth
to death arcs. And,life
as we know it,ceases.
But is that all?
As I pulled up more onions
I thought about
conception and transformation.
My question to myself was:
Does conception begin before sperm and ovum?
Yes.
It begins from before the beginning.
And all we souls now manifest in
the flesh were waiting our turn to be born.
It is now we who are waiting to die, as all the wild
onion desiccating under the redwood trees.
POPE POET THE FIRST
Sometimes I wish I
were Pope so I could
set my bulls in motion
and bring centuries of misdirections
back into line to the truths of
the true church
and reunite the believers into
the fold
of love, goodness, peace, plenty
and
mindfulness of the joyful
mysteries of the universe,
and the readmission of clouds,
water, wood,
air, metal and earth
as blessings, and reblend them into the doctrine
of the great wondrousness of the
Infinite, Unknowable Cause of the
Arising of All Beings and Matter.
That would be the subject of
my first bull ex cathedra.
HARMLESS
I don't want to be
afraid of anyone, and
I don't want any one
to be afraid of me.
I don't want to be frightened
or threatened by anyone and
I don't want to frighten
or threaten anyone, either.
I'm no fool, however, not a
sheep waiting to be lead to
the slaughter, nor a naive waif
waiting for the jack boot while
dreamily chanting peace and
love.
I only want to be harmless
and I want others to be
equally as harmless. We don't
have to be a society of
suspicions,
afraid of some, leery of others;
or cautious about where we live
or go and at what hour.
We gauge our lives
by the relative degree
of safety of a place.
We do this to be spared
the indignity of assaults and
threats to our person--even to
our lives.
We carry this fear as we walk
about our own city.
Sometimes I feel like a
hunted animal as I
walk through certain parts
of town. A human being
should not have to feel that
way.
Our ancestors, no doubt, had
to live in close proximity to
giant beasts; so their wariness
is understandable.
But why must I dart my
eyes, or look behind me or
become extra alert
if a stranger approaches?
Yet my fears are not
unfounded, nor are the
fears of the many and
the moans of the victims or the
pain and the lamentations at the
funerals of the innocent victims
of urban violence, hate,
psychosis, crime
and indifferent bullets.
Harmless: I want
the world
to be harmless so I can
walk the streets at all
hours and not regret I
don't have a .38 in a
shoulder holster for ready use.
Why must any of us live
such a life? Harmlessness:
If anyone has a better
answer for making the world a
better place other than by being
harmless--let me know right
away.
Wild Onions Two
Yesterday I pulled
wild onions and then
I wrote a poem.
I smelled like wild onions
all day; it was not an
unpleasant smell. I even
tasted one; not a bad taste.
I took piles and piles of
wild onions to the dump site,
Pulling up those pungent bulbs
was a lesson in natural
philosophy and anatomy, for
at the end of the day my
back hurt and a certain muscle
twitched and ached more than the
others.
I looked up muscles in an
anatomy text and found the
Latin name for the hurting muscle.
However, I renamed it. I call it:
Onion Pulling Muscle.
The pain of which caused me to
reflect on the weakness
of the body and how delicate
is the balance of things
mysterious and wondrous.
After I put the anatomy text away,
I sat with a pillow at my back
and, the discomfort
notwithstanding,
wrote a poem about
wild onions.
The Mouse and Mrs. Whitney
A Very Short Story
Mrs. Whitney hadn't the heart
to set the trap to kill the
mouse her
employer had seen scampering
across the kitchen floor.
Mrs. Whitney was not afraid of the mouse,
nor did she hold any particular
grudge against the
small gray thing. Mrs. Whitney was temperamentally unfit
to set a trap to kill a mouse.
But her employer expected it of
her.
So what Mrs. Whitney did was bait
the trap, but first she soaked
the bait
in strong vinegar and then she
put the trap
in a place no mouse would ever
go. And
when asked by her employer if
the trap was baited and set,
Mrs. Whitney could tell her employer (in good conscience)
that "Yes, the trap was
baited and set."
FIRE SONG
The burning log
is singing. I hear
it distinctly; it is
a high-pitched hiss/whistle
with slight variations.
It is sizzling sap
forced out of the wood
by the heat. That is
the science of the audio
phenomenon.
But I hear true singing:
A one note
tune, hissing and whistling
through the ligneous,
proto-instrument.
The sap is burned out,
and all that is left are
the ashes of the music
of bubbling sap.
TIRED FIRE
The fire burned
itself out.
For the longest time
it roared and shot
up flame and
sent out a hot,
dry heat.
Gradually it settled
into soft, sensuous
tongues of flame
slowly consuming itself
until
There was only the
glow of coals and
charred stubs of
unburnt
wood.
The memory of the
fire sleeps in its
ashes bed, and I
am off to my
own bed.
MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
MAY 1995
WILD
ONION POEMS5/14/95