Sample Poems by Dane Cervine

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Second Thoughts on the Spiritual Path

Beautiful wasp zombifies cockroach…
—YouTube video

If one loves Brahman with steadfast devotion,
one becomes Brahman.
By thinking of nothing but the wasp,
the cockroach is changed into a wasp.
—Sankaracharya

While reading The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton—
a Catholic monk delving
into the mysteries of India—

I become infatuated with the Hindu passage he loves,
describing how one becomes divine.
How a cockroach finds its wings.
At first, the metaphor seems beautiful
till I explore Wikipedia, think twice
about being turned godly.

The emerald wasp—known for its strange sex life—
stings a cockroach to use as host for its larvae.
Injects venom to paralyze the front legs,
stings the brain, disables its escape reflex.

This jewel of a being drags the victim to its burrow
by pulling its antennae like a leash,
lays her egg inside the cockroach.

Once hatched, the baby larva chews its way
into the abdomen of its host to live as a parasite,
consuming organs in an order ensuring
the roach lives till a jeweled cocoon forms inside its body.


Analogous, I assume, to this ancient
spiritual metaphor.

Eventually, a new emerald wasp emerges
from the cockroach's body to begin life. If this
is what the Hindu sages meant,
it would explain a lot. My indigestion,
for instance, headaches that won’t go away,
my obsession with the Alien movies
where a new insatiable life-form is incubated
inside the human.

I may re-think the spiritual quest,
though the divine consumes me even now.
The jeweled wing of it springing through
the cockroach of me—wait,

this is much too Catholic, even
Hindu, in its distaste for the mortal.

I’d rather not be a zombie, even
for the divine. Even if it means
just being a cockroach for the duration.
Even if it means remaining a pest,
wings useless for flight,
living in leaf litter,
rotting wood, holes
in decaying stumps.
As divine
as any
thing.

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The Mighty Box

Mara’s 60th birthday bash blares Motown & Salsa
from the Mighty Box art gallery
in San Francisco’s underbelly.

Greek and a bit wild,
she was my wife’s boss at the university,
gathering friends not to thwart
time’s relentless beat,
but vibrate it in the body’s box,
bones shaking with deep bass & brash horns
blaring like an underground train bent,
not on arrival, but going on forever.
Reason enough

to get drunk at this mighty party—
but I am the designated driver
and poet, drift instead into scenes from
the MOMA visited earlier. Magritte’s immense eye:
The False Mirror, blue iris filled with clouds,
unblinking. This confusion
of what is real—

Time and its regrets, or the true mirror
of this moment: my wife’s eyes
laughing as we dance,
deeply mortal, deeply beautiful.
There is everything to lose

in this mighty box of a world. The threat
itself, paralyzing

as in the other Magritte painting:


a black-suited man with black wings
marooned with a mute lion on a bridge
entitled Homesickness—as though
we’ve already lost by becoming mortal.

Yet here we are.

Michael Jackson moonwalking me
into my wife’s arms, while Mara
dances with a friend who cavorts,
somehow, exotically, with a cane
despite her broken foot.

All of us broken in some way,
and not caring one damn bit.
Black wings and all.

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Therapy Day

It’s a long day,
beginning with the red-haired firefighter
unable to douse the wildness in his wife’s blood
who suddenly leaves with the kids for the cold of Michigan.

Then, the German-Lit student armed with her thesis
about Prometheus, Lucifer, Frankenstein
and the perils of consciousness: fire, black wing,
salvaged heart stitched inside a monster-god.
How she feels

like all three myths, packing the car for Idaho
with her degree in the glove compartment. Then

the ragged beautiful couples come,
flailing their broken loves like great myths.
The construction worker with gorgeous tattoos
rippling his arms—psyche on secret display—
while his fiancée, unlike Medusa,
wants a nice wedding, a happy life.

Or the most anonymous innocuous couple
one can imagine lost in the labyrinth
of polyamory and hot sex and how
to keep Pandora’s box from
swallowing them whole. Finally,

the long-married Silicon Valley meditators
plumbing the depths of the empty nest
with psychedelics & Rotary club conferences
while marveling at love’s longevity.

They’re all going to make it, somewhere.

Later, at the Rio Theater concert—
my head still filled with each knotted story—
the folk-singer Shawn Colvin jests that at sixty-one
she’s been in therapy so long that
45-minutes into her concert she reflexively
starts wrapping things up because
her confessional hour is over.

But we egg her on to deliver every song,
each of us a

Diamond in the Rough,
Riding Shotgun Down the Avalanche,
moving Steady On,

music a kind of therapy while we
weave like a drunkard, a balloon up in the air
needing a puncture, someone
to point us somewhere

in this Promethean myth of a life
with its singed wing,
its salvaged heart.

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Mission Impossible

Tom Cruise is 56 years old and still
doing his own movie stunts,
falling from helicopters and racing motorcycles
at the same age the cranky actor Wilford Brimley was
playing the old man in Cocoon
as he and fellow old folks’ home residents
snuck into a nearby swimming pool to cavort
with beautiful aliens in Elysian waters,
to make them young again.

My younger brother, who is also 56 and a filmmaker,
comments on this after Cruise’s sixth rendition
of Mission Impossible’s impossible koan:
am I still young, or too old to know better?

Is age simply a matter of calisthenics, staying loose,
foregoing the stand-in during the dangerous scenes,
risking everything, still?

My brother is an “older father” of two young ones,
whose antics of tree-climbing, trampolines,
and joyous mayhem keep him young,
yet evoke his age every passing minute.

We decide Cruise looks good—we’d rather be him
than Brimley—though the old mustachioed actor
seems more settled in himself,
more at home in his body,
slow-moving as it may be. Till Brimley,

enlivened by the alien Antareans
whose bodies of light turn the old swimming pool


into a fountain of youth,

grabs his wife’s hand, hops into the alien spacecraft
as it returns to a dimension where
they will never grow old,
never die. A good story.

Still, my brother & I know we’re more apt
to be like Tom, cruising into further sequels
absent friendly alien spacecrafts,
eyeing the next script for character roles rather
than young gun-slinging heroes—

where you find yourself in a swimming pool
being lapped by the grandkids
flying their plastic helicopters
over the impossible cliffs
that it is our mission
from which to one day fall.

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Keeping An Eye on The World

Your job is to go on looking, to not be turned to stone.
—Tony Hoagland

Medusa, with her hair of writhing snakes,
guards the underworld—which is also this world.

Let her gaze catch you, and your heart,
the marrow of bone, the silk or old leather of skin
will turn to stone. Peer too long into this

writhing gorgon called world and madness
may come—even the beauty,
paralyzing.

To live softly in your skin rather than turning
to stone takes luck.

Amulets help—a good poem,
charms, crossed fingers, knocking on wood.
Anything to keep you safe while sneaking peeks
at Medusa’s snake eyes. In the old days,

castles were adorned with gargoyles to keep evil away,
naked women with immense vulvas called sheela na gigs
to repel spells. Or hunky punks thwarting evil
with their own squat dysmorphic bodies.

The body itself a human amulet when hung with crucifixes,
silver bullets, wild rose and garlic
to keep at bay vampires, devils, moods.