Bill Cushing
Bill Cushing Poems
Up where the mountains
curl like sleeping dragons,
peaks piercing
far above the clouds,
...
Hair bobs around a face
of Nefertitian beauty:
She sits with an arm
draped over the arm
...
A shape appears
and is gone,
comes into view,
disappears, until,
...
If you’ve done life right
you do not feel or even
see the years coming
until they have long passed.
...
Chrome and black tile at breakfast again;
coffee’s so strong it pulls your eyelids back
going down, and while last evening’s drunks,
with five a.m. shadows, use it
...
They flock
to the park
cloaked in black,
perched on benches in the Winter sun,
...
Kneeling on the floor,
thumbing through the albums
around me, I see
the pictures:
...
Gone and now cremated,
I wait for my sister
to meet me at his now-
once bungalow. Searching
...
The rolling surf and mists of
clouds reflect
the sunlight off the side
of our flight and into
...
I have always taken
the four a.m. watch:
those three hours before dawn when,
inhaling the moist sweetness
...
Bill Cushing Biography
Born in Norfolk, Virginia while my father was serving in the Navy, I was raised in New York's Queensborough. In fact the town I grew up in (Douglaston) is also the place that produced John McEnroe and James Conlon. In my youth, I was very mobile. I attended high school in Pennsylvania and then went to college in Missouri but did not last long there. After that I was in Virginia, back to New York, then to Florida (with some extended stays in Baltimore, Corpus Christi, Texas, and the Virgin Islands) , and Puerto Rico before moving to the Los Angeles area where I have been since 1996.)
The Best Poem Of Bill Cushing
Cusqueños
Up where the mountains
curl like sleeping dragons,
peaks piercing
far above the clouds,
in another world
two miles
above sea level sits
the center of the Incan empire,
Cusco: a pupute,
bellybutton of the world.
Like a crouching panther
this place,
all diagonal
slopes, everything
hard stone: boulders, smooth squares
of grey granite the size
of a room; cobblestones,
loose ovals of softer pastels;
and of course, interrupting
the landscape is the weighted
masonry of churches with arches
lifting statues
promising spirituality
but instead
delivering conquest.
In the morning comes
the hammering from the town square:
a stonemason crouches amid
rocks, boulders, and stones.
His song rings out
with each ping of the steel
striking the rock
he works on. Not far,
the finisher chips
discretely on the rough work,
trimming the rock into shapes
that could easily
have come from a lathe.
Then there are the people,
the cusqueños:
Trudging along
the sloping roads and paths,
they carry belongings
or wares in the lliclla-
colorful blankets sprouting
babies, flowers, hay,
or more stones,
the wraps that
wrap
around stooping shoulders
and seem to push the carriers
into their own incline
as they make their shuffling way
up these narrow and steep
streets while we tourists steep
coca tea in our rooms,
attempting to adjust
to the heights.
At midnight
we bolt awake, our bodies
gulping air to catch breath; feeling
a tingling in fingers,
we drown in thin air.
The cusqueños,
like the stones surrounding them,
are squat, browned,
with hearts enlarged
and noses slightly widened:
equipment for the altitude.
The old ones peer
through occidental eyes
cracked and peeling
from age and
knowledge,
knowledge ancient
and pure.
The look says:
'Nokanchis ocmanta causanchis,
we will endure.'
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