Featured Poems
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This Morning
Sometimes I can’t get going - my arms, legs and mostly my heart wooden. And lethargy rules. I want to curl up with the two sleeping dogs in their cushioned basket. or disappear into the back room with a good program on the radio about somebody else’s life how they got up and achieved great things against all odds while I lie under warm blankets. Outside the plum is blossoming purple pink bamboo beginning to shoot new calligraphy into the chilly wind and the lately pruned apple tree getting ready for a stunning performance looking at me through the window with the question, “what is your problem?” That Man
That man riding a bike through Queen Anne’s lace is mine, large frame and shoulders castle of bone and beauty. How can this be happening? how can some vagrant cell march like Hitler through his bones and liver? As if dark occupation can silence him. To think ahead is to unravel. This step is enough. Images are confining, mystery more potent, more imaginative, more lightly to welcome the one guest who like a prayer flag dances in high winds. Pass the musical instruments while variables calculate and weep; life is woken not by a morning alarm, but by the middle of the night with its tonnage of threat insistent shadow and sobering cry of impermanence. And by day a new authenticity as if the bag of neurosis has vanished scattered in a drained ocean, in it’s place a simple sweet melody I could sing it for you, I have listened to the birds, apprenticed myself to the flowers to the breeze that softens the islands and the beautiful melody that moves through our hearts as if hope did not matter anymore. Robin Redbreast
And almost under my descending foot, beneath the long thighs of pine, cedar and distant geometry of blue, and below Salal and huckleberry, her wings slightly lifting her grey eyes fogged and dimmed, her breath ebbing. This June morning a small bird dying and no record, no tiny gravestone hidden in the woods, nothing written in gold letters of her lineage, her fledgling’s desiring above the green field. I wanted to pick her up and take her to a leafy church in the undergrowth for her memorial, but already her name is being born by the wind to the branches, to the clouds where she is most at ease. And the dappled owl preparing a tribute, a cosmic chant. Squirrels in every direction announcing her death to the forest as darkness prepares her shroud. Anon My favorite poet is Anon. She locked her poems in a drawer, supposed to be doing the laundry or putting slippers on her husband’s feet. My mother told us in the 70s, would you believe, make sure you are made up, a gin and tonic ready when he returns. I was working twenty four hour shifts, and I too would like slippers and a drink. If the poet did put a name to anything, it had to be male like George Sand. I would like to take my pussy hat and hurl it at the wasted centuries. To put up neon lights on all sex shops, only for women’s pleasure. To say to little girls “shout everything you care about.” I would fill the senate with women who disband the band of brothers in their house of violence. God cringes at the word cunt. It hurts her, it offends the beauty of the holy entrance to what is soft and loving. Anon has endured since the cruel burning of her sisters because their poems were healing and a threat to the ledgers of power. Still she flees the most despicable weapon of war. For her the angels weep and for the perpetrators, even the devil is ashamed. Kayaking. Hauling the boat over rocks your unshod feet tenderised by barnacles and embalming sea weed’s oily flowers cushioned in a rusty under green. Take all of your self, your whole history; the past hour’s neurosis into this small container and be no more than blue to where the water is turning silver at the meeting of currents. When you are far enough away from the cabin, the dock, the washing drying the afternoon, let the paddles rest and rock and be taken. You are more than you ever imagined. Look at the horizon in the mist below the mountains, the silent islands communicating from familiar distance Can you go on living your life on the shore as if the kitchen of things mattered? Drifting in unhitched expanse you belong elsewhere. Sooner or later in a random hour released into unfamiliar territory with no idea of it’s mind blowing contours. Untangle from the morning’s imperative and paddle out of your mind to an intimacy beyond yourself. Abundance Abundance leaps from the latin abundia; the verb abundare; a shit load, three bags full! a host, quantities, scores, a slew oodles of blackberries. Single mellow moon and sovereign sun, and the night sounds from the marshes to catch to shoe. lace and light of matins diffuse in the chapel of bird song. The country side looks through your window, your open door - Do you have any idea how expensive you are, the industry it takes to keep you amazed, and grateful? Oh Lordy lord! |