The Margins

Night nibbles at the margins
of the day, yearning for its page
to be read all the way up to dawn--
a book we can't put down
until dreams illustrate its musings:
Silverfish scuttle away
upon discovery, and
brittle-page odor of
a thousand nights stowed away
threatens to awaken us--but
does not have the kindness
to do so.

12 September 2012

Wringing

                                         leaning against the door
                                            of the refrigerator
                                               to hear the hum and
                                                  to feel the reverberations,
                                                     to absorb the rush of life
                                                        outside that other door--
                                                           the electricity of connections
                                                              to voices and ideas
                                                                 and busy-ness
                                                                    and songs and chatter,
                                                                       growth--
                                                                          to escape the fading
                                                                             of life and dreams
                                                                                soaking me up
                                                                                   like a sponge,
                                                                                      leaving me dripping
                                                                                         and spreading across

the floor

Love Poem, Inspired by the Bards

Love is deeper than any sea that
I thought I would ever scavenge,
A rough and roiling voyage--
Not a frolic in a pond
Which only breathes of fronds and polliwogs.
Love is not Ophelia's barge entombed
With weeds which drifted her unto death.
Love leaks in floodwaters of despair, yet
Builds a lighthouse to guide the valiant bark
Home to its craggy shore.
Love is not the perpetual trumping by a hero's antics
Nor a schoolboy's daring
To prove the heart for a flutter
Of a simple kerchief or the wink of a darling Calypso.
A steadfast hymn is the longest song--not a Siren's call
To dash one's heart, not an Antony's pact with Cleopatra
To die for drama's sake to prove that the world is cruel.
Monotonous seems the daily embarking and the disembarking in
The mornings and the nights,
And persistent are the tides that ebb and flow with lunar moods--
But passionate sings the deepest rhythm that few can ever hear
In the crashing of the waves of dear devotion that
Sanctifies my reason to dive headlong into the depths--
To be one with the currents that satisfy my reason to weave
The net that holds my love as a constant trophy.

ANOTHER PLAY HAS ENDED





Another play has ended.
The audience disengage the
                              Magnetism of the boards--
                              Catharsis completed,
                              The cycles of heroes repaired.
They tread gingerly into aisles
Toward other realities, lumbering
A bit, questioning the return
To the tedium that has sent them into this
                               Realm of the stage of sounds and
                               Sights, marvels and ether--
Wondering how
                               To enlighten--
Murmuring
To their equals and to themselves
(unlike groundlings and fickle mobs)
So as not to frighten
                                The Muse
Whom they wish
                                 To carry away as in a basket
                                 Of rushes--
                                 To flow gently
                                  As a river might--past the populations
Who know no art.

SECOND RESUME

A second Dorothy Parker

I would rather like to be,

Yet I fear she would say,

"Go hang in a tree."

RINGING IN SPRING WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

 



Spring has sprung;

See how they run!

Seize the day--calloo, callay!

The goat man whistles;

Follow through the thistles!

Pick a memory bouquet;

In the sun we'll make hay!

Gather up rosebuds!

 

O how the sap floods.

Amongst Starfish on the Shore

A sounding board...more likely a sponge,
Almost drowned bearing up
Under the gravity of
The venting of marooned Sirens
Needing relief...
What is the mouth of a sponge?
It becomes a thing crusted
With squamous salt
If she finds herself washed ashore,
Dried up and abandoned
After reeling through the nebulae
Of eddies and tides and jellyfish.

Warning

The sky, layered in textured and roiling grays,
Submerged a dull orange-red
Into the morning's horizon of the lake and
Gave background to water birds
Perching high in February's bare trees.
With necks hooked and silhouetted,
They watched the clouds,
Never seeming to notice
A hawk as it flew by
With a fish in its claws.
The light, limited and superb, escaping
The darkened clouds
Polished the tree limbs shining and
White as crooked bones beseeching the gods,
Furnishing a stage
For the sailors to watch
The birds watching the thunder build.
Cypress trees, void of fronds,
Stood sentry nearby, stately and hard
Against the next
Harvest of turmoil.

lunch with pandora

Cat Stevens and Sweet Baby James and Beatles

and Crosby, Stills, and Nash

sing love songs and break-up songs from so long ago sung

to fresh brave and newly chapped faces

later played at a constant beat

on tape decks and radios

in breezy cars that drove by houses on hot summer nights

while we rode shotgun in best friends' cars

to drag out the dousing with tears the smiles

of first love

of the rain and the fire

that came later as you set off on your own

to the world so wild that you met with a smile

songs played again as classic songs to girls forever sixteen

why couldn't you have gone there just in your mind?

as the song says

why was the golden-haired green-eyed one so beckoning to you?

why why why?

we asked ourselves then

we could work it out

we thought then

how does a singer have the power

to reduce a woman to a mewling girl?

they're just songs

they were our life forces

we sang them at the tops

of our lungs with speakers

blasting during the constant

circling of the streets rushing

our hearts with hope

for new love when actually we

thought love couldn't be reformed

after the mysteries of a new world

had been revealed to your young eyes

as the malevolence of heartbreak spewed out yet again

onto a world of girls

diminishing us as females

I was wrong 

I love this house and these two cats and

the one who lights the fire

it's warmer here

than in those chilled parked cars

but my pizza has gone cold yet the ice

has melted in my coke

 

 

 

 





Can You Pray Then?

Can you pray without words when

Thunderstruck, speechless

To compel verbs

Worthy of sounding

To a sacred height?

Can you listen to the flowing of water,

Send compassion when reading a poem,

Wipe tears while gazing at a painting,

Stare into space when too stricken

To conjure expression,

Hold a stranger's hand

To help him stand--

Yet accomplish the asking for grace?

Can you summon a shield

 And daily bread when you dance?

Can you pray while you dream?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJr6FknZhpM

 



THE ECHINATE STEMS OF ROSES

The echinate stems of the roses

The young man presents to his love:

Of what do they bespeak?

Willful heartache from submission

Begat by promises of splendor

With magnificent numbing barbs

Fetching a rush of blood

And collapse of velvet petals?

 

(from The Grandiloquent Word of the Day:  Echinate--spiny, prickly, bristling)

All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy

Triskaidekaphobia--

The hotel floor omitted--

Shining space of void

(triskaidekaphobia:  fear of the number thirteen)

AEOLUS

                                                                         

                                                                        
Without grasping whether black branches
Silhouetted against the morning sky thrust forth
With buds hidden against its grayness, I wonder,
Rather, does the gray oppress

The rattling of their fingers
Which attempt to undermine vague fog?
The coiling wind might divulge the secret of
The winning claim. The wind’s might, with a
Current of change, calls latent valor against
The strength of mystery.
It stirs hibernation, forcing it to grow
Weary. It stirs attempts of hoary laughter at
A false spring smothered. It calls forth
Rain to revive and cleanse. It calls forth
Snow to blanket more sleep.  It clears
The path for Helios in his shining chariot.
The wind, ambiguous to the eye that peers
Out the window, seizes
A revel in March.

PAYING THE DEBT

From the confines of her bed she hears

The dripping drops from the rain

That has come--

Hollow-sounding drops, echoing from the walls of the bucket,

Falling from the eave above her window,

Containing themselves in the bucket as a fluid mass, waiting,

Marking time endlessly, yet bearing up encapsulated

In the confines of the infinite moment--

A muted sound, drumming the
Certainty of the end...
And after she is lulled, stranded in the

Limbo of the dripping drops,

The bucket brims over, spilling

Its unseeded water in sheer and shining glazed cascades

Onto the ground...

Onto her nearby garden.

A death is a planting.

FORGIVEN

The tax man, ambitious was he.
Forgiven he was, yet quite wee.
We can all do as amply
As the man in the tree--
Above all, to forgive thine and thee.

An adultress was posed for her sin
As was Jesus in a ploy, but he then
Inscribed in the grime
And suggested in time
To cast stones at not what they'd been.

A leper the Teacher did heal,
The odious who'd been yet concealed.
He begged with appeal
For his censure's repeal:
His sure faith the dear Lord could feel.

A panicked, feared man was possessed
With demons that Christ did address.
The Legion of greed
Did plead to proceed
Into pigs but were drowned as their guests.

He requested we pray not in grandiose ways
For the nourishment of our bodies' long days.
He appealed for redress
Should our enemies transgress--
For release from a wicked one's sway.

 

 

TONGUE-TIED

A tongue like

Two left feet--
A mouth like
Two left thumbs--
The teacher can't
Help but talk
Like a teenager--
Like she can't
Spit out a sophisticated
Sentence in a cool group
Of adults, so she sits shyly by,
Chewing on a pencil,
But like--but give her
Hands a blank slate
And she can wield her
Way prolifically,
Yet economically,
Through diatribes
As wisely asserted declarations
Charge down her arms,
Heated by her blood,
Articulated by her fingertips,
Urbane, complex, and critically considered,
Clearing the metaphorical room of debaters--
But why would she want them
To leave?
She doesn't.

SYNTAX



 

Poets have words

Some days

But can put no good

Order to them--

Nothing pithy to say,

No revelations held,

Nothing even for therapy.

I'll just watch the leaves

shiver on emptying limbs

through the window now--

misplaced modifier aside.

Yet the day cries one word:

"Hallelujah!"

(Thank you to high school English class buddy Mike Barnes for the inspiration.  Miss Stella would be proud of our collaboration.)