My last five posts of 2017 are reruns of five of the most viewed posts on this site during the year. I was surprised and pleased to find this one made the list.
Mushrooms I Have Known
Reticent and tired, withdrawn,
dejected, I return.
Emerging overnight from nothing,
then withering back to zero.
Does light incite you?
The shade?
I walk by and say hello.
You do not speak.
Palinode (soubasse)
In the land of two-dollar mornings, those things
we barely sense take precedence: uncaressed
skin sheathed in ivy, the punctuation mark diverting
power. Insidious corn, the cries of distressed trees
(cavitation in the xylem), soubasse, the ghost note,
prickling from below. Singularity. The appointee’s
hubris. The defining weight of a zero’s center.
A zero’s center defines emptiness, meaning nothing,
or, diverted light, a vacuum. Regard plenum: an air-filled
space, or a complete gathering of a legislative body. And
how did we arrive here from there? From the body we
compose units of measure: an ell, digit, fathom, the mile’s
thousand paces. I expose film to light, concealing yet
establishing a rational point.
Concealing the point implies position without extension,
a moment shedding its cracked sheath and giving rise
to the divine: above, below, male and female, hot or
cold. Reconciliation. A plateau. The still place linking the
infinite to the open hand, limitless black. Burning, I
calculate oxidation and dispersal, tendrils, a flaxen leaf,
its proposition to endings.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in ditch, in January 2014, and was posted here in September 2016..
My poem “Prescribed” is one of three featured at The Clearing, a British online magazine focusing on landscape. I’m thrilled to have a piece included. Thanks to editor Michael Malay for taking this one.
“If You Drop Leaves” has been published at Bad Pony. Many thanks to editor Emily Corwin for taking this piece.
Wet Grass, Weeds
A lone raven
circling the neighbor’s oak,
an oddity in this neighborhood,
lending mystery to the afternoon,
a gateway through dandelion
fluff and the blue seeping through clouds.
A car rumbles by,
stereo hammering the air,
warnings everywhere for the wary.
“Wet Grass, Weeds” first appeared here in May 2016.
Tree
where you go
the wind follows
as if no
choice remains but
that of sun
and oak an
attraction such that
limbs curve to
light a certainty
which cautions us
to intrude lest
we lose all
sight and sense
of beauty you
are this tree
Written in the 80s, “Tree” first appeared here in December 2014.
Let It Remain
Comfort of name,
of pleasure
freshened in
repetition, unformed
pears falling, and
the mockingbird’s
inability
to complete
another’s song.
I will take no
moment
from this day
but let it remain
here in the knowing,
in the tyranny
of the absolute
and its enforced
rhythm desiring
both flight and
maturation,
the ecstasy
of fruit grown full.
“Let It Remain” first appeared here in September 2015.
I’m delighted that my poem “This Island is a Stone” has been published in the latest issue of MockingHeart Review. I am grateful to editor Clare Martin for accepting this piece.
To the Lovely Green Beetles Who Carried My Notes into the Afternoon
Such beauty should not be bound,
thus I tied loose knots,
knowing you would slip free
and shed my words
as they were meant,
across browned lawns,
just over the cedar fence
or at the curb’s edge,
never to be assembled,
and better for it.
* * *
This appeared in riverSedge Volume 29, Issue 1, released in October 2016. I first encountered riverSedge in 1983, and vowed that one day my poetry would be published in this journal. It took a while…
O at the Edges 