My poem “We Do What We Must” is live at Third Wednesday. I am grateful to editor David Jibson for taking this piece, and to Plain Jane for providing the title in last fall’s mini-fundraiser for Brick Street Poetry.
Poem Up at Third Wednesday
18
Tag Archives: language
Landscape
Landscape
Utterance
within the parameters set
by form
expressionless
save motion
the lone branch
brought to the fore
and in the distance
stock ponds collecting rain
the word is
forget, as in the imperative
as in function, as in
you must have
This first appeared here in December 2014.
Wind
Wind
That it shudders through
and presages an untimely end,
that it transforms the night’s
body and leaves us
breathless and wanting,
petals strewn about,
messenger and message in one,
corporeal hosts entwined,
that it moves, that it blends,
that it withdraws and returns without
remorse, without forethought, that it
increases, expands, subtracts,
renders, imposes and releases
in one quick breath, saying
I cannot feel but I touch,
I cannot feel
* * *
“Wind” first appeared in Blue Hour Magazine and is included in my first chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
Trains
Trains
1
In the marrowbone of night,
your song parts the fog.
I never knew the secrets entrusted there.
I never knew that cinders and steel
could lie so passionately
and still believe that the watchman’s hours
would evaporate and leave us scratching for more.
I have stolen time.
The windows remain closed and shuttered.
Even the wind turns away.
The track narrows.
You call.
Again.
2
Sometimes song seems the only respite,
the rhythm of clashing cars
and moments stretched beyond the next bend
to that point where light winks out.
We both know this lonely tunnel.
Payment is due.
I have always exited alone.
3
Another evening, and red smoke completes the horizon.
Your ribs stretch for distance,
and while I cannot see their end,
I know by sound
their lot.
Sing for me.
It is not
too close.
“Trains” was originally published in Lightning’d Press (Issue 8) in Spring of 2014, was reprinted on Aubade Rising in April, 2015, and has appeared here several times. It is also included in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
Something Lost, Something Trivial
Something Lost, Something Trivial
Another word, another bewildered
moment in transition: the phrase
barely emerges from your mouth
before crumbling back into a half-opened
drawer in the loneliest room of a house
that died seventeen years ago.
I nod as if in understanding, and stoop
to pick up a crushed drinking straw,
the kind with the accordion elbow
that facilitates adjustment.
From a rooftop across the street,
a mockingbird warbles his
early morning medley of unrelated
songs, and you say left oblique,
followed by matches, then
collapse on a bench,
winded. I sit next to you
and we both enjoy the warmth
and birdsong, though I know
this only through the uplifted
corner of your mouth, which
these days is how you indicate
either deep pleasure or
fear. I have to leave soon,
I say, and you grab my wrist
and stare into my eyes.
Broom, you reply. And more
emphatically, Broom!
Though I cannot follow you
directly, knowing both path
and destination, I pick my way
carefully through the years
stacked high like cardboard
banker’s boxes stuffed with
papers and receipts no one
will ever see. I know, I say.
I love you, too. Broom.
* * *
“Something Lost, Something Trivial” was published in January 2016 in the first issue of MockingHeart Review. Many thanks to founding editor Clare L. Martin, for her multiple kindnesses.
As the Gravy Flows
As the Gravy Flows
Viscosity is always a consideration, as is definition:
traditionally a sauce composed of meat juices and
thickeners, or, a sediment of melted tallow, which
somehow brings to mind a laborer rising early after
a hard night, eating red-eye, made of fried ham
drippings and coffee, served over grits. Or perhaps
an egg gravy – a béchamel sauce flavored by bacon,
with water and milk, and an egg – ladled over butter-
rubbed biscuits. But then I picture my vegetarian
friends pushing away from plates of this fine repast,
and not wishing to deny them or those following a vegan
lifestyle, we turn to roasted vegetables with broth, oils
and wine and a savory yeast extract. But I can’t fathom
a life without giblet gravy, which features the neck and
offal of fowl, including the liver, the taste of which may
be too strong for other recipes using giblets, an interesting
word in itself, from the Old French for a game-bird stew,
and the Middle English meaning of an inessential
appendage, or entrails, morphing to garbage. I would
never throw out an onion gravy, essentially a thick sauce
of slow-cooked onion and stock or wine, and admit to
having tasted a cream version with the consistency and
flavor of diluted paste, indicating a lack of balance in
flavor and poor roux-making technique. My favorite
would be an Italian-American buddy’s gravy, his word
for a rich ragù of sausage, braised beef and shredded
pork, red wine, tomatoes and herbs, served over pasta.
This of course stretches the definition of the word, but
language is elastic, is it not? So it flows, as does the gravy.
“As the Gravy Flows” was drafted during the August 2016 30/30 Challenge. Thank you to Lady Phoenix for sponsoring the poem and providing the title!
Memoir (Cento)
Memoir (Cento)
Your hands touched
everything. Will you
be a fountain
or a sea?
A woman sleeps next to me
on the earth. Now
nothing else keeps my eyes
in the cloud.
Each rock is news.
* * *
A cento is composed of lines from poems by other
poets. This cento originated from pieces in:
77 Poems, Alberto de Lacerda
Because the Sea is Black, Blaga Dimitrova
Body Rags, Galway Kinnell
Song of the Simple Truth, Julia de Burgos
Love Poems, Anne Sexton
For further information and examples of the form, you might peruse the Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-cento
Irretrievable
Irretrievable
How we grieve the simplest
truth: we are
the scatterings,
relics of
the mind’s
erosions,
less than the sum
of our bodies. I cannot see
the word
but it smokes like
the color green
burning, but not of
flame, and once
the knife enters
you must avoid
its secretion
and peel the flesh
to reveal
what hides within:
the stem’s
purchase, pith,
seeds,
the irretrievable
shape
of a word
my lips cannot
form.
***
“Irretrievable” first appeared in a slightly different form in Vayavya, in December 2013, and subsequently appeared here in April 2016..
The Sky Refutes East and West
The Sky Refutes East and West
Here, the horizon lingers.
The open eye, the mouth’s shape.
A hoop, the circle without iris.
Does the screech owl acknowledge latitude and hemisphere?
The Semitic alphabet contained no vowels, thus O
emerged as a consonant with a pupil, morphing into a dotted ring,
and later, with the Greeks, an unembellished circle (which of course
they cracked open and placed at the end). The female lays eggs
on the remnants of earlier meals lining the bottom of her den.
If you listen at night you might hear the purring of a feathered
cat (the Texas screech owl’s call varies from that of its eastern cousins).
The difference between sphere and ball.
To pronounce the Phoenician word for eye, sing the lowest note possible,
then drop two octaves. They usually carry prey back to their nests.
Screech owls are limited to the Americas.
Coincidence and error, the circumference of other.
***
“The Sky Refutes East and West” was first published in Prime Number Magazine, and also appears in my chapbook The Circumference of Other, included in Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks (Silver Birch Press, 2015). It made its first appearance here in May 2016.
That Number Upon Which the Demand Lieth
That Number upon Which the Demand Lieth
Overcoming duality, yet binding: the trinity.
Beyond the contrast of two, it initiates the concept of many.
Albertus Magnus claimed that three lives in all things.
Becoming; being;
disappearing.
In Old Saxon, the month of May is named trimilki, season of three milkings.
Number as quality depends upon the visual field.
The ancient Egyptian sign for the plural requires three strokes.
Points; lines;
angles.
Lao-tzu said the triad produces all.
Acronyms, sports, and traffic lights reflect our ternary culture.
The devil may appear in the form of a three-legged hare.
Witness; testament;
tribute.
Representing the unknowable: I, you, and the beyond.
The figure of completion, the number of the cube.
A Sumerian number sequence began “man, woman, many.”
Curse; liturgy;
blessing.
The scale as a succession of thirds.
Imperfection implies the concealment of perfection.
Shiva’s number, his eyes, his braids, his place.
Root; third;
fifth.
The triangle in Euclidean space.
I walk the three roads to the commonplace, preferring rhetoric.
Three to through, it penetrates the personal, unhinges that door.
The law; the land;
the world to come.
“That Number upon Which the Demand Lieth” was published in Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art in September 2017. I am grateful to editor Susan Lewis for taking this piece.
O at the Edges 