Tag Archives: life

Musing on My New Chapbook (4)

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I Have a Bird to Whistle is available for purchase now.

From where do these poems come?

The seventh poem in the chapbook, (salt, mask, descent), was begun two months after I’d survived a heart attack, a particular type known commonly as the “widow maker,” and only a few hours after I’d learned a friend had died. The questions that arose from both events have never been answered.

The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.

Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.

Thanks very much for supporting my work. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am to you all.

Poem Up at Poppy Road Review

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My poem “Flame” is up at Poppy Road Review. “Flame” was first published in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second; the chapbook’s title is taken from a line in this poem. Thank you, editor Sandy Benitez, for taking this poem.

Available at Amazon.Com and Here

 

Publication Day! And More Good News!

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February 25th marked the official publication date of my new chapbook, I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), available here, and if that wasn’t enough to get excited about, I also signed the contract for my next one, The Sadness of Old Fences, which will be published sometime in the distant future.

Thank you, poetry community, for supporting my work!

Earth Keeps Spinning

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Earth Keeps Spinning

What book
do I pull from the shelf
in this hour
marking my friend’s
return to that light-drenched

inkling before everything
collapses?

Which title, which
weight shall I
covet? What
do we hold if not
each other?

Being no one, I cannot say.
The earth keeps spinning
even as I walk
to the mailbox,
anticipating new words.

He cannot read these lines.

I do not write them.

 

* * *

“Earth Keeps Spinning” was first published by Red River Review in August 2018.

 

 

Apricot Wood (with recording)

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clouds

 

 

Apricot Wood

I built a frame of apricot
wood. This was for you. The clouds float
through it even as I sleep. You wrote
once of wild herbs gathered and brought
to a lovely girl, an offering not
of passion but of some remote
desire to hear a word from the throat
of the Lord Within Clouds. I thought
of this as I chiseled the wood.
Last night it rained. I listened to
it from my bed by the open
window, hoping that the clouds would
not leave. This morning two birds flew
by. It is raining again.

 

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Originally penned in the 1980s, “Apricot Wood,” is included in my 2015 chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform. It was first published in 1986, in SPSM&H, a publication devoted to sonnets, and was featured on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily in March 2015. It’s interesting to look at my writing from this period. Some pieces seem to have been written by a stranger, long ago and far, far away. This one somehow seems closer. 

 

 

As Breath Defines Constriction

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corona

 

As Breath Defines Constriction (Solar Wind)

The snake swallows itself, integrating the opposite. Or, illustrating the
nature of earthquakes, encourages conjecture.

Wind meditation. The practice of circling mountains, of emptying oneself.

Matter accelerating away from the sun. The prickly pear on the roof.

The Tendai monks of Hiei run 40 kilometers each day for 100 consecutive days.
Only then may they petition to complete the thousand-day trial.

Coronal mass ejections temporarily deform the Earth’s magnetic field.

I sweat while driving to the store for cold beer.

The heliopause is the point at which the solar wind’s strength is no longer
sufficient to push back the interstellar medium.

No matter its destination, a comet’s tail always points away from the sun.

At which point does one hear the sound of sunlight entering stone?

They must complete the thousand-day challenge or die. To this end,
each monk carries a knife and length of rope on his journey.

A map is simply paper. Solar wind, cord of death.

Stones in the path, quivering earth. Eyes focused ahead.

***

 

“As Breath Defines Constriction” is included in The Circumference of Other, my offering in the Silver Birch Press publication, IDES: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks, available on Amazon.

 

stones

 

Musing on My New Chapbook (3)

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The pre-publication order period for I Have a Bird to Whistle ends on February 24. I believe that there will be a small increase in price after that.

 

From where do these poems come?

The third poem in the chapbook, (soubasse, plenum, leaf), started with an interest in the sounds trees make when suffering from drought, and moved on to etymology, politics, questions of measurement and, as always, perception. The definitions of “plenum” were particularly illuminating, as were the origins of various units of measure, as were those sounds we sense but don’t hear, those feelings tugging at us, perhaps without our knowledge.

The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.

Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.

 

Firewood

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firewood 

 

Firewood

For two years the oak
loomed, leafless.
We had aged
together, but somehow
I survived the drought
and ice storms, the
regret and wilt,
the explosions within,
and it did not.

I do not know
the rituals of trees,
how they mourn
a passing, or if
the sighs I hear
betray only my own
frailties, but even
as I fuel the saw and
tighten the chain,
I look carefully
for new growth.

 

chain saw

“Firewood” is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second.

 

Poems in Love Poem Anthology

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Stephanie L. Harper and I have individual poems and another collaboration in Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love, a print anthology of love poems, now available on Amazon.

 

Which is an Eye or a Bowl, a Dream

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eyes3


Which is an Eye or a Bowl, a Dream

Or well-placed mirror in a sunburnt room, shivering through shifted
images: that hand, blackened and stout, opened like a dark peony;
the tattooed chin; shovel and torch; hook and owl. You say no one
chooses one fist over another, that bread’s rise completes its cycle
and begins anew, pressed flat and rounded. Take this heart and seal
its chambers. Note the anterior descent. Compression, lesion. Plaque.
Consequence. And your friend, who slept, never to awaken. Lying
in that strange bed, you taste salt, acknowledge change, whisper
to no one: audible house…audible tree, knowing that time’s limit
remains unclear. The air swirls and you accept this new light.

 

Note: “Audible house…audible tree” is from Jane Hirshfield’s “Not Moving Even One Step,” from The Lives of the Heart.

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