Greeting the Moon (after Li Po)
Wine conceals the night’s approach,
while blossoms blanket my clothing.
Drunk, I stumble to the stream and greet the moon,
thinking of birds, so distant, and people, so few.
The transliteration on Chinese-Poems.com reads:
Amusing Myself
Face wine not aware get dark
Fall flower fill my clothes
Drunk stand step stream moon
Bird far person also few
This adaptation first appeared here in September 2014.
The Simplest Coercion
Each portrait betrays a similar
attraction: faces
swallowed by the artist’s
eye, his sight being
beyond optic, that assumption
inherent in every expression
but one. Yet this, the self-
portrait, reveals a hint
of secrets – an unwillingness
to confront,
the simplest coercion.
* * *
Another piece from the 80s…
This first appeared on the blog in May 2015.
The transliteration on Chinese-poems.com reads:
Spring sleep not wake dawn
Everywhere hear cry bird
Night come wind rain sound
Flower fall know how many
Letter from Austin
Michael, when you say moons do you see
cold stone floating in the firmament
or phrases frayed in the mouth and spat on paper?
And does the Spanish moon simmer at a similar
pace to mine or yours? Which embers blush brighter?
But let’s turn to estuaries, to salt and clamor and gun-
running poets and interrupted words sold in stalls
between parenthetical gates, to incomparable cavas
and the deterioration of envy and intervening years.
Or perhaps mislaid passion – a friend claims love
is merely a bad rash, that we scratch and scratch
and inflame but never truly cure what ails us. Sounds like
politics to me. Or sports. And business. Or neighborhoods.
On my street people should cook and play music together,
laugh, raise chickens and read good books. They should
brew beer, swap tomatoes, recite each other’s poetry and sing
in tune. But we’re different here, preferring instead electronics
glowing in dimly lighted rooms. I reject this failure, as I also
reject the theory of centrifugal force spinning off the moon’s
body from the earth’s crust, preferring to imagine a giant
impact blasting matter into orbit around what morphed into the
earth, and somehow accreting the stuff into this orb we
sometimes worship. This, to me, is how good relationships
form: explosions of thought and emotion followed by periods
of accretion. But what I mean is I hope this finds you well
by the river of holy sacrament. Remember: brackish water
bisects our worlds. Turn. Filter. Embrace. Gotta run. Bob.
Originally published in Heron Clan 3, this first appeared on the blog in July 2015.
My friend Michael occasionally sends hand-written notes or letters to me, and I respond with poems. This is one. You might read some of his writing at Underfoot Poetry.
Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter
Or a restless leaf, a footprint.
Is fault on a blameless day,
scrawled on a washed-out sky.
My friend’s music orbits his home,
worms through the cracks
in the bluest lines, ever new
and permanent, staining even his hope
long after the lights stutter away.
And the rain’s attenuated sorrows?
They’re coming, he says. Like goats
through a fence. Like lava. Like tomorrow.
* * *
“Sometimes Love is a Dry Gutter” was first featured at Vox Populi in January 2017. I’m grateful to editor Michael Sims for supporting my work.
Who Will Know
If I drip like snow from the roof who will know?
When I throw stones at dead men who will know?
The mother’s ghost rests in a razor-filled moat.
He purses his lips, laughs, says who will know?
You are the night sky above the red-cloud horizon.
When I fade like twilight, tell me who will know.
Which vein traces love, which proffers denial
as our blood starts flowing, and who will know?
Unanswered prayers line his frozen pockets.
When he unclenches his tiny hands, who will know?
This man’s tongue repels truth no matter the hour.
If we hear only what he allows, then who will know?
* * *
“Who Will Know” made its first appearance in May 2019 at The Local Train Magazine, a publication out of Bangladesh.
Sault Ste. Marie
Too often you see yourself and wonder
which bodies ancestors navigated
to gather such glorious scars and wrinkles
in one place, both noticeable and unseen,
little waves in a great lake of flesh.
The mirror is not unkind, you think,
with proper lighting — in candlelight
or late evening’s peppery glow,
after a few drinks. Then you recall
crossing the equator three decades
past, how the deck’s non-skid surface
scratched your knees as you scrubbed
the twists and currents that’d buffeted
you to that imagined line on the globe,
and later, the following points and clock
faces withering down the long queue
of jobs, the spilled beer and incomplete life
sentences. Even now, Superior washes
through its locks, filling, denying, allowing
one’s depths into another’s space with equal
regard, promoting passage, flooding past with
future, present with then, balancing tomorrow, now.
“Sault Ste. Marie” won LCk Publishing’s Spring Poetry Contest in April 2017.
