New Year
How transparent you’ve become:
even the leaves blow through
your pockets, and penitents
line up, awaiting the latest word.
Those who have, fear the most.
Each day collapses under its own
weight, rising again into the new.
Surgery brooks no illusions;
this house, too, will fail.
Owning little, I pour tea and wait.
“New Year” first appeared here on January 1, 2017.
Hummingbird
The thought makes
trembling so
incomplete, a consequence
of knowledge attained. I look out
and see leaves flitting in the dusk,
the air closing around them
like the mouth of an old well
swallowing light. Such
hunger we find difficult
to comprehend. The wind shivers
through our lives and repeats itself,
though differently each time.
Every departure is a return.
“Hummingbird” made it’s first appearance on the blog in December 2014. I wrote it in the 1980s, probably between 1987-1989.
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, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second. I first encountered riverSedge in 1983, and vowed that one day my poetry would be published in this journal. It took a while…
Flowers
How they share our
desires, shape
our days.
Passion to hope,
fingertips to
lips. Some bud
easily, others
struggle. A little
water, light, a kind
voice. Sometimes so
little achieves
so much. Yesterday’s
sunflower droops on
the sill. Today’s promise
arrives with rain.
Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated
Dear Charlotte: The sun here winces daily, stumbles
across morning before smudging gray like an old slate
scarred with decades of chalk dust and erased messages.
I’m hunting work, and there are days when it feels
as if past experiences have been rubbed out, or maybe
I can’t make myself slog through the powdery white
crusted blend of ennui and discounting youth. Those years
spent chiseling out budgets and manipulating spreadsheets
have wrought zilch. Even the service seeking writing
tutors shot down my application. Seems SAT scores
from the 70s can’t be validated, and how else might they
measure one’s qualifications. But somehow I still exhale air
cleaner and more carefree than any I’ve taken in since
the century rolled over. Funny how that is. The more shade
they throw my way, the stronger I feel. Seated at wobbly
tables by restrooms in near-empty restaurants. Chipped at,
ignored, reviled. Questions answered with curled lip and
haughty tone. Laughing, I relish it all. L* the kitten
just launched herself at the table, scattering across the fake
wood floor mail and bits of poetry which might be
hammered into a collage of shady loan offers, crappy
lines and massage therapy ads, if my talents leaned
in that direction. But scooping out the litter box seems
my crowning achievement lately. I wonder how a creature
so pure and new to the world produces something so
vile, without intent? I have other questions, too, but will
leave them for a subsequent whine-fest, which I’ll scribble
in smoke or invisible ink on another long-shadowed
day. Until then I’ll dream of southern winds and coffee
and beignets under bright skies in a life I should have
lived. If only. Your virtual and faithful friend, B*.
“Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated” first appeared in January 2021 in the inaugural issue of Book of Matches. Thank you, editors Kelli Allen and Nicholas Christian, for taking this piece.
And to Sleep
and what we
sense if not
of our selves
or within this
space we contain
may be of
no thing touched
by one’s fluttering
eye as if
awake we see
even less the
dreams of course
real though we
hold them only
in our sleep
Another poem from the 80s. “And to Sleep” first appeared here in February 2015.
Scarecrow Listens
These silences I hear, are they not
music? Interspersed with sunlight and
air flowing through fragrant grasses,
insects ticking in the leaves or burrowing
towards moist darkness, and my friends
cawing from their perches, if I arrange
their presence in sequence, perhaps
around the day’s bones, will you
know my spirit? And when I interweave
these tunes, independent and unrelated,
shaping them into one separate melody,
will you recognize its heart and shiver
to the beat? Ornette Coleman freed
his playing, celebrating the territories
of the unmeasurable, the unnamed. The
real is, no matter what you call it. Take
this leaf and place it atop three others.
What have you? And what am I if not
a gathering of the unwanted, scraps
melded to serve a thought-free purpose,
another’s need. Fleshless, boneless,
breathless, bloodless, I know only
that I am; having no ears, still I listen.
“Scarecrow Listens” first appeared with two companion pieces in Eclectica in summer 2016.
Every Wind
Every wind loses itself,
no matter where
it starts. I want
a little piece of you.
No.
I want your atmosphere
bundled in a small rice paper packet
and labeled with strings of new rain
and stepping stones.
I want
the grace of silence
blowing in through the cracked
window, disturbing only
the shadows.
Everywhere I go, bits of me linger,
searching for you.
Grief ages one thread at a time,
lurking like an odor
among the lost
things,
or your breath,
still out there,
drifting.
* * *
Music: “Gymnopedie No. 1” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
“Every Wind” first appeared in The Lake in July 2016, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, available for order via Amazon.com and Finishing Line Press.
Scarecrow Takes a Holiday
Having neither organs nor neural impulses,
I no longer ask why or how I hear and smell,
taste and see, feel. This morning I woke
to magpie song and onion breeze, in
a body not mine, yet mine, at peace
on Jeju Island, far from my crows, yet
still among friends singing the same
language. I know this: home lives
within, and no matter where we travel,
it rides with us. Like the man who
spoke to me, bald, bearded, a pale
foreigner in this land, comfortable
here, at home. He listened for my reply,
but unfortunately I’d not been given
a mouth, and my words dropped to the
ground and were rolled away by
beetles before he noticed them.
Perhaps I should have written a note,
but he wished to gamble and how
could I refuse? I am hollow, but not
empty, whole, yet not complete,
away but here. He took a coin
from his pocket, flipped it. I saw…
A response to Daniel Paul Marshall’s “Scarecrow Travels (after Robert Okaji)”
This first appeared in May 2017.
Glass with Memory
When I remember you
glass comes to mind,
but nothing so transparent
as an unclothed thought
or warmth trickling in
through the pipes or
under the haze of
the second night’s sheet,
no two alike except
in appearance, but under
the lamp’s unconscious glare
I find warmth spreading
across the hard surface,
telling me all is
not lost, that smoothness
persists beyond our reflection.
“Glass with Memory” made its first appearance on the blog in February 2017.
O at the Edges 