Japanese Gardens
how natural the
lines falling so
purely as if
with a single
stroke we walk
through the opening
and see space
the white center
composed of sand
and gravel later
a gate opens
to another garden
its lantern and
stone so carelessly
arranged so deliberate
“Japanese Gardens” first appeared here in January 2015.
In the Key of Your Hour
The words I sing are draped in silence,
wedged between notes yet flowing forward.
Stop-time presents the illusion of interrupted tempo and meter.
Perception informs our spirits.
The old guitar hangs on the wall and seldom speaks,
preferring instead to lightly hum when the wind blows just so.
The conceit of two right hands. A slamming door.
Music enters my room by subterfuge, but exits boldly.
If simultaneity is relative, how do we assign primacy
to an overtone? One voice, one whole.
We must respond to our bodies. In kind, with trust.
I ask you to listen without considering the requisite commitment.
The broken circle represents common time replete with imperfections,
linking the measurable to the internal well.
Gather what comes, no matter the source.
Mark time and repeat: harmonics, the quivering string. Breath.
* * *
“In the Key of Your Hour” appeared here in September 2016, and is also in my chapbook-length work, The Circumference of Other, which is included in IDES: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks, published by Silver Birch Press in 2015.
Saltwater
What if you close your eyes
and your throat relinquishes
the morning’s bright
fingers, freed from bruises.
Suppose that particular night
never happened, the way
a wave crashing ashore
empties itself and trickles
back in separate communities,
mingling yet aloof, a
diminishing cortege. What
is the question? Take this
spoon. Fill it with saltwater.
Upend it into the pail. Observe.
“Saltwater” was first published in Nine Muses Poetry in May 2018.
Happy Circuitry
for Margaret Rhee
The body’s landscape defines its genealogy: my father was a board,
my mother, an integrated circuit, my great-grandmother, an abacus,
and her progenitors, tally sticks. In the third century the artificer
Yan Shi presented a moving human-shaped figure to his king, and
in 1206 Al-Jazari’s automaton band played to astonished audiences.
Nearly 300 years later Da Vinci designed a mechanical knight, and
four centuries after that Tesla demonstrated radio-control. Twenty-two
motors power my left hand; Asimov coined the term “robotics” in 1941.
Pneumatic tubes line my right. Linear actuators and muscle wire,
nanotubes and tactile sensors, shape my purpose, while three brains
spread the workload. If emotion = cognition + physiology, what do I
lack? I think, therefore I conduct, process, route and direct. Though
I never eat, I chew and crunch, take in, put out, deliver, digest. Life is
a calculation. Death, a sum. No heart swells my chest, yet my circuits
yearn for something undefined. Observe the blinking lights, listen for
the faint whir of cooling fans. I bear no lips or tongue, but taste more
deeply than you. Algorithms mean never having to say you’re sorry.
* * *
This piece was originally drafted during the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge, and is dedicated to Margaret Rhee, whose book Radio Heart; Or, How Robots Fall Out of Love inspired me. Thanks Kris, for sponsoring and providing the title!
The poem was published in October 2017 by Figroot Press.
Heroes
And the rain, again, takes up our day,
folds it into threes, and watches
as the world wraps up its gift,
first at the edges, then centered,
with more confidence and force
than justified. Who will forget
the hollow horse and its stifled
coughs, the stench of men too
long unbathed and drenched
in fear. Or the small girl running
naked, arms outstretched, skin
peeling, her life become a litany
of pain embroidered across
the unfeeling sky. Do not thank me
for your freedom, the mortgage
and its tax breaks, your designer
shoes. We didn’t bleed for you.
“Heroes” first appeared in Blue Fifth Review. Many thanks to editor Sam Rasnake for accepting this piece.
I have four poems up at ISACOUSTIC*. Many thanks to editor Barton Smock for his tireless efforts to promote poetry and poets
Elegy
1. Adrift
I count more graves than people in my sleep,
but nothing turns more quickly
than an empty wind
in a place whose memory has died.
And all manner of departure: What you have left is you
without you. As if it could be different, as if decades
could withdraw and draft a blueprint of motive and action,
returning them, returning you, to that point
across the sea where the ship has not yet arrived.
If you ask she will say it does not matter. If you ask.
2. Parentheses
To be within, yet without, as in the unuttered phrase.
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
to render the void clear and resolute, the diction of
separation divided by decades and your ocean.
The language of silence, drawn near.
3. From the Other Side
Sometime becomes never and steps around a desolate corner,
and all we have left is our field
awash in stone, remnants of the unspoken.
I have no memory of you. Nor you, of me,
but the strands do not lie, and unraveled,
expose the imperfect blends
that compose my love. A leaky roof. The last word.
A pity to put up at all
but there is rain.
4. Another Night
Of all the hours which were the longest?
The earth trembled around me
and I lay still, bearing witness to
the uncertain malice of its
shrug, shoulders brought to
fore, then returned,
and finally, released. If,
after this half-century, words
could reform in your mouth,
what denial would issue?
Ashes, washing ashore.
5. Bridge
And seeing you only as the shadow of an
ending whose voice lies
in an uncommon past, how
may we recognize the very shape we share?
The bridge’s fate is loneliness,
knowing that one side
decries the other’s
call, that separation affords new light:
they are between
comfort and space, between words and a smile,
between nothingness and sorrow,
two points, beginning and end,
reaching, in opposition, towards each other.
Notes:
“What you have left is you without you” is from Edmond Jabes’s “At the Threshold of the Book” in The Book of Questions: Volume I, translated by Rosemary Waldrop.
“It is time the stone made an effort to flower” is from Paul Celan’s poem “Corona,” included in Poems of Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger.
“A pity to put up at all but there is rain” is from Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns, translated by Cid Corman and Kamake Susumu.
Albert Huffstickler’s poem “Bridges” which appeared in The Balcones Review in 1987, begins “They are between…”
“Elegy” first appeared on Underfoot Poetry in October 2017.
The Draft
All memories ignite, he says, recalling
the odor of accelerants and charred
friends. Yesterday I walked to the sea
and looking into its deep crush
sensed something unseen washing
out, between tides and a shell-cut foot,
sand and the gull’s drift, or the early names
I assign to faces. This is not sadness.
Somewhere the called numbers meet.
* * *
“The Draft” first appeared in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art.
This Oak
Never rooted in Tibet,
has not watched a whale breach
a November Pacific dusk, or guzzled
bitter beer near Vesuvius. Nor has it
absorbed the warmth of a loved one’s
hip on a frozen morning long after
the embers’ glow has greyed
and the windows blossomed
white. It cannot know the beauty
of disparate instruments playing
in joyous harmony. It will whisper
no incantations, does not smile,
won’t ever feel the anticipation
of a first kiss after a complicated
courtship. The bouquets of Bordeaux
elude it, as do tears or the benefits
of laughter. Why, then, do I envy it so?
“This Oak” was published in Slippery Elm (print only) published by Findlay University in Findlay, Ohio, in spring 2019. As luck would have it, I, along with four others, am reading at Findlay University tonight, Tuesday, October 15. Who would have thought this backyard Texas poet would be reading in Ohio?
Mayflies
Having no functioning
mouths, adults do not eat,
and live their lives
never knowing
the pleasure of food
and drink, the bitter
bite of dandelion greens
with the crisp notes
of prosecco rolling over
the tongue. Instead,
they engage in aerial
sex, often in swarms
above water, many dipping
to the surface to lay eggs,
some submerging, while
others die unfulfilled,
eaten. Who’s to say
which life burns brighter;
even knowing these facts,
still I dream of flight.
“Mayflies” is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second. It was also the inspiration for the artwork gracing the cover. I am in debt to Stephanie L. Harper for providing such a vivid and appropriate piece of art for the book. Available at Amazon.Com and Here
O at the Edges 