Three Poems for Mid-July
July 14, 2009Poem 1
Encouragement for Writing a Poem
Oh, just sit down and do it. Make it
anything as long as you don’t use kisses
as a metaphor. Or chains, or black shirts, or
candy-bead necklaces, or tattoos, or telephone conversations.
Please. What do you need?
Clean paper, a new pen.
A cocktail napkin, a lip-liner pencil (nude-blush).
A boot, a blank screen. Viola!
The words should come like a swarm of bees
out of your honey-dripping head. They should fly
like darts flung from your fingertips
into your target audience. They should tumble
like alliterative dice out of the polished cup
of your mouth. See, it’s easy, even
I can do it. What’s the matter with you?
How hard can it be? It’s not
like you’re actually writing
a novel,
or something.
Poem 2
fossil
you are ever too busy
to go inside a fossil
the traffic the children the job
the news the mate the rules
everything conspires against it
even still you cannot but run
your fingers over its flinty ridges
admitting your desire for osmosis
for the smooth patience such stoneliness emits
if only you could be still could be breathless
could be an observer to the world
frenzied and unthinking all around you
if only you could cool yourself
under a museum’s indifferent light could slumber under
dust gathering like years on high
untrekked limestone cliffs
Poem 3
American Haiku
I can have a title if I want
and syllables clinking like too much money
nature is just what is outside the window
Three Poems Contemplating Beauty
June 19, 2009Poem 1
Herding the Sheep Clouds
like little pockets
gather soft lint
your thoughts
are tiny films
flickering amber
ideas blossom
into great
lazy sheep clouds
grazing treetops
hum-humming hungry
tasting beauty
for the first time
Poem 2
A Cricket Beneath the Bed
what scratchy songs
tattoo midnight’s silent skin
opening dreameyes
to your message pulsing
through the frigid depths
outside of time
a quickening
of every drowsy cell every star spilled
inside the sleeper’s head
the throb the chirp the light
dripping pooling at last
the soul deciding to take off
her clothes and swim
Poem 3
How Could You Be Otherwise
a silhouette behind a rice paper screen
that’s what you were
before you were born
indistinct shadowy a world
slowly turning towards dawn
that was the dream of you
lank black hair and brown eyes child of mine
how could you be otherwise
then the dreamer awoke
a gnome an old soul
blue eyed and blondish
fourteen years later
long-limbed and curious
musical and beautiful
you are light articulated
you are the why and because
you are the salt the sugar the vinegar
of my very being
Three Short Poems for a Summer Afternoon
June 11, 2009Poem 1
The duck drifts close
to the edge of a man-made
waterfall, too busy preening to consider
what’s over the edge.
Poem 2
Mid-afternoon miniature golf:
small children with scuffed putters.
Parents wisely stand back.
Poem 3
Like a dog, a little boy
chases ducks along the rim
of the pond. Yelping with joy
as they scatter.
Three Poems About the Telephone
May 30, 2009Poem 1
Answer It
the phone rings
and you come unstrung
like a string of pearls
the phone rings
and your fingers are encircled
in tones of silver and gold
the phone rings
and the bedroom in the back of your head
is papered with cut red velvet
the phone rings
and keys jangle
in the caller’s calloused hand
the phone rings
because he has put his finger on
the only existing key
to your heart’s lock
Poem 2
What Pulls You Through *
in the course of the conversation he
takes you back to his family’s farm
white eyelet curtains fluttering through open windows
over the telephone he leads you into that Iowa cornfield
stalks so high and dense no one can see you
lays you down in the plowed earth wet and cool
breathy cirrus clouds behind his head the sun eclipsed
by a kiss that tastes of promises and
it is the idea of that kiss that pulls you through
the babbling miles of fiber optics
and sows your desire in his dream that very soil he turns over
with ungloved hands
Poem 3
When Anxiety Won’t Return Your Phone Call **
then it’s time to forget
the number you’ve been dialing
time to reprogram
that speed dial
turn on the radio and argue out loud
with the talk show host
slap down that newspaper
get up out of the comfy chair
and go back to the phone
call that man to find out
what’s really been on your mind
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* This poem originally appeared in The Lucid Stone, Winter 1998, Issue No.16
** This poem originally appeared in The Moon, Volume 1, Issue 7, July 2003
Three Poems from a Previous Life: Canada, circa 1993
May 13, 2009Poem 1
The Narwhal
Markham Museum, Markham, Ontario
you’re not real you’re
fiberglass and paint whale-song-moaning
through climate-controlled museum air
filling empty bottles and shells
with the silt of history your spiraled tusk
as lethal as the knight’s lance as legend
as the unicorn’s horn unreal
your great needle slid through the fabric
of frigid waters burst through the broad nets
of incredulous fishermen skewered any and all
disbelief in God and sea monsters
Poem 2
The galleons rise,
prows moonward; buoyant bodies
sway in the sanguine waters with each contraction
of the heart. In every vessel, a captain
unrolls charts, calculates the distance
between us. The light from their lamps
threads through the portals, links mooring
ship to ship. The constellations they draw
differ from person to person: the howling
woman, the man of glass, the laughing dog.
The tide turns inside each of us.
Anchors raised, the ships drift from shore.
Poem 3
The Egg Illuminates*
In the midnight of the kitchen, the egg illuminates.
From an open box, a pearly radiance
billows; through an open window, the light
blankets fields sown dark with cricket song,
unrolls onward only to break
over the rim of insomnious cities.
warm the egg in the basket of your hands.
in the silence between breaths, heed
the tiny claw scratching against the shell, the fainest
of heartbeats beneath wet feathers.
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*This poem appeared previously in the Midwest Quarterly, Autumn 1996, Vol.XXXVIII, No.1
