sometimes I wonder (revisited)
Sometimes I wonderif she ever existed.
—found poem
Sometimes I wonder
if she ever existed.
Only a smile now
a gesture
copper hair flashing
she fades even in dreams
artist in the supermarket
She stands in the aisle like reverse Stendhal:frozen, her hand extended over the mound of apples.
Apples push into her like the fists of a lover
knocking at a locked door, urgent, juicy, plump.
It's always like this: fruit overwhelms, vegetables
scream longing; fresh trout imagines a sizzling grill,
beef lounges in a marinade, ready to sear.
She wants to paint, to cook, to knead warm
transit
Night. City street after rain.Early autumn leaves cling to the pavement
like wet hair on a waiting face.
Amber and blue incandescence
lies in pools for walking entrances,
performances and exits,
as the occasional soloist mimes
man walking alone on the street
concert
engine idle just beyond theancient boathouse
river calm and waiting silent
to the weed beds
and the spaces vast, beyond
ease the throttle slowly forward
hear the engine twist
inside the music
The part I sing in our quartethovers above or below the melody;
often it sounds like the French horn.
The Lead's note sounds familiar;
the Bass is the solid foundation;
the Tenor lilts above all, thrillingly;
my part, the Bari, fills it all in.
cocoon
Inside the silk threadsis what will come:
beautiful wings,
gleaming reds, yellows, blues,
curves and strength,
the freedom of flight
instead of plodding,
gnawing eating.
lotus eaters
This is the first in a series I started a while back. I should write a few more on this . . .everyone on the street was
somewhere else
listening to music
words from another time
another place
after
She used to purr when she leaped onto the bed;I prefer to think of her arrivals.
I could read her expressions through the fur:
glad to see me (and usually was):
relaxed eyelids, fur sleek off the face;
impatient with my stupidity:
Mauve and Gold
If a god were eating strawberriesWhen that sunset happened,
I know he'd stop in mid-bite
With red sweet juice dribbling
Down his chin onto his toga
And just stare and do a god-thing:
driving home
The sun set just before we turned west onto the roadthat curved into the pure black landscape silhouetted
against the absolutely clear tangerine and indigo sky.
As our headlights revealed and dismissed the familiar
meanderings of this riverside route and its clusters of cottages
On being mistaken for myself
Photos never lieexcept when they must,
with a minimum of mendacity,
tell welting whoppers
about how egregiously old
the old codger has become.
I have studied photos
taken years ago
that make me look
what was left
First they took away the all moneypoured it into the government trough
and they fed the war in Afganistan
but still that wasn't enough
so they crucified the artists
and they stood around and laughed
Reading Dickens
[Written the day after having been one of the performers to read Dickens' A Christmas Carol to an audience of several hundred.]
[First, the reader surrenders to text; then the audience
surrenders to the reader's surrender.
Being a ham helps: Dickens' text is highly developed
melodrama, written when that form of expression
was probably at the height of its development.
Nowhere is Dickens' involvement in his action more
evident than in his confession that he wept as he
wrote the death of Little Nell.]
Reading the first few words out to the darkened audience,
words lying on the inert white (more…)
performance day
The schedule is set: the printout sits on the little table
beside the bedroom door. Twelve items, from “2:00 p.m.
Set-up”, to “10:00 p.m. Time to pop the cork…”—
the well oiled machine is ready to roll. Except my tongue,
which feels as if someone is squeezing one side with pliers.
A quick sound check before breakfast (more…)
those old poems
When I revisit the poems I wrote here
under all these layers of since,
I delve drifiting sands, find amphorae
of seeds: they plant themselves
and bloom afresh: orchids, (more…)
rictus
The smile on the stage, on the street, at the office
is not the same as the smile in the quiet room,
at the mirror, at the furry creature beside you.
The one is armour, a mask built according to a formula;
the other has no recipe, but issues naturally from
joy. It is the flower in the forest, the vacation that
you can’t take; it takes you. No airline can (more…)
Watching Paul
He plays his guitar left-handed, brings back the day they played Shea,
the Fab Four, forty-four years ago. Then, they played over baseball speakers
at fans screaming so loud that nobody could hear the static or the band.
Now, he is a time machine, giving us a trip to the perfect moment sculpted
by a billion memories into the quintessence of pure joy. Today, the screamers
are parents and children and their children: they sway (more…)
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