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
The through
Parking lots hold terrors for the brave:
the simple act of shopping is preceded
by trials that’d roll Ford over in his grave
because we know that if we don’t succeed at
parking so we exit from the spot
nose first, we’ll leave it, quaking, in reverse,
afraid of hitting (more…)
Podcasting poetry
I spent three hours today setting up
my recorder so that I could make MP3s of
a new series of poems, and thereby
turn up the thermostat in wordcurrents
enough to shake up the various
hibernating fauna that live here
in this garden of earthly delight.
It took forever to start because
the first six test runs of “anatomy”
sounded as if I was reading it
through a long hose while
sipping something interesting.
The “something interesting”
didn’t bother me, but the long hose
set me to a frenzy of settings adjustments,
experimentation, and trying to figure out
how I fixed it last time. I seem to do that
a lot: forgetting how I did something before.
This time, I fixed a whole new way that makes
me sound as if I were reading through
a clown’s underwear.
It’s the nuances, you see: it’s something
we poets go after a lot, salting in the nuances
and trying to shade the text with HB crosshatching
to give it innuendo and subtlety, possibly irony and
chocolate sauce that I should have been able to imply
in the text, without hitting the reader on the head.
So now I’m reading the text
into a microphone. It is not just my
dumb voice, but also my pauses,
inflections, breathing— turning up
the thermostat, even if this is the winter solstice—
it’s enough to make a snail overheat.
But it’s still fun, or I wouldn’t do it.
low gravity
The children were outside discovering
what Northern children have learned
afresh after every snowfall: snow
creates low gravity. Any of them
could express the formula kinetically
by leaping onto a pile of the stuff:
the soft landing demonstrates (more…)
prescription
I have been noticing the delicate dusty webbing
drifting near the fluorescent light, filling the corners
in the spaces between self and the books below.
All manner of details arise: static on phone calls,
the whine of my computer fan, looming deadlines;
certain memory and judgment skills, names, math.
These and other details (more…)
Idyll
The rolling expanse of green lawns
sculpted flower beds and lollipop trees
spreads sweetly along the river at the
foot of our city
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .until the geese arrive
with their little green and black cigars
that they excrete like giant parentheses (more…)
clicking on the play button starts the sound. You may adjust the volume by the sound control to the left. You may access a complete list of podcasts here. I shall add to this list as I add podcasts. I have recently improved my recording equipment; as a result the sound quality will improve. If you have any requests, please comment below the podcast list.
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