Category: POETRY
Again, look up “poem” in the dictionary if you don’t recognize the word. Or, better yet, just have a look at what’s here and form your own impressions.
End of Exponential
Race among the garbage odors:
fly-gyres in summer air,
cyclone clouds of silent wings,
fly circles centered on my stare.
What is not today decaying?
Groceries turn into waste,
poems go to tattered pages;
tongues dry out and lose their taste.
Why do I continue watching,
figuring trajectories?
Somewhere maggot eggs are waiting,
forming new simplicities.
Is there any end to spending
everything we own or steal?
Can we carry on forever
trading money for a meal?
Termite generations cycle,
chewing cellulose to dust —
more discarded cells consuming.
Somehow, calculate I must:
How much longer can we make it?
How much further can we go?
How much more can we discover?
How much less can we still know?
(10 July 1974)
Hope
I can feel the stupid phoenix rising
out of the ashes of despair, dumb bird
aren’t you ashamed to be so
gullible?
Cynicism
False Reason leaps at Beauty’s throat.
The grinning beast you thought was your only hope
lives only to kill.
What wisdom leads only to death?
Death is unwise.
You wring yourself dry
while growing grass
splits mountains.
If truth is despair,
what is truth?
Elsewhere.
Consider: an open eye
looks up as well as down.
What is closed in us?
(Probably around 1972)
Justice
The fool said justice would be done.
The coward said it couldn’t.
The saint was just with everyone
although he knew they wouldn’t.
Edge of the Axe
(a postponed revision of “The Carpenter” from 1966)
I grew in the roots all winter,
wine waiting to rise;
I mellowed in wood till you made me see
the luxury of chair and table
set in a frozen skeleton of maple.
So seeing, I cut and killed the tree.
You made what you wanted
and we moved on.
I swam in a rolling tide of pine.
All the coniferous, brittle
turpentine trees
breathed into me
spirits of ordinary needles.
Then you began to see
how broad pine beams
build structure into dreams.
Again I saw timbers
toppled and trimmed,
treated for use.
Then I spoke in the oak’s rough tones,
grumbling green solidity.
I grew tough,
drew up gnarled and huge.
But soon enough
hard floors and solid stairs
called for the oak, broken and cut.
You cancelled the monument,
moving on.
Kneeling about the base
of a towering cypress temple
tended by storks and egret priests,
I needed to grow to know the grace,
the grand patience of that place.
I rose to an insular spike of pride,
mystical spire spun with thin green,
when again at the edge of understanding
you stepped away and wanted
weatherproof wood
so your structures would stand
when you moved on.
Save me the still willows,
silent, to wait on.
Stay, let me sit a while,
shifting and watching,
sifting my will
slowly away.
(22 July 1975 — a good example of ruining a poem by revision?)
The Carpenter
Cherry blossoms charged pink,
blinked of rich red future rush
of fine new fruit,
falling
freshly to me;
only too soon did I see,
reposing in now-familiar limbs,
that smooth red wood would so well suit
for carving fine rich furniture;
cutting and milling it
I moved on.
Ranging
in wide rolling tides of pine,
forests of firs, all the coniferous brittle
turpentine trees
breathed on me
a fresh crisp needle-fragrance;
I grew as wild and wide as that common tree.
But then I began to see
how broad pine beams
build structure into dreams —
and again I saw
timbers toppled and trimmed,
treated for use.
I moved on.
Along a lonely road
a live oak leaned and spoke
roughly in rich tones to me:
moss-bearded sage,
issuing wisdom gray with age,
grumbling green solidity.
I grew tough,
drew up gnarled and huge;
but soon enough
hard floors and solid stairs
called for the oak, broken and cut.
Nothing was left then but
to move on.
Kneeling about the base
of a towering cypress temple tended
by storks and egret priests,
I needed to grow to know the grace,
the grand patience of the place:
insular spike of pride,
mystical spire spun with thin green.
But then,
again at the edge of understanding,
I stepped away and wanted
weatherproof wood
so my structures would stand when I
moved on.
Save me the still willows,
silent, to wait on —
soul, let me sit awhile,
shifting and watching,
softly waiting,
sifting my will
slowly away.
(1966)
Suicidal
Adam,
cutter of cords,
died giddily in a greedy gamble.
Fading intuition knew and rang the only knell,
and in the reverberations of that solitary bell
mindstrings stirred into mad ensemble,
seeking lost chords.
Death —
resting, maybe —
is this the time to take the test,
to stalk and trap my anmal defeat?
But no. The echoing knell recedes and bares my grave,
I hold on to my bones and guts and meat,
forget this death like all the rest,
greedy zombie —
living.
(26 Aug 1974)
Now Goes
The present flashes in and out
raising a spray of instants
in its wake.
Riding the moving moment
on a fresh-waked mind
I am in time
until I’m twisted away afraid
out of the stream
suspended
slowly to sink in the lake of today
and swim in all the
used seconds.
(14 July 1974)
Shakespearean Monosyllabic Word Sonnet 1
He
smells
sea
shells,
shrimp,
fish.
Imp
wish:
vault
harsh
salt
marsh:
turf→
surf!
2022
Fish Haiku
Lurking by mangroves,
the snapper explains his name
to shrimp and fingers.
Vegetarian
mullet eats no other fish,
and yet is eaten.
Fearsome fangs belie
the graceful delicacy
of spotted sea trout.
Beloved of snook,
annoyer of bait fishers:
The humble pinfish.
A patch of bottom
comes loose, grows fins, gills and teeth,
bites the unwary.
A cruising tarpon
sucks in what appeared to be
one misguided shrimp.
Fiddler crabs will tempt
banded bandit by pilings;
barnacles are saved!
Finny bayonets
slashing in the morning sun:
spanish mackerel!
Flash, swirl, strike and run:
scalloped silver, pink and white
redfish at sunset.
Pilchards flock in green;
suddenly a snook attacks:
showers of silver!
18 February 2009 – revised 23 September 2023