Reading so many beautiful poems of gratitude and thanks-giving this week, I wanted to share this, from my last book, Crazing: Flotsam The storm drives all ashore—thrown stick with dogteeth, twig of twisted pine, thumbnail jellyfish with dark sails fallen, torn kelp, fouled ballast, soapy olivine foam. Everyone here has the same story. We are…
The White Queen Comes the White Queen worryingand hurrying to keep up and losingher hairpins. Mind pieces slipout of their sockets. Because it is all held togetherwith hairpins —the old kind, meant to be invisible? And they were invisible.I didn’t know they were there holding my mind togetheruntil I startedto lose it. Someone whose name…
Myopia in the Afternoon What landscape is this? My flesh curvingover your bones, pectoral swellunder my cheek, darkness of tangled fur,and beyond that, the wet angled branch of a tree, and beyond that,something white, something pale blue.Call it tree and window,sky and snow. But what this is, so close at hand, I cannot say.This landscape…
Fat Time Under purest ultramarine the raisedgoblets of trees overrun with gold.We should be reeling drunk and portly as groundhogsthrough these windfalls of russet, citron, bronze, chartreuse. Everywhere color pools like butter, like oil of ripe nuts,like piles of oranges under a striped tent. Oh, let us be greedy of eyeball,pigs scuffling in this gorgeous…
Bless You, Father Walt for lying stripped and singingin the floes and fallows of your own body.For granting us land-rights to your shaggy unkempt tonguewhere through long syllables of scarlet leaveswe ride shanks-mare, drunk on the public road again. Oh, bless me, Father Walt!Lend me your large boots to caper and hoot at dusk,make me…
Spring by Cazenovia Creek iThe roses have come throughthough some are dead to the ankles.Now, in this cheerful airthey must be feeling painwhere the dead places are stretchedby little flames of juice – when it catches they burnburgundy and green and green. iiGreek Persephonein her dry meadowscould linger, could fritterpicking orchids and anemones but hereearth…