My Life in Mathematics My third grade teacher fissioned us into teams.Flashed cards. Shouted. Five seconds to answer:7 times 8! Ruth! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! My team always lost. A brain can be a cloud chamberfull of random events. And shame is easy to memorize. Later, my mother drilled me with flash cardsin a…
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…
Travel Instructions for Elmwood Avenue You leave the sepia light of the tea restaurant,lapsang and peony, earth and green twig,continuo of quiet human voices. Outside is rain, fat frying, damp exhaust, sputum,spit of tires on a wet street, brakes tunedto the pulse of streetlights: green, amber, red, green. You blunder, glasses fringed with rainbows,until your…
The Inventor of the LuVailean Sonnet She was no Millay, my Great-Aunt Lucy, but she named herself Lyra LuVaile, Poet Laureate of Long Beach, California, and wrote a book in which she speaks familiarly of Stars, the Cosmos, the Music of the Spheres – subjects I might write about, myself, though not perhaps so familiarly….