Glass Beads

So the concentrated leaf falls of early November plugged the drains, and the heavy rain filled them. Then came a night of north wind rattling windows, and we woke to find sheets of ice anchored at every street corner: new bodies of land, slick ephemeral continents. They will break under the weight of daytime traffic, like dreams that crack and crumble under the pressure of waking thoughts.

I picked up an oak leaf beaded with frozen raindrops, but didn't bring it inside. Too sad, to watch the glass beads melt.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Smoke and Boiler

They forklifted the old boiler out of the gym
and dumped it in the ash-pit. Every year
lush vegetation hung over it in summer.
Come fall, it resurfaced like an iron whale.

We sat half-awake against it and passed
a cigarette from hand to cupped hand.
The leaves overhead scattered the smoke
so no-one would find us cutting class.

Black residues dripped from the outlet valves
like India ink from an old pen's nib. We joked
that our lungs would look like that the day
that we fell over dead-- clunk!

The boiler breathed of death and rust,
rot and obsolescence. We smelled only smoke.

--words courtesy of Big Tent
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Intersections and syllable sestinas

Intersections, a poetry and math blog, has posted a link to Wag Revue's syllable sestina challenge as part of a series on square stanzas. Check it out.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Fisheye Noir

Swizzle sticks loom distorted
by the angle of vision
skyscrapers askew
in the city of drunkeness.

A glass, a clear glass
of only water--
no one will bring it to me.

A man could die of a hangover
trying to remember
where he put his keys
not to mention his car.

The walls are stained and sweating.
It's like being underwater,
fish in a grimy tank
in some dentist's office.

One clean glass, one fisheye lens
of unwelcome clarity
shows me last night's
dusty bottle.

--image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

T-Shirt Weather

T-shirt weather in November; it’s
a strange time. Abalone sky instead
of mackerel. No miracle of frog
downpour or fish explosion, just the mists
of breath that wreathe each passer round the head
as hazy day replaces morning fog.
Abandoned jack o'lanterns hold debate
with mushrooms sprouting out of fallen leaves:
is fall more poignant when it comes so late,
or when the autumn gales ruin sheaves

still standing tall for harvest? Loss is tragic
at all ages, say aficionados.
Winter works inevitable magic
whether led by drizzles or tornados.

Image courtesy of Steve Perry's blog
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Prolegomenon

In the Names of God
Merciful, Benevolent
let these poems be true

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Wind Farms: Repost

Windmills courtesy of Pacific Power. This is a very characteristic scene in the eastern half of the Columbia Gorge these days. I'm reposting this poem to go with it:

From a distance they're spiky white heiroglyphs
that seem to stitch blue air to golden earth.

But up close, they're giants
swinging triskelial arms far above the head
of a man on a swaybacked horse!
Sucking down power from an endless sky
they spin kaleidoscope shadows across the thirsty ground
on days when whitecaps lie on the Columbia
like fine lace on a table, and the cars on I-84
shake in the cross-gusts at the mouth of the John Day.

The black gushers were a harvest millions of years
in the making, only decades in the spending.
Wind farms are not a cycle of sow, cultivate and reap.
Wind is a gift of the eternal Now.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Coming Out through the Cascades

on I-84 is like
watching a speeded-up movie of climate change.
Fog-dripping hemlocks leaning on the elbows
of angular Doug firs
and droopy deep-shade rhododendrons guarded
by the spiky intensity of Oregon grape
fade away in favor of
the glistening long needles of ponderosa
and leathery oblong oak leaves.

We're not there yet.

Tumbling creeks are decorated with yellow triangles:
alder and cottonwood leaves. But now
the deltas narrow to the silver blades of willow
deep-rooted over dry watercourses.
The parkland opens into tawny fire-loving grasses.
The last tall ponderosas fall away
and belts of squat juniper criss-cross the flats
above swatches of sagebrush.

We're not there yet.

And we won't get there on this road. Angle south and east
get over the divide and watch the grass turn white,
vanish from shimmering alkali flats, the fossils
of ancient oceans. On the bare earth we read
notes from the past
and warnings from the future.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Free Range Chicken Farming

It's healthier. You get a leaner bird
with thick-shelled eggs, more vitamins and taste
and fewer antibios. Who'd complain?
I'm not convinced that poultry spirits yearn
for freedom: that's a lot for chicken brains
to grasp. But God knows I would have preferred
to shoo the hens outdoors to scratch and peck
instead of shoveling deep-litter waste
in stifling heat and ammoniac stink.
If it gets on your skin, it makes you burn.
The smell gets into all your food and drink.
You'd like to wring each scrawny feathered neck.
They say it's more humane, and I agree,
not for birds, but farmers who range free.

image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Mushroom Weather

Here in a northwest November
south storm winds rattle warm
through still-turning trees.
Persimmons and pumpkins glow
like autumn suns.

It's mushroom weather, slug weather:
too wet for yardwork, too warm for winter's
season of putting tools away.

Strange second-summer growth
of mad geraniums. Grass, dead
all through sunny August, flourishes
under lowering leaden skies.
Lawnmower sounds fill the daylight hours.

Only the peony acknowledges winter,
leaves collapsing, giraffe-yellow
with brown spots.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

November Tritina

Each year repeats the same sad tale:
I'm ready now for dwindling days
for somber rain and freezing nights.

November wholesales lots of night
but sun is stingily retailed,
a few drops every truncate day.

The Ouroboros loop of day
has dimmed down to three-quarters night
as dark mouth swallows golden tail.

We tally winter days and nights.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Shade

Now she inhabits the same space
as the maple that died of root rot
in the year the rain refused to end.

Its leaves were huge, phantasmagorical
and their absence throws sunlight
across the yard in big patches

in which she curls up to sleep. The sound
of the breeze through those immense
palmate greens is the wheeze

of her breath in the last days. We felled
the dead trunk in sections for safety
and they hit the sodden ground

with a soft thump like the sound of her
curling against our bedroom door
ignoring the soft couch every night

even when winter froze aging joints.
Now she inhabits the same nameless space
as the dead felled tree and lost leaves.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside