Up-Speak

You hear it in each line-- the upward lilt
that turns a period to question mark
and draws the eyebrows into quizzic tilt.
A statement needn't end in some gruff bark
but certainty is crippled by the curve,
the ghostly serpentine of up-speak. Level
out that sentence, gather up your nerve:
assert some confidence and shame the Devil.

A thoughtful speaker (soi-disant) inflects
a statement with a falling end, a sound
of purpose, showing gravity and ground.
It's said, the deadly rising circumflex
suggests self-doubt wherever it is found.
Or maybe that's what everyone expects.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Silences

Daphne, pregnant and cursed to silence
by the relentless sun-god of past summer
wandered into a winter grove

where gray-brown naked figures struggled
against encroaching cold, clawed weightless light
from the pale sky with black boughs.

They seemed barren, skeletal. Yet at each twig's tip
a fleshy swelling, packed with soft tissues
crumpled, folded tight as a baby's fist

and sheathed in tough translucent scales. Every
fingertip was pregnant with flowers and leaves
of the coming spring. Daphne's fingers

pregnant with words she dared not speak, swelled.
The nails burst, bled. Secrets unfolded
from the ragged fissures, lifting her arms

into the sky, sinking her feet
deep, deep into earth. Mute, Daphne wrote
evidence of Apollo's crime on every leaf

but no-one read them. A hundred books,
a thousand books, a thousand women
in a thousand groves watch as their testament

is gathered back to the blind earth.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Drums and Gongs

The rain comes down like kettle-drums and gongs
declaring war. Like soldiers, raindrops fall
and gutters overflow with marching songs.

I can't imagine what ancestral wrongs
are righted thus. What cloud-bestirring call
makes rain come down like kettle-drums and gongs?

It's difficult to guess what grudge, so strong,
could capture water's heart in vengeful thrall,
make gutters overflow with marching songs

and rivers roar like surging, angry throngs.
Poor dryness, made to stand against a wall
while rain comes down like kettle-drums and gongs--

a firing-squad of droplets-- helpless, longs
for days of summer sunshine. (Don't we all?)
The gutters overflow with marching songs--

no. That vocabulary just belongs
to human hearts. No cause political
makes rain come down like kettle-drums and gongs
or gutters overflow with marching songs.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

My Mother's Olivetti

taught me to type
just as a difficult horse
makes a good rider.
It was massive and intricate,
like a Wurlitzer organ. I wrestled
with the keys. When I struck just right
the tiny cast-metal letters
banged the platen, loud as horse's hooves
trundling the carriage ahead
with stoicism more Slavic or Germanic
than Italianate.

Olivetti's out of business now,
couldn't muster enough obedient coin
by marketing their ironclad Merrimack
in the era of mice and monitors.
Horse and buggy in the land of the automobile,
only my calloused fingertips remember
your staggering staccato gallop.

--another word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Barefoot Muse anthology

The online journal Barefoot Muse has reinvented itself as a POD press, but remains a champion of metrical poetry. As one of its first products, it's bringing out an anthology, Best of the Barefoot Muse. Poems from this blog will feature.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Winter

Last week it was light when I woke up at 6:30, the gift of Standard Time after several weeks of getting up in the dark. This morning it was dark again. Heavy rain clouds were hoarding morning, carrying it on their backs like the pools of water on a kappa's head.

Friday morning it was fall: crisp air, fog, brilliant leaves everywhere. By Friday afternoon it was dark and cold, that damp, bone-biting chill that Portlanders know as winter. I've seen seasons change overnight before, but never in the middle of the day.

Now the trees are nearly stripped, and the leaves coat the sidewalks with sodden brown mush. They're talking about a chance of snow by midweek. Five weeks to solstice, then the long upward turn of the year begins again.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Toward Winter

Summer is the season of desperation,
riots and burning cities. Spring;
burgeoning life, mass movements, hope renewed across
barbed-wire frontiers and lines on maps.

The politics of autumn
are thrift and endurance, spinning cocoons
out of raveled sweaters, dead leaves gathered
into beds beside heating vents.
Clouds hover like full trays of plates, white on gray,
held overhead and poised to tip, spill rain over the edges
if the waiter's wrist should weaken.
Heavy with water in a season
of occupations. Like water, crowds
part, flow, absorb force,
pool at the bottom of a downturn--
weight is a form of power.

Fall is a season of seeds.
Fall is a season of collapses-- remember November, 1989
when the wall came down?
Water can weaken foundations,
leave walls poised to tip, spill over
fall
fall
fall.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

NaNoWriMo: what I learned

No, I'm not doing it this year; I have a guest post up about it at Write Anything.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Topaz

The predawn sky is lilac. There's no fog
and down the rain-wet sidewalk, hand in hand
the usual couple with the usual dog
come sniffing for a latte. We demand
so much of life, ignore the little gifts:
the orange edges of a leaf, a cloud
like crimson ribbon, overcast that lifts
above a city's sleepy morning crowd.

Broadway runs east, but there is no horizon
behind the hills: the vista's lined with trash
and soggy leaves. The rush of auto wheels
drowns out the silent shout the sun gives, rising.
High in downtown towers, windows flash
like square-cut topazes in frames of steel.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Industrial District

sparkles at night, an earthbound
constellation. By day, trains
snake through it moaning
for their glory years. Pigeons fly
under the high-arched freeway
bridge; in and out of
broken warehouse windows;
over the beep of backing semis,
clattering forklifts hoisting pallets;
among the blackberry tangles
that cover waste areas
faster than fire can burn.

Kingdom of pigeons and
loading docks, noisy and
drab by day with gray-smoke
feathers, silent glitterbox
by night: flanked by flowing
water and grain elevators,
piers like fingers combing
loot from the river: this is land
that remembers swans in
flocks that blackened the sky.
A hundred years from now
it'll remember the trains

and after that, the trucks.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside