Solstice Light

All night I tossed and turned with dreams of light
and woke with early morning's gleams of light.

Remember how, in summer's darkless days
we woke and slept in blazing streams of light?

But winter swallowed up my memories
of light, digested them to memes of light

that sparkle in my tumbled-blanket thoughts
as dust motes dance in falling beams of light.

Solstices suspend the year, a crown
of days that hang between extremes of light.

Basso profundo, treble flute: the tones
that frame a symphony on themes of light.

The year falls ragged from my windowsill.
God hems the sky with silver seams of light.

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Solstice

Arrived at work late this morning: it was 8 AM and the sun, the first sunrise after solstice, was just lighting up the downtown skyscrapers and the upper slopes of the West Hills. I went upstairs to the cafeteria, whose picture windows face east, and soaked up a few minutes of light. Now it's uphill all the way to Midsummer.

Last night we went to see Tintin. Tintin wasn't a huge feature of my childhood (not like Lord of the Rings: yes, I've been swooning over the new Hobbit trailer, and yes, we saw it on the big screen last night), but I'm fond of it nonetheless. And what an excellent movie! Can't remember the last time I had that much fun. I always suspected Snowy was really the Brains of the Outfit, and it seems Spielberg agrees with me.

Wandering around Lloyd Center before and after, we ran into not one but two former co-workers of mine; one was attending the same movie. Much as I'm not fond of malls in general and indoor malls in particular, Lloyd is a good place to run into people.

December has been almost completely dry, foggy at night and frosty in the mornings. Our quince saplings have finally, grudgingly, condescended to allow their leaves to yellow. I suspect they're responding to the daylength rather than to the actual weather: after all, they're native to Central Asia and officially cold-hardy to some ridiculous figure like 20 below zero. Put your ear to their slender trunks and you can hear the howl of Kazakh wolves racing the December winds across the frozen steppe.

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Annunciation

A glass and steel womb
hangs like an ornament
from the low-slung belly of the year.
The baby's heartbeat fills the room,
fetal thunder on the monitor.

Overcome by fatherhood, ape-like Uncle Joe
wipes his eyes furtively
on the end of his bowtie. Drag-queen Aunt Mary
affects unconcern.

But she's the one working on the album,
swinging her stapler like a man driving nails! Maybe
she's seen the future.
Maybe she's heard an angel whisper: Noël
Noël.

--another word salad poem

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Items accepted...

Fault Lines Poetry accepted "Her Name" and "My Mother's Olivetti" for their inaugural issue, spring 2012. Also "Pleistocene Relic" will be included in the "Phoenix Rising" sonnet anthology. It's up right now as a sample poem.

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Hubert

Hubert Sumlin, 1931 - 2011
In memoriam

Spoonful of water in the desert sand
Smokestack lightning shooting out of his hands
Guitar lead in a Chicago band.

Boy aged six in a southern land
Played his axe and he played it grand
Cut his teeth on a Chicago band.

Red rooster walk with his tail all fanned
Back door man with his back door stand
That's what he played in that Chicago band.

Willie and Wolf made the Chicago brand
Radio carried it to foreign strands
Hubert's sound in that Chicago band.

Guitar man with your guitar hands
Walk on down to the Holy Land
Play devil blues in Heaven's band.

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Lines on Notes on Lines

What disciplined care composers devote to their lines
when passion would scatter black and white notes from their lines!

Feet shuffle dusty roads in the dawn, drawn
by the swinging of chapel bells in their cotes, on their lines.

The words of the duet are tragic; love, loss and despair
but the singer's voices distill ecstasy, remote from their lines.

Wind keens in the bay, flute over rhythm section:
slap of waves and creak of rocking boats at their lines.

Invisible panpipes echo from rocky, untenanted hills.
No-one is there to dance but tethered goats on their lines.

Have you heard my people singing the old freedom songs
as they stood in the rain, waiting to vote, in their lines?

Perched on the glass insulators atop a telephone pole
a meadowlark spills music from his throat down the lines.

Old women at sunset, faces wrinkled as dried apples
hum soft ballads, the stories that life wrote in their lines.

Drunk on the lyrics of Hafiz and Yunus, I make
a song to praise God out of quotes from their lines.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside