Odds and ends, several poems

For one reason and another, I've fallen behind on posting, and am now catching up with one big post, or maybe two...

From the March meeting of my prompt writing group:

Philadelphia to New York by Night

We departed in the dark
left brick houses behind
white lines unrolling through taillight red.

Dawn broke over domes
with cold chemical names
snorting strange stinks to wake backseat sleepers.

They towered over tidal flats
with no sea in sight.
Six years old on I-95, I eyed the horizon

for a glimpse of grey towers
first sign of distant city
hovering above water-wastes ringed by refineries.

Tangled spans of concrete spaghetti
cross-tied Connecticut to Cross-Bronx.
Aunts and uncles nestled among asphalt loops

watched and warded by
the giant grey bridge,
grandparent cradling us in strong arms of steel.


From the April meeting: Spell-checker hates this one.

Words for Rain

Astamery: the nostalgia evoked by the smell of wet pavement drying in spring sunshine

Brilliquary: the sudden realization that an apparently harmless cloud conceals thunder and hail as your favorite shoe conceals a scorpion

Quiritache: what you feel when you see the camellia petals heaped and rotting into brown slush

Dromion: sourceless depression frequently blamed on rainy, overcast weather

Limtarrick: the mingled dread and relief that accompanies the first rains of fall

Truinnis: the perverse yearning for rain and clouds that strikes during summer, under blazing blue skies

Cloebarry: the sensation of falling asleep listening to rain

Plasque: a desire to run open-mouthed through the rain until drunk


Bydlo, or, Implied Motion Bydlo is one of the pieces in Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."

A sketch
shows a distant ox-cart in silhouette.
Foreground: the road is rutted, muddy
hoof-prints filling with water. No pencil-blur
around slowly turning wheels
or ponderous hooves.
Above the cart, a swallow
hangs.


Dave Harvey taught a light verse workshop at the OPA spring conference:

A limerick: traditionally limericks don't have titles

Van Winkle awoke from his coma
giving off a most frightful aroma.
He washed out his beard,
fifty feet, it appeared
and clogged up the falls at Multnomah.

A dorklette, also untitled:

You can buy eggs by the dozen
but after the sell-date, you muzzen.


A pompouselee: the title is everything

I Reflect on Driving to Bend to Attend the Oregon Poetry Association Conference in Beautiful Spring Weather, While My Husband Stays Behind to Attend the Lovecraft Film Festival in a Dark, Dank, Theater

I’m in the car
not where he are.

Available! High-Voltage Lines, Knocking from Inside