Wind Silver

Wherever the wind turns it finds silver:
on the corrugated surface of the lake
under the tossing leaves of alders
sliding along the stems of foxtail grass.

As if the world were made up of sofa cushions
and now and then God has to rummage for
spare change. He throws a handful of quarters
in the ocean, they turn into a school of anchovies.

I hold my hands up to the rushing sky
but the wind just riffles my hair.

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Stone Rainbow

original image courtesy of Carole Nickerson
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Bottom Wakes

Bottom. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
about to expound this dream.
--Midsummer Night's Dream, IV.i. Wm. Shakespeare

so here I sit:
under a tattered umbrella-- no,
it must be the sails of a windmill
which, as all men know, means madness.
Poor Bottom, first a fool, then mad,
preyed on, like spring lambs by eagles,
by visions no sane man would harbor.

But I would not trade this donkey head
for common wisdom, weights and measures,
the petty daily round of common life.
I'll eat grass like Nebuchadnezzar--
mad, but still a king. I'll go on all fours,
Bottom, but still a donkey. Into the arms
of spinning windmills, Sancho, ride me!

--image courtesy of oncle Jim via Read Write Poem

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The Old Toy Chest

We had us an old wooden chest
with a lock that had long lost its key.
The toys that we had were the best
that any kid's playthings could be.

Marbles and Lego blocks
A horsie on springs
Old keys with no locks
and puppets on strings.

The toys that delighted a kid
are worn out or broken or chipped.
The names that were carved in the lid
have faded to shadows of script.

A train with caboose
on a grey plastic track
A brown velvet moose
with a corduroy rack.

The chest we have given away
to younger kids making a start
in teaching themselves how to play--
but I kept the key in my heart.

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Neap Tide

Today the falling surf uncovered rocks
that rarely see the sun; encrusted with
goose-barnacles and kelp and softer things,
the fleshy blossoms of the sub-littoral.
If it's true Kharybdis was a goddess
of the tides, anemones should be
called kharybdimones, for they are stirred
by tide as land anemones by air.

Upslope the sand, untouched by water these
three days, was sculpted by the wind into
fantastic dunes.The flats between were carved
to spiny ridges, hoodooed shelves that begged
for tiny shadows of some caravan
to give them planet-scale. Next week, I know
these lands will lie forgotten under waves
and wind and sand will write their names in shale.

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Dragon Year

"So what's your sign?" My kinship is: with boats
that race to scarlet drums, their oars like legs
on water-centipedes; with kites afloat
above forbidden cities; pearls or eggs
encysting essence; rulers of the flood;
warden of temples and pavilions;
source of a pigment that resembles blood
which painters use, and call vermilion.

The zodiac's a bracelet hung with cryptic
charms called constellations, symbols worn
like ruts into the path of the ecliptic,
to which Western horoscopes adhere.
My heritage is elsewhere. I was born
in nineteen sixty-four: a dragon year.

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St. Johns Bridge

They call this Cathedral Park
bu there's no cathedral, just the bridge--
the one the architect says he liked better than the Golden Gate.
And who am I to argue? There's no stained glass
but it'll serve as our cathedral, with its pointed Gothic arches
and the deck, a leap of faith suspended
from cobweb cables. And narrow lanes. When you cross that bridge,
believe me, you are close to God.

The far shore rises up like a solid wall of forest green.
Somewhere there's a ramp that'll get you down to Highway 30
but you have to have faith
and take that corner slow.

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In the Groove

The wheels are spinning madly out of groove,
the horses thrash the chariot through the sky,
their tangled traces need to be cut loose.

Poor Phaeton, he wanted just to move,
to drive his daddy's big-wheel, make it fly
but couldn't keep his rhythm in the groove.

Hell of a way to go, but really, who's
in charge of their own end? Live fast and die
when Titan-hammered thunderbolts cut loose.

Falling rock star, kid with lots to prove,
he jumped the track too soon. To improvise
you have to learn the edges of the groove.

So play it straight a while, pay your dues
and keep in mind that "mastery" implies
you got it right before you cut it loose.

No, I won't listen to those boredom blues,
those "free expression", "do your own thing" lies.
I'll walk the straight and narrow, in the groove
before I try to play it fast and loose.

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Wind Love

3 Word Wednesday: Fickle. Sparkle. Wrinkle.

deep-wrinkled willow
shallow sun-sparkling water
fickle wind loves both

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A Few Short Lines

Are you there,
Beloved?

Cry of the
Desolate heart.
Eye in the wilderness,
Flesh telescope—
Gazing beyond
Heaven's ceiling
Into God's eye.

Join me.
Know what I know:
Love.

Made flesh, but
Not forever,
Only for a time
Pass through the world
Quietly.

Random movement
Strange encounters.
Truth is nothing you can
Use; but
Valuable nonetheless.

Why? Limbs sprawl
X-shaped against
Your headstone.
Zero hour.

Again,
Begin.

Come through the
Desert holding an
Egg from some
Fabulous bird
Given free like grace.

Hatch into wings
Iridescent silver.
Join me.
Know what I know:
Love.

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After Solstice

too soon yet to notice
the shortening days, but I feel
the light leaving. Waking

late this morning: gnomonic shadows
all along the street proclaiming
it's later than you think.

Three days of rain and overcast
at Midsummer (or summer's first day
depending on your calendar),

and the sun returns with no better
counsel than this? Keep it. Don't expect
me to build a sundial on my lawn--

I'll place a boulder with mossy flanks
pointing eternal North, winter or summer.

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Lines of Sight

Lines of sight connect new lovers
like high-tension wires from eye to eye—
you feel the sparks.

That's how a heart discovers
how to navigate an electric sky
like a rising lark

past the gyre where the falcon hovers
through thunder gathering heavy and high
into storming dark.

Lightning scatters below and above her.
Blinded, the lark gives a terrified cry
and God harks.

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Admit One

Original images: ticket courtesy of Kevin Abbott, cherries courtesy of S P Veres, calligraphy courtesy of Nevit Dilmen
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Heart Attack

3 Word Wednesday: Arresting. Rhythmic. Wicked.

wicked left arm pain
arrhythmic clench and release
cardiac arrest

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Mallow

One afternoon the fragrant mallow, pale
harbinger of sultry summer nights
was blooming in a hidden hollow vale.
I, a creature painted black and bright
passed it by with scorn. I followed trails
of gaudy hues, seduced by neon lights.
You would have seen me starving, swallowtail
adrift on city streets, stained black with blight.

Retrace my path, and see the hawkmoth's flight
as evening gathers over mallow, sweet
though colorless. He drinks her nectar right
from tender lips. She is no shallow cheat,
unlike the dark marquees and silent heights
that tower over shadowed hollow streets.

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Osprey Circles

Inspired by some conversation about white space on the WOM-PO list. I had to load it as an image because there's no way I would have got the html to cooperate.

This almost qualifies as a concrete poem. Maybe an impressionistic concrete poem, if that isn't a contradiction in terms: I think the shapes are suggestive of the subjects. It also can be read in rows or in columns.

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Summer on the Esplanade

Ospreys, goslings and mutant bicycles. What more could you want?

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Absurd

Oh, what is absurd?
A featherless bird?

If I baked a cake
and sliced it in thirds
would anyone take
a piece of absurd?

If I rode a horse
all saddled and spurred
would I be the worse
for being absurd?

When memory fails
and photos are blurred
I'll tell you a tale
both true and absurd.

Forget being sober
and pleasures deferred
just give all that over
and live life absurd!

Oh, what is absurd?
A meaningless word.

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God's Almanac

April showers bring May flowers
so they say.

From thunderstorms, great gaudy spikes
of penstemon and lupine.
Scarlet roses from the dews of passion
and steady rains bring out the faithful violet.
Dry weather blooms into dusty lavender.
Rosemary grows out of the tears
that I shed in remembrance of the Beloved.

April's rainfall is recorded in the fields of May,
weather almanac of the heart, each page indited
by God in green ink blooming a thousand hues.

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Dancing the Indus

black mud sucks at feet
tablas articulate new
rhythmic dimensions

--for Poefusion
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Volume and Final Pages

The bellydancer drapes herself in vellum.
She's being slowly devoured by the bibliography
of a reference work on something convoluted and obscure
like the total tonnage of shipping to Madagascar in 1950,
or the hand positions used to mute medieval trumpets.

Her dog is never tethered and barks only softly,
his gaze is sapient and serene.
A moribund onion on the windowsill
mists the glass with its last exhalations.
The final pages of every volume sound the same.

trumpet; vellum; tonnage; devour; bark; bellydance; tether; drape; bibliography; hand; moribund; mist; convoluted; onions; sapient

--words courtesy of Read Write Poem
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scribblefish

Original images: fish in water by Vince Varga, fish on wall by Oleksiy Petrenko
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Gifts

Nothing but grey drifting
outside the window, and the noise of birds
chattering and fighting on the roof
at six on a humid summer morning.

Nothing but copper haze
hovering over afternoon sidewalks, and
weed-eaters snarling across
shocking green lawns.

We asked for nothing more
and received so much.

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Beachcombing

3 Word Wednesday: Dangerous. Keepsake. Restless.

pretty shell keepsake
dangerous to turn your back
on restless ocean

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Sam Iamb

I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
--Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), Green Eggs and Ham

Most of us in the English-speaking world grew up with that. In case you didn't notice, the lines above are perfect iambic tetrameter:

I do not like green eggs and ham.

Much of Green Eggs and Ham is written in tetrameter. The series of questions asked by Sam-I-am is in headless iambic tetrameter; that is to say, seven syllables beginning and ending with a stress and alternating in between:

Would you, could you, in a house?
Would you, could you, with a mouse?

Seuss used a variety of meters (Wikipedia has a nice summary), most of which were some variant of tetrameter. I should note that he never stuck slavishly to a given meter: he was always ready to break it at a dramatic juncture, such as when the hapless hero of Green Eggs and Ham finally gives in and agrees to try the stuff. (Hat tip to Christopher Moore, for correctly identifying Green Eggs and Ham as a sinister manifesto for high-pressure sales methodology.)

One tetrameter he rarely used was trochaic. Trochaic tetrameter is a fiendishly difficult meter to rhyme in. (Note that I disagree with Wikipedia on the omission of the final unstressed syllable. Do that, in my opinion, and it loses the trochaic feel completely.) Seuss sometimes got away with it by repeating the last, unstressed, single-syllable word: blue fish/new fish.

Actually, trochaic anything is hard to rhyme in, in English. But in tetrameter, two of the eight syllables per line are committed to maintaining the rhyme scheme, which makes constructing an intelligible, graceful line brutal. (It's moot if you're not rhyming, cf. "The Song of Hiawatha.")

The proportion of syllables involved in the rhyme for each meter is as follows:

Iambic pent: 1/10
Iambic tet: 1/8
Trochaic pent: 2/10, or 1/5
Trochaic tet: 2/8, or 1/4

Iambic tet is no more difficult to write in than iambic pent, and I've even written in iambic trimeter ("Death and Mourn") without strain. (Of course if you actually have more to say than will fit in that number of syllables, it's no good struggling with a short meter.) But the drop from trochaic pent to trochaic tet is a killer. I've now written a fair number of poems in rhyming trochaic pent, but only one in trochaic tet ("Swallow Feather").

Many people have argued that iambic pent is the "easiest" or "most natural" meter in English. I'm wary of such claims, because of the effect of familiarity. We've all been exposed to more iambic pent than to any other meter; we're used to it. What if Shakespeare had written all his plays in iambic tet? (An interesting exercise; grab a long speech in fairly consistent iambic pent and rewrite it in iambic tet.) Would we now be claiming that was the most natural meter?

A few words about the meters with more unstressed syllables per stress, such as anapestic and amphibrachic. I've used those quite a bit in more songlike poems, such as "Gambler's Epitaph" and "Second Chance Saloon." What I find in working with those meters is that I stick fairly faithfully to the two-unstressed-between-stresses pattern internally, but I allow the number of unstressed syllables at the beginning and end of the line to vary freely. (That makes it a lot easier to find rhymes, for one thing.)

If these were actually being sung, I think the melody would carry the listener smoothly over any metrical bumps at the beginning or end of the line; not so much in the middle. But this looseness doesn't sit well with the demands of formal poetry, although the one sonnet I've written with such features—"Monochrome Rainbows"—has actually been pretty successful.

I need to explore these metrical frontiers. After all, if I really try them, I might find I like them...

So I will dispense with trochees and iambic
experience for poems eggs-and-green-hammic.

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Falling Time

It falls like snowflakes from the past and covers
old forgotten ground in alabaster
undulations. Deathless star-crossed lovers,
ancient epigraphs in crumbling plaster,
shrines with aurochs skulls: time conceals them
under layers of white forgetting. Glaciers
borne on mountains grind them down and deal them
silent death-blows, ultimate erasure.

Time's the dancing skeleton in all our
closets, skinny snowman with a grin
as black as coal or holes in space that swallow
lost neutrinos whole. He's starving thin.
Forget-me-nots give way to autumn asters.
Remember God, and Time yields to his Master.

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A Date with Ben Franklin

Read Write Poem suggests a date with a historical personage.

"why me," he wonders

Because I wanted to know
what it was really like

feeling that lightning strike
run down the string

handling the hot slag lump
that had once been a key

and now, shapeless and smoking
nonetheless turned in your hand

and opened so many doors
even though it wasn't really like that

Because I wanted to know
if your legend has ballooned

like the sails on an outer-banks schooner
running before a storm

and needs to be trimmed for accuracy
And I wanted to know if you

would rather be remembered for
the Declaration, the glass harmonica,

the Gulf Stream, abolitionism,
political satire, chess, refrigeration,

being right about the wave theory of light—
most of all I wanted to know

what was it like, just what was it like
then?

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Forgetting Letters

For Steve Perry's dad. On behalf of everyone who knows Steve, and is forever in the old man's debt thereby.

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Summer/Winter

Snow lies in the hollow of the stone
Cut grass lies bleaching in the heat
Cold metal's touch burns to the bone
Sucking a snowcone for relief

Cut grass lies bleaching in the heat
Icicles hang at the river's edge
Sucking a snowcone for relief
We wrap woolen scarves around our heads

Icicles hang at the river's edge
We stroll into shade and breath the damp
We wrap woolen scarves around our heads
Air shimmers above softened macadam

We stroll into shade and breath the damp
We blink away frost-tears to relieve our eyes
Air shimmers above softened macadam
Hard glisten of snowbanks dazzles and blinds

We blink away frost-tears to relieve our eyes
Hot air from the fields smells of burning toast
Hard glisten of snowbanks dazzles and blinds
Dry air scorches in the hollow of my throat

Hot air from the fields smells of burning toast
Cold metal's touch burns to the bone
Dry air scorches in the hollow of my throat
Snow lies in the hollow of the stone.

--for Read Write Poem's alternate lines prompt. I thought a natural development would be to turn the whole thing into a pantoum.

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Clownfish

3 Word Wednesday: Folly. Hostile. Ordinary.

ordinary fish
are not foolish or hostile
beware the clownfish

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Callus

The soles of human feet in utero
develop callus, thus anticipate
bipedal life, supporting adult weight
on layers of thickened skin. How long ago
did we project ourselves from bole to bough:
a dizzy swing, a hurtling flight, a date
with death averted by a grab at fate
ignoring earth that waited far below?

It seems a poor trade, clumsy upright gait
for freedom of the canopy, although
if we have lost the right to brachiate
we've also gained these clever hands that know
how to remake a world. A useful trait,
this tiny callus on each infant toe.

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Shells

This thing of all things I've been trying to remember:
How the long gentle ellipse of sand came to the turquoise embrace of salt water
How the hawk in the thermal made grace of the black coral cliffs
which were eroded to razor-edged hollows and holes by rain
How the angelfish moved like vertical ribbons of seaweed
and the cowries were brown velvet studded with precious stones
How no-one then could have foreseen the strange flowers
that would grow from my flesh in a land of cold rain and moss
How I could have overlooked Him lying in the warm shade laughing
at my childish fingers clutching broken shells that now I polish
lovingly and turn, hold to the light, only to see the reflection
of palm fronds etched against sky far behind my shoulder and
Him watching.

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Season of Locusts

Here on this morning of haze and thunder
after a flash like echoes of a word spoken
behind slammed doors: look over yonder
where the last leaves of spring's tender
greenery tremble to a scorched waking.

Summer comes in a cloud of strange hungers
like locusts falling on fields already stricken
by drought and barren. Sap dries on fingers
that shred dead grass in helpless anger
for causes with which we can hardly reckon--

promises made when the season was younger
infinite possibilities of sap rising
burned to sudden ash by stronger
light and thunder on a distant horizon.

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Watering Peonies

Here at the humid edge of evening
under gold-heavy clouds and still air
water runs into the brick ring around
the peony bush. Dandelions
and Queen Anne's lace raise their heads
in gratitude. Water like God's grace
is for all; but underground the roots
entangle in savage unlit robbery.

Sunlight is for all; but in the dense shade
of the camellias nothing grows but violets
and moss. I prune back the branches
heavy with glossy leaves and dead flowers
and let a little water spill from the bucket
careless of dandelion gratitude.

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Barefoot Muse pub

The summer issue of Barefoot Muse is up, including a sonnet from yours truly.

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