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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

Svalbard

February 3, 2012 • • 10 Comments

I stare at Svalbard on the wall map:
wind-whipped polar seas and all
the world’s seeds stored for years
against armageddon and ambition.

Ten thousand stalks of corn in rows.

I watch a woman lonely stare
across thickening seas, the stars
out most days, bright and forgettable
twinkling motes of TV static
against the day going black.

Crushed beneath deep winter’s snows.

How many months till the whalers’ shack
falls silent? She shivers, kicks
at the tracks in pebbled stone,
pulls the emergency parka tight
against her wasting frame.

The fever comes and goes.

Acorns

November 16, 2011 • • 5 Comments

so many acorns on the ground…
someday I’ll get to explain
these to my little boy
how they become trees
with nothing more than water
sun and a little help
from squirrels and blue jays
things about time and the
distance to the sky
and through years
how the trees will still be young
when he is old and
I am gone and there will
still be acorns on the ground
a trail of breadcrumbs
leading back to a forest where
we all grow toward the light

—

I wrote this last spring when my wife was pregnant and the ground was littered with acorns like I’ve never seen. You couldn’t walk down the street without a constant crunch-crack underfoot, and as I walked the dogs on those spring evenings, my mind was always on my soon-to-arrive son and I wondered—still do—what he’ll make of this world.

Anyway, I forgot I’d written this one and so many months later, when there aren’t so many acorns lying about, here ’tis.

Husbanding

October 19, 2011 • • 4 Comments

moonlight sparkles in
grey hair and
bourbon ice

beneath pine trees she
severe counts satellites
on silent skyways

falling stars
fading shine

the sky’s last synaptic glow
strange and waning

the highway fell
silent last summer
no cars since then

her mind wanders
revisiting the cellar
each jug of potable water

she calculates
consumption, her husband’s
weight beside her

bourbon ice (luxury
for special nights like these)
grey hair
moon-sparkling knife

the broken highway
heat lightning
bones in moonlight

—

Another poem about water, or rather, the lack thereof.

While Sitting in Church

October 14, 2011 • • 3 Comments

My videopoem “While Sitting in Church” was featured yesterday over at qarrtsiluni as part of the Worship issue. The poem is from my Birds Nobody Loves series, which will hopefully soon become a short collection when I can find the time to finish it off. Anyway, check it out, and thanks to issue editors Kaspa and Fiona who accepted it within hours of my submission. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an acceptance so fast. It’s a great issue they’ve put together so spend a while checking things out, especially Sherry Chandler’s “Doxology.”

Slow & Coiling

August 31, 2011 • • 11 Comments
Afternoon temperature. In the shade.

Slow & Coiling

drought doesn’t rage
like hurricanes or tear
the world like twisters

it’s a slow dismantling
of yellowed ecosystems
ash blown on wind

blind salamanders
blocks from a jenga tower
pulled one by one

cracks snake the earth
the quiet collapse of cattle
roaming mudpits, abandoned

fawns starving on roadsides
constellations of vultures
summer’s stars dark and full

silent silent sky
smoky whispers of a thousand
cigarette wildfires, sirens

a lone bat loops the dusk
where swallows and kingbirds
once flew toward trees

songless losing leaves
months before their time
tree rings tell futures

constricted bands
a snake coiling around
this thirsty dying land

Heat Advisory

August 12, 2011 • • 6 Comments

bring water, electrolytes
this night will burn

heat and light
have come untwined

out on the porch
I call back the dogs

swift feet, darkness
panting shadows

sweat beads my forehead
the stillness of trees

leaves roasted
beyond autumn gold

pray for rain, ask
in secret for hurricanes

they claim this red moon
only reflects

Ghost Stories

August 8, 2011 • • Leave a comment

No one puts stock
in ghosts anymore.

But everyone has a story
that begins with I’m not crazy.

Maybe it’s the bridge on 97
or the creaky floorboard upstairs.
The chair they’ll swear was rocking,
or totems of the dead discovered
in strange forgotten corners.
Lights on the Devil’s Backbone.

Ghosts love these stories.
They know

there isn’t any darkness
more forsaken
than the end of memory.

—

This was inspired by Dave Bonta’s “If there were such things as ghosts”. Dave invited others to add poems to his post’s comment thread and the result is a wonderful mix of ghost poems. This is the one I came up with.

While Sitting in Church (videopoem)

August 4, 2011 • • 1 Comment

I made this back in March and never got around to uploading it and then forgot all about it until something sparked my memory yesterday. It’s based my poem of the same name, originally posted a little over a year ago. This is the second video I’ve made from my Birds Nobody Loves series (the first was “Chasing Westward”).

The images are photoshopped versions of some of my pictures of black and turkey vultures. I’m planning to use these as illustrations in the Birds Nobody Loves collection I’m slowly (so slowly) putting together.

The real purpose of this video was experimental. I wanted to try to figure out how to make my editing software do the “Ken Burns effect” that was so nicely done in “Beach/Snow” a beautiful video by Peter Stephens. It was complicated but once I had it figured out, it got a lot easier to get the pans and zooms I wanted.

The music is by Oleg Serkov downloaded from Jamendo and licensed under a cc-by-nc-sa license. This is the first time I’ve used Jamendo for music for a video. There’s a lot of good stuff there besides Mr. Serkov’s wonderful work.

As to the poem, it comes from the church I attended when I was in high school. It was built on the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Travis. They built it lengthwise and placed the altar on the long side which was made entirely of glass so it was easy to let your mind wander out to the open sky above the lake where turkey vultures circled endlessly.

I’ve always found it strange that church is held indoors but that church anyway made it feel like you weren’t completely disconnected from the natural world, which is why I still consider it the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen.

It is also where my fascination with vultures began. Watching them each Sunday, thinking about their place in the scheme of things and watching their effortless flight, I couldn’t help but fall in love with them while witnessing in awe the sheer wonder and beauty of creation.

The Room at Night

July 27, 2011 • • 5 Comments

How many times to sing
“Redemption Song”? The first
song I thought to sing him
when he needed singing in the NICU

Some other parent sang nursery rhymes
in curtained spaces with beeping monitors
to metronome the time

Not knowing any rhymes, I went with Marley
it stuck and now it’s ours

Quiet, now, he settles in to rocking
my voice trails off to mumbles
this song of freedom…

Moonlight, thunder moon
streaming in through the live oak
the passing hours marked
by moonlight dropping down the blinds

The dogs dream
their twitch-footed dreams
the squirrel finally caught,
whimpers and low growls

The fan spins
beneath its spider shadow
ceiling jungle

Dim lines trace frames
black pictures on the wall
beyond the room… I can’t see them
but I imagine what they might be
surely not the same images
hung there years ago, not
at this hour. They’ll have shifted
become things I can’t conceive,
ideas of things that can’t exist
in morning light

Everything is strange now
and somehow more easily understood

His breath slows against my shoulder,
he sighs much like the dogs,
and I watch the late minutes tick
through this room of simplest
dreams