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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

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

Chlorine Summer Days

June 8, 2011 • • 2 Comments

We’ve been in triple digits most days lately. Too hot to do anything, even walk down to the neighborhood pool. Seems almost too hot to write so here’s a rerun from 2006:

Chlorine bubbles
Teenage lifeguards
Lap lanes
Sun
He can’t hold his breath that long
She swims, swims, swims
Swim
She can’t hold her breath for him
Holding hands
Holding breath
Chlorine water bubbles
Break like glass
Smiling faces break the mirror
Sun
Swim
Summer
Ten more laps
Five
One
Holding breath
Holding sun
They hold each other
Swimming
Only Labor Day
(so far away)
Dispels the dream
Of swimming, sun and
Water love
Chlorine swim
Sun five
Breath one
He will hold his breath for her,
Offering it like sunshine gold
From wrinkled hand
Swimming, she accepts
Breathes the breath
Of summer sun

Evening-Star Rain Lilies

May 16, 2011 • • 3 Comments

 

Evening Star Rain Lilies (Cooperia drummondii)

It actually rained here last week. Free water fell from the sky. Now, these starlike beauties have appeared everywhere. I stopped on my bike ride to photograph a few to ID, and was pleasantly surprised to discover their starry name.

evening-star rain lilies
along the trailside

a blanket
for a few more
cool nights

East in Winter

April 28, 2011 • • 4 Comments

The sky is the east
bound highway. Winter
trees hold hawks.

How many miles
can we run
without radio?

The engine fades,
the rumble of the road,
its hypnosis.

Weave in and out
between trucks.
There’s more freeway

as much ahead
as behind.

Easter Morning

April 25, 2011 • • Leave a comment

this backyard wildlife…
a congregation awake
discovering spring

≈

a new mourning dove
on the fence by the feeder
studies the others

≈

young squirrels—
so much thinner
than the adults

≈

a new family
house sparrows chirping
the busy backyard

≈

six house finches
learning the hummingbird feeder
sun-sparks in water

≈

fledgling goldfinches
flap inexperienced wings
on Easter morning

—

This weekend, we were treated to families of lesser goldfinches, house finches, house sparrows, mourning doves and fox squirrels coming around the backyard so the adults could show their young where to find the food. The juveniles were clearly just out of their respective nests as they were following the adults around flapping their wings and chirping to be fed. It’s never long before the babies figure out how to find food on their own at which point they will be indistinguishable from the adults.

I’ve seen this in the backyard with black-crested titmice, common grackles, mockingbirds, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, and Bewick’s wrens, and it’s one of the joys of feeding birds (and squirrels) but I’ve never seen so many at once.  It was, quite simply, stunning and humbling. Songbirds don’t live long and most don’t even make it through their first year, but I like to think that at least some of these birds will be out there for a while, maybe waiting for me to count them one day down along the pond trail.

—

Publication announcement: My haibun “The Grackle Tree” from my Birds Nobody Loves series is in the latest issue of the ‘zine Nothing. No One. Nowhere. Thanks to the editors for publishing it along with so many other wonderful poets. It’s an honor to be included.