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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

Thrown to Sea

February 3, 2011 • • 8 Comments

Thrown to Sea

A leopard stalks the high slopes, at home
in a thin-sky world on the blue edge of night.
She pads over a landscape of fossils, old shells
and ancient plastic embedded in stone.
Her tail is a python, pursuing her through the snow,
telling lies and trying to throw her back to sea,
but she maintains her balance, always.
It’s what she does. The sea is just a legend.

The ocean spits out plastic, faded, thin,
but whole. The great-grandchildren
of those who threw it in retrieve the relics,
invent stories and religions for their ancestors,
singing their praises only to go home
and complain bitterly that they didn’t
leave behind something more useful
than just the cast off detritus of their lives.
Not even a boat to get off this rock.
They are prisoners. The sea is the law.

It’s an odd T-shaped island. Flying over
you can’t help but look for other letters,
an alphabet afloat on the Pacific blue,
but it’s just that lone T, and the people,
they are of the sea. They throw their best
plastic in and watch the waves swallow
all the evidence that they had lived.
This is their sacrifice and preparation.
The waves call them. The sea is Heaven.

—

This is something of a mash-up. I’m rereading David Mitchell’s brilliant Cloud Atlas. The opening takes place in the Chatham Islands. I know nothing about them, but I read the Wikipedia entry where Chatham is described as a “t-shaped island.” The snow leopard business and the description of his tail as python-like came from a National G article and many nights observing my own cat and wondering what he makes of the gray snake that follows him everywhere he goes. It must lie to him because sometimes it needs to be bitten.

Hard Freeze

February 2, 2011 • • 8 Comments

The sky is newspaper,
the print flown
to join the black birds
huddled against
the leeward sides
of highway signs.
The big story is air,
Arctic breath that burns
away our words.
Silent and stunned,
we gather to witness
the marvel of ice
surviving in the wild.

—

This poem grew out of this stone.

I’m happy to say that I was able to write one small stone each day in January as part of the river of stones challenge. (I posted them over at a gnarled oak where they crosspost to various social media platforms.)

There is something in finding time to stop for a moment, engage, see, and try to write, creatively, what is seen that strikes me as prayerful, a sentiment I’ve mentioned here before. It has the capacity to change—for the better—the way we see and interact with the world. There is peacefulness in it too, and I had almost forgotten that.

Starting the year with this simple approach to opening has been a joy and a pleasure, and so hats off to Fiona and Kaspa for setting the river flowing and reminding me of the importance of slowing down to witness the wonder of even the most ordinary of moments. These moments are, after all, the stuff from which lives are made, if not remembered and celebrated years later.

I plan to continue doing these each day by making it part of my daily writing practice again. That was always my intent with a gnarled oak when I started it two years ago, but I fell off over time, and weeks would sometimes go by with nothing. They say doing something for 30 days will make it a habit, so we’ll see if that’s true.

Homo Neanderthalensis

January 27, 2011 • • 13 Comments

Old teeth still talk. Shards of bone and flint
blades found in Spanish caves, scraps
of DNA unravel the edges of a story—
a sentence from which to divine an epic.

What tales did these other humans tell
when their cousins came north, surrounded
them and built a new world full of strangers?

Did they know their time had come? Did they
dance with ghosts and worry about decline?
Did they imagine other isolated outposts of their kind
lonely and encircled also by these wise interlopers?

I would like to have known them, and I wonder
how the world would be if there were still
mirror humans, living in a shadow world,
hunters stalking slopes alongside us,
mysterious as strange footprints in the snow.

The sun must still have risen and set, ice receded
as the world shrank down to just a range,
a hill, a cave. Is this the way of age, this shrinking
of the landscape until we wander no farther
than the yard, puttering around our piece of earth,
no longer wondering (and just a little afraid of)
what lies beyond the blue gray mountains?

—

Inspired by the National Geographic article “Last of the Neanderthals” (Oct 2008).

We Talk of Trains

January 24, 2011 • • 10 Comments
Train in Round Rock

We Talk of Trains

Road signs, riddled with bullet holes,
executed for the mathematical precision
with which they spell out isolation,
define and witness the desert loneliness.

We talk of oceans, beaches beyond horizons,
valleys hidden in the mountains, extinct volcanoes,
ruins and the railroad tracks following the highway.

A crumpled taco wrapper flutters up from the backseat.
Someone grabs it before it escapes out the window.
Dust devils swirl outside, wrestling earth and sky,
spinning proof that everything only wants to escape.

We talk our dreams in circles, always
winding up at the same rest stop, a teepee-shaped
gas station, the movie we’ll make when we get home.

A train rumbles alongside us; sharp-edged
graffiti decorates boxcars. We wonder about people
who painted their anger on a train in Saint Louis
only to watch it disappear into the desert.

—

“We Talk of Trains” and the accompanying photo “Train in Round Rock” were first published together in ouroboros review #3 (July 2009).

Grackle Ghazal

January 13, 2011 • • 19 Comments

I stroll the streets and dodge mangy grackles,
fluttering birds in trees, those angry grackles.

Black feet and dark beaks snap at my sandwich—
I’m surrounded by the grabby grackles!

I sit a bench and study pawns and queens
‘til “checkmate’s” called by the cagey grackles.

At dinner parties, I near drop my drink
shocked by the sins of the feisty grackles.

I hang for hours on back porches, strumming
old guitars, swapping lies with folksy grackles.

At night, I roost in city trees and sing
croaking wild songs, toasting jolly grackles.

—

This is in response to Big Tent’s prompt about alliteration. There’s some in there, but the process led to a ghazal and some grackles.

Go to the Big Tent to see what others came up with.

For those who may not know, grackles are, like blackbirds, members of the icterid family. Here in central Texas, we see two species: the common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) and the great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus).

This post was included in I and the Bird #142 hosted at Birds O’ The Morning.

Old Selene Telling Lies

January 6, 2011 • • 26 Comments

My old feet are pinprick cold these days.

I sleep in socks and dream of stars
and wear slippers all day long.

I ruined these beat old stompers
when security had me marched
down from the moon.

(Hand me that Epsom salt, would you, hon?)

It was a long road down,
and I wore lousy shoes.
The way was cold, strewn with debris,
the Earth just bluing then.

I stumbled over gravity, kicked back
the comet curtain and saw you,
so beautiful by the pale light
of my old waning moon.

I lost track of the steps I took, then.
Eventually, I quit counting all the miles.

In the end, though, they forgot all about me,
but then that’s just how it goes
for us used-up old goddesses, isn’t it?

(Oh, baby, these dogs’re barking.)

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s latest prompt, which suggests we write about feet. That’s where this started but then it walked off (har-har, oh I slay me) in a surprising direction when I found myself writing the line about walking down from the moon.

There are just a few gnarled oak chapbooks left. It’s a collection of my favorite micro-poems from 2010 previously tweeted, ‘dented or otherwise shared. Let me know if you want one. They’re free and I’ll ship them anywhere.

Read more feet poems here.

Just a Tributary in a River of Stones

January 2, 2011 • • 1 Comment

I’m participating this new month in Fiona Robyn and Kaspa’s River of Stones, the international small stones writing month. A small stone “is a polished moment of paying proper attention.” Fiona has been kind enough to publish a few of my stones over the past few years at her small stone journal a handful of stones, and you can go there for some examples. Or better yet, visit the River of Stones and follow the links on the blogroll to see some of the stones people are writing this month.

I’m posting my stones over at a gnarled oak, where I publish my micro-poems. They’re also cross-posted at Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook. Additionally, I’ll probably post a weekly summary of them here. Maybe.

My stones typically show up as haiku, though not always. Here’s today’s:

The great blue heron
stands in the still creekside grass.
Patient as stone.

Also, I made another gnarled oak chapbook of my favorite micro-poems from 2010. It’s a holiday gift I make for family and friends, and I save a few for blog readers. If you’d like one, use the contact page to let me know and tell me where to send it. I’ve got 10 to give away here. They’re free and I’ll mail them anywhere. Go here to have a look at the digital version of last year’s.

The Dead Man and Road Songs

December 16, 2010 • • 31 Comments

1. About the Dead Man and Road Songs

The dead man has been everywhere, man.
He walks along the shoulder, holding out his thumb.
From the Yucatan to the Yukon, and the left shoulder to the right,
the dead man has seen it all.
On Saturdays, the dead man goes honky tonkin’.
They write songs about him and call him
‘Stranger’ in Texas and ‘Buddy’ in Tennessee.
He hopes to pull the tire jack from the stone and become the king of the road.
When Jesus left Chicago, the dead man followed hoping to elude
the hellhound on his trail.
The dead man still carries the old guitar he found at a crossroads in Mississippi.
He tries to play like Robert Johnson but comes off sounding like Elvis.
He’s met them both out on the highways and told them he was following the Dead.
That was a joke, though, and he thinks they knew it.
In Luckenbach, he joined other dead men and they sang songs by Willie,
Waylon & the boys until dawn when the Sheriff arrived.
The dead man let love slip away somewhere near Salinas
and hoped to reach Amarillo by morning.
He got off the L.A. freeway without getting killed or caught.
He is on the road again, chalking up many a mile.
He’s walked through every road song worth singing, a long strange trip indeed.
Yes, the dead man has been everywhere, man.

2. More About the Dead Man and Road Songs

The dead man prays for all the roadkilled animals at least once a day.
He started doing this a long time ago, and it’s become his habit.
The dead man bums a smoke when he can, another habit.
He has seen (and sometimes set with a careless flick of the butt)
summer wildfires that scorch the median.
Coming around again in springtime, he’s seen the wildflowers
growing best where the roadside had burned.
This makes him feel important.
In the summertime he sleeps among the roadside prairie grasses,
and he huddles under bridges in winter.
Someday, the dead man will get where he’s going.
He hopes he’ll know it when he gets there.
But the dead man has been on the highway for years.
You have seen the dead man, and you kept on driving.
He doesn’t mind, though, loneliness and solitude are his beans and beer.
The dead man understands this is how songs are made, where they come from.
These are the dead man’s wandering years, and he is in no hurry.

—

This is a response to the Big Tent Poetry prompt to write a dead man poem using the form invented by Marvin Bell, which is based on the Zen admonition to “live as if you were already dead.” I started writing sentences and soon I realized that the dead man was a highway wanderer and that there were lots of songs about him.

Many of the lines in Part 1 either refer to or are borrowed directly from songs by Geoff Mack, Hank Williams, Roger Miller, ZZ Top, Robert Johnson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, George Strait, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, and the Grateful Dead.

Mad props to Dave Bonta for his post about formatting poetry in WordPress, which gave me the answer to indenting long lines, something I rarely use.

Go here to read more dead man poems.