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Category: Poems

Poems written by me.

Navajo Country, 1996

April 27, 2010 • • 20 Comments

Cars were rare along the highway
On that day of dusty miles.
You came up a ridge behind us to
Observe our passing.
Through the rearview, we watched you
Emerge, then fade back into the desert.

—

This is a response to Read Write Poems’ NaPoWriMo #27: Let Someone Else Take the Lead wherein Carolee invites writers to do an acrostic poem. I’ve never done one before, but figured I would need a short word for today and so I went with coyote, a favorite animal that I’ve heard far more often than seen. This poem is about the first time I saw one.

Though I’ve missed a few days of posting due to internet issues, I’ve been writing and back-posting what I wrote those days here and at a gnarled oak.

Galveston, Last Summer

April 26, 2010 • • 5 Comments

Early Sunday morning,
we sat on the seawall

watching a laughing gull
eat a fish. There wasn’t

much happening, just the
gulf falling and rising

with the sea’s slow breathing
between hurricanes,

porpoises jumping over
waves, pelicans floating

above the shore and that
gull working on his fish

while glancing upward at
a sky filled with thieves.

I’ll Race the Fiercest Gulls

April 22, 2010 • • 15 Comments

How much time could you borrow to put off
the moment when you’ll go tomorrow?

The sound of earthquakes will reverberate
across saffron-tinged plateaus tomorrow.

Despite the coming squall, will the sky still
fill with pepper-colored crows tomorrow?

Through dizzying emporiums, I’ll hunt
the rare rust-colored rose tomorrow.

I’ll row this boat and race the fiercest gulls
across the Gulf of Mexico tomorrow.

I’ll grind my glass and polish brass to see
as far as Galileo tomorrow.

In tendrils of light across the night, I’ll
write my name to guide you home tomorrow.

—

Another attempt at writing a ghazal, this time using the words in the wordle prompt (NaPoWriMo #22) with an interesting set of words provided by Catherine. I used all of them except flinch.

One of the things I’ve been doing during NaPoWriMo is experimenting with forms I’ve rarely (or never) attempted and my favorite, thus far, is the ghazal. I first read ghazals in Sarah J. Sloat’s excellent chapbook In the Voice of a Minor Saint (Tilt Press, 2009) and was immediately struck by the form. You can read some of her fine ghazals at Linebreak and Eclectica (the one at Linebreak appears in the chapbook).

I only know of the form what I’ve read in wikipedia and deduced from studying Sloat’s poems and a few others I’ve found here and there, but when NaPoWriMo is over, I’ll probably try to learn more since it’s a form I find quite compelling.

Greenish

April 22, 2010 • • Leave a comment

I write with a pencil
that used to be blue jeans,
a pen that once, was
trash.

Coiled light bulbs everywhere
whitewash coal,
fluoresce the dim glow
of self-satisfaction.

Is there any way to go
green? To be clean
and live lightly?

To go past saving money
(the only green that
gets anyone talking)?

—

This is a response to Robert Lee Brewer’s NaPoWriMo Earth Day prompt at Poetic Asides.

I think increasing awareness of our collective footprint and impact on the planet is a good thing, and I think it’s good for us to do our part and think about the impact of our actions (and our plastic and toxic junk) on the planet, but I often wish there was more concern for environmental protection beyond the ways in which we can now possibly profit from it. I don’t need to be able to cash in on something to make it worth saving. Maybe I’m funny that way.

You know what else is funny? The word bulb. I never really thought about it until I started working on this poem. I don’t know why, but the word makes me smile.

Looking for Flaws, Hoping to Find Some

April 21, 2010 • • 11 Comments

A student once asked for
something interesting to read.
Something good.
Something you can feel, she said.
Something honest.
Something real.

I asked what that would be like.

There would be misspelled words,
she said, a few bad sentences.
Not sufficient to interfere
with the story, mind you,
but an honest flaw or error
here or there so you’d know
it wasn’t perfect,
wasn’t meant to be.

Just enough to get a glimpse
of the true imperfect person
behind the artifice.

—

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt from Read Write Poem (#21: Perfectly Flawed) provided by Kristen McHenry asks us to consider the idea of perfection. It’s an interesting prompt that reminded me of a conversation I had with a student in one of my sophomore English classes a few years back. Further thoughts about perfection in literature were sparked by an interesting post, poetry by concession, at slow reads, which is very much worth checking out and probably influenced this poem.

The Desert Years

April 19, 2010 • • 4 Comments

We drew maps showing river deltas,
our path predicted by the contours
of our fingerprints, and we followed
our spirals forever away from home.

Where there was water once,
we marked those places on the maps
and gave them names from dreams.

We camped beneath aircraft carriers,
marooned a hundred miles inland,
and spent nights watching our flames

flicker and dance
like tortured acrobats

laughing us to sleep
against the rusted hulks
of ruined navies.

In the mornings, we watched
the sky for clouds or crows
and threw rocks at the sun.

The rains never came.
We moved on.

—

This began as a response to Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo prompt # 17: Something Elemental provided by Neil Reid.

The Cattle Egret

April 15, 2010 • • 8 Comments

There’s a swagger in the way the cattle egret walks across the fields of this fenced frontier, wingtips looped into his belt buckle. He won’t talk much at first, but if you get him going he’ll spin stories like country songs—beer drinkin’, cloaca kickin’ and trains beyond the horizon. He’ll tell of blue northers ripping down the plains and the time he lit a fire under a mule that hadn’t moved in two days. He waits while you imagine what a burning mule would smell like and then tells how the mule just moved over a couple feet from the fire and stayed put another two days before movin’ on. Usually, though, he just stares out past the longhorns, dreaming lonely dreams from another time. Maybe he even writes a song or two about the rough and tumble old birds of the past. In the evening, after a long day picking bugs off the backs of settled cows, he sends demos to Nashville and Austin hoping he’ll make it big someday.

glowing orange
the cattle egrets fly off
into the sunset

Sonnet for Ho-Ho’s and Ding-Dongs

April 14, 2010 • • 6 Comments

When I get up, it’s coffee and donuts,
(It won’t be hard to find the death of me)
And more honey on that pile of biscuits,
And, oh Lord, yes, more sugar in my tea.
Daily, I stop for ho-ho’s or ding-dongs;
For my chocolate fix: a Hershey bar.
The convenience store is where I belong,
And I’ll gladly try anything by Mars.
Vegetables look good and green and all,
But processed snacks fulfill my sweetest dreams;
And always at the food court at the mall,
There’s caramel-drizzled fudge-nut ice cream.
I’ll run long endless miles for exercise,
But those miles never match my sugar highs.

—

I wrote this during 4th period today primarily for the amusement of my students. We’re writing sonnets and being the good teacher that I am, I wrote during class as well so they could see me revise it and also as a reminder that poems need not be serious all the time. The meter isn’t quite there, I don’t think, but they got a kick out of it, and it’s always good when they see their teacher doing and therefore valuing whatever they’re working on.