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Tag: poems

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).

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.

Nightfall Beyond the Glass

November 22, 2010 • • 2 Comments

Enfolding dust swirls silent
gray and separate,
the magnificent desolation
of night casting in unnoticed.

Beyond the glass,
a shadowless plain, illusion of silence,
the killing emptiness of absence,
countless broken stones,
the bones of unformed worlds.

Tiny pockmarks reveal bites,
the wind’s invisible stone teeth,
nibbling us all down to nothing
beneath the bad moons rising.

Who looks to these for love songs?

That dread moon waxing in the east?
This moon of fear rising again in the west?

—

Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. Fear and Dread, the dogs of war. They’re little more than asteroids captured by the Martian gravity. Due to their diminutive size, they appear only as bright stars from the surface. Phobos moves so fast and orbits so close to the planet, it rises in the west and sets in the east. Because of its orbital speed, it rises and sets several times each night.

“Magnificent desolation” is the phrase Buzz Aldrin used to describe the surface of the moon.

Cloudy Day

November 4, 2010 • • 4 Comments

Street Cones

This is mostly an experiment with Flickr. The poem is one I wrote back in April and I took the picture with my iphone a few weeks ago in New York. I used Flickr’s editing tools to add the text and touch-up the image. I was able to do everything I wanted to do without Photoshop, which makes me wonder if I really need to upgrade. The more I play with Flickr, the more impressed I am with it. It’s crazy I’ve had an account for 4 years, and I’ve never used it until about a week ago.

The Ramble

October 28, 2010 • • 7 Comments

This is an attempt at doing a video haiku, basically using Dave Bonta’s approach, which I really like. In this case, it’s almost documentary. It’s from my day in Central Park last week. One thing I noticed while birding in The Ramble was that whenever I stopped for a few minutes and just watched, the ground started to move with squirrels, sparrows, and all sorts of other critters. To see it, I had to stop. I tried to capture a little bit of it on video and the haiku came from notes I wrote at the time. Sitting and watching (or in this case, standing and watching) and that quiet openness to experience that ensues is the essence of both birding and haiku. At least for me. I don’t know if this video captures any of that, but it at least documents the process.