Backache

Backache

The full bulk
of the dead maple
has finally weighed in
on your body
and cut you down,
if only for a few days.
Your trunk recalls
the outstretching of your own limbs

overhead
barely quivering

wrestling the unwieldy chainsaw
through dry wood,
already seasoned
for turning or burning,

cracking away
under it’s own weight

crashing just where you planned
with your precise angled cuts,
geometric falling success
jumping away just in time.

Only a failed cluster of
shriveled spring leaves
at the top of the thinning crown
denied the tree’s last hurrah.
Your whole body
a clenched fist
when you felled the tree
you could not save

hating the loss
as much as the heights
you had to climb,

fear present as anger
wound every muscle
into a solid coil of grim
demolition.

The columned trunk watches,
the still-standing stump
tall as a man
gnarled with burls
waiting these last days
for the final weighty
whine of the saw,

when your body fist unclenches
and lets you drop the last
remains of a departed friend.

Eight months: the square dance

This square may be all circle but I am getting sick of the dance
as I am do-si-do-ed from legs shoulder width apart
legs bent to take the bounce the strain of whatever may come

to tipping back and forth on the cradle of my hips
regulating your metronome spill your astronaut float
through my centre of gravity

to learning the best way to get up
when my legs have been kicked out from under me
my knuckles split not on an enemy’s glass jaw

or uncut teeth but on the kinks of mattress coils
couch cushions carpet piles as though they were soil
and you a seed to be carefully buried till spring

but what I know now restless before the big event
walking off your sucker punches your pile drives
is that even long green promises split the soil

The Morning After Mayday Effects

we drink two oceans
commemorating the office of collegial graduations
& hidden associations
but we watch match point
set across the pond
labelled with the cape of good hope
round the horn of passage

how luck will have it
(& for accessorizing success --
a ring & a miss)
how will this go over
mmmmmmthe top
playing without a net
in darkest woody
africa gone south

tennis, any
mmdonjuan?
frankly, scarlett.

business base as usual
in that family way

(my mother leaves a message.
call about wedding.)
talk about your scattergun approaches!

in vino veritas.
spin the baby.
fortune favours the brave? the bold? the daring? the audacious

we got away with getting our parts
in each others' auditions
survived universal deceit

we've shaken the past &
what we've bagged has seasoned us.

carpe meum.
happy 5th, J.

Glaze drips like fired wine
dancing down the wet goblets.
Dishwater slips away
the whisper of friends’ lips,
washing away evidence
the simple lunch –

brown eggs cracked,
peeled away like hunger,
releasing wet whites,
tuna salad made by six hands
arranged just so on
red-tinged ruffled leaves,
just what we had on hand,
adorned with dark olives
no bread to break, so
crisp tortilla rounds
sat sunny on the mounds—

rinsing lunch from the kitchen air
with shining soap bubbles.
Plates catch reflections of
overhead track lighting
tracing smile shadows
caught in the departed meal
still attached to the vessels.

cat poem

Bajeebers, two poems behind already. *puts nose to grindstone*

Hang, we call it, her little
carry-on of fur and flab
pendulously swinging beneath
her belly. She's become too fat
or middle aged to be efficient - when
she jumps it's not athletic,
she doesn't make it look easy, you
can tell she's working hard, breaking
a sweat getting up to that chairseat.

Still, she's ageing gracefully, getting
greyer around the edges, making
no bones about her love of drowsing
in the sun. She's more likely to muscle
onto your lap than attack your feet.
When you pet her, she falls down,
turns over with a grunt, exposes the long
chubby line of belly. The move
is still endearing, the way she looks
at us, willing us to hold up
our end of the bargain.

Cats are not gods, Egyptian or
other, they aren't wise, they don't
know secrets we don't know, except
ones about the death of small squeakers.
This cat is foolish and silly, she is a terrible
shedder, she has kitty dandruff. Her tail
is too short. She is terrified of other cats,
even ones half her size. Every day
she teaches me
things I already know. Trust
is beautiful, love needs
no reason, and
surrendering dignity
is optional.

Odd as in Ode

I will be away the rest of the weekend and unable to read/respond to any poems (unless I find a computer with internet access). Enjoy the weekend. I'm really enjoying all of the poems so far--you people kick poetry butt.


Bearded Bouquets—another od(e)ditty


Hops are a coarse bunch—
too smart for beer-bellies

they hang about in toughened packs,
all hairy armed, petiole,

and cordate, clutch dirt-
stiffened rhizomes and grin.

Leathered, they are wild ones
biting birds with bines looped on fences,

make grainy eyes at squirrels
and sharply comb serrated leaves

with palmated lobes. Hops form pacts,
bond together, train their own

green shoots each spring to preserve
their formations, create gang-

branched networks, herbaceous
ideas of their Brandoesque selves.

depictim

lost poets

(a little bit of fluff for day 4.)

lost poets

let's round up all the lost poets
who shuffle their pyrrhic feet
through this neighbourhood
while we work or sleep,
who hunker under foreign porches
in the rain and pull up flowers
they haven't planted but deem
sublime and worthy
of only their own unique attention

they roam with open notebooks,
trailing feral rhyme and unbroken lines

no one has posted their photos
on streetlamps, no handbills list
their publishing histories or nervous tics --
there's no reward

but we'll recognize them by the jackets
of out-of-print books and lure them
to the back door with talk
of free verse or wine

we'll line them up, flush left,
and sharpen their pencils

Fade To Blank

Fade To Blank

They have your teacher locked
away with copies of his work
displayed in a glass cabinet
outside his door,
so he can recognize the room
assigned as home.

They say he can cuss a streak.
He hates noise,
wants quiet,
but loves Frank Sinatra.
If he’s awake he’s
looking for someone to kick—

Don’t get too close—

All the workers know to be
careful ‘cause he is one
strong kicker.

My friend calls
from the still darkness
when the patients sleep,
staying up all night tired
after cleaning houses, in need
of conversation with someone
who remembers who they are.
Remember him? You told me his name.

Your teacher’s halo hair and beard
were still as wild as I recall
in a café where poets drank
and smoked and roared –
so says my friend in her latest
report, grabbing a smoke
outside the view of the cameras
outside the oven warm building.

Your teacher has no memory
of being
anyone we would recognize.
We would be strangers to him
even after many introductions.

But the staff reminds him
he is a poet, a man of words,
a teacher.
My friend told them
this is important.

He hears the truth like news,
sometimes pretending
he believes, because
my friend wakes him
most mornings,

And her brown face smiling
is more familiar than
lost realities.

No expense is spared
to tend the man,
the father, the teacher—
yet time blinks in his eyes—
Expired.

The rhythms of forgotten verse
play angry in his vacant head.

No wonder
he kicks the others
in the shins,
strangers
trying to intrude
into his private stanza.

Refusing Heaven

This poem takes the title of Jack Gilbert's latest book, Refusing Heaven, as a starting point and jumps off from there. It was a great exercise, but his title poem kicks ass, so please check it out when you get a chance.



Refusing Heaven
after Jack Gilbert


The man at the turnstile is taking tickets.
I search my pockets and find none–
I’m wearing a hospital gown.

He shakes his head with the practiced
half-smile of a bureaucrat, as if to say
what did you expect?

Even God has to make a living.
Over twenty years of working the gates
and still no raise. So much for the union.

His former life forgotten: taxi driver
steering white collar drunks home on Friday nights,
women with plastic hips to the airport.

The seated weight of his daughter
on his shoulders, heels knocking his chest,
gone the way of twelve-hour shifts.

It’s not our time I say, wishing I had remembered
to scoop the kitty litter before I left.
Poor cat. We do the best we can.

Someone else will have to wash the sheets
in our absence. Let’s go for a drink I say.
Put up a sign that says back in thirty minutes.

But he doesn’t move, just squints at the stadium lights.
By now he realizes it’s all fiber optics, special effects,
but just once, he’d like to be invited backstage.

Auditions

Auditions will be held
for the next 50 years.

Here is the role
I'd like you to play.

Here are your lines.

Please learn to say them
properly.

If I don't like
your delivery,
I will correct you
until you get it right.

The script will change
over time.
Please be on the look-out
for your new lines.

Please note:
if you gain
too much weight
or too many grey hairs
I will have to put out
a new casting call.

And if you cannot fill
the role I've created for you
I will just have to find
a better actor.

ok, i'd like to -- and will, someday -- spend a lot more time with this one.


sleeping with leonard cohen

i'm sleeping with leonard cohen again,
like all those old nights i curled
around his words, furtive with my own

i keep him in our sheets, tucked into my side
of the bed -- he's a small man and bent
now under the weight of his mind

he is courtly, polite, except for his hands
which are everywhere, busy with touching
or poems that last all night

i try to cover his mumble with my pillowcase,
but i can't muffle this old man in our bed, this relapse
and you lie, these nights, looking at the wall, listening

Cloudburst

Sadie came back from the rez,
riding in front of the thunderstorm
moments before the sky broke loose,
banged on my door
and hollered my name —

never mind the two years
gone without even a parting
cup of black coffee

just grinned and said,
“I knew you’d be here.”

And she was right
as Red Lake when she laughed
and said, “We musta missed
each other down at the pow wow
last week.”

Didn’t I see her
in the bleachers or hear her
cussing the poor excuse
for fry bread they were

trying to pass off?
Her cousin will show ‘em
how to make it if they
can’t do no better than that.

Storms fly in on
the Doppler, green
blobs heading this way,
but no cable station

can tell when Sadie will
blow through and remind
me of the way rain tastes
when it’s laughing.

spread e-go'ld: a tale of two stephens -- even?

it's all about the eagle
whether the stephen is roasting the george à la colbert
or the harpooner is skewering kyoto
thousands of hits daily says something
about either nesting or nested values.
follow the blood to the head.
bald faced lies
when is the brain not a muscle
wait i know this one
but i'm a bundle of nerves
when it loves being hustled

when i opened the robot's rebellion
a brain at war with itself was the first thing
that leapt out
as chapters go
capitals & accipiters
the brain is a bloody thing
but by george that rugous gorge
can be healed with holy spackle

this has been a synapshot

now that i know the scope
i just need to work towards the automatic
rifling through my responses
is not option

let your hip do the talkin'
you can raise your sights later

a little truth
can push the necessary lies
a long, long way
down their gullets

the future is a hybrid of the purists

Seven months: the ultrasound

I am the fork-scarred sink the utility the water table
you are the warming goldfish
he is the big eye anxious on your domestic bulge
the wet magnification of dorsal flicker ventral thrum

They all should have known better –
you might circle my drain
showing fin and bony ripple on each grainy pass
but I’m the only one likely to go belly up

Cunning Conversations


Clematis understands the organ of speech
could befall her name, learns sprawl—

the need of the body to fold
itself in to boundaries placed beside

and beyond, fenced lines she straddles
legs she roots, her progress a pioneering

of paths not settled by anyone.
Clematis stretches her arms to hold

more than herself, an offering—
sky’s taut body unused above,

his clouded washboard abdomen
horizon of leanness, a word smoothing

her cheek, one significant sigh
released in a long-winded draught,

the slip of a hybrid tongue shirring
pink-furrowed petals.

Crush

Crush


At best a circus tent on stilts:
lopsided peaks boast illegible banners

over signature stripes. Maybe it reads asshole,
maybe future wife, who knows at the outset.

A rope ladder descends, the sturdiness of popsicle sticks.
Inside those darkened flaps, what waits?

An acrobatic marvel or the same contortionist
from the last top. We are ever hopeful, so we enter,

strong men into the freak show. Past lion tamers
and their dented hoops, to sit on a padded bench, watch

clowns play up their tricks like the one or two
stories we know will get us laid.

It’s all monkeys on bicycles. A cheap slide
from intermission to the end,

but we’ve paid good money, we’re tired of being alone, so
we clap till our hands smart, try hard to be amazed.


----
Note: I'm trying to get away from the three stanza wonder
(one of my default settings). I'm curious how the couplet form
is working here? Thoughts?

Lost

This is actually yesterday's poem - too tired to input it last night.

==========================
Lost

Somewhere on my trip I lost
track of what month it is.

Then I misplaced the loonie I'd set aside
for the laundry machine's
precise monetary demands.

Luckily I found another
but in that load two socks
- one black, one white -
ran off together.
Never would've noticed
if they'd stuck to their own kind.

My uncle died a year ago
but I haven't changed
the entry in my Palm
or deleted him
from my recipient list -
I think he still likes
receiving updates.

The Yanks dropped another
last night to the Sox -
their 11th L this season.
I saw losses five and six live
in Minneapolis
only weeks ago
with the man who
only months ago
was my lifemate
and now is on hold,
status indefinite.

I could stand to lose
a few pounds -
I decided that a while ago.
And the stress and guilt
and a bit of cockiness
I'm sure.
And I sure as hell would
like to ditch this cough.

But the things we want
get lost sometimes
while a few things we don't
stick around.

making a garden


we speak now
in this sweet green time,
before the roots are deep,
of the space
waking around us,
the possibilities
of lupin or liatris,
dianthus or delphinium

you plant meadow rue
and sweet woodruff
in my ears, along
the furrow of my spine

i show you
with my hands
the best spot
for columbine and thrift

your fingers white roots
unravelling in the night

Early Harvest

A nice delivery came today:
a friend, a gift, a treat to share.
It is so lovely when
so early in season
products of gardens

even ones so carefully
attended, indoors,
through the frozen months
the long dark months so pressed
for green so wanting in it’s absence.
Damp quilt chill in the recent air
the thawing’s only just begun

a whisper of green beginning.
But a smile and a small bag
walked past my own seedlings,
through my lavender door,

entered the rooms
that make a house
the size of a pocketbook

with barely room to lose a pair
of glasses, magnifying details

vital detecting realities
variant pungent delicious.

Taste buds wash hands,
and take their seats
anticipating the feast.