Published in Abandoned Towers! Yay!

http://www.cyberwizardproductions.com/AbandonedTowers/toc.html

in all your terrible world waking.

in all your terrible world
waking I gently kiss
your eyes dreaming

the sharp sunlight
of april moves

gently the night
which has dark
hands.

(Wrote this a long time ago, when I was a teenager.)

Thoughts and Memories of a Rainy Afternoon.

Rain poured through my fingers like soiled sheets.
An umbrella sits, lonely, on the front porch.
I see you, sitting there, on the swing,
leafing through a copy of
USA Magazine in the pouring rain,
immersed in the pictures,
I suppose. You love to draw, it is your hobby,
you say that one day you want your pictures
to be put up in an art museum-not in Paris, you insist,
or Rome, but a local museum,
like in Boston. We live in Massachussetts.
You love Boston. It is your favorite place.
Sometimes,
we go there on Saturday mornings, and eat at the
Bagel World
on Fork Street, and watch the traffic go by.

Sometimes,
I wonder what you are thinking, if perhaps your thoughts
are about art, or me. I usually tell myself to quit it.
Most of the time,
I do not listen to myself.

How To Follow Paths.

I followed you down the path.
It was gentle and kind.
The loving was not simple;
there was no peace, only hatred.
I do not generalize. I put my hatred
in a tiny box and send it out to sea.
I gather my fruit, put it in a
basket, and sail it out to sea. It hopes to find land.
My neighbor is a woman named Lonnie.
She hardly leaves her house.

She cannot hear me from where I stand,
and call out at her-ask her if she wants
any banana bread. She always says no.
I do not think she likes bread of any
kind, her blinds are always shut, her door
is always locked, she never takes the time
to stop and smell the roses
that line her sidewalk. She drives a gray
mini van.
It is parked in the driveway.
She has not come out of her house
today. My television is on in the den,
it is time to make breakfast.
The sun just came up into the sky.
A new day enters me.

Better.

Her tears mar the windowpane.
She makes herself get up from her spot
at the window. She makes herself a cup of tea,
lilacs bloom on the window outside
the front door. She makes herself remember what she
was doing there, why she was there, what she
was supposed to be doing. That the garbage
needs to be taken out, that the dishes need
to be done. The tea is strong. It makes herself
reflect on things that have happened that day.
Her husband came home from work. The dog
barked. Someone mowed the lawn, which was filled
with crabgrass. She loved good
deeds. They filled her with a sense of belonging
she does not feel doing anything else. She thinks
it makes her see better. Instead of worse.

Riddle.

One day, when she’s old,
she’ll tell you the answer to the riddle
that has been tormenting you for years.
I have heard this one before; the words
curve like a spider’s silky web, they are
put on the shelf in the wine cellar
before being released to the public
If poems beat on the back door,
would you think to answer it?
Would you know, quickly now,
how to explain the ending to every story?
Metaphors drop out of the sky like clouds;
they land on your doorstep,
shaking and shivering in the cold.
Will you take them in?
They are orphans, you know;
they have nowhere else to go.

(Age 23, I think)

New blog I like. Poetry.

http://livingpoetry.blogspot.com/

Bologna? Tuna?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIrW7V-RG88

I wanted to add this one to my list of blogs....

But I don't know how to add it yet.

http://pleasefindthis.blogspot.com/


(Never mind I figured out how to add it.)

Magazines.

Magazines I read:

"Times" Magazine
National Geographic
The Atlantic Monthly
New York Post
Poetry Magazine
Ploughshares
The Paris Review
Threepenny Review

What Is Wood.

the light from the lamp shines
on my desk
it is such a great desk
made from polished wood
I don’t know what kind of wood
it is
maybe it is brass
but brass isn’t a kind of wood
I’ve heard of brass organs
brass rings
brass silverware
maybe the wood is made from oak
but an oak is not a desk
an oak is a tree you find in
the woods
and sometimes squirrels hide their
acorns in holes
just before they go into hibernation.

(Written age 23.)

Raphael’s Rhapsody.

There is sage in the brush behind my house.
I put a pie on the windowsill. The day comes pouring
in through my window, it is so warm I am wearing a shortsleeve t-shirt.
I am waiting for a call from my brother,
Raphael, who just moved to Brazil.

He is nervous, as he is wearing his heart on his sleeve.

He just proposed to
his girlfriend, Roxanne, who had thirteen boyfriends before him;
I assured him she would say yes, it was perfectly obvious
she wants to marry him. But even as I said this,
I had my doubts, for Roxanne is one to change her mind.
I wondered if it would work out; she is a
fashion designer,

he is a real estate agent, sometimes it does not work out
because the man cannot stand it when the woman
makes more money than he does.

I am contemplating what to have for breakfast-maybe a bagel,
maybe a bowl of cereal, Shredded Wheats, or Cornpops,
I haven’t decided yet. My cat wanders in, meowing like a cow,
hungry for something to eat-I sigh in exasperation.

He had
just pounced on a mouse this morning, dragging
the remains into the barn, sucking out its inner goodness-the
heart and the limbs, the liver and lungs, as gross as it sounds.

This makes me think of how

strange life is, and how I don’t know what it means to be
alive, only partially alive, eating fruit and vegetables,
and watching an occasional movie on my DVD player.

One day I hope to know.

My current taste in fiction books.

I feel like reading a very thick novel. I have the last Harry Potter book, but I do not feel like reading a fantasy at the moment. Maybe Michael Crichton, or Tom Clancy, Elizabeth Moon, or Nelson Demille.

Winter Falls On Cedar.

Bright winter morning, the snow flies,
sticking on fir trees and windshields. I trudge
through miles of winterland (just the driveway, really)
I open the door

to my automobile, but it is too cold to start. I trip in
the doorway as I go back inside the house, take off
my hat and coat, and call for a
taxi to take me to work.
The taxi is late;

he calls me fifteen minutes after I'm supposed
to be at work and says, "I can't make it, I'm stuck in the
driveway," with me knowing all the while he is not
stuck in a driveway, frantic to
get to his customer. I know,

at this hour, he has better things to do:
he is at home sipping a brandy in his Spiderman
pajamas, watching a rerun of The Early Morning Show.


(Written Age 22, or 23, forget.)

Geese Pond, 1985, and a Photo of My Daughter

In the summer, when the wind chimes shiver,
the light over the hills is like a beacon going south.
It can't be going south for the winter, not yet, for
the
geese are still here. My daughter is feeding the
geese
at the pond, laughing, smiling, talking to them as if
they
could talk back. And sometimes they do.
I wish I had a camera so I could take a picture of her
feeding the geese, so she could look back upon it when
she
is twenty or thirty and smile. Or better yet, I wish
I had a canvas
and paints so I could draw my daughter, a still
portrait that has come to life
before my very eyes.
I write about geese in poems, I write about the long
grass
around the banks and
my daughter's jeans pushed up tenaciously around
her ankles so she
can walk into the water a little ways,
her hair in her face as she gives
a piece of herself to the geese,
and the small, shallow pond.

(I wrote this when I was 22, 23.)

Opal Rain.

The rain drenches the world in diamond colors,
red, opal, pink, pale green. The colors graze on
water lily pads, shelter things unseen, destiny
without reason, a sky without a name.
I hold you close, like there’s no tomorrow,
I hold you in my heart like words-a thumb,
a fist, a fingerprint, a beam from someone’s flashlight.

The river knows nothing, speaks nothing of rivers;
it shakes and shudders in times long lost.
The black cat creeps on its four paws, to a spot
below the river Nile, drops on all fours, and
evaporates rapidly into thinning air.

I am not light, nor color, nor tears,
the light is not green, I am not opal.
I am multi-colored, I see myself in smoky mirrors
spread out before me like cropped pollen.
It is me, I am myself, I crawl inside myself, and dwell,
hoping to rest awhile. No clocks tick here.
The spiders have spun silky spinning webs,
they are all spun out; shadows echo in spurts of gray.

I know not colors, they are not words I speak.
Light follows through, reasons unheard.
Unspoken, thoughts, dream of ‘morrow.
Forever and after,
I dream of home.

autumn harvest.

streams rush by in flowing rivers.
golden like footsteps and crimson
as peonies.

water rushes past old ears, pretty girls
flick their dresses to the wind,
storms are drive(n) to the point of
resuscitation.

an old man pleads for the corn to
stop growing-he hears it from where
he stands. he watches Oprah
and the Bad News Bears,
and,
on sundays, he stays up all night,
playing solitaire with an old deck of
cards.

harsh winds blow in straight lines.

the poet in her old house putters about,
moving this way and that to the
tune of the wind.
this is nomad’s land, tears fall
like ash and silk.

River Of Lost & Found.

One day the river will stop flowing.
I will be there to witness it.
I will stand on the bank of the river,
knee deep in the crabgrass, and watch the water
swirl slowly down, down, down, to the last
bit of water, until there is nothing,
nothing left anywhere.

One day, I will see the river, and it will
not be a river any longer.
The fish will be all gone, eaten or starved;
their skeletons littering the ground like
a graveyard,

and the bottom of the river will be a dried
bed.
Pigs will sleep in it. Beavers will move
in it, up, down, or across, and they will
sit and stare, their tongues hanging out
of their slacked mouths.

One day the river will stop flowing-
One day I will no longer be here,
one day my memories will fade,
and I will sit and think of things that are
lost.

THE FIELD OF QUIET.

the field of quiet is a withered rose
in a mesh of field (s) a mystery wrapped
in shroud when clouds shiver in an arc

and fade glistening like a glass (pass)
movement is/

Winding Down the Hours.

A black woman stands on broken rocks.
She wonders what time it is. She does not know.
Her mind sees deep within herself, the sunlight
That falls on the ground, she forces herself to move
Forward.

Time is never still.
Lost worlds and lost words, I protect myself from the tick-tock
Of the clock. A black woman walks outside to get the mail;
A pickup truck rumbles by, sounding like firecrackers.

Who’s to say what we will see, today and tomorrow?
Who’s to say what we will know, one minute from the next?
The ticking of the clock is all we have-it sounds like motors
Running, it sounds like clocks ticking.

A black woman stands on broken rocks.
A pickup truck rumbles by, sounding like firecrackers.
The clock ticks in the kitchen.