Poetry Month as Poetry Week
Hey Campers,
I have budgets due very shortly and so, here are the other poems I promised for your reading enjoyment--or not.
Homeland
The surfaces of my childhood home
enter my room
in photos on the internet,
much as its interiors
enter my soul in dreams
Photographic perfect skies
give the sun-leached yard
the glow of unreality,
the stillness of deep memories
Dangreous plants still
guard the boundaries:
malaluka bushes, Florida holly hedges
their poison leaves and berries
poised to sicken curious innocents
Missing are my mother's gardenia and hibiscus,
my brother's palm,
grown from the coconut he buried,
now gone to lethal yellowing
Gone, too, the cactus garden
with its spanish bayonets
and other hostile plantlife,
now a manicured lawn
The house has been tamed,
menace pushed to the edges.
The rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows
shun this shell,
bereft of the succulent contradictions
of a beautiful family with dangerous interiors.
Fargo
For the woman sunk in the green shadows
outside her house
yesterday there was no such thing as
grief
But today,
today it washes in cold sheets
from the sky.
And she knows--
also new:
exhaustion
keening loss,
the true meaning too much.
Inside Out
Outside Her
a retiree fishes for perch
but fusses about the heat
an eleven-month-old girl
wobbles into her first step
Mr. Bennet gulps for air
Outside Her
3,000 people are simultaneously grateful
for 3,000 different reasons
the northern sun melts
the bears' classier accommodations
someone She once glimpsed on a subway platform
makes an enormous sacrifice
a rainstorm sweeps in
Inside Her
are echoes
only echoes
The Problems with Flying
Allergies to feathers
The whole thing about clothes--you can't wear just anything
The choice between the ability to breathe and the ability to see
Take offs: what if somebody sees you? What if nobody sees you?
Geometry
Physics
Landings: what will the townspeople think (see clothes above)?
The farmer who expects you to be able to do other things like know how the tractor works or make it rain or heal his bum leg
all, of course, things that have nothing to do with flying
Addictions: looking down from on high, soaring, intimacy with wind, free fall, being able to get the heck out of town
The temptation to go too far (see Icarus below)
I have budgets due very shortly and so, here are the other poems I promised for your reading enjoyment--or not.
Homeland
The surfaces of my childhood home
enter my room
in photos on the internet,
much as its interiors
enter my soul in dreams
Photographic perfect skies
give the sun-leached yard
the glow of unreality,
the stillness of deep memories
Dangreous plants still
guard the boundaries:
malaluka bushes, Florida holly hedges
their poison leaves and berries
poised to sicken curious innocents
Missing are my mother's gardenia and hibiscus,
my brother's palm,
grown from the coconut he buried,
now gone to lethal yellowing
Gone, too, the cactus garden
with its spanish bayonets
and other hostile plantlife,
now a manicured lawn
The house has been tamed,
menace pushed to the edges.
The rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows
shun this shell,
bereft of the succulent contradictions
of a beautiful family with dangerous interiors.
Fargo
For the woman sunk in the green shadows
outside her house
yesterday there was no such thing as
grief
But today,
today it washes in cold sheets
from the sky.
And she knows--
also new:
exhaustion
keening loss,
the true meaning too much.
Inside Out
Outside Her
a retiree fishes for perch
but fusses about the heat
an eleven-month-old girl
wobbles into her first step
Mr. Bennet gulps for air
Outside Her
3,000 people are simultaneously grateful
for 3,000 different reasons
the northern sun melts
the bears' classier accommodations
someone She once glimpsed on a subway platform
makes an enormous sacrifice
a rainstorm sweeps in
Inside Her
are echoes
only echoes
The Problems with Flying
Allergies to feathers
The whole thing about clothes--you can't wear just anything
The choice between the ability to breathe and the ability to see
Take offs: what if somebody sees you? What if nobody sees you?
Geometry
Physics
Landings: what will the townspeople think (see clothes above)?
The farmer who expects you to be able to do other things like know how the tractor works or make it rain or heal his bum leg
all, of course, things that have nothing to do with flying
Addictions: looking down from on high, soaring, intimacy with wind, free fall, being able to get the heck out of town
The temptation to go too far (see Icarus below)