While I was out looking
all these other
people came along
whose names I
never heard, their sound
being buried in my
own next word –
oh we’ll be galloping, galloping
high on our horse and absurd!
Tag Archives: poetry
Sun set and the children still at play
On your white porch fronting your dense
Catskill wood you’ll wander the mind backward
through the midnight ocean, the black
forest, golgotha, to, at last, our primieval
garden. You’ll wonder what went wrong.
Who’d mean to keep old God away? Not you,
though you did, as now, his cross but a
seesaw – up and down and nothing changed.
Devil to the fisher bleary in his mind
Our hook is hidden in no dancing fly.
It hangs above the water with no enticement but
impalement. Our strength is in stillness
and waiting.
Later you want
Later you want for it to have
been something and meant something,
to have unfolded inevitably like
the glance the cup the door the kiss and the dream,
but for now all you have is
the want in later you want
Forest of the wild manimal – or, The psychic space the artist projects well beyond the eyes
If we don’t know what mix this is – we don’t –
we don’t stay but follow for where she’s left,
our cavity of wild becomes the world, but what
kind of world will it be?
For Anne Forest, and for Annegien Schilling
My mystical trip to Missoula
My heart has been troubled
with my wanting
it’s to be –
like moons and planets far away –
but who would go there?
One will one day I pray
go to scoop the lot of it,
retrieve it to twirl
again within me,
but that will be where it’s never been,
real smoke in the heart of Missoula.
Your beauty, once of our time
How would and when proud
astride the wind you go?
With beauty and time you never know.
Our living is dying. God made it so.
Sergeant Miller held the sky
Sergeant Miller held the sky
while my father and I
said goodbye.
Trees lay down.
Wolves prowled the ground.
Our words were hard like a hammer.
Men will be bled. Men will be gone.
Men will lock hearts in the slammer.
A regular story
Rubens wonders
how to put that ripple of unrest
in Paradise where it doesn’t belong.
It can’t be there — or how then,
for won’t then
Heaven, too, be spoiled?
He sleeps and dreams Eve,
who comes wanting not knowing —
and in an arc the dream falls
from the snake to the woman to the man.
For Jim and Nancy Forest
Because of the junk
When my grandma put up her fence
it wasn’t because of the neighbors.
It was because of the junk.
They’d never done anything and
she’d never done anything.
But she didn’t have to look at it.
They’d all have to look at the fence, though.
And at, behind it, the open heart of man —
at Adam atop his heart cleaving.
