Make y’all of winter what you will:
The pine trees, tufted like old men’s ears,
The disappearing footprints of a sparrow,
Tire-tread slush translucent in the sun.
Global warming? Honey, it’s the South.
One good sled run wears the track to mud,
But dogs and children, mittenless and yelping,
Wear it regardless, gravelled snowballs pelting.
And if the wide-eyed wondering girl
Fat and frosty fingers in her mouth
Slurped her skyfall from a grimy fender
Bird-shat, bug-splattered beneath its sparkly splendor—
Let her father shrug, and drink his beer.
It isn’t much. It will be gone tomorrow.
Cheap Sonnet No. eiπ+1. In Which the Poet Fails to Grasp His Meaning
The dry leaf crumbling in the toddler’s fist,
The cloud-form wind-rent at the careless naming,
The fluttering dream that flees the day’s periphery,
The memory-scent long rotted from its root:
The lover hard pursued will not be kissed
Nor love be raveled out from life’s polyphony;
The truth, that beaten dog, is loath to trust us
’Til it lay its head unbidden at our foot.
And still with art the cunning mind constructs
Its algorithms and its aqueducts
To calculate the right, to channel justice,
Enumerate the light and catch the raining…
Once holding, we behold what’s left us then:
Water wisps that cling to porcelain.
Cheap Sonnet No. (√5±1)/2. In Which the Poet Bemoans, Again, the Failure of His Tomato Plants
These are the seeds that Christ forgot to mention,
Guaranteed by faith and factory rearing,
Sown not on rock nor thorn nor bitten path
But in good scientific soil, and bathed
With electrically timed warmth and light.
They thrust themselves awake like Christmas morn,
Unfurled leaves like mouths of baby birds
Mother-fed, quiescent while the year matured,
Stunted, never feathered out for flight.
Beware, my brothers, engineered intention!
Every life must suffer nature’s wrath.
Plant by singing and by signs. Mourn
The lost. Save what will be saved.
Listen though you are not granted hearing.
Cheap Sonnet No. 1843½. In Which the Poet Espies a Yellow House
Sing what no neighbor dares confess
Amid the squalid safety of the new
(Constructed character of mismatched cubes,
Rectilinear gardens, monochrome)—
This cottage clothed in cheerful dereliction,
The color of a child’s shining sun,
With window-box and dooryard in a mania
Of zinnia, petunia, gazania—
Accidentally annexed, arrises askew,
Gilded, bowered, vine-rife, breeze-cleaned, bird-rung.
Why scorn what abundant life includes,
Careless or a contrary ambition?
Whatever saints and sinners call this home,
God bless and keep them in their foolishness.
An unfortunate accident
Your wobbly letters on the little jars,
The i’s like lollypops, the g’s like smiles,
From your younger self alert the nose:
This one cumin, that one coriander,
Saffron, sumac, cardamom, paprika–
No, that’s cayenne, dad! –Lighthearted warning
To which (as to so many of your words)
I might have listened.
Cheap poetry, September 26–October 2
From his hands a melody unfolds
That flits like butterflies through hastening crowd
Seeking stillness on which to alight.
Summer’s fire sags like an overripe peach
And bursting on October’s horizon, splatters
Cool evening across the sky.
Cheap poetry, September 19–25
Words tumble over, clumping, clinging,
To roasting pans, potato ricers, caught in the nap
Of soft carpet, leaving me
Speechless.
Dawn opens slowly, with fog-cooled ardor:
At the hinge of the day, you have to push harder.
Cheap poetry: A manifesto
Last Monday was my daughter’s birthday, and the Birthday Troll came again this year, in the night, to steal her presents, hide them in the woods, and leave riddles as clues to their whereabouts. He’s like Santa Claus for curmudgeons, and considerably more entertaining, not to mention one isn’t bound by the Byzantine mythology of popular culture and corporate marketing. The riddles are after the fashion of old English rhyming riddles, like the ones Bilbo Baggins traded with Gollum in the slimy dark under the Misty Mountains, and so I spend half of August looking at the stuff in my yard and woods through the eyes of a grumpy itinerant poet with a twisted sense of humor1 and trying to find metaphor, simile, pun, any sort of literary device to obfuscate the quotidian.2