Do Bears hide under bridges
Just lolling in the brook?
Do Fairies fly with Midges?
I never thought to look.
Just lolling in the brook?
Do Fairies fly with Midges?
I never thought to look.
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This will have me caught up through today! Muse handed me a free one. Known
when I finish a poem even if it's shortened or not finished but has to be, for posting, I clamp it tight to me: holding it in order protecting its meaning visiting it again and again whispering it in my mind never vocalizing never a sound or percussion, cuniform artifact meaningful to no one but its maker. I will never fix one finish one or return to one in any construction, like my sketches: I will crave to return change it watch it change, I will want to alter poem and sketch alike, but once named each piece is from then forward known. Blueberry Orchard: Spring
I never thought of blueberry orchards. I'd seen untamed bushes dark and sooty red tipped in deep wooded swamps like wild cranberries a few plants clustered in tiny enclaves. Like cranberries incarcerated as livestock in straight line bogs contained and perfect no longer wild I pictured blueberries precise and orderly long straight rows pollarded, easy picking for machines. Here, in a blueberry orchard tugging constricted limbs picking stalks and thready vines from twiggy fingertips. combing long soft dry ochre grasses like coarse hair from the bases easing snarling grey bearded poison ivy from the trunks little twig whips sting lip and cheek and eye snapping out from nowhere and never blood; a warning greeting. Here, in a a blueberry orchard Small enclaves sun whitened bark and pink lichen each blueberry stretched outward reaching across rows red tipped twigs wildly tame.  Taming Tiger
Taming a tiger. Taming a wild landscape. Equally hard: one kills you faster.  Yesterday's Wind Yesterday's wind pulled the last mummified cherries from an early Winter deadfall and blew scores of house sparrows across the parking lot.  Maple Devil
We were cutting canes and vines and dead goldenrod away in the blueberry orchard all down the rows, when down off the mountain comes this baby dragon, this tiny taloned hand! Scoops up a dozen bushels of dead maple leaves swirls them, barrel rolls them, a big brown fat wheel of dead maple leaves engulfs the picnic table flips it upside down but unseen in the fracas then pirouettes like a little dust devil across the lawns and sits demurely down under the last maple. Also, it roared.  First Day Back
Sugar Maple warm in the sun under my hand. Smooth, blistered, algae on it's bark the color of beryl. A startlement of snake under a quaking aspen, warming, knotted around dewberry bramble, gold speckled in an acorn cap. The little curve over a rise thick with low shrubs in June, but here in April, all skin and bones! Laughing at their nakedness I run past trailing my palm over gold curls on the big yellow birch. I ran right past Sam's Dell, around the tree and under the bobcat branch and up to the grasses and came to a dead stop wondering how I'd got so far and how much I'd missed. I turned around to find I was standing under the last pagoda tree on the path. Thank you, I said, for bringing me back. Any reason the Poem-A-Day can't be a song? Hum a swing piano blues:
How Come Blue? How come Blue sounds so pretty? It just rolls off my lips. Not like green curled with envy, more like red as a kiss. How come Blue sounds so pretty pulling soft at my strings? Buried gold deep below me whispers low, softly sings. How come Blue sounds so pretty? It just rolls off my lips. For I'm blue for the moment for the place where we kissed. Bluebird boxes on a Blueberry farm. In lieu of a poem until I catch up.   "Pantoum" form of poetry, my very loose interpretation. It has to do with repeating lines in sequence through the poem, plus it's only supposed to be three stanzas but I never read instructions and have made up my own.
The Music of Water Over Stones If nothing else, the place we lay together, there, the music of water over stones still soothes strangers into lovers. For you, for an afternoon (if nothing else) I steward that place. Listen: There! the music of water over stone. There is a tree, named for you, for an afternoon that sang a few graceful hours I steward that place! Listen: If nothing else, there is a tree, named there: the music of water over stones that sang a few graceful hours. |
