Cloud Kingdom at Dusk
On his back on a grass hill
lies a boy, who, in this dusky hour,
watches the sun paint a castle
with pastels on keep and tower:
a gentle peach upon the spire
that’s lit by a cloud dragon’s fire.
Tag: Poems
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An Amazing Poem about Moonbeams
Moonbeams
Sometimes, the moon drops down a line
when fishing for him, or her,
who’ll climb starward that silvery vine
in search of wild adventure.
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A Country Woman and Her Daughter
A Country Woman and Her Daughter
The girl enters with a glad meow,
summer weather following like a tail.
The screen door bangs on sunset’s brow
she pounces on her mother with a purr.
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Looking through a Microscope at the Universe
Evidently, you have it backward.
The microscope is for the microscopic,
the telescope for those enraptured
by the awesome scope of the cosmic.
Clearly, you’ve made a mistake.
Yet in life’s surprising petri dish
lies a macrocosm of creation:
startling stuff that makes up bird and fish,
complex atoms which incite elation,
that look like stars in a great black lake.
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Church Bell
Church Bell
The air’s dead in the cemetery.
Unmoving, the Spanish moss drapes
like monks’ robes in a monastery
in that gliding Reaper’s shape.
Live oaks stand as still as lead.
A sound. Through glossed air comes a knell:
sliding like glaze, sticking like dread,
conducting a new soul to its stone cell.
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The Candle
The Candle
A flame leaps on a taper’s end
like a child filled with joy
or when playing with his friend –
such warm, bright light in a boy.
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Desert Revival
Desert Revival
We once were all in desert dry:
scorched by sun, parched by thirst,
we’d thought that here we’d die.
But when the night came coolly
we felt we’d weathered the worst.
Our zest it quickened duly,
as life extended, untraversed.
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Season’s Chimes
Season’s Chimes
It’s inadequate, the sounding chime,
to convey the sundry dawns and dusks
that rise and fall like crops of flowers,
and seasons that stock and sap the bowers,
and fields aging from seed to fruit to husk:
these many great and small cycles of time.
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Heartgash
This wound no hand can stanch,
neither doctor’s nor family’s.
For it, no balm in homilies,
in truths, or olive branch.
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The Great Motivator
Happy Saturday!
Here’s a new poem.
The Great Motivator
Life, that grand adventure,
is fraught with zestful noise
of kings, paupers, alloys
strange, shaky, and unsure,
and is hung o’er by death,
clammy and ominous:
the dark, repugnant bliss
that vitalizes breath.
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Time
Who knows thee, Time, but the living?
Who fears thee, but those who know you?
Thy ways, strict and unforgiving,
cripple and bow that which you grew,
and bury what you brought from earth.
With march and mien unpitying,
you bring sadness in place of mirth,
then, again, you make the old new.
Such baffling brew is all thy worth
that draws death from life, birth from dearth.
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Summer’s Shades
Summer’s Shades
After spring’s pastels come summer orange.
Like a glaze, lilac hardens to purple,
carnation pink deepens to a rose tinge;
and powder blue turns cobalt, deep and full.
While on branch and twig, birds sing, perch, or cringe –
sweet songs praising, perhaps, shades bright or dull.
In summer the birds soar o’er prairies singed
by a sun that dyes grass like golden wool.
Like through a syringe, bright colors Time pulls,
while the moon, white skull, illumes the night strange.
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Recurrent
Upon the beach there lies a rainbow foam
white, at first, then with opalescent shine:
a shimmering hue in the dazzling sun
whose bubbles in their iridescent domes
display, like love, attractive and subtle signs
for brief and beautiful whiles, then are done—
burst like a primer when touched by the gun.
Now the beach grows cold; the gloaming glows gold,
while new waves that roll reflect stars of old—
and, again, the foam’s hues shimmer and run.
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Death in Autumn by a Waterfall
Death in Autumn by a Waterfall
In autumn’s gold-larched, cold Cascades
a river runs down a mountain—
whose slopes are hued in honeyed shades,
glazed in spray as from a fountain—
to kiss the stone of an abyss.
From water dashed against granite
a roar rises like plains thunder,
while the bay, from trees that dam it,
smells of moist earth from dense vapor,
and mist bedews sheer cliffs of shist.
And there in brumey, drizzly clag
waits the gloomy, black-robed reaper,
calm ’neath a cantilevered crag,
to bear an old careworn sleeper,
with soothing hiss, to the last bliss.
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Christmas Love
Revelers swing round lamp posts;
snow flakes swirl through the air;
street lamps cast golden circles;
church bells sound in the square.
We spent the last penny in our pockets
on a drink we shared in the bar;
now night has cloaked us in darkness;
the city lights are glimmering stars.
Warehouses are shut and forbidding;
a train stops with a screech and a hiss.
We stand by the cold quick river;
I brush snow from your cheek and we kiss.
This old American town tonight
was never once so bright by day;
the cruel agonies that color our lives
have faded to a harmless grey.
In the churchyard the graves are cracked and crooked;
it’s where friends and family lay remembered;
all their smiles and laughs still treasured
on this snowy twenty-fourth December.
We’d keep the parlor lit by soft light;
while music played, shadows danced on the wall.
I knew the good times could never last forever;
I just never knew how quickly they could fall.
But night brings charming dreams anew,
and when dawn comes they’re with me still;
I’ll share them with you this Christmas Day;
we’ll let hope shepherd us, come whatever will.
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Cartographers formerly inked squares
with dragons near their peripheries
and precipices over which ships tumbled
to Hell, or rocks, or seas
never known before.
And quack chiropractors with pricking needles
tattoo courses: their phony kinesiology
tracking down one’s back like generations
sprouting from a family tree.
These are maps, each a colorful arras
of pictograms and symbols,
an archive of devils and seraphs,
of the cosmos and the void.
Maps, one and all.
And their significance?
What shall be their importance,
ages and eons hence?
When the streams have dried,
and the crabs have hidden
in the sand of the ocean floor?
Only that maps etch themselves
and have recorded our paths and their ends
which lie in the distance like misty Incan ruins,
faint epitaphs of their architects.
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Nautilus
A good poem, like a good riddle,
May take a long time to unwind,
And in that time we find its pleasure.
The old nautilus shell—spiraling,
Whorled, and iridescent—shows at once
Its bright chambers to light
And hides its cavities in shadow.
Turn the thing, and find its great eye
Watching like a riddle, or a poem,
To see whether its strange bearing can be found.
They are ancient and pearly, these things,
Found on the floors of deep waters:
Hard without, soft within, cryptic and fascinating—
A verse in a nautilus, a nautilus in verse:
The labyrinth at home in its library.
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A Nighttime Stroll
While I marvel at the starred, phantom sky—
where silver clouds scud and the pale moon beams
in an epic ether, tinted ink blue—
a weary, worthy town slumbers and dreams
of fortune, of flight, or falling through space.
Where the air smells of pine sap and wood smoke,
fireflies blink, the dirt path leads into trees,
and pondside bullfrogs call mates with hoarse croaks.
When descending the hill through low grasses—
that run to the foot of a hemlock stand,
whose spectral shadows hide the wispy way—
there come a turn and vista of the land.
There lie the distant village and spired church,
the quiet houses, and earthy, quaint lanes
surrounded by arable wheat pastures:
rolling hills topped with rippling grains.
While on a solitary nighttime stroll
through rustling grass and the brisk, biting breeze,
in view of an old, wild, gleaming river,
there comes a worn, welcome feeling of ease.
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New Spring
The memories of raw winter fade like youth
before the season’s budding daffodils.
We used to walk this narrow path together
from our home to the crest of the bare hill.
There we stopped to watch whitecaps and sea oats.
Just as often, we stayed home, nude in bed.
While the coffee steamed over a blue flame,
I kissed your ribs, and you let yourself be led.
The dogs lazed, and dust dappled the light beams.
Such are the warp and weft of the past’s loom,
whose fabrics are of unstylish design.
I moved houses when the hyacinths bloomed.
I left behind our old, bayonetted ghosts.
Such battle-weary and war-torn phantoms
are taxing partners for the jaunty soul
and will hold a wistful mind at ransom.
I left pining wraiths in our kitchen and field,
where, with great care, we’d raised violets and phlox.
So, when spring came, and the air’s clean perfume
was beholden to fields of wild lilacs,
my mind involuntarily recalled you.
But I’m holding hands with a new lover,
so I take the unsought reminiscence,
lay it back among ivy and clover,
and walk with her from those bygone places,
into the sunlight that warms our faces.
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Downtown at Dusk
In April when the crepe myrtles and cherry trees bloom,
city folk are reflected in the rain’s puddles,
by water that serves as mirrors for impressions.
Wind whips billowy clouds into an eastern gloom,
while on the shiny street, a wayfarer huddles
beneath the tall windows of lordly professions.
The sun leaves plum-shaded shadows beyond buildings
and beams wash walls in apricot and tangerine.
In this fine twilight, a black cat’s lime-gold eyes glint;
hazy rays catch rich institutions’ burnished gilding.
Night falls on folk fat and merry, lonely and lean.
The cat leaps. Windows glow with a lemony tint.
In the darkness, people’s reflections disappear;
edifices are shades of coal and emery.
By night, people’s luminous private lives appear,
while day’s brilliant impressions fade to memory.
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Our Hope Rises – A Rondeau
Our hope rises like a strong wind,
buoying us as we ascend
from gloomy fogs we’re loathe to fly
into a clear and better sky,
one where fewer troubles attend.
From lonely walks with tragic ends
to crowded tracks among cold friends
where we’ve left our own dreams to die,
our hope rises.
Even as we misapprehend,
stumble, fail at making amends,
and live a self-evident lie,
still, if we but honor and try
to be noble before life ends
our hope rises.
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The Earth – A Sestina
The Earth
Our globe has more than mere water and land.
It has more than caps and boots of white snow,
more than a snaking navy cloak of sea,
more than a tawny belt of desert sand,
more than just gusts that the hidden wind blows,
and more than all the grass in a prairie.
For even when fire strips grass from prairie—
blackening the miles of once-golden land,
with ash swept as far as the hot wind blows—
even when spring’s buds are coated in snow,
and even when rich valleys turn to sand,
there is more potential in soil and sea.
There is regeneration. Sky to sea,
grass to ash, bones to dust: the wild prairie,
the austere mountains, and the humble sands
all change and renew as biomes of land.
The process is cold, delicate as snow,
and whirls through seasons just as the wind blows.
What will be from what has come. The old blows
of time, and the future we cannot see
together form renewal: a clean snow
that covers death in the wood and prairie,
leaves reviving water in thirsty land,
and brings tendrils from an infertile sand.
So even from unfruitful waste—the sand—
from pole to pole, so far as the wind blows,
each season breathes new life into the land.
Reefs made of dead oysters grow undersea,
while, on shore, fire revives the prairie,
and tundra is insulated by snow.
Ice ages come and cover Earth in snow.
Then time passes. Frost melts. Lakes become sand.
New species inhabit epic prairies.
And still, time passes. Winnowing winds blow.
Shorelines change, and bays are lost to the sea.
The treeless field becomes a wooded land.
So. Ephemeral are prairie and snow,
like shadows from land, like moisture from sand,
like a wind that blows the spray from the sea.
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The Mountain – A Villanelle
The Mountain
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
At the mountain’s foot are crows, black as coal;
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
The dawn of the trial holds its mystique:
a challenge to pioneers who are bold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
The trailblazer starts with certain technique,
but must break himself to make himself whole:
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
By dusk of the trial, the sun seems weak.
The long day has grown dark, starless, and cold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
But fight on, through the pain, the doubt, and shrieks.
Fight on, through the dismantling of your soul.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
Keep hope inside when you’re too tired to speak,
and pay with your spirit every steep toll.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
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The Ancient River – A Villanelle
The Ancient River
From a ridge, looking to a valley below—
one hazeled and shadowed by the sunrise,
with willows bending in the wind’s soft blow—
is an old river with a hooked oxbow.
Over it, the sun scumbles the cold skies
with her honeyed rays and pale, warming glow—
snuffing the stars, shortening the shadows,
eliciting a wood thrush’s sweet cries,
and thawing grass in the frosty hollow.
Beyond the horizon the river goes.
While ever-winding and wild its way lies:
now eddying in banks of ice and snow;
now coursing across a taiga’s meadows;
now sharpening a granite cliff’s sheer rise;
now beating rapids with its ceaseless blows.
Gone now are night and its fine indigo.
The gold sun illuminates the vale’s skies,
lighting the ancient river as it flows
into a future that nobody knows.
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Gliding wild above a cold, churning sea
that roils, crashes, thunders, and hurls spray
over the gloomy shores and mist-wreathed trees,
is the eagle, taciturn bird of prey.
Over dank sands, on frosty winds it flies—
through icy sheets of foul, sleeting weather
that mantle the beach in a leaden shawl—
into the leafless, witchy trees of fall,
where it roosts awhile to preen its feathers.
Ravens croak, and barred owls soar through the sky.
The eagle coils, leaps, wings through twilight’s pall.
On frigid thermals the bald eagle flies,
wheeling through the squally, wintry weather
watching whitecapped seas with menacing eye,
then bolting, like lightning striking heather—
its grim wings cocked, its bearing primeval,
its aspect awful—toward the cheerless bay.
There the eagle, with savage sorcery,
magics a salmon from the heaving sea.
Through the sleet, the fish is borne away,
wriggling in sharp talons raptorial,
to a high, cold, windswept, bone-filled eyrie.
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A Fire Burns in the Hearth
A fire burns in the hearth.
It is night, and the sky is clear.
The air is cold; the stars are bright;
The birches are leafless;
The ground is soft and rolling
Beneath a foot of new-fallen snow.
A man’s wet leather shoes,
Creased and furrowed with age,
Steam upon the stone hearth.
Near them, lying flat, are his wool socks,
Testaments to time outdoors.
By the socks are two feet,
One crossed over the other,
Soles to the flame.
Dry blue jeans and a plaid
Wool shirt cover him.
His eyes gaze into the fire.
The house is otherwise dark.
The stabled horses’ breath rises in the dark.
The old barn smells of oiled rope and hay.
Nickering, the young bay stamps her feet,
Then sidles nearer to the old palomino.
In a clearing in the middle of the yard
Stands an ancient sugar maple. Ice glazes
Its branches. When the morning
Sun comes, the tree will gleam and seem to shine.
It is an enormous tree, one estimated
To be two hundred years older than the
Hundred year old house. Like a cosmic phenomenon,
The tree draws things to it: Birds,
Squirrels, horses, dogs, and people.
Now a great-horned owl leaps
From the tree’s branches.
It flaps once, twice, thrice,
Then glides nearly a quarter mile.
The owl flies over the hoary mist
That floats above the frozen creek.
Then the owl is gone,
Disappearing into the pine forest that lies
Deep and cold and still,
Where in many minds
Mystery, horror, and romance
Still thrive in winter.
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Stars are birthed in clouds.
Stellar nurseries:
Helium, hydrogen, heat; collapse.
Ka-boom. Nascent stars scatter.
Pop pop pop: little lights populate
Our skies. Ideas illumine
The human map, pinpricks of light
In shadowed minds: starlight,
Enlightenment, Orion,
Ontology, Modernism,
The Milky Way. Constellations,
Philosophies chart courses
Across galactic oceans
And dark, moral seas.
Imagination: the distant bear, Ursa;
The Chippewa folk bear—
Both connect to creation.
Humankind aligned to stars
Since times primordial,
From fairy tales to sailor’s sails,
And stars, like people, grow old.
They are born, shine awhile,
Give light, warmth, aid life,
Then die, and vanish
In the stream of Time.
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A Good Man
I am a good man—
That’s what my employees all must say
(Or I’ll withhold their holiday bonuses
And have them working Christmas Day).
I am a good man—
For that you can take my girlfriend’s word
(And if my wife protests the sentiment,
Then, like me, pretend you never heard).
I am a good man—
I keep my word at any cost
(And all of those who say otherwise
Are just the losers and the lost).
I am a good man—
I am assured so every day
(And thus I find it very strange
That people don’t come my way).
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Old Charts
The tea leaves are muddled; the lies are twice-told.
A lot and very little have changed.
Folk are not called slaves but still they are sold,
And some marriages can still be arranged.
Still. Still: Ignorance, as before, is poor.
It thieves, robbing both the foolish and wise.
And still, honest work makes a cherished core;
Since before the Greeks, such work has been prized.
Some metaphors remain too: Hope, the bird—
Whether caged or just a “thing with feathers”—
Has, as its strong song, the uplifting word;
Its wings fly one out of foulest weathers.
So, much is hard to parse: wild, chaotic.
But the human spirit remains so clear.
Amidst the coiling maelstrom psychotic
Are love and care: old charts by which we steer.
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Perception
In the climactic anarchy of sex—
When the various passions are
Kaleidoscopic shards
Of colored glass,
scattered on a marver
For the gaffer
To roll a molten gob through—
Then disorder is at its most understandable.
Night lightning flashes,
Illuminating distant hills;
There’s a gasp of perception.
All the anarchy assembles
Into a sudden, coherent shape.
The forking, electric wires vanish.
Darkness falls again.
Groping, searching for a spark—
What lit
This planet’s immense and antres chamber,
Provided that brief, enlightening flame?
Later, when reflecting on that quick glimpse,
One already muddled,
She finds in it
Fatalism and independence,
Care, instinct, and hedonism:
The growth and transience
Of two human lives.
