A happy birthday
with my mother, as it was
fifty years ago.
A rainy Wednesday
like a day in Seattle
nineteen fifty-nine.
Half a century
in my book. What verse will I
write on the next page?
Posts Tagged poem
Poet at 50 (3 haikus)
Oh America
Oh, America, you big stupid brute, I love
your huevos rancheros and black coffee,
the way you dance on Saturday night,
your Southern accent and blue denim,
soft magnolia breeze and white-washed
clapboard churches. You are my neighbor,
my old girlfriend, my old demented uncle
who makes me turn away in shame from
such crazy talk, so much blood spilled,
wiped on your shirt. Isn’t it about time
you grew up and opened your heart to love?
Jasper Johns, "Green Flag"
(I am) A dull-edged blade
I am a dull-edged blade
sawing through the day’s tough hide.
A swift and terrible slashing is best
when the thickly callused surfaces
will not yield to the first tentative stabs.
Now the pink flesh gives way under
my insistent pressure, the bone
a hard gray stela where I make my mark.
The dogs can suck the marrow.
Blood is my ablution, and pain
is the whetstone with which
I sharpen myself for the next beast.
Middle Age
Lately I find myself slightly out of step,
like a man trying to catch up
to a scrap of paper
on a windy day.
Around me twirl the dancers in perfect time,
shoes shiny and stomping out
their happy tunes,
a blur.
I stand in the middle
unable to focus.
Is that why it’s called
middle age?
Sisyphus Resigned
This is not the old tale of pushing the boulder up the hill.
My life is a heavy history of recrimination and defeat
that pins me to this slot canyon, sun-dried, mummifying,
only a sip of warm urine left to drink. If my teeth were
sharp enough, I would gnaw through gristle and bone
and walk out of here a free man, with only blood
marking the passing through my final days.
Every Falling Leaf
I worry about the birds — these birds,
singing here in this tree, whose names
I do not know, who best, I think, be
heading south — and all the children
of all the friends I have known and forgotten,
in cars on dark, curvy roads. Where
could they be going on a night like this?
The sky is too wide, the forest too deep
to fret for every falling leaf. For this,
men invent gods, multitudes of them.
They watch over fish and fowl,
beast and man who creates them
in the image to which he aspires —
all knowing and all seeing.
I see the skunk — that one
dashing across the big curve
between South Range and Trimountain —
sleek, beautiful, head down, tail flying,
a black and white banner of night.
Take care, fellow traveler, you and I
have little ones waiting at home.
Poet, Write What You Know
All I know is this headache.
Flaring pain circumscribes my world.
You might say it hurts like being circumscribed
without anesthesia. This is how you might think
if there were room for you in my head.
Poets don’t write about love and roses
so much any more. I’d love to be rid
of this headache; it blooms like a red, red rose.
It hurts so much I cannot remember
if this headache caused the rain
ot the other way around. I feel like
I could vomit up roses, a bouquet,
long-stemmed even. I have just enough strength
to put down the pencil and close my eyes.
