First Night in The New House, with Full Moon (#fullmoonsocial2015)

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August_moon

First Night in The New House, with Full Moon

The rising full moon fills in
a small cratered crack in the old window

where a stone or BB years ago must
have dug in before reflecting off its loss

As I sit with my son waiting for his breathing
to level into what I know will be dreams

of the many things he will make and be
the moon continues across the sky

and out of the window’s framing (though the moon
in the window cratered out bright and tiny

remains where it is
how like the past sometimes refuses to move)

#fullmoonsocial2015 Hey! Supermoon tonight. Write and tag your moon poems…

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Remember that fun time we all had, the last time there was a crazy moon out? Write a poem and tag  it on WordPress, Twitter, Instagram, the old barn door, wherever, as #fullmoonsocial2015. Mei Yao-ch’en and I believe you must. Go!

Excerpt Tuesday – Breakfast Companions – Durso

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So great to see LD’s poetry represented in art. Is it possible that Marcy Erb’s illustrative framing could somehow remind me of O’Keeffe AND Kenneth Patchen at the same time? Must be.

Excerpt Tuesday – Breakfast Companions – Durso.

Of Physics and Publications: Beloit Poetry Journal

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First, apologies for my relative absence from this site and yours, with only two poems poking their scruffy heads up over the last five weeks or so. I was in a battle with the laws of physics. More specifically, I was taking a physics course at the University of Virginia. It’s a long story. Okay, it’s not that long a story. It was only because I have lived in this physical world for so long already that I managed to survive, more by wits than learning. At any rate, the transcript for the course is now on its way to my undergraduate home, 28 years after I took my last undergraduate class, to fulfill a distribution requirement unrelated to my field of study. And at some point before the leaves fall off the trees this year, some document attesting to my B.A. in English from Cornell University should actually reach me. What was it like for a fifty year old guy attending a summer course with 18 year old athletes and pre-freshmen?

Long story. But one I’ll tell in time, if there is no more pressing news. But for today, there actually is some news.

During this time of my Sisyphean struggle with inertia, momentum, torque, and midterms, I received notice from Beloit Poetry Journal that they wish to publish a few of my poems.

I am guessing most of you are familiar with BPJ, but if not, feel free to pay them a visit here. My poems will appear in the Winter 2015 issue.

For the moment, I am happily relieved of my recent burdens–remembering the relationship of energy to volts to power to current, and so on–and prepared to get back to writing poetry. I hope you’re still out there to read some, and I will once again be lurking around your own sites to read all that I’ve missed since mid-July.

On a Photograph of Sky on the Surface of a Pond Seen Through a Tree and Therefore, By Extension, On Magnetic Resonance Imaging

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On a Photograph of Sky on the Surface of a Pond Seen Through a Tree and Therefore, By Extension, On Magnetic Resonance Imaging 

The thinness of things

is real and holds itself like the only breath
an image can take.

The tree digs through the sky.
On the other side its heart

emerges upside down but still centered
between the branching out

and the taking root. Your life
plunges outward

like a branch occupying space

in a photograph showing neither
its beginning or end

the pond’s surface surely capturing it
somewhere outside the frame

where I cannot see what you see

only the empty sky beneath the tree line
and an image breathing out

to a moment it will never see: a leaf
rippling depth across the landscape

Kwakiutl

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Kwakiutl

On a long journey. The road darkened like glass
after the candle behind it has guttered.

I met the forest there like a corner rounding everywhere.
Birds who’d never heard themselves before were asking

for their names. Though we could hear the train beyond the ridge
we knew it was empty except for a woman anxious

she’d missed her stop as she dozed. We walked but I could not hear
your step behind me over the sound of the leaves growing.

I am tracking a number in the dark. It keeps changing typeface
to throw me off the trail but it is the only set of tracks ahead of me.

Even as I slow down I am accelerating. Your own footsteps
are catching up to me but I am afraid the number ahead will tire

at last and I will catch it, panting on a hip-high rock among the pine.
I should go back to the woods in the daytime, who ever thought

you were nocturnal, and in the light splaying
among the leaves I am not afraid of numbers.

leaf

In the Month of Your Birthday

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In the Month of Your Birthday

Mid-afternoon storm hours behind me, on the walk home.
Slight breeze triggers rain in the maple, cascading

leaf to leaf in the layers of small shadowed sky, not a memory
of rain but the actual rain, retained, in the vast shadows, actually

falling, and isn’t memory an actual thing moving in a real space,
and like the rain in this maple, not touching the ground.

Thoughts As I Wait for the Thunder Moon to Appear

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Thoughts As I Wait for the Thunder Moon to Appear

Chuang Tzu asked, why is what the world does worth doing?
The thunder moon which I cannot see teaches me that it is unavoidable.

Regardless of all that I know and do not know,  it is launched without slowing
over the clouds. As the arrival of clouds cannot be avoided, neither can the departure

of clouds. It may not be worth doing, Chuang Tzu said. And yet
it cannot be left undone. I am looking without seeing, Chuang Tzu,

and it may be enough that I am no longer looking for the moon.
In the quiet, unseeable, the small chicory flower unfolds towards dawn.

As the departure of life cannot be avoided, neither can its arrival.
When the moon’s no longer needed, clouds break open like blue petals.

Dog Days

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Dog Days

Nothing sturdy in the stem.
Nor of legacy in the one-season leaf.

All dogs must die, but not at once.
Like grass, let’s grow monuments

too numerous to be destroyed
in a single death. We’ll sit with this one

through the moments
we’ll not remember in a year

to remember we can build
what matters from pure light

recognize love same as we know
the texture of both sides

of this summer leaf waving
welcome and farewell

in the single breeze passing
from invisible past

to invisible future. All dogs
like summers will pass

but not before we live them
through. Let’s leap into

the coming stillness.
Let’s make the favorite meal.

Let’s sit with this one, no more
special than a blade of grass,

great as any dog or summer ever lost,
and let it last as long as it lasts

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Last Poem of Spring

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photo

Last Poem of Spring

Boxing up books. It is almost summer.
So many different flowers are packed in

the small flower garden. Gin and tonic
in a jar with ice, as light leaks away.

There are the dead, the lost,
the memories floating in patterns

like fireflies, their season starting
with a wild inland storm, mountains

disappearing behind the gray wall