Erratum
Smaller than a pen’s
mistake on paper
misplaced dosh
over the letter next
to the i are the wings
of the small insect
opening and closing at the
center of this thought
Erratum
2 Replies
Tag Archives: not haiku
Fore-cast
Fore-cast
The breeze comes as promised
without rain but we don’t mind
so much is unreliable a sunny
afternoon unpredicted is welcome
and as last year and the years
before on summer days like this
yellow walnut leaves cascade
a promise the breeze won’t break
If Lucky
If Lucky
We stay with the day just another wave
sliding into the palm of sand so inclined
to hold what is offered even so briefly
as if time made a difference when
the difference has left us these lives
on the thin film between sky and earth
I’m good at earthquakes
you said and you at thunder
After Rain, Foothills
After Rain, Foothills
Remnants of clouds
wasps hovering over the hollows
The storm a black wall in the sky
a father turning his back
cars break the quiet
thoughts attending their own wake
and now you
are you you or what you mean
from “The Drift”
from The Drift
In the dream the same beach
we’ve never been to together
is calling though once we stood
on a jetty watching the sun
read the gathering clouds
the riot act sometimes you have
to lower yourself as well to circumstances
to rise some place else entirely
*
The waves here
slide across and beneath
each moment grand tectonics
some brought to level
annihilation by incremental loss
some subsumed by a surge
of gain so that what they’ve gained
gains them in final shape
Rising Tide, Waxing Moon Setting Early
Waves crash—a murmur
in the moon’s ear—still asking
who is pulling whom
Summer Song
Summer Song
Distant motorbike resonates like a bullfrog
in the summer dark, a mating call of bars
closing and the steam of recent rain
rising to the reducing horizon
Chicory
Chicory
My boy falls asleep by my side each night
cats sometimes fight in the alley even in rain
walking in the hallway past the open door
one daughter sleeps suspended by pillows
the other flings everything aside and sprawls
face down and then I’m here room as wide
as a hundred year old house and your guitar
sits waiting for you and I sit waiting
I finally hear the crickets they’re late this summer
when a poem begins to emerge it begins
like stink bugs and hard backed bugs
charging the window screen like rhinos
then when all that fails like moths alighting
holding their ground like kites in instant photos
and when that fails I finish my tea and listen
the crickets I hear are from a midnight walk
in Ithaca on Coddington Road 28 years ago
in the dark of no streetlights and miles of field
when my soul first disappeared into a million
songs with no refrain and when that all fails
I go out and look at the gangly weed of a plant
in the front yard I spared from the weeder for
No good reason one afternoon the next morning
it was full of modest flowers the color of late May
skies closing up at noon like it was the old school
diner of the plant world since then I have noticed
it everywhere on the highway’s side every morning
the short lived beauty newly bloomed each day
and I think I’ll write about that but cannot find
a poetic way to describe a plant made entirely
of old ladies’ elbows and eye wrinkles that turns
into a goddess in the cool morning air so
I sit waiting along with your guitar it is not a question
you will come up and carefully take it
from its case and hold it and find the chord
that brings me back to this
Spirit
Spirit
I don’t believe in spirits but I believed in the spirit
of my first unborn daughter because I saw her
framed by the blue gray screen, a face with expression
and a body with movement. What else constitutes
a spirit if not those? My wife’s great aunt Julia
pulled onto route 17 in Murrell’s Inlet and into
the path of a white pickup truck; she was flown
to Charleston not by angels but by helicopter
and when we saw her she was still alive
but I knew whatever was Aunt Julia was not there
and I resented when a hospital chaplain came in
to pray with us over her. Couldn’t he see that
her spirit had already fled or been knocked out of her
by four tons of steel? Spirit as more than consciousness
or less, as essence, a vector of character even before
experience presses its thumbs into your clay, a vector
which I recognized by its absence in Aunt Julia
having seen it preside so often over a cup of tea. But of my daughter’s
spirit I cannot claim the same familiarity. And how
did I feel it was with us that painful night
flashing in the air around our grief
as panicked as we were, the three of us sure
there was some solution, a way to get back
to the world just before that evening?
*
I don’t get visits from spirits that often. Aunt Julia
has never come back to have tea or hoot her
wise southern laugh with me in a kitchen of my dreams.
I’ve not once seen the face of my unborn daughter and
on occasion I think if she had not left us that night
the three who came after her would never have
existed. And who then might have? Because I don’t believe
in spirits I have even discounted visits from the only
two to keep up with me, my first pet Tuna Cat
who suffered much before his death and my poetry teacher
Archie; they last came to see me together. Archie had a new place
just under the earth and though the floor was all dirt
it had a kitchen and everything. And Tuna, sitting
on the counter. “I like it here, Jeff,” Archie said to me,
and I think, I think he meant it.
Driving Down the Mountain After Dusk
Driving Down the Mountain After Dusk
Dusk is finally gone but it has left a mark on the dark green slopes
like pencil has been rubbed over everything
You know there are trees there pines and oaks maples others
but now all you can verify is that it’s a hill with the disposition
of trees or a tendency towards treeness but it’s too dark
to prove the trees are there and we’re moving too fast
following a line we can’t see the end of but which we know
ends before daylight
Translations from the English 