Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Everywhere is a mirror, if you care
to look: red porch floor made glossy
by wind-blown rain, hummingbird
hovering over its surface. Round
soup spoon skimming, dipped
beneath to snare a disc
of ginger, coarse ruffled leaf.
Your eyes: across these bowls
of cooling tea, dark irises
enclosed in softer brown. Late
risen moon: careless coin, forgotten
wish tossed into shallow water.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
It started out simply, a game
of little questions as she ironed
a stack of laundry in the afternoons
while I colored pictures at the table
and rain drew circles on the windows—
What would happen if you went to school
and discovered you’d left your lunch
and had no money in your pocket? or,
What would you do if you came home
and the doors were locked, and no
one was here? I don’t remember when
the hypothetical problems became
more difficult to ponder, or if my mother,
pausing in the rhythm of her labors,
considered the metaphysics of these
further tests. Next, she asked questions
that seemed to be about other persons,
say, the neighbors next door: What
do you think would happen if one day,
you woke up to find your parents
had died? I’m sure it was only
to prepare me for the difficult
uncertainties of life, to begin
to teach my mind to cultivate
the detachment which comes
of acknowledging what it can’t
ever control. I can’t remember
if my dreams were suddenly
clouded with locusts and plagues,
if blood bubbled upon the waters;
or if I ever saw in them the angel
of death waving a sprig of rosemary,
walking on the grass and passing
beneath the trees which trembled
slightly, even those whose leaves
were toughened by a long summer.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
We get up to rain and fog; or rather,
smoke— the swamp still burning
in the month-long aftermath of
lightning strike. Not even a hurricane
could put it out. Whatever else one
might say, it is a form of dedication.
Name your materials, then: peat and fossils;
ethyl alcohol, grains soaked and swirled
in a silo of glass. Little clutch of wood
shavings; cone of paper, puff of breath.
Coals in a tempered dish. Some light
to take you past the midnight hour.
At a conference many years ago,
a Persian poet I didn’t even know
looked at me and said, Your stomach
is tight; don’t try too hard.
And it’s true. Don’t we want,
so many times every day, to unclench?
The world looms close. Only look up
at the brilliant fall sky
and the silver gleam of a plane
glancing off the buildings.
Somewhere in the woods, a bright
clearing where a tree came down.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Glyko Karythi: Green Walnut Spoon Sweet [Greek]
What falls, will fall of its own accord
because the season dictates it— acorns
and chestnuts on the ground, leaves now
beginning their russet plunge. No sword
needs to sever the filaments, no word
except what blows, mostly unseen, through
the late hours. Sometimes the light thud
of a globed body: hard green pear, gourd
bitter with unripe longings. Fall’s rewards,
we think, are tinted scarlet: apples, late-
blushed nectarines we gather, moving from tree
to tree. But also the rough, raw, blurred.
A stinkbug on the railing drops, not quite unheard,
to the porch floor. The seed’s housed in a shell
that cracks to metaphor. I marvel at how walnuts
packed whole in honey were once hard, uncured;
but yield all, steeped long in sweetness, complex art—skin,
flesh, bone you could cut, clear to the wrinkled heart.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
O, to grace, how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be.
Let Thy mercy, like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to Thee.
~ “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”
Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
hummingbird buzzing into the teeming
garden, I’ve followed your dizzy trail
these many years: from bed to bed, down
mountain trails, across oceans, to the last
bergamot flower’s four thin flagons nearly
wilted in the shade. So long I’ve dreamed
of climbing into a harness and zipping
across swaths of hidden forest, where
no one has yet catalogued the dream-shapes
of ferns and flowers beneath the canopy;
or dropping from a little plane with you—
one quick tug, and the pocket of silk
billows up like a mellow flame, its
rustle an ineffable name, to bear me
back down to checkered ground.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Shh. Say nothing of the racket of jays
in the crown of an oak, commotion
of feathers every which way—
I don’t know either how to find
the way back to the garden; only
now there is everything to say.
Moths lie still on the mesh
of the window, light
being the project
never quite done.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Where is your silver tea set, that gown of fine
embroidered silk, its train of gauze?
Ropes of pearl wound at your neck,
your tiara’s ruby diadem offset by the dark
waterfall of your hair— so self-
possessed, your bearing wrought by mountain
life, cold air, knowledge of the vengeful gods
whose hungers root, white and deep, hard
within the writhing animal’s entrails.
Askance, you look upon the roaring crowd
at carnival, eight thousand strong who’ve come
to gape at such uncommon beauty. You know the fog
will sift and bloom through centuries,
lay cloudy vermeil upon dissolving bones.
And we wonder if, beneath the city streets
breast-plated with garbage, the blood of some
old sacrifice still smolders, slow
flame the rain can’t quench.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
In a dream, an avocado tree in the backyard:
winds in typhoon season hailing fruit too high
to pick— In a dream, fluted shapes beneath
its branches: plumeria and ginger lilies.
Fragrant spikes turn brown at summer’s height,
wings folding back into the tree. Can you name
the shopkeepers all along the road into town,
opening their shutters in the morning?
The bakers have been at their trade
since well before the break of dawn,
pinching the yeasty hearts of bread
before their crusts darken at the touch
of flame. At the intersection, little boys
wait with rags to buff and shine the crowns of
leather shoes, and stray dogs roam the alleys
with hungry eyes. I turn and wonder
how the lake’s four corners have folded
into a handkerchief; how, looking
straight up from the street, the church’s twin
spires are compass points spinning slowly and I
their dizzy fulcrum, planted on the ground.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The beginning, or the end
of an affair? Water obeys
the tidal surge. Last night’s moon,
liquid wafer. Coin that pays
for air so clear today, sunlit
leaves green as June again.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
A restless wind turns over leaves
and enters, searching through the house
when we unlatch the windows.
*
Cobblestones emerge from under
veils of water and moss to turn
their eyes toward the sun.
*
What star is crossing rapidly toward another
in the heavens now? So glad for them, I turn
my face toward the light of their passing.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.