Poems & poem-like things – Page 1107

April 8, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The Penitent Roasted by the Sun

This entry is part 5 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

For the sin of thirst, surround yourself with mirrors
& wait for baptism.

For the sin of sensitivity, plant yourself among lawn ornaments,
neon-bright & obvious.

For the sin of poverty, expose yourself
to the cauterizing desert of the sky.

Build a stockade between the storm door & the doghouse
to incarcerate the green thieves of light.

You have lived too many years as a parasite,
drunk the high-fructose corn syrup of paradise.

It’s time to tunnel into the brazen day
& shrug off your integument, oh locust.

Under what basket or milk crate have
you hidden your cry?

April 6, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The Man Who Lived in a Tree

This entry is part 4 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

Turn up the lights on the hominid pen.
It’s feeding time, though some
don’t even know they’re hungry.
You can give them each
a slice of manna if you like.

See the one who squats in the crotch
of that tree? Almost since birth
he’s exiled himself from the ground.
Unlike the others, he seems to realize
something here is missing—
a grotesque sensitivity that makes him
a wolf in this wood, this tree
he clings to like a mother.
When the wind agitates its leaves
he hugs himself & rocks
back & forth, moaning.

Unlike the others who gibber with awe,
he wants nothing to do with us,
& recoils from your face
as if from a stone that the river
never learned how to read.
But see how his tree glows
in this lurid light, like a harp
rearing above a dark-suited orchestra?
Someday soon we will reunite it
with its former companions,
that whole forest enjoying
eternal life: value-added products
of our loving care.

***
UPDATE: Marly Youmans‘ series of five poems in response to paintings by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (including “The Man who Lived in a Tree”) are now live on his website. Go look.

April 2, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The Comfort of Angels Attending the Dying

This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

You always dreamed of a death
in the open, stopping at the wye
in the highway that runs past
the shell of the old mill,
the land like a black lung
infiltrated by bronchial trees.
You’d keep your eyes pinched shut
against whatever brightness might spoil
the immaculate desolation.
After so many tiresome years
of living for others, this would be
your own time at last,
alone on the baked earth.

But it seems the Father won’t let you off
that easy, sends a pair of his goons
to bookend your shoulders
& breathe cabbage in your ears.
Meaty arms wrap around your chest
like pythons & begin to squeeze.
Let’s go for a ride, they whisper.
Death in the open — you’re finding out —
means all bets are off. The air turns
dangerous with blades.

March 30, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The Grave Dug by Beasts

This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

Solitude is a burrow
into which you fold yourself
like a letter into an envelope

stamped Return to Sender.
It’s the metal flag raised
for the postman

or for the prisoner of conscience
still loyal to his cause,
waiting for the sky to change

its mind about being a roof.
His letters come back to him
with all the words blacked out,

leaving only the punctuation:
tooth marks, claw marks, tails.
This is the solitude

of St. Anthony, beset by lust
& anger, indolence & madness:
who wouldn’t want

to lose himself in
an unmarked grave
excavated by indifferent beasts?

March 29, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Tree-sitter

It sat down in my pool.
Swayed like a sapling.
Spoke to me in its dreams,
which were as plush as truffles
fruiting in the dark.
Luna, it said, Luna— as if I
were its pale progenitor.

Others of its kind boiled in & out
like tiny, earth-bound storms,
chewing with a fury,
& my cousins shook the mountain
when they came down.
My strange familiar clung to me
with its naked forelimbs & howled.

It had one short root with which
it communicated to others
of its kind, reaching through
the air somehow.
Where did it go, that larva?
Did it ever manage to spin
a real cocoon?

Submissions for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees are due Monday — March 30. Details here.

March 27, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Two-minded

I believe one thing
in my poems &
another in my prose,
like a window that opens
onto different yards
depending on the time of day
or the presence of other
open windows, like a road
that leads sometimes into town
& sometimes deeper
into the forest, where
this morning the raindrops
glistened on every
bare twig, a ruffed grouse
throbbed in the leftover
corners of night like
a drum of war, & I pulled
a long white hair through
the eyes of my left boot
in lieu of a bootlace
to keep its stealthy tongue
from giving me away,
scout as I am for an invading
army of distractions,
believing one thing
in the morning &
another in the flat afternoon
when objects lose
their luster & fall back
into the vacuum
of anywhere-but-here.

March 26, 2009August 1, 2015 by Todd Davis

Letter to Dave from the Karen Noonan Center on the Chesapeake Bay

This entry is part 11 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

The last two days out on the bay I observe
the tundra swans leaving the flat horizon
of this water, arcing over tidal pools
and the inescapable prairies of marsh grass.
You are on your mountain to the north, closer
to their calls as they wing their way away
from this estuary that saves them each winter.
After so many months of shifting land, of rising
and falling tides, their heavy bodies must ache
for a release, a reprieve to our comings and goings,
whether by boat or air or, oddest of all, by car,
which looks nothing like the way these birds travel.
It’s the unyielding tundra where they will give
themselves over to their own desires. I suppose
most of us need the solid earth beneath our feet
as we choose a mate. The undulating waters
of our hearts make it hard enough to remember
which flyway to follow, let alone how to spend
those transitory days in the half-light of summer
brooding over what we’ve made between us.

—Todd Davis

March 25, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Rat Catcher to His Rats

Collection of the British National Media Museum
(photographer unknown)

You lady’s purses, you tack-toed
wallops of white silk, you grim grins,
I have you on my string as good
as legal tender for my room & board
at any inn, my dog & I
welcome there only so long
as you are not, my beauties—
& so we’re tied together in a way.
This broad-brimmed hat wards off
two kinds of yellow, sun & scorn.
How dare we subsist on the hard-
won crumbs of brutes!
But the trap is a good teacher.
Somewhere you must have
your own canny king, making free
with all the best morsels of dark
& swarming nations.

March 23, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Spirit captions

A headache came tapping like a convict at the end of a tunnel.

We were on the air ten hours a week offering bad advice & good pewter spoons.

I would no sooner open my mind than a bad idea would slip in & begin to replicate itself.

With factories on all sides, flakes of soot sometimes grew to grotesque proportions.

The rabbi warned us never to go out without our yarmulkes.

I’m a positive thinker. We create our own destiny, you know.

My twin died before we were born. We were best friends all through school.

I’ll never forget the astonishment on that Hun’s face.

I’m telling you, Doctor, the moon follows me everywhere I go.

I was a punch line in the comics with my empty thought-balloon.

Turnips, radishes, potatoes, leeks… I am getting in touch with my white roots.

I’ll have you know that “laudanum” comes from the Latin word for praise.

Spirit catchers are an old, old thing. What I want to know, Mr. Hope, is how you capture light.

“Man with a spirit face appearing” is the work of the spirit photographer William Hope (1863-1933).

Feel free to leave additional caption suggestions in the comments.

March 22, 2009March 13, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Over the Hills

This entry is part 10 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

Dear Todd,

I was taking the broom for a slow shuffle
around the dining room when I heard
the fluting of wild swans & rushed out,
scanning the sky till I spotted the long wedge
high above the hollow, heading north.
They were as dark against the sky
as we must be to them against the ground,
pausing in our Sunday labors, mouths open
as the swans pass over the train tracks
& the river, over the interstate & the quarry’s
enormous silent megaphone,
over a cardinal singing in a barberry hedge,
over junker cars & houses sheathed
in fading asphalt shingles,
over old carpets left out in the yard
to kill the grass where a vegetable garden will go,
over the burrows of amorous woodchucks
and the leaf nests of squirrels,
over sheets & long johns flapping on the line.
The swans seemed tireless. Their one refrain
might as well have been “Over the Hills
& Far Away,” as in the Burl Ives song
about the piper’s son. They’d keep it up
long past the last tree, I knew — until
the land cleared of almost all clutter,
there where the darkness disappears for months.
I went back to my sweeping,
assembled the dust from every corner,
then opened the door & ushered
that small blue hill into the wind.

I also shot a mediocre video of a flock of tundra swans this morning. You can watch it here.