opaque

opaque

I am painting today, near-black bark
and a sash of strewn sand, a mélange
of what fills my heart to its tender brim.
And that brim, how it bows and quivers,
yet obeys the fragile laws that contain it.
My brushes grow stiff, ignored as I am

coaxed by the dull grey wings of winter
birds. January is tintype, a dim remembrance
of an argent day and yet another to come.
But I am hungry for this pallid vista,
glad that it pushes hard against the panes,

a homeless season that groans for hearth
and stew, knows it will never have either.
I will paint the road that brought me here,
the sooty bridges and the river’s iron
spine. There will be a hinge somewhere
that has no rust, a sterling pin that slips

like a starved man into the dole. Light
will bloom in hues stolen from the moon.
When I am done it will seem as if the canvas
is a flecked sky stretched on a frame of opal
bones. You will find yourself drawn within.

birdsong

I offer my perfection, severed and apart,
the swan’s glorious neck, white, silent.
Like feather laid on feather, I build
this place, temple to my own frail god.

No one comes or goes, yet how the halls
are filled with tails of sashes slipping
into doorways. I say silence, but listen.
There is a windchime’s bright refrain,

water over stone, the wind’s desire to cease.
Peonies sugar the air. The terrazzo hoards
the day’s heat. I preen and practice
before the fountain’s pool. I am a wing

splayed and honored, without purpose.
Even my beauty is incomplete. Here
I am, disjointed, dancing, a little hen
hanging chandeliers inside her coop.

Lantern Festival

Tonight the rare moon persists, calls echoes
from every nook. Winter has stripped
the lace from the pistachio, left it
black and keen against the cloudbank.
I have cared too much about the revolution

of barren planets, the climate of the sun,
the dream of water plumbed from stone.
By daybreak I expect a cure, a dose
of ice and sunlight. It is building

that calls me now. My desk bows
beneath the weight of strategies
and maps. I will swathe the windows
with crepe, ignore the bait of star
and branch. Even the snow will lose

its pretty riddles. My lips are lined
with ten-penny nails. I wait for morning,
for the moon to melt into the west,
a pale votive snuffed by my breath.

Antonio López García

Antonio’s canvas


Boundaries collapse within my fist,
crushed like ancient lace.
When I lift my hand to the wind
it is sacred to watch
them sough the air with immunity.


I have not finished the bletted quince.
I am waiting for time to reveal
the hues of this fisted apple.
The door is peeling now. The paint
has given up its desire to oversee


the small leavings of this house.
Has it been months, already
since I came inside , since the orchard
bloomed and scattered velvet
blossoms on my windowsill?


My brush takes me beyond these walls,
past the confines of the apoapsis.
The quince will flower again
before the winter moon is snagged,
full and ripe, in her branches.


http://www.tdludwig.net/painting/lopez.htm

hope

hope, originally uploaded by mrs. french.

Oh, it has been so long since I have felt good about the future of my country. It is a beautiful thing to feel hopeful. I am proud to be an American on this day.

Ike

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has been battered by storms this summer.




Ike was a ferocious hurricane that left a swath of destruction in his path from the Turks & Caicos Islands across the Caribbean, Haiti, Cuba and the Louisiana and Texas coasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
If you are interested in helping in the recovery effort I reccommend the following institutions~

Operation Blessing International~ http://community.ob.org/site/PageServer

Galveston Rising~ http://www.galvestonrising.com/

American Red Cross~ http://www.redcross.org/

after the water

There is a always a threshold for things
that alter us, a clean edge at the start,
the surprise of it like a blade pressed cold
against the throat. The first wave is forgotten

in the next. Fierce water rises like a wicked sun
to spread across the fields, the little houses,
the ponies with their bright new shoes.
Oh, the tumble and spill of cobbled hopes,

the surge of flowerpots and paperbacks!
And there my heart dissolves, in the unbound
Bay, like a snow flake swallowed by the tide,
assimilated so that I might wrap around the fallen

palms and beams, might taste the rust and ruin.
It is nothing, no solace, no redemption,
but a useless rag I use to blot the tortured landscape.
I will not ask for pardon, will not assume

it matters. Better I was a splintered pole,
something stark and astonishing, than this quiet
sadness that only laps the dirty hem of sky,
an imperceptible swell that bears no boat or seed.

August

sea dream , originally uploaded by Sea Dream Studio.

Beneath a coronet
of scrim spun clouds I wait
for nothing. Expectation has flown
away like millet on a parched wind.

My open hands drop only silver
shadows onto the prairie.
I am no emptier than before.
It is only the willingness to stop

the approaching penumbra that alters me.
When possibility is recognized,
met face to face in every surface
that offers clear reflection, I see

that it is but another property
of light, a coveted revision
of the familiar spectrum.
The summer sun sets

the horizon trembling . I aim
to fill my arms with gold and amber
beams, to hoist the impossible
weight of luminance back into the sky.

yield

A year is an arc, a swath cut
deep into the earth. Mud and ice,
clover, violets, dust and dew
occur within. Days fall, a steady rain
of pebbles down the steep sides,

grit so fine it chafes the lungs,
rocks as jagged as hasty lies.
I have walked from June to June,
barefoot and sweetly shod.
No matter. The stones still bruise.

Sand finds its way into my bed.
Sun and storm pursue my share
of sky, duel above like lazy gods .
In these twelve months graves
have blossomed, flat as fungus,

spread their spore-like, rotten
flowers, an unavoidable plague.
Joys are harder to define,
closer held. I dare not speak
of them. Gems so precious stir

the greed of trifling deities.
A year is a song, the descant
honed and smooth. I hear it
in the ryed wind. It swings
like a blade, closer, closer.

imagine that!

http://ibpc.webdelsol.com/best2007.html

Interboard Poetry Community

POEM OF THE YEAR

May 2007-April 2008

Judged byKelly Cherry

Bad Weather by Dale McLain

Submitted byWild Poetry Forum

Judges Comments

Poem of the Year
Bad Weather

It is the music first of all that tells me this is a poem to pay attention to. The poet varies short and long sentences, carrying the cadence of them straight through to the slant-rhyme couplet that brings the poem to completion. The diction holds steady thoughout; nothing strays beyond the tessitura of the poem. This very American poem ("Sheetrock," "twister" "prairie boat") adheres to a classical sense of proportion that is equally evident in the speaker's statements. The same is true of the emotions it contains: we hear the speaker's fear and exhilaration but also a carefully calculated self-mockery that derives from years of experience with the phenomena. ("You can grow accustomed to storms," we were told in the very first line, and the poem demonstrates that you can. Accustomed, but by no means passive.) Because the self-mockery is handled lightly enough, it charms and does not depress. The poet's gentle acceptance of the emotions stirred by the storm gives to the poem a good-naturedness that the reader feels must be inclusive: reader and poet can experience--let's say weather--the storm together. --Kelly Cherry

Bad Weather


You can grow accustomed to storms.
Every night they shake our sheetrock,
set the bricks trembling. Mortar remembers
it is only sand. Our jaunty roof begs
to be doffed. And I huddle within my frame
with dread and an awful wish that the past proves
its redundancies, that miles away the twister
will drop- not here, not now when I have just
remembered my own name.

When the windows bow like Galileo's glass
I begin to pray to deities yet unnamed,
beseech the clever stars that hide
behind the churning ceiling. I confess
that peace is not my plea. Instead I ask
for more colors and a measure of strength
to face the wind. The red oak fusses
at my window, whines and scratches to come in.

But it holds, this vine-covered house,
stands on its wide flat bottom, a prairie boat
anchored fast in hard white clay and history.
Within I slip off my shoes. Tonight is not the night
that I will walk on broken glass and wear the unmistakable
face of disbelief. The thunder's growl begins to lose
step with the lightning. In the attic rafters sigh
and creak like scrawny old men. I lay my head
on the last damp cloud where dreams of whirlwinds
and flying shingles wait. I sleep
like a town wiped off the map.

time flies

time flies, originally uploaded by Sea Dream Studio.

defining my macrocosm

There is solace in the company of cedars,
a fluidity to the air by this familiar creek.
Larger stones bare their backs to slatted sunlight,
dry in the eternal prairie wind. Darting minnows
find this stream too shallow, but it is my ocean,
the opposite shore another coast, its sloped bank

built of foreign soil. The climate breeds all gusts
and unnamed storms. Legend has it only fools
tie up there, hitched to rock as brittle as midwinter.
On my side there are bluebottles born to stitch
tall reeds, a ruffled chirr concocted to cover silence
like smut on a lantern’s curved glass. I am obliged

to drowse and consider the fording of this fabled sea.
How easily I could gain transport across so thin
and unremarkable a spill. Barely a drop would follow
me into the alien copse. Already I wear the costume
of a native, woven like a scar into my willing flesh.
But even in sleep I lie anchored, sunk fast and deep

in bisque and history. I awaken to a small eddy
where frostweed petals spin like stars in a fluid sky.
Behind me waits a well-worn path, certain passage
engendered by my own steady hand. As I walk
I cannot help but note the dampness of my lacy hem,
the way my skirt is weighted with the froth of dreams.

blue, originally uploaded by Sea Dream Studio.

dispatch

I long for a voice like a wing,
feathered and soft, that I might tell
you everything that hides within.

The perfection of plumes
laid side by side, hollow shafts
that ache for air, a subtle iridescence
in slanted light; these things might speak
for me in truth and tenderness.
And then the sky would drop
a silken curtain, miles of sapphire

unfurled. Strong and fluent,
I would convey, at last, a pureness
of heart untainted by a single word.

keeper

Sister has taken the lower faux branch
this morning. I admire the delicate curve
of her pink feet, how she perches like a quetzal.
But we are drab, the two of us, ladybirds
with dun feathers and no mysteries caught
under our folded wings. I catch Mildred’s eye
in the mirror with the dangling silver bell,

give cheep of hello and a little nod.
She is in her dreamy mood, trying to forget
the slender bars that contain us. I give the bell
a tap with my orange beak, but it is difficult
to distract her from her yearning.
There is a fresh scoop of seeds in the glass
dish. I sing my thanks. Poor sister,

she cannot give up the sky. Her song
is lost, her eyes always hungry, searching.
I will take her a plump sunflower seed
and smooth the feathers on her head.
There is nowhere for us in that bright
unbounded world. We are safe here,
my brown wing soft across her back.

Millie’s summer vacation

At Wrightsville Beach the untidiness
of her desire washes up one June,
a sullen creature lost on a bad tide.
It is nearly dark and the Atlantic
demands the remains of light
that glimmer above the water.

The fishermen see it first, gasping
there in the spindrift and wonder
if their hooks might hold it.
She, on the other hand, turns
her back on the creature,
contemplates, instead,

the tilt-a-whirl that spins
against the now black sky,
tossing constellations like neon
confetti. It is no surprise to her.
This ungainly flotsam had been
her familiar for so long.

Moonlight reveals too much
The gelatinous heap trembles,
calls to mind a human heart.
She knows that she must claim it.
In the end she shoves it roughly
into her little creel, like bait.

Mignon

It is in the strata of woven twigs
I shelter my life. Notice the incorporation
of plume and silk, the finest threads
gleaned from bin and clothesline.

Here, where the wind lionizes endurance,
one might claim a moment in the lull
to knit a nest of beauty and sawgrass.
I lodge in a cottonwood, a common tree

amid a copse of sisters, wren-dull
and smaller than a fist. But it is said
my voice is fine. Its churr and trill
loops through the boughs and leaves

a lace of blossoms strewn beneath.
It is storm season now and I am nestled
in this scooped lair of lichen and prayer.
I petition the gods of pupae and seed,

the emperors who own the sky,
even the man who wields the saw;
Give me spring once more and I will sing
to shame the bright and faithless cockerel.

seaworthy

Rivers converge, the narrow rocky ones,
the placid and the fierce, all tumbling
toward the sea and I am on a gentle bank
beside the least of these. Bright water eddies
around twigs and leaves, tucks into nooks
of pebbles and weeds. It is a reluctant stream,
content it seems to meander beneath a canopy
of cottonwood and plum. I dip my fingers
into this languid brook and bring them to my lips.

I am wanting salt, a citrus wind, silver wafers
of sunlight strewn atop a restless tide. But for me
there are stave oaks and dull-hued ladybirds
that chat among the upper limbs. I engage the sky
in conversation, send my thoughts like puffs of smoke
into the Texas blue, where I imagine them as clouds
bound for fond horizons. Back inside I gild feathers
and snip tin. A steady rain of rust falls into my lap.
What can I send down the skin-deep Trinity;

a hammered heart? disgraced relics? I find the world too big,
my hands too small. All the gifts I fashion are heavy, riddled
with imbroglio. They sink, reliably, in the silted bed,
like stub nails in dry pine. Still I adorn my fallen nest
with bits of lace and parchment, wax the brittle hull
of sticks and clay. It is a prayer of sorts, a burnished faith
that leaves my hands to find the current. Far downriver
the delta flowers all bow their saintly heads
for every passing tender that lusts for charity.