at a remove, inglorious

I live in the construct of your proclamations,

in the watery shadows you fail to sharpen.

You remain undefined even in the keenest light,

ephemeral, forgettable, though I cannot forget

the crooked tale that bore you. Your voice, a hinge

song, rust on rust, a lark’s own hymn, fills the rafters

like moonbeams. What a meager thing to clutch,

a slight breath between  verses, an absence.

I am a snowflake atop the hoary permafrost,

sharp angles of ice rendered in pen, discarded

by sky and crushed by intention. I fall from mercy,

a silver blossom, weightless in an arc of mutiny.

I live in the hem of your coat, a broken thread,

knotted in the hope of pearls and lanterns.

Oh, what am I, but an ache in your jaw, a tooth

in angry decline?  Somewhere I am none of these.

There I am a copper wind, curled like smoke,

an impossible light that follows the wrens

into the twilight’s grace. You gaze the other way. 

brief

I found the blue one on the bottom of the cage,
dead in the way that only birds can be,
a feathered husk. It weighed no more
than the memory of an unremarkable day.

I might have worn it on a thread, an ornament
of sky and sad curled feet. Things die. 
We are such unheeded orphans, afterthoughts
at best. Our histories are barely mounds 
upon the earth’s resilient back. Our stories

find no audience. The long nights consume
the heart, the heft of bone, the light
that someone might have cherished. 
We are fistfuls of feathers, so insubstantial 

we fear the wind and the crush of wheels.
It would take so little for us to fall,
to be wrapped in a shred of lace
with only a suggestion of blue to mark
an epoch that once was winged.

remains

The bones of your dory rest under the pines.
Untouched since last August,

she gathers webs and shadows.

She should be long done, painted, varnished,
 graceful in the bay.
The wood sits beneath the sky,

bears the sun and moon, the rain
and snow. The wind hums through her, 

echoes her emptiness. Always she aches 

for your hands to finish her.

Anne, who would be queen

Oh, that I might be tidy, sky blanched,

fields ribboned, trees skinned of bark.

But all is a-jumble, tangled and on fire.

Your fox-grin is torn away by a gust.

I am left to imagine your chattering jaw.

If I were neat you would be buried

behind the flat stones, courted

by cockroach and pin-light. 

But you are a shattered goblet, here

and there, sharp and eager for flesh. 

My shelves are rife with such stories,

spines rotten and pages loose.

I will never pick them up again.

I leave them for the flood, for the blaze,

for the blind-eyed moon. Let the tragedy

play out once more to the song of glass

and wind. Remind me what to regret.

Then perhaps I will disinherit

this chaos, my birthright of disarray.

I will let you go like a handful of dust.

a winter day

Morning breaks, cut-glass bright and rife with winter
birds. I hear the stars shift just beneath the day’s blue
façade, a whisper as silvery as the icy creek’s refrain.
I miss the umber twilight, the grackles penciled in, charcoal

and sepia suggestions of movement. It is too keen,
this early light with shadows as sharp as calligraphy.
There remain no pine swept paths, no sugar-sand ways
where sea oats bow. There is only macadam and limestone,

a sleet-glazed cliff, a dull scene daubed on its craggy face. 
Thankfully, the day is brief, a snowy trillium trampled
by the coming dark. By four there is iron on the wind. 
I paint in this poor light, in hues gleaned from a well.

Familiar, this darkness. Sweet, the absence of truth’s cruel light.
I paint a door as black as these bare window panes,
imagine a room behind it where even the night gleams
golden and claims dominion over the sting of frost and fear.

On reading poetry

On reading poetry

Master of pot lids-
clatter, sing, and snivel.
You think yourself bigger somehow
when you stand on sheets of paper,
arms sticking out of the windows
of a very small house.
You prissy poet, with one trick
reincarnated ad nauseum,
I would know your smear
in a bucket of snot.

I have eaten your words
after you, the regurgitated
strophe, a bowl of lukewarm mush,
staccato verses caught in my throat.
The tapeworm of your prosy proclivity
burrows in my belly.

I return to it though,
out of some curious loyalty,
Run my hands over almost sonnets
mortified by the thrill
the symmetry stirs.
One acquires a taste for it.

nineteen

I would offer up the violet cords
that twine my wrists, the knobby arc
of my sleeping spine, the nakedness

of my greed. Oh, pillow and moon,
light severed by reeds, at night I wish
for impossible things. Coyotes run
like starlings on the wind, yet I remain
astonished by the rush of seasons.

I would, you know, even now,
open my hands in honesty, forget
the reasons and regrets. If I could

breathe again the river would sweep
the song from my mouth and all
I would do is kiss you, fill you
with the light of captured stars.
I would offer up the violet shadows

that haunt my eyes, the tender bones
I’ve borrowed from the wrens,
the truth that has no words but these.

Autumnal

October is a door I am thrust through,
a maw that gapes before me, all bittersweet
and acorn shades. Some think it lovely,
but I do not. I see its hunger for all
that is alive, from leaf to ruddy flesh.

It longs to dress the hills and glades
with garish hues and coffin mounds.
The air bears a bouquet of sorrow.
The grackles bear it up on ragtag wings
and span the fire laced sunset

with their omens and harsh cries.
Memory comes as a conjurer, clever
and unkind, in a swirl of dark wind.
He burrows in the chest, worm-like.
I think of autumns when I was young

and took the aching light as a sign
of tenderness, let it pour down
my throat like an elixir. October
makes me close my eyes. My heart
though, is a door ajar to this familiar grief.

sincerely

I am not writing about the storms
of May, or sparrows’ wings folded
like empty gloves, nor how
the constellations seem as stark
as sequins on a dark skirt.

I offer, instead, this letter that reveals
the pale skin of my shoulders. It builds
no bridges for gaps in time, tenders
no apology for embellishments
scattered like petals and ash.

An observant reader knows
to plumb the white space.
The back story is the one
that breathes and shudders
like a woman. I am saying
that I hardly know myself

what my hands will create
and I am not prepared
for imposed silence or solitude
that falls like a curtain
of watered silk. I petition
for a prescribed darkness
and a soft, grey hush that muffles
like the snow.

I am writing to say
that paper, wind,
certain rays of light
contain me truer
than this flesh.

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.