Autumn Poems - Part II

Autumn Poems - Part II

Autumn is the Season that Lies Down

The sun pours slow thick light aslant the garden,
buttering the royal red of marigolds.
It brings to mind good breakfasts.  Pancakes
slightly creamy inside, sticky in the mouth.

The cirrus have returned and tease the heart
because the softness of their silk
against the blue is so impossible.
When in such silken robes, the lady angels
cross their legs and bend to morning coffee,
the tightened fabric outlines their hams.

You do not have a robe like that.
In the one you have, you do bend forward
to your coffee and the crossword.  The smell
of toast is the smoky incense of the morning.

                     November 13, 2013

Presence and Absence

Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
(They make a wilderness and call it peace.)
                - Tacitus

As if an autumn forest writhed in a gale,
twigs and branches blurred and snapping,
where the traveling bird must find its roof
under its wing or entrust its ouces of flesh
to the spiraling air and mix to oblivion
with the blown, yellow leaves, and a pale sun
at last shines grayly, and the winds are gone,
and all is still without one sound, and birds
who lived walk upon the fallen trunks or dig
in the earthy masses of up-torn roots, just so
we woke to war and learned the bad news of
its  unkind ways, and then a muddy desolation
when war reached the mere absence of its roar
and we called that peace and said, Good news?

                     September 2016

Autumn in Five Places

Autumn beats the sunny yolk of summer,
bends its vertical bright shafts slantwise.
In a Connecticut driveway, light through clouds
polishes the red beads among the bayberry's
trim leaves and coats the fruits of dark yews,
their syrup tightening their red skins to tension.
Gold light sideways spatters California eucalyptus,
lies lustrous on buckeye chestnuts brown as oiled wood.
Autumn makes velvet of the garnet petals
of marigolds on the dining room table.
Autumn once washed over the pure notebooks
of schoolkids.  Once it lay on the pages
of young men reading Chaucer for the first time,
and changed his April into an October forever.

                     December 17, 2005

Man and Leaf

I.  Me

An autumn tree of moderate size
with glistening wet, black trunk,
each branch divided, redivided,
to wet, black twigs, with pendant leaves,
sparse and shining red, red.
A wet and wooden cloud.

In my brain that wants a lovely lasting,
the tree takes the form of sculpture,
complex, metallic, in the air of a museum.
Yet, even such a masterpiece at length
would rust and crumble, just as now,
without stir of air and while I look,
a red leaf drops.

So the tree disrobes bit by bit,
becoming bare, obscure, and humble,
one tree among many, wintering,
till it puts on green again becoming
a different tree, not this one
that won my affction at a glance,
barely seen, then gone.

It might someday become a fossil,
every texture print in negative,
to be opened by my descendents hammer.
Yet, even then, among other fine collected rocks,
it will wear and blunt over time,
peeling, shedding dusty layers,
losing leaves and twigs.

II.  Leaf

As a leaf, I jostled with my brothers
to look out on the world.
I gloried in my red and saw it all.
And, when I fell, a vision unexpected came:
The shiny silken tissue of the clouds.
I thought: I've seen the sky -- how beautiful! --
before I've closed my eyes.

                     December 17, 2005

Autumn Poems - Part I

Autumn Poems - Part I 

The Strength of Butterflies

A high wind, a fire wind. 

The air is rumbling.  The trees hiss.

A Monarch wanders and pokes

among the late zinnias.  It flies

as if it were a scrap of paper

at the mercy of its own light weight,

Except it flies this way on windless days.

For its wings have muscles.

Once, my grandson cried in my arms.

He laid his wet face against my neck.

His arms were tight around me.

I stroked his sweaty body

as he was taught whatever it is

that hot tears teach.

                    November 12, 2019

Biking up Palomares Road

The Indian Summer has moved on to another year.

Today gray covers half the sky, and the blue half

is filled with scudding clouds.  The earth is tilting!

The wind at my back eases the twelve percent grades.

The leaves on the pavement scud along with me.

I love their strength, their landscapes, and curls.

They are crispy and brownish and make scraping sounds

as if a bag of potato chips had broken open,

and the chips scurry across the parking lot.

I can’t eat these leaves though insects can.

                    December 4, 2019

Hot Fall Day on the East Bay Bicycle Trail

The sea gives off its odor

and blends into the warm air.

The bicycle wind soft against my body.

In the motionless green water,

there are the depths, the rocks, the seaweed,

the clouded, salty place

that cools a swimmer’s skin,

and burns his open eyes,

that fills his mouth with tasty bitterness.

It’s a day like hugging my daughter

In her still damp bathing suit.

And I say:  How good you smell.

Did you have a nice swim?

                        October 4, 2019 
 

Prayer when I Cycle on the Road

O, little skunk.  O, bird.  O, squirrel.

O, fox.  O, cat. O, deer.

O, flattened holocaust.

O, mayhemed bodies.

O, tongues from stretched-wide mouths.

O, last line of your litany.

May Our Lady pet your matted fur to gloss.

May she fill you out with her milk and tears.

May she set you down to walk heaven’s earthy paths

like ours this autumn lined with brittle grass and leaves.

May she toss you up to heaven’s breezy skies

like ours this autumn, fogged first and then the sun.

Amen

                                      October 28, 2019

Up and Down the Driveway

I love the sweeping, the lugging

of bags from car to garden.

balancing a shovel as I walk,

eating cherry tomatoes that fall to the concrete.

This can be done:

moving my legs back and forth. 

Not leaving a lasting mark

that I walked the earth.

Odd that, as I do what is small,

the driveway becomes larger. 

It pulls down the wind from the sky

and fills with the sky’s movements.

                         October 4, 2019

September is like Monday

Monday at work was my favorite day.

Every problem that had woven the wall of thorns called Friday

would disappear as if touched lightly

by a magic sword, and I’d pass through

to a castle only in need of tidying.

In September the gears

of Earth and Sun make again,

and exactly, the tilt of the Equinox.

The sunlight falls aslant, blankets meadows,

and wreathes trees.  This Monday is true:

November winds will sweep the trees;

The winter quiet will be a resolution.

                        October 7, 2019

 

 

 

The Beginning of My Poetry Blog: Why?

I'd written poetry when I was a teenager, but wrote very little afterwards.  In about 2004, way past my youth, a poet friend suggested that I should write.  I was skeptical because I believed that writing poetry was a gift to exceptional people.  It was not for a career and family man like me who liked to read.   But I was blessed with a solid ego and with boldness and curiosity.  And I had a liking for my teenage work -- now lost -- and an interest in the few poems I'd written later.  I also had more intellectual background than I'd ever accounted.  In college, I'd taken what I realize now was a life-changing college class in English literature.  I'd studied Latin and Greek, and they gave me their great gift: a love of clear language and beautiful expression.

The result: I began writing in 2004.  I have not stopped since.  I admit, though, that here have been times when I have wanted to stop because I felt that "enough was enough" or that I was not enjoying this work or that I had nothing to say or that the Muse had become a nag.  In other words, I've had a writing life similar to other writing lives.  And, as in those lives, there are high moments, and they are wonderful.

The result of the writing is that I have in my hands a body of work that I never dreamed would come into existence.  When I read the poems, I find that I become excited as a reader and not as the writer.  This excitement is telling me two things.  First, that the poems have something to say.  Second, that they have achieved independence from me, that they exist in their own right.  They are important enough to preserve.

Although the poems are independent, they are delicate, easily lost, and unable to fend for themselves.  They have to be saved from flood and fire.  A blog is the best way to do this because I am guessing that the internet will last in some way, shape, or form until the end of civilization.  With the poems on the internet, I don't have to worry about all those pieces of paper, the thumb drives, the backups, the different word processing products I have used.  I can preserve them in the "ether."  It is a gift that all the ancient and medieval readers and scribes must have wished for.  Really, it's a gift that even the lovers of paper books want.  

If I blog the poems, others might read them.  The poems should communicate.  I don't pretend to expect universal readership!  But I can hope that the poems will be part of my legacy, the inheritance of my children and grandchildren.  In my own life and attitudes, legacy has given me perspective that is animated by curiosity and love.  It also brings connection, knowledge, and sometimes even understanding or at least the right questions.

A blog also gives me the opportunity to comment on my poems.  There are those who say that a poet should not explain.  I'm not sure I agree.  I think that, if poems are part of our life and culture, a gloss, in the medieval sense of the word, might sometimes be part of them.  They bind us together over centuries into a unity that is the larger commonwealth.