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.
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?
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
No comments:
Post a Comment