Friday, December 23, 2011

And a couple more...Bouquet in Boulevard, 2000 (?) and Shooting the Breeze in Southern Cultures, 2006 (?)

Bouquet

When you’re away, I sleep on your side of the bed
and smell the sheets where the weave is richest
with your scent—bath-damp hair, armpits, feet,
the alchemic reminders of your sex.
Call me, won’t you? Call me what you will:
pillow-sniffer, linen-lecher, truffle-nosing swine,
or better yet, a drowsy drunk who smells
the empty bottle’s cork to tease the tongue
and taste again the flower in the wine.






lShooting the Breeze

Aloof and aloft, the buzzards circled the farm,
and we would shoot at them, to no effect,
small guns popping, round after round.
                                                             Did we know better?
We were thirteen and had guns,
maybe small guns, but big enough, if we could only hit one,
to blow a hole in any bird that fed on carrion.
                                                Still, we wondered
silently, how they rode the breeze forever,
as if sanctified.        
                        Only later would I learn
about the great-winged vultures the long-gone pharaohs deified,
and even later, Dante’s circling song to death,
how it undoes so many,
                                           and from a P-3's vantage point,
watch Beirut burn and learn at last, I too was charmed,
flying circles, like an icon.




























A couple of poems--will post more, these were in Triquarterly Online, 2010

Half-Life


Every day invisible bits of him break free,
fly off, and leave him simpler, more leaden
than the day before while he strains to make
the daily round, and flesh that used to hum
at slightest excitation dulls to half-life,
his ass depressing the spring of his chair,
like a slab of roast beef on a butcher’s scale.
But when he’s in bed, past instants of touch,
the quanta of longing, spark networks of nerves,
like manicured nails stroking his spine,
his dream-dome illumined with firework
traces of memory’s decay arcing across
sleep’s deep ether.  And so he sinks
every night, marveling at his plenty of loss.




Old Bitch and Bone


He envied his dog her bone, the way she shook
and damn near shat while she sat, expectant,
waiting to clamp and tooth it in the weeds,
the way she cracked the shaft and fanged the fat, 
gristle and marrow and old bone mojo,
every scrap, no part unchewed, unknown.
When she was done, she clawed a cradle
for her bone, came inside and went to sleep. 
Later, when he let her out, he winced
to see her stiff-hipped hobble-and-squat,
the way she sniffed what midnight offered,
nosed the dirt and found the spot she had clawed,
circled once, lay down and seemed to stare
at a young moon rising, whiter than his hair. 

My blog

I don't really know what I'm doing, so this blog page is bound to be pretty goofy.  A bit about me:  I'm a father, a teacher, and a writer.  This page will mainly feature samples of my poetry and, maybe, a few random observations of a general nature.  I hope you enjoy the poems--assuming I can figure out how to post them--and feel free to leave commentary.  Thanks.