Poetry

The Hardness Scale

Diamonds are forever so I gave you quartz which is #7 on the hardness scale and it’s hard enough to get to know anybody these days if only to scratch the surface and quartz will scratch six other mineral surfaces: it will scratch glass it will scratch gold it will even scratch your eyes out…

Among Giraffes

Among polite giraffes swaying their long necks innocent of their loveliness, among cavalier hippoes who yawn through the afternoon, among properly misbehaved monkeys flying from tree to tree, among the dogs and cats of this neighborhood perfectly at ease secure in their niches, I stumble: the half step in the great chain. If I seem…

Bittersweet

1. Celastrus scandens is the innocent, woody vine whose clusters of orange fruit open to expose bright red seeds. Scandens means climbing, or examine, see, spectacle, and scene. The Greek root meant stumble, then snare, hence scandal and scansion too. So, sparklings or star-seeds strung out on a hard, twisted line, tumbling, stumbling, and scandalized….

The New Atlantis

The Feast of St John, Corpus Christi Sunday, Houses breathing warmly out like stacks of hay, Windows wide, the white and yellow Papal flags Now drooped: one side of the street nods at the cool Shadow opposite sloping towards the canal’s Green weed that reflects nothing. Turn a corner, Nettles lap at a high hoarding,…

4/5/74

The air was soft, the ground still cold. In the dull pasture where I strolled Was something I could not believe. Dead grass appeared to slide and heave, Though still too frozen-flat to stir, And rocks to twitch, and all to blur. What was this rippling of the land? Was matter getting out of hand…

Courting Surfaces

For courting surfaces unscathed, to pass over furnace rocks, to slide down an oily pane or walk the waters, tension held, requires a lightness, speed, yearning, the danger’s to stop, look down, attend until you deepen, disappear, an aspect of where you are, at one with its hue and weather, weight and changing, as a…

Penitentiary Toll

The blue Norfolk air Is familiar with sea gulls. The ground is crawling with cats. The random observer, going about his time, May carry a pencil and piece of paper, To hunt out remarkable quarry:            Today, Five cats, all furred-out in black and white      Patterns, were up in the same tree;      All out on…

My Old Professor in a Bar

He’s turning into a Mason jar for homecured liver pickle; showing a fine regard for black Jack Daniel’s. I saw him once in a silence so pure I thought of the gulls who stand on the Charles so long you think their soles are frozen flat. The other time he sang, said he’d spent his…