I tossed a draft of this against the Twitter wall yesterday and it stuck. A little.
I love your soft
Solomon-songed geology–
oh, those hills and valleys–
your glacial erosion.
Category: My Poetry
Brothers.
Bag of apples,
sharp cheddar,
Sixpacks and
loaves of bread:
Biblical fare.
Binoculars, and
a taped-together
roadmap.
Aspens rusting in
meadows gone to gold,
the day thick with
autumn mist, wanting wool.
Appalachian boys
loosed in the caldera,
hooting camp elk bugles
from the highway,
taking turns at the wheel
and reading out loud
from torn and trampled
paperbacks. Whitman.
Sandlin. Pound and Pope.
A great-horned owl swept
across the asphalt
at eye level, giant
and hungry and vital.
The fire-refreshed forests
a lawn of lodgepole saplings.
Categories
Read My Poetry
I started this blog with the intention of posting old poems, maybe even adding some new poems, but it quickly became fun just to post whatever the hell came to mind whenever the hell I felt like posting–my literary impulses buried by the weight of whimsy. It doesn’t surprise me, alas, that my poetry isn’t burning up the internet goes–in the great Pantheon of Poets, my feet are planted squarely in the muck. Or, as I recently joked to another hobby artist: of all the would-be poets on the internet, I’m confident that I’m on of them.
I don’t think it helped that I posted a bunch before anyone actually started noticing this blog, but the truth is that, according to my statistics, my view drop considerably when there’s a poem on the page–like folks are scared of verse. You’re not scared of a little verse, are you? I considered reblogging some of those old posts, but I think that might be tacky. Instead, I’m just going to throw out links like a Carnival barker.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, you won’t believe your eyes…
https://oldroadapples.wordpress.com/category/my-poetry/
One, no, two big silvery, slippery
shadowy trout lurk silent, tails sweep
slowly steadying against the current,
beneath a tangled lodgepole strainer
Left over from spring’s high water.
These fish must be grateful
For a log like this, just right
And rotting back to the mud it sprung from:
A once-proud, once tree skeleton
Now just an eddy sanctuary
For two old cutthroats–like Butch and Sundance,
Pancho and Lefty, like Edgar and me–
No, not that. He’s downstream with his fly rod
And I’m not shouting. These two are mine.
I don’t let my shadow cross the water,
But here–big luck, Vegas-odds luck:
A greenish grasshoppery weed-to-weed leaper
Vaults, a mini-martyr, into my denim lap.
I snag him by one frail spring-loaded leg
And
I
fling
him
in.
Plop. He’s in. Can’t swim. Fish keep station.
We wait,
as the sun
dapples ripples,
we wait
and wait
and wait
and wait
(bug flits around considerably, like a…bug)
FLASH!
The Titan was brought low by a beast
so small and slow a grain sets it in shadow.
A long year he lay, first modest and afraid,
his massive arms and beautiful, terrifying hands
jutting out helpless beneath short sheets.
I looked long and unflinching into his eyes,
waiting for the burst of the dam, the warning
wail of the train riding the crest of the wave
and then the flood, and then the fire.
I might have cried at the old man, wrecked
and left stranded, burning at the bridge,
but nothing can be had from a wrung dry sponge.
one thousand drums thrum
rhythmic primal pulse beats still
not fit to kiss verse
A pencil-stemmed girl
Stands fist raised on a table
Curses defiance
Goblin black stormclouds
Enshroud peaks, squash alpenglow
Pour, blow, flash hate love.
She cackles at the wind
Bring it, motherfucker, yes
You surly bastards!
l love your sinuous
soloman-song geology,
your verdant plains,
your lack of erosion.
If it weren’t
for this shovel
I would write
so many poems;
But, if I didn’t
have to shovel
I might not have
more poems to write.
Starting things off with a poem that winks back at you when you stare.
Hey Babe I think about all the miles
And the dishes and the diapers and dolls
And the I’ll cook and you can do the dishes
And the hours days months years decades—
Damn, Babe, decades! And I don’t want
To tell you I’ll grow old with you, or I’ll never
Leave you or, jesus, I see little goddamn stars
And rainbows and think of you and I sure as Hell
How sure is hell, though?—shit!—
Don’t give a damn about the flower I give you
When, what I really want, right at that moment,
Sitting across the table from your mom and your pop,
Is to light you on fire in a hurricane, laugh, and sing.
