Triolet On Time
For boys add to their woe by sitting still
Was the best line of my youthful poem.
Now age and illness ask again why will
Such boys add to their woe by sitting still?
You’d think of this they’d had their awful fill
And, dreaming dreams of life they’d finally sow them.
For boys add to their woe by sitting still
Was the best line of my youthful poem.
A Poem Changes In the Night
Yesterday, a line I based
at rest among other desert
impressions lying still well placed.
Although it was but barren waste
simply sand not even dirt
there yesterday a line I based.
Morning rose with me, I raced
to find my sleeping line to bless her
impression lying still well placed
An all too vivid sun’d erased
from where in my poetry’s best worth
yesterday a line I based.
Grinning greenly without taste,
a leafy valley hussy’s mirth,
impression lying, still well placed?
No more, and she will dominate
and raise forbidden secret hurt
where yesterday a line I based
resting in a quiet desert.
For Stan Getz
Where the Volga flows
your sweet tenor woes
your Stan Getzness
never forgets us
with this Russian rose.
Sets my soul aflame
no matter your acclaim,
riffing riffing always riffing
whatever's done is now forgiven,
Sonia was her name.
Your horn’s eternal cries
make me fantasize,
what a tender bride
what a frantic ride,
her dark flashing eyes
Those eyes that hypnotize
those deep Brazilian sighs
Orfeo seeks his stolen love
peace has lost its moaning dove,
Discover her before love dies.
Nothing Of Value
Throw away a jar of pennies,
This is very good advice.
Then nickels, dimes and quarters
Worth little more than lice.
In the soul’s progression
Such ridiculous device
As a coin, a dollar or a million,
Clocks and clothes and mice,
Nothing lasts forever,
And ever’s worth the price.
Miss Wild Power, She Of Octobers Through Decembers
From the day she came in glasses to his office
primly dressed with light brown gabardine,
spectacles were measure of all beauty,
intellect the mark most feminine.
True, some stars have fallen from the heavens.
species have evolved from lower forms.
Doughnut holes are full of anti-matter.
Literary monsters breathe new storms.
Canticles to darkness swell his evenings
thick with turtle soup and burgundy.
Hidden gardens droop behind dutch doorways.
A red-winged blackbird flees its balcony.
Brown November weekends were the rule then
whether it was Fall or in the Spring
when wishes turned again to expectations
as leaves somewhere between the ground and wing.
Yet when a dimpled smile slides her glasses
careening like a sleigh ride down her nose,
reindeer charge and Santa cockeyed dashes
through the open door on tipsy toes.
Wild Power is the name she’s known by
all the time she’s with him and without.
Flowers grace his navel; I don’t know why
grapes hang sweet and bitter from his mouth.
Shared and warmer times beyond his winter
might extend as doves on quiet snow
wander blindly bump and scratch a hint of
what birds seek but still can barely know.
Caravans of snow geese wedged on journey
flow to Season B and back again.
Bobolink and sparrow join in melee.
Hummingbird lures rooster from its hen.
Friends and lovers dawdle day and night in
words like bread or cheese the poet’s feast.
Poetry means nothing but the writing
not unlike the flowers, grapes and geese.
Born of magic spells in secret covens
the siren in his evening song enchants
poetry with nightingales and ravens;
her Cabernet he carefully decants.
Where in all of this are rhyme or reason?
Neither one is crucial, I suppose.
I used the former solely for this season,
left the other stewing in repose.
Tragic plays portray all lovers cower
underneath black skirts of nature’s law.
comedies are he and Wild Power
debating truths abstruse as Santa Claus.
Dusk and dawn are one by deep December;
each instant is a picket to the fence
(holding back the children of November)
engaging me to sing in present tense.
