Ordinary April

Houstonia  (JO'B)

 

Many guns are firing

and bells are ringing

The sun

takes a higher course

Many turtles

have their heads out

Pure and simple bluets

spot the continent

—from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, April 24, 1853 

Dawn Among Bones

 

               From peach to tangerine fading

               to daylight sky behind the bones

               of mountain ashes once the hope

               of one who watched his children

               grow and go beyond these fields

               now testament to blight and infestation

               bones returning to the ground

               in the place they lived and never left—

               his own. 

               Birdsong less and less.

Waiting Out the Storm

Waiting out the storm.  (JO'B)

                    Waiting out the storm in the open doorway

                    of a neighbor's barn, gusts of shattering rain

                    telling me I have the right to be silent,

                    But I want you to know

                    I remember everything

                    when everything changed,

                    And I will ride again when the strong, sweet sun

                    pushes into the time I go through

                    in this always vanishing world.

Come Closer and Listen

JO'B

I wish I had known                             

to call for help                             

in the dark                             

I wish I had known                             

you would come                             

—repurposing a line by Charles Simic

And Yet Tomorrow

JO'B

                 Under the layers of evening

                 I hear the creek in the valley

                 And the river in me

                 Sorrow sings the sweetest strain

                 And yet the south wind blows

                 And yet tomorrow

                 The sun may warm my back

                 I'll wait

                  

Three Oh Five

JO'B

                      Come closer

                      my friends of the dark

                      the notepad the pen

                      the small circle of light

                      the second hand's slow sweep

                      the book on its stand

                      a sentence or two strong enough

                      to repeat in a whisper

                      as if you could hear it

                      my face faint on the pane

                      against the fathomless night

—after Charles Simic's "Nothing Else"

The Next Front

JO'B

              Weathered enough to know

                        We've missed each other

                                  This time through, yet

                                             How pretty to think

                                                      One of us will go on ahead

                                              And wait.

Just After

JO'B

"I do not know which to prefer," Wallace Stevens wrote. 

"The beauty of inflections. Or the beauty of innuendos.

The blackbird whistling. Or just after." 

———

An easy rain has ended

The wind lies down upon the pond and sleeps

Embers of sunset reflecting there

The questionnaire had asked

Are you ever lonely?

Chorus frogs begin to sing

When I am very still

Pure clear ringing notes

A floating world

Monochrome

JO'B

Blackbirds singing          

As color drains from the west          

I had promised myself          

More solitude          

A Bridge for Kelly

Rooftop on Delancey Street n Lower Manhattan, 2005.  (JO'B)

On a rooftop

At the center of her world

In a city of exceptions,

Above the rough edge of Chinatown,

A wordless poem of the heart,

The falling man of the HVAC,

 A depth of bridge to Williamsburg,

Became her woods and valleys in the light,

Became her constellations in the night,

She found her peers,

Artists and writers and musicians,

Gentle, complex thinkers,

Laughers, quick to care,

And they found her,

Far too near the end

Of the last American Renaissance.

Delancey Street, New York City, 2005.  (JO'B)