Favorite Poem Number 19

I came rather late to appreciate Jim Harrison’s writing. But I was a fan from the first time I read his poetry. Accessible, often humorous, always profound. Harrison was also a prolific novelist, as well as a food columnist. One of the most entertaining food books I’ve ever read is A Really Big Lunch, a collection of his essays on food.

https://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/520994685/celebrating-a-glorious-life-of-excess-in-a-really-big-lunch
I’ve also read three or four of his novellas, as well as three collections of his poetry. I highly recommend that you check him out.

Harrison was born in the upper peninsula of Michigan and retained a residence there for his entire life.
He also spent time in Montana and Arizona. He died in 2016.
Here’s one of my favorites. I’ve never been good at landings either.

Man Dog Jim Harrison

I envied the dog lying in the yard
so I did it. But there was a pebble
under my flank so I got up and looked
for the pebble, brushed it away
and lay back down. My dog thus far
overlooked the pebble. I guess it's her thick
Lab fur. With my head downhill the blood gorged
me with ideas. Not good. Got up. Turned around. Now I
see hundreds of infinitesimal ants. I'm on an
ant home. I get up and move five feet.
The dog hasn't moved from her serene place.
Now I'm rather too near a thicket where
I saw a big black snake last week that might decide
to join me. I moved near the actual dog this time
but she got up and went under the porch. She doesn't like
it when I'm acting weird. I'm failing as a dog
when my own kind rejects me, but doing better
than when I envied birds, the creature the least
like us, therefore utterly enviable. To be sure
I cheeped a lot but didn't try to fly.
We humans can take off but are no good at landing.

(from Dead Man’s Float (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

Favorite Poem Week 18

I’m a sucker for a sonnet: Petrarchan, Elizabethan, Modern, what have you. I’ve even tried my hand at writing a few, though only one has been deemed worthy of publication.
There are several times in my life when I happened to be in the right place at the right time. October of 2009 was one of those times. I had just started writing poetry more regularly and had entered the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets annual Triad contest. Beginner’s luck had brought me an honorable mention in one category, and a third place in another. So I attended my first WFOP conference. I think I’ve only missed one since.
That is where I met Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn was the Wisconsin Poet Laureate at the time. She and Phyllis Wax, who was also attending, invited me to join the critique group, The Hartford Avenue Poets. I didn’t even know what a critique group was! Anyway, like I said, my good fortune. It’s 11 years later, Marilyn has since moved to Madison, but the HAPs, as we call ourselves, still meet regularly. It was the best thing that ever happened to my writing.
All that is preface to my saying that Marilyn is one of the premier sonneteers writing today. Not to mention on of my favorite people. Enjoy the following two examples of her sonneteering prowess, which she has graciously allowed me to reprint here,
Until next time,
Ed

Pyrotechnics at Amherst

          If I feel, physically, as if the top of my head were taken off,
            I know that is poetry.

—Emily Dickinson

But which ones were they—the poems that did
this awesome deed?  Whose gunpowder lines
ignited right in front of her, firing flame-red
peonies, palms, rockets, straight into her brain?

Herbert’s transcendental thunder?
Or Emerson, whose counterpoints of doom
and doubt, science and salvation, stunned her—
dazzled her with their afterbloom?

Did she survive the heart-stopping artillery
of Keats, of Barrett-Browning—the kind that flies
and detonates before it falls? Or did she,
pale target, take it right between the eyes?

How long till she came back to life again,
trembling and reaching for her pen?
first published in November, 2009, in Verse Wisconsin

Reading the Obituaries

Now the Barbaras have begun to die,
trailing their older sisters to the grave,
the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye
just days ago, it seems, taking their leave
a step or two behind the hooded girls
who bloomed and withered with the century—
the Dorotheas, Eleanors and Pearls
now swaying on the edge of memory.
Soon, soon, the scythe will sweep for Jeanne
and Angela, Patricia and Diane—
pause, and return for Karen and Christine
while Susan spends a sleepless night again.
Ah, Debra, how can you be growing old?
Jennifer, Michelle, your hands are cold.
first published in Spring, 2003, in the Cream city Review

Favorite Poem Number 17

The most powerfully emotional poetry reading I have ever attended was at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ, in October of 2016. The mass murder of 49 people, and the wounding of 53 others, who were dancing at a gay nightclub in Orlando had occurred earlier that year in June. At the closing session of the Festival, the poet Robert Hass preformed a new poem, “Dancing”, in which he chronicles the discovery of fire by our ancestors, the invention of gunpowder, firearms, and eventually assault weapons. The poem culminates in the description of the shooting. Hass recited the poem with increasing emotion and emphasis, especially each time he came to the word dancing, or the phrase, “they were dancing.” By the time he read this section near the end of the poem, he was shouting “They were dancing!” and our tears were flowing freely everywhere in the crowd of over 2000:

“...They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night.

Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history

Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies—

30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument,

And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history

Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride—

They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club,

A spring night....”

In fact just writing about it now, tears are welling up.
The absurd juxtaposition of dancing and mass murder. Hass captured it perfectly, and I’ll never forget it.

Dancing by Robert Hass

The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America,
Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation
Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not
A man who kills fifty people in five minutes
With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose
Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists
Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people
With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness—
You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors
Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning,
Must have been, the great booming flashes of it
From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling,
Must have been, an awful power, the odor
Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires,
The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding,
Furious, driving hard on their haunches from the terror
Of it, so that to fashion some campfire of burning wood,
Old logs, must have felt like feeding on the crumbs
Of the god’s power and they would tell the story
Of Prometheus the thief, and the eagle that feasted
On his liver, told it around a campfire, must have been,
And then—centuries, millennia—some tribe
Of meticulous gatherers, some medicine woman,
Or craftsman of metal discovered some sands that,
Tossed into the fire, burned blue or flared green,
So simple the children could do it, must have been,
Or some soft stone rubbed to a powder that tossed
Into the fire gave off a white phosphorescent glow.
The word for chemistry from a Greek—some say Arabic—
Stem associated with metal work. But it was in China
Two thousand years ago that fireworks were invented—
Fire and mineral in a confined space to produce power—
They knew already about the power of fire and water
And the power of steam: 100 BC, Julius Caesar’s day.
In Alexandria, a Greek mathematician produced
A steam-powered turbine engine. Contain, explode.
“The earliest depiction of a gunpowder weapon
Is the illustration of a fire-lance on a mid-12th-century
Silk banner from Dunhuang.” Silk and the silk road.
First Arab guns in the early fourteenth century. The English
Used cannons and a siege gun at Calais in 1346.
Cerigna, 1503: the first battle won by the power of rifles
When Spanish “arquebusiers” cut down Swiss pikemen
And French cavalry in a battle in southern Italy.
(Explosions of blood and smoke, lead balls tearing open
The flesh of horses and young men, peasants mostly,
Farm boys recruited to the armies of their feudal overlords.)
How did guns come to North America? 2014,
A headline: DIVERS DISCOVER THE SANTA MARIA
One of the ship’s Lombard cannons may have been stolen
By salvage pirates off the Haitian reef where it had sunk.
And Cortes took Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses, 12 cannons.
And LaSalle, 1679, constructed a seven-cannon barque,
Le Griffon, and fired his cannons upon first entering the continent’s
Interior. The sky darkened by the terror of the birds.
In the dream time, they are still rising, swarming,
Darkening the sky, the chorus of their cries sharpening
As the echo of that first astounding explosion shimmers
On the waters, the crew blinking at the wind of their wings.
Springfield Arsenal, 1777. Rock Island Arsenal, 1862.
The original Henry rifle: a sixteen shot .44 caliber rimfire
Lever-action, breech-loading rifle patented—it was an age
Of tinkerers—by one Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860,
Just in time for the Civil War. Confederate casualties
In battle: about 95,000. Union casualties in battle:
About 110,000. Contain, explode. They were throwing
Sand into the fire, a blue flare, an incandescent green.
The Maxim machine gun, 1914, 400-600 small caliber rounds
Per minute. The deaths in combat, all sides, 1914-1918
Was 8,042,189. Someone was counting. Must have been.
They could send things whistling into the air by boiling water.
The children around the fire must have shrieked with delight
1920: Iraq, the peoples of that place were “restive,”
Under British rule and the young Winston Churchill
Invented the new policy of “aerial policing,” which amounted,
Sources say, to bombing civilians and then pacifying them
With ground troops. Which led to the tactic of terrorizing civilian
Populations in World War II. Total casualties in that war,
Worldwide: soldiers, 21 million; civilians, 27 million.
They were throwing sand into the fire. The ancestor who stole
Lightning from the sky had his guts eaten by an eagle
Spread-eagled on a rock, the great bird feasting.
They are wondering if he is a terrorist or mentally ill.
London, Dresden. Berlin. Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
The casualties difficult to estimate. Hiroshima:
66,000 dead, 70,000 injured. In a minute. Nagasaki:
39,000 dead, 25,000 injured. There were more people killed,
100,000, in more terrifying fashion in the firebombing
Of Tokyo. Two arms races after the ashes settled.
The other industrial countries couldn’t get there
Fast enough. Contain, burn. One scramble was
For the rocket that delivers the explosion that burns humans
By the tens of thousands and poisons the earth in the process.
They were wondering if the terrorist was crazy. If he was
A terrorist, maybe he was just unhappy. The other
Challenge afterwards was how to construct machine guns
A man or a boy could carry: lightweight, compact, easy to assemble.
First a Russian sergeant, a Kalashnikov, clever with guns
Built one on a German model. Now the heavy machine gun.
The weapon of European imperialism through which
A few men trained in gunnery could slaughter native armies
In Africa and India and the mountains of Afghanistan,
Became “a portable weapon a child can operate.”
The equalizer. So the undergunned Vietnamese insurgents
Fought off the greatest army in the world. So the Afghans
Fought off the Soviet army using Kalashnikovs the CIA
Provided to them. They were throwing powders in the fire
And dancing. Children’s armies in Africa toting AK-47s
That fire thirty rounds a minute. A round is a bullet.
An estimated 500 million firearms on the earth.
100 million of them are Kalashnikov-style semi-automatics.
They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night.
Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history
Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies—
30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument,
And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history
Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride—
They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club,
A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire.
The immense flocks of terrified birds still rising
In wave after wave above the waters in the dream time.
Crying out sharply. As the French ship breasted the vast interior
Of the new land. America. A radio clicks on. The Arabs,
A commentator is saying, require a heavy hand. Dancing.

Robert Hass, “Dancing”. Copyright 2017, from Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence

Favorite Poem Number 16

Since I missed posting last week, this is post number 16, not “week 16”. Apparently, I couldn’t keep up that rigorous weekly schedule. Sigh.
If you’ve been following along on these posts, you’ve probably figured out that I prefer poets that write it beautifully, but plainly. Poets that don’t send you too often to an encyclopedia or a mythology guide book to figure out some obscure reference.
Last week on one of my neighborhood walks I opened up a Little Free Library door and found a jar of buttons. I didn’t take it, as I’m sure someone else would put it to better use than I can. But it immediately reminded me of one of my favorite Ted Kooser poems. I heard Ted read this at the Fox Cities Book Festival several years ago. He signed my book on the page of this poem.
This poem takes me back to my childhood when every house I entered harbored a jar of buttons. And the first stanza of this poem just knocks me out. What a way to describe it! And the extended metaphor is preserved throughout. A poem to study and emulate.

​A Jar of Buttons

by Ted Kooser

This is from a core sample
from the floor of the Sea of Mending,

a cylinder packed with shells
that over many years

sank through fathoms of shirts—
pearl buttons, blue buttons—

and settled together
beneath waves of perseverance,

an ocean upon which
generations of women set forth,

under the sails of gingham curtains,
and, seated side by side

on decks sometimes salted by tears,
made small but important repairs.

From “Delights & Shadows” (2004) by Ted Kooser, from Copper Canyon Press,
used here by permission of the author.

Favorite Poem Week 15

“You can’t afford to kill time, while time is killing you!”
This week’s poem is “Factory”, by the great Milwaukee poet, Antler. There are so many memorable lines in this poem that I couldn’t begin to cite my favorites. So I’ll just leave it at the one above.
Allen Ginsberg called Antler, “...one of Whitman’s poets and orators to come…”, and he convinced Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books to publish “Factory” in 1980 as part of the Pocket Poets Series. It’s number 38 in the series, for those of you who are keeping track. Ginsberg’s famous poem, “Howl”, is number 4, by the way.
I’m proud to say that I have a signed copy of the book. Antler lives nearby in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. He’s a bit of a recluse, but aren’t all poets to some degree? When I delivered his copy of the 2018 Wisconsin Poets Calendar, which I co-edited, I took my copy of “Factory” with me and asked for the autograph. He invited me in and we chatted for about half an hour. In Ginsberg’s back cover blurb for the book he states, “...this is more fineness than I thought probable to see again in my lifetime…”. That’s high praise indeed.
There are still a few copies floating around on Amazon, but it’s a rare book now and they are pretty dear. If you can afford it though, buy a copy and sink yourself into all 1600 lines of inspiration.
Meanwhile, here is the opening of the poem. I just read it again and I still get the chills.
Until next week.
Ed

Factory --by Antler
(beginning of section 1)

The machines waited for me.
Waited for me to be born and grow young,
For the totempoles of my personality to be carved,
and the slow pyramid of days
To rise around me, to be robbed and forgotten,
They waited where I would come to be,
a point on earth,
The green machines of the factory,
the noise of the miraculous machines of the factory,
Waited for me to laugh so many times,
to fall asleep and rise awake so many times,
to see as a child all the people I did not want to be,
And for suicide to long for me as the years ran into the mirror
disguising itself as I grew old
in eyes that grew old
As multitudes worked on machines I would work on,
worked, ceased to exist, and died,
For me they waited, patiently, the machines,
all the time in the world,
As requiems waited for my ears
they waited,
As naked magazines waited for my eyes
they waited,
As I waited for soft machines like mine
time zones away from me, unknown to me,
face, flesh, all the ways of saying goodbye,
While all my possibilities, like hand over hand on a bat
to see who bats first, end up choking the air—
While all my lives leap into lifeboats
shrieking—"You can't afford to kill time
while time is killing you!"

Favorite Poem Week 14

The best memoir book I’ve read in the last few years is, What You Have Heard is True. That title is taken from the poem below. The memoir is Carolyn Forche’s telling of time she spent in El Salvador as a young poet and journalist. For anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the brutality inflicted on the peasants and working poor of Central and South American countries, much of it by forces trained by US military personnel at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia, this is a must-read book. I shed tears several times in reading her gripping descriptions of the innocent poor that were tortured and murdered in an effort to maintain a rule of terror and stave off a popular revolution.
Which brings me to this week’s featured poem. 'The Colonel' was written in 1978. El Salvador was in disarray, in the middle of a civil war between the US-backed military and government, and the Foarabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The poem describes an incident in which Forche was invited to dinner at the house of a colonel who commanded military personnel whose job it was to thwart dissent and protest among the peasantry. Near the end of the poem there is a description of one of the shocking tactics that were used.
The casual but detailed description of how the food and wine were served is followed by the awful telling of the length to which the colonel went to inflict fear into his young guest. This brutal description is followed by the line, “something for your poetry, no”? spoken as as he holds his wine aloft in a toast.

If you can read this poem without shivering, you are a stronger person than I am.

The poem was published in the 1981 collection, The Country Between Us, published by Harper & Row. The book was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1981.
Here is the poem. Brace yourselves.

The Colonel

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went   
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
                                                                           --Carolyn Forche, May 1978
Until next week,
Ed

Favorite Poem Week 13

“Every war has two losers”. These are the words that first attracted me to the poetry of William Stafford. Here was a poet with the conviction to claim Conscientious Objector status during World War II. Could I have done that, I asked myself? The Vietnam war, sure, but World War II? As I read more of his poetry, I fell in love with the accessibility of the language, as if he were talking to a neighbor, but being profound at the same time. Next to Ferlinghetti, I have more Stafford poetry on my shelf than any other poet. It is hard to pick one or two to share, but here are two of my favorites. “The Dream of Now” is the first poem that I took the time to memorize. I mean why start with the Iliad when this one is only a dozen lines? But they speak to me, especially at this time of the year when I can feel spring coming north.
And “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” is a poem for all seasons, and grows more important every year it seems to me, So many lines to let sink in:

maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact,

and

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Until next week, be awake people.

The Dream of Now --William Stafford

When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.

When spring comes north, and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.

Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other --William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Favorite Poem Week 12

This week’s poetry blog features the poetry of Sylvia Cavanaugh. Sylvia’s third book of poetry is, Icarus: Anthropology of Addiction (Water’s Edge Press, 2019). In it Cavanaugh blends elements of the Icarus myth (the maze, the minotaur, wax wings, the consequences of flying too close to the sun) to write poems of everyday topics like friendship, raising a family, Shepherd’s pie, beach glass, surfing, and more. We even learn the name of Icarus’s mother, Nacrete (at least I didn’t know).

But what this blog is about today is a form at which Sylvia has become a master, the golden shovel.

For those who don’t know, golden shovel is a form that uses a line from another poem, a song, a quote, etc., as an epigram and then fashions a new poem using the words of the quote as the end words of each successive line.
For those interested in the origins of the form, it was invented by Terrance Hayes whose poem, “The Golden Shovel”, was fashioned using the words in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool”, as the end words in his poem. The Golden Shovel was the name of the pool hall in Brooks’s poem. You can read both poems at these links:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28112/we-real-cool
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel

There are five prime examples of golden shovels included in Cavanaugh’s Icarus book. You’ll find two below.
Notice how reading the end lines top to bottom reveals the epigram used. The trick of course is to make it seem unobtrusive, unforced, and also to say something new. And for her purposes here, there was the added requirement of having it fit into to the book’s theme. She does this quite deftly, I think. Enjoy.

Law of Gravity

“how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing, in his ecstasy”
From The Windhover, by Gerard Manly Hopkins

I am the unspoken reason as to how
the boy’s flight ended so tragically. He
tumbled crazily from the dizziest rung
of sheer joy, his youthful flight upon
fleet wings, my cold law indifferent. The
science of attraction wins, with the rein
of mass, the void of empty space, of
mathematics. O, how he slyly flaunted a
stodgy force like mine. A weak wimpling,
he was careless of his waxed wood wing.
I trudge through particles and planets in
a hungry, insistent way, and I pitied his
craven flight, his defiance, his ecstasy.

A Bee to Her Flower

“Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah.”
From “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen

My dance of geography is to remember
the scene in shake and waggle, when
everyone is staring, ravenous, and I
go through the motions, moved
by some strange impulse, hovering in-
between the audience and you,
your scented leavings on my legs and
brightly buzzed in electrostatic charge, the
evidence of lust as clear as holy
stigmata, or the boy’s wax wings as he dove.
O, but the hive’s hexagonal imperative was
just an emergent property. A job moving
me thoughtlessly on, forging me female, too.
They say I’m simply a working John and
sometime nurse maid. Truth told, every
one of us spells the singular busy breath
of some incomprehensible whole. We
are the God of old who tried to think and drew
a blank. But your sexy nectar was
so sweet. Praise be, praise be, Hallelujah.

You can order Icarus: Anthropology of Addiction from Water’s Edge Press or from Sylvia’s website.
https://sylviacavanaugh.com/
https://www.watersedgepress.com/

Favorite Poem Week 11

Favorite Poem Blog Week 11

Many years ago, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, I happened onto a photography exhibit of Milton Rogovin’s work. I didn’t know about him at the time, but he’s been a favorite since. A Buffalo, NY, native, Rogovin is noted for chronicling the lives of poor and working class people there. In one study, he visited the same families three times each, at 10 year intervals. The results were amazing.
He died in 2011 at the age of 101. Here’s a link to the NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/arts/design/19rogovin.html
And you can see more about Rogovin at the website: https://www.miltonrogovin.com/

At the museum I learned that in the late 60’s he had been invited by Pablo Neruda to visit Chile and to tour the island of Chiloe which is still now, for the most part, pristine (I’ve been there), but at that time was even more so.
I wondered what the result of that collaboration had been and discovered a book, Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile (White Pine Press, 1999). In the introduction to the book, there is a reproduction of the handwritten invitation that Neruda sent to Rogovin in 1966. Windows, is one of my favorite books, and I revisit it often. You can still find used copies on line for under $20. No matter how many Neruda books you have on your shelf, this one would be a nice addition.
This week’s poem, “Too Many Names”, is included in that book. It was first published in, Extravagaria (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972) and it contains the most favorite of all my favorite lines from Neruda:

“They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.”

Here’s the full poem. See you next week.

Too Many Names Pablo Neruda
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.

No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.

When I lived amongst the roots
they pleased me more than flowers did,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang like a bell.

It is so long, the spring
which goes on all winter.
Time lost its shoes.
A year is four centuries.

When I sleep every night,
what am I called or not called?
And when I wake, who am I
if I was not while I slept?

This means to say that scarcely
have we landed into life
than we come as if new-born;
let us not fill our mouths
with so many faltering names,
with so many sad formalities,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much of yours and mine,
with so much of signing of papers.

I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, bring them to birth,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crepitant fragrance.

Favorite Poem Week 10

This week’s post is late due to my computer being out of commission for three day, sigh.
This week’s poem is, “Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was born in Germany and lived most of his adult life in Los Angeles. He was employed as a postal worker until he quit to devote himself to writing. He wrote several novels (the first being titled Post Office) and was a prolific poet. Including his novels, short story collections and poetry, he published 60 books. He lived hard, gambled and drank a lot, sometimes requesting that a cold six pack be provided at his reading table when he read in public. He died of leukemia at the age of 74.
“Bluebird” is my Bukowski favorite, transcribed below. But I also highly recommend “So You Want to Be a Writer”, which you can read here:
https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
And you can hear him read his poem, “The Secret of My Endurance”, which is hilarious, here:
https://www.openculture.com/charles_bukowski_reads_his_poem_the_secret_of_my_endurance
Till next time.

Bluebird Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.

then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

Favorite Poem Week 9

The 27th Annual Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon took place here in Milwaukee this past
 weekend. It is a fund raiser for a bookstore that for 40 years has been a champion of the 
arts. They have the largest collection of  small press poetry that you will find anywhere. 
They also present readings and workshops; host music programs, film presentations, and 
writers groups; and house an art gallery that presents a half dozen or more showings each 
year. This is all a preface to say that I tuned in (it was a virtual fundraiser this year, 
of course) to hear John Koethe’s reading. I was reminded again of why John is one of my 
favorite poets.
I’m not usually a fan of longer poems, and John writes a lot of longer poems. 
But John’s poems keep me engaged in a way that make me want to continue coming back 
to his poetry, which I do again and again. 
Here is one of my favorites, “This Is Lagos”. It was first published in a 
2009 collection called Ninety-Fifth Street. But if you really want to get into 
Koethe’s poetry pick up Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) .

This Is Lagos			by John Koethe

. . . hope would be hope for the wrong thing
 —T. S. Eliot

Instead of the usual welcoming sign to greet you
There's the brute statement: This is Lagos.
If you make it to the island—if you make your way
Across the bridge and past the floating slums
And sawmills and the steaming garbage dumps, the auto yards
Still burning with spilled fuel and to your final destination
At the end of a long tracking shot, all of it on fire—
You come face-to-face with hell: the pandemonium 
Of history's ultimate bazaar, a breathing mass
Whose cells are stalls crammed full of spare parts, 
Chains, detergents, DVDs; where a continuous cacophony
Of yells and radios and motorcycles clogs the air.
They arrive from everywhere, attracted by the promise
Of mere possibility, by the longing for a different kind of day
Here in the city of scams, by a hope that quickly comes to nothing.
To some it's a new paradigm, "an announcement of the future"
Where disorder leads to unexpected patterns, unimagined opportunities
That mutate, blossom, and evolve. To others it's the face of despair.
These are the parameters of life, a life doled out in quarters, 
In the new, postmodern state of nature: garbage and ground plastic
And no place to shit or sleep; machetes, guns, and e-mails
Sent around the world from Internet cafés; violence and chaos
And a self-effacing sprawl that simply makes no sense
When seen from ground zero, yet exhibits an abstract beauty 
When seen from the air—which is to say, not seen at all.

Across the ocean and a century away a culture died.
The facts behind the Crow's whole way of life—the sense 
Of who and what they were, their forms of excellence and bravery
And honor—all dissolved, and their hearts "fell to the ground,
And they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened"
(Plenty Coups), meaning nothing they could do made any sense, 
Beyond the fact of biological survival. It's easy to forget
How much of ordinary life, of what we value, long for, and recall—
Ambition, admiration, even poetry—rests on things we take for granted,
And how fragile those things are. "I am trying to live a life I do not understand,"
A woman said, when the buffalo and the coups they underwrote were gone.
They could have tried to cope. Instead they found their solace
In an indeterminate hope, a hope for a future they couldn't yet imagine,
Where their ways of life might somehow reemerge in forms
Of which they couldn't yet conceive, or even begin to understand.
It was a dream of a different life, a life beyond the reservation
Without any tangible location, predicated on a new idea of the good
With no idea of what it was, or what achieving it might mean—
Like listening to a song with no sound, or drawing an imaginary line
In the imaginary sand in an imaginary world without boundaries.

It feels compelling, and I even think it's true. But these are things
I've only read about in magazines and book reviews, and not experienced,
Which was Plato's point—that poets don't know what they talk about.
It doesn't matter though, for most of what we think of as our lives
Is lived in the imagination, like the Crows's inchoate hope, or the fantasies
Of those who leave a village in the country for the city in the smoke. 
And when I look in my imagination for the future, it isn't hope and restoration
That I find but smoldering tires and con men in a world of megacities
And oil fields, where too much has been annexed to be restored.
I have the luxury of an individual life that has its own trajectory and scope
When taken on its terms—the terms I chose—however unimportant it might seem
From the vantage point of history or the future. What scares me is the thought
That in a world that isn't far away this quaint ideal of the personal 
Is going to disappear, dissolving in those vast, impersonal calculations
Through which money, the ultimate abstraction, renders each life meaningless, 
By rendering the forms of life that make it seem significant impossible. 
Face me I face you: packed into rooms with concrete beds
And not a trace of privacy, subsisting on contaminated water, luck, 
And palm-wine gin, with lungs scarred from the burning air, 
These are the urban destitute, the victims of a gospel of prosperity
Untouched by irony or nostalgia—for how can you discover
What you haven't felt, or feel the loss of things you've never known?
I write because I can: talking to myself, composing poems
And wondering what you'll make of them; shoring them
Against the day our minor ways of life have finally disappeared
And we're not even ghosts. Meanwhile life regresses
Towards the future, death by death. You to whom I write, 
Or wish that I could write long after my own death, 
When it's too late to talk to you about the world you live in, 
This is the world you live in: This is Lagos.

Favorite Poem Week 8

As many of you know, I have tried to be an advocate for peace for much of my adult life. And especially early on, my poetry was sometimes criticized for being “political”. I happen to think that all art is political, including poetry. There are, of course, good and bad poems of any type and heaven knows I’ve written my share of them.

This week I turn to one of the poems that had a profound influence on me. It made me realize that poetry could take on any subject and still be well-crafted and beautiful. Like many boomers, my consciousness was raised by a reaction to the war in Vietnam. Many writers and artists tried to respond to this and to influence others to use their artistic talents to respond.
Denise Levertov wrote this poem in the early 1970’s and I have a clear memory of first reading it and my reaction to it. Here was someone speaking out, but in a completely different way than the speakers at the rallies and protests I was attending. I continue to read it regularly and try, but fail, to emulate it.
See you next week.

Goodbye to Tolerance by Denise Levertov

Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,

I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
Tolerance, what crimes
are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.

Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-balanced?
Then how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy.

Favorite Poem Week 7

Today I want to feature a poet many of you may not be familiar with, but should be.
I met Dan Denton and a few of his Toledo compadres at a small press conference in Indiana several years ago. Dan is an auto worker at the Jeep assembly plant in Toledo, and a proud member of the UAW. He is also an awesome poet.
Since that first meeting Dan has: installed a podcast studio in his home and a podcast https://noduckstudios.com/about, started publishing a regular poetry zine called Lunch Bucket Brigade (two of my own poems appear in LBB#2), published a couple of poetry books and a novel, hosted several live Facebook events, been elected chief steward in his department at Jeep, and become one of my favorite poets. I often refer to him as the reincarnation of Bukowski. Look him up!
In the meantime, enjoy this one:

Rip Your Vocal Cords Out, by Dan Denton

Rip your vocal cords out
and whisper me a love song

Nobody reports the news anymore
they just tell stories
the news channels
should not tell stories
Nobody covers
the Squirrel Nut Zippers
just Free Bird
and Sweet Home Alabama
Rock and Roll
died a sudden death
in 1994
and Garth Brooks
strangled all the heart
out of country music
the radio no longer has any guts
Today's college degree
is tomorrow's ticket to conformity
The monks don't
set themselves on fire anymore
they don't pray out loud either
Denny's grand slam breakfast
hasn't hit it out of the park
in this decade
and the coffee is strongest
at midnight
So strong
the diner is now open
25 hours a day
Lord help me, I can't change
I'll set myself on fire
before I salute your anthem
The flag never had
any guts to start with
Your backbone is brittle
The artists are almost extinct
there are no more poets
Just factory workers
and baristas
and accountants
and college professors
trying to become poets
The poem always comes
after you quit trying
they never learn that
at the universities

Uncle Sam will no longer
finance your reassignment,
the military complex
sees no profit there
The patriots are missiles
Liberating those
that just wanted to be left alone
The Patriots are football players
The real Patriots
argue on social media
I would delete my Facebook account
but without notifications
How would I know that I am
How would my government
keep track of me
Nobody falls in love anymore
Couples map out their lives
in corporate coffee shops
They turned free love
into a commodity
you have to pay to play
Love is a protest
Jesus got hijacked
by some crazy people
Push the un- mute button
and whisper me lies
don't let me drift off to sleep
with all this sadness
Tell me it's all a nightmare
Tell me that none of it is real
Make me believe in fairy tales
Rip your vocal cords out
and whisper me a love song.

Favorite Poem Week 6

This week I want to celebrate the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission’s selection of Dasha Kelly Hamilton as the 2021-2022 Wisconsin Poet Laureate! I’m posting her poem, “Wonder”. You can visit her website here:
https://dashakelly.com/

WONDER

You’ve cradled a
miracle in your arms
Warm and glowing
Held a star against your chest

You’ve wished upon the dimples,
freckles and wild tangle of curls
A million times today
Gazed into infinity
Small eyes, wide with wonder

You’ve done nothing but
wish and wonder 
How bright?
How big?
How will you 
harness a star?

You are everything in these moments
Holding infinity and 
yourself

You are galaxy and, already,
everything you’ll need
to fill our sky with starlight

Favorite Poem Week 5

Lawrence Ferlinghetti will turn 102 on March 24 of this year. He is one of my favorite poets. I have more Ferlinghetti poems in my “Favorite Poem” file than poems of any other poet. His collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, has been translated into 9 languages and has sold more copies than any other collection by an American poet. I keep a copy of it and of his gem of a small book, Poetry as Insurgent Art, on my nightstand.
Ferlinghetti is the founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco which is a mecca for writers of any genre. Do not visit the Bay Area without stopping there. In 1956, he published Alan Ginsburg’s poem Howl, for which he was arrested and tried on obscenity charges. He was successfully defended and the right of free speech was upheld (at least in that instance).
As I said, I have dozens of favorite Ferlinghetti poems. I have chosen to highlight this one for a couple of reasons. First, I am a big baseball fan, and after the disaster of the COVID-ridden 2020 season, I am anxiously awaiting the February date when pitchers and catchers report for spring training. Secondly, you will notice how, on the surface, Baseball Canto is a celebration of the great American pastime, but along the way the poet manages to include a critique of America’s problems. White supremacy is addressed as well as the fact that minorities for decades were excluded from the Major Leagues. But after the playing of the National Anthem during which the umpires like Irish cops look for the coming of the Great White Hope, the poem then turns as Willie Mays steps to the plate and from there on, the poem is a song (canto) of praise for the diversity of culture and language that is America.
One bit of baseball trivia for those who don’t know. There is a reference in the second stanza to facing east during the national anthem. In most stadiums the flag is located in center field, and baseball parks are constructed with home plate facing east. This is so that by the afternoon the sun is not directly in the batter’s eyes. This is why left-handed pitchers are referred to as southpaws, because their pitches come at the batter from the south side of the stadium. OK, more than you probably wanted to know.
Happy New Year.

Baseball Canto by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Watching baseball
sitting in the sun
eating popcorn
Rereading Ezra Pound
and wishing Juan Marichal
would hit a hole right through
the Anglo-Saxon tradition
in the First Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders

When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up to the National Anthem
with some Irish tenor's voice
piped over the loudspeakers
with all the players stuck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops
in their black suits and little black caps
pressed over their hearts
standing straight and still
like some funeral of a blarney bartender
and all facing East
as if expecting some Great White Hope
or the Founding Fathers
to appear on the horizon
like 1066 or 1776 or all that

But Willie Mays appears instead
in the bottom of the first
and a roar goes up
as he clouts the first one into the sun
and takes off
like a footrunner from Thebes
The ball is lost in the sun
and maidens wail after him
but he keeps running
through the Anglo-Saxon epic
And Tito Fuentes comes up
Looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointed shoes

And the rightfield bleachers go mad
With chicanos & blacks & Brooklyn beer drinkers
"Sweet Tito! Sock it to heem, Sweet Tito!"
And Sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that doesn't come back at all
and flees around the bases
like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company
as the Gringo dollar beats out the Pound
and Sweet Tito beats it out
like he's beating out usury
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism

And Juan Marichal comes up
and the chicano bleachers go loco again
as Juan belts the first fast ball
out of sight
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third
and keeps going
and hits pay-dirt
to the roars of the grungy populace
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National anthem again
to save the situation
but he don't stop nobody this time
in their revolution round the loaded white bases
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics
in the Territorio Libre of baseball.

Favorite Poem Week 4

I am putting off Ferlinghetti for one more week to post my favorite holiday poem. Ralph Murre is the former Poet Laureate of Door County, Wisconsin. He is also the author of several books of poetry, the publisher of Little Eagle Press and RE/Verse (both currently on extended hiatus), an artist, and a musician with a YouTube channel. In short, Ralph is a modern day bard extraordinaire. If you are not familiar with Ralph’s poetry, then now would be a good time to look up more of his excellent work.
I came across this poem several years ago and fell in love with it. I read it each year at this time. You should too. “Yes, even the fruitcake.”

In Dark December by Ralph Murre

Whatever you believe,
whatever you do not,
there are sacred rites
you must perform
in dark December.
Do this for me:
Pull together
the kitchen table,
the folding table,
and that odd half-oval
usually covered
with bills and broken pencils
and red ink.
Pull together family and friends,
cool cats and stray dogs alike.
Turn off everything
except colored lights,
the roaster,
the toaster, the stove.
Cook. Bake. Eat.
Yes, even the fruitcake.
Eat, crowded around
those assembled tables
with mismatched chairs.
Reach so far
in your sharing
that you hold the sun
in one hand,
the stars in the other,
and no one between is hungry.
Now walk together,
talk together,
be together
on these darkest nights.
Give and forgive.
Light candles and ring bells.
Sing the old songs.
Tell the old stories
one more time,
leaving nothing out,
leaving no one out
in the long night,
leaving nothing wrong
that you can make right.

See you next week.
Ed

Favorite Poem Week 3

For starters, I’d like to see how many people are paying attention. I have a new copy of Claudia Rankine’s book , Citizen. I will add it, gratis, for the next person who orders a book from me.
Now to this weeks poet.
I wasn’t, as many poets were, enamored with poetry in high school. It kind of intimidated me. But in a college survey class on English Lit, I was exposed to Yeat’s and this is the first poem that I fell in love with. I found it way more accessible that other poems I had read prior. In other words, I “got it” right away. I studied it. It drew me in to poetry, and eventually I found Ferlinghetti and was hooked, but he’s for next week.
Here’s the Yeat’s poem, although I’m sure many of you have read it several times:

The Second Coming 

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Don’t forget the offer of Rankine’s book. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Favorite Poem Week 2

I first became aware of Todd Boss’s poetry about 10 years ago, when he was featured at a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets conference. His work amazed me right from that first meeting. He had published a book, yellowrocket, which I’ve read and re-read several times. It’s a fantastic collection. Here’s one example, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy”. Right from the start you’ll find one of the hallmarks of Todd’s poetry, the random rhyming, showing up here and there, always a surprise, and always just the right word in the right place: mind/wind, mention/tension, ratchet/catching, matched/scratched, on and on throughout the poem and throughout the book.
Then there are the sounds. Take this gem of a stanza from section ii:

“even our laughter, clunky from the
dusty hurdy-gurdies of our hearts,”

And finally, I marvel at what Boss does best. Starting from the everyday, the mundane and taking us to the profound. Enjoy this poem. Buy this book.

To Wind a Mechanical Toy

i is to mind it. To wind between
finger and thumb a thing too

inconsequential to mention 
is to find the essential tension 

that divides the living from
the dumb. To grind some gizmo

into usefulness, the ratchet 
catching against the paul

(much the way a match scratched 
against a wall of flint is minted

into flame), is to come directly
into a kind of small (but 

no less existential) bind:
To bring a thing into motion 

(whether it be a diversion or an
ocean) is to draw one’s bow 

across resistant strings
(and yes, I speak for the Creator

when I broach this notion), 
for everything’s radical that is. 

To exist at all is to feel the clock-
steady undertow of inertia. 

My mother had a music box
I loved when I was a boy. 

I loved to twist its comical key
and set its tiny tines into play 

across its rubbled metal drum. 
I loved the way, ere long, 

its song lost the muscle of its
wound copper coil and how

sublimely sound surrendered
to a well-oiled but untimely 

end. The pressures of applied 
and implied stress impressed me. 

The tune was Edelweiss, I 
think.

(Bless          my 

home         

                       land 

         for- 

                                    …)

Repeatedly melody’s tendency 
to resolve succumbed 

to a far more commonplace 
dependency: the exquisite

frictions of applied physics. 

ii Yesterday a friend asked me, 

Why is it so hard to be happy? 
She asked it very generously,

but I didn’t have the energy
to crank my pretty little theory

out of its filigree box. “Life 
sucks,” I said. We laughed, but

even our laughter, clunky from the
dusty hurdy-gurdies of our hearts, 

was half over before it started, 
and in truth it wasn’t a genuine 

mirth. (You know the worth of a
good laugh when you have one. 

Often I find I get one in the car, 
about five hours into a trip. Any

quip or observation or country
song can set me off by then. 

The best laughs are deep down 
in the odometer.) I don’t know 

what to say to her. Shouldn’t 
things get easier? Why don’t we

love better fragrant than fresh? 
That romance traditionally 

blooms in spring is one of love’s
greatest plays on words—a twist

that untwists as trysts turn to
marriages, marriages to mists. 

iii For Christmas last year my boy
got a Schilling tin toy from 

Santa Claus. Guess who got
more play time out of its 

wind-up spiral elevator, chute, 
and tumblers? These gadgets

aren’t actually made for children, 
so of course by New Year’s Eve

I had it broken, but that’s when
the real pleasure began: 

to find a glue that favors tin
was my first endeavor. Then, 

to re-install the fallen platform
not just where, but better than

it had been mounted before, 
that was the second. Then, 

when the glue was still drying:
trial-runs one and two and three; 

the adjustments they required; 
the removal of the part and its

re-reinstallation; trial-runs four, 
five, six, and seven … I finally

had it up and running, but who
cares? By then I’d had my fun, 

all alone at the dining room
table, the kids asleep upstairs, 

Times Square crowds counting
down, and another ball falling

from the past and into the future
through the gimcrack contraption

we call our monthly calendar, 
but which is actually the rise 

and fall, the ease and pull, 
of the solar, lunar, and stellar

mechanicals of the universe, 
locked in their epic argument over 

which is bigger, which is stronger, 
who started it, 

and how, if ever, 
it will end.

Blog #1 Favorite Poem

Hello Friends, Poets, and lovers of poetry,
After months of owning this website, I’ve decided it‘s time to start doing something with it.
I plan to post semi-regularly one of my favorite poems in the hopes that you’ll like it too and enjoy it like I do.
So here goes nothin’ as they say. Let me know if you like this one, Stay safe and stay healthy, and if I can do this regularly enough to remember how to get into the management section of this website, a weekly post may become a new year’s resolution,

Happy poeming,
Ed

A Coal Fire in Winter by Thomas McGrath

Something old and tyrannical burning there,
(Not like a wood fire which is only
The end of summer, or a life)
But something of darkness, heat
From the time before there was fire
And I have come here
To warn that blackness into forms of light,
To set free a captive prince
From the sunken kingdom of the father coal.

A warming company of the cold-blooded-
These carbon serpents of bituminous gardens,
These inflammable tunnels of dead song from the black pit,
This sparkling end of the great beasts, these blazing
Stone flowers diamond fire incandescent fruit.
And out of all that death, now,
At midnight, my love and I are riding
Down the old high roads of inexhaustible light.

New Website

I'm launching a new website to signal the next phase of my poetry career.