I’m delighted to announce the publication of my newest volume of poetry, From The Inkwell, which is (almost) my complete works from 2008, minus a piece here or there that’s best kept to myself.
You can see my other volumes of poetry on My Lulu Store.
I’m hoping that this volume will sell more than the last one, which sold a grand total of three copies, including the one I bought for myself. 🙂
Without Hats
January 4, 2009
Life is a quest for the perfect hat.
The rest is just distraction –
the necessary evils of sustaining life
until we find it.
It was easier 60 years ago,
when everyone wore hats
all the time.
A walking smorgasbord of lids
from which one could sample,
taste a little of this tweed cap,
admire that felt fedora,
wrinkle one’s nose at that
feather-bedecked monstrosity.
Nowadays, however, there’s a famine,
with the fast-food John Deere cap
predominating, and the delicacy
of a tam o’shanter so rare
as to be drooled at from across
a restaurant, nose pressed to glass.
Gone are the days when a bowler
or a top hat
adorned every pate,
and gentlemen lifted their hat
to a passing lady.
Perhaps our lost gentility
is nothing more than
having forgotten our hats.
From the Weekend Wordsmith
Chimera
December 12, 2008
That’s how it works:
One’s sanity depends
on the sanity of others,
and folks with no point
of reference drift irretrievably
into the abyss, forever
pursuing their chimerical vision
of goodness and light.
For the Weekend Wordsmith
Mt. Longonot, 1988
November 25, 2008
It certainly seemed like an avalanche,
the trickle of scree running away
from our boots that had run around the mountain,
and up from the plain, so far below.
Standing here at the edge of that life,
on the cusp of another,
nudging these pebbles down the slope
where they would dislodge so many others
unthought-of and unseen from where
we stood, at the top
of our world, miles ahead
of our friends
who had stopped to enjoy the view.
No Snow Day
November 22, 2008
IRW
How many “covers the ground like a blanket” poems
must we endure before
May’s rescue from
chilled and many-times-rewarmed similes?
Have you noticed how many little girls
are named April, May, June, Julia?
I’ve even met an Augusta.
But never a February.
Although, what they were thinking
when they named someone April,
I’m not sure.
Does it mean that she’s cold,
and prone to tantrums?
Do they, south of the equator,
name their children November
and January, to remind them
of the sun in the chilling depths
of a Montevideo June?
Better to name her Rhiannon,
that she can run with the wild horses
all the year long.
Or Ray, to warm us
during the bottomless chill
of the seemingly-endless winter.
Ray, who now laments
that it doesn’t, in fact,
cover the ground like a blanket,
and he must go to school.
One flake short of a blizzard,
and he is condemned to sit, wishing
he was outside in the cold snow,
wishing he was inside
in front of a warm fire,
rather than outside in the cold snow,
wishing the opposite.
Pickle Jar
November 8, 2008
It was the pickles
that caught my attention.
After all, the city was full
of late-night revelers suddenly
realizing that it was morning,
stumbling home, their heads enormous
and heavy, their eyes burning
with the sun and the hurricanes,
clutching the last bottle of the evening,
a talisman against the return
of their adult responsibilities.
But, inexplicably,
he carried not a Budweiser,
but a gallon jar of kosher dills,
his step slow and determined,
his eyes firmly on his feet.
A long moment later, he came past
again, ignoring the cleaning truck
spraying away the excesses
of the New Orleans All Saints day sybaritism,
and the last trickle of frat boys
down from the University for the long weekend.
This time, with a case
of paper towels, straining to carry
them, but not about to let his determination
be dimmed by his coworkers
breezing past with teetering
arms full of boxes.
All the while we sat
over our grits and eggs,
tried to catch someone’s eye
for one more cup of burnt coffee,
he shuffled between the store room
and the front door
with the daily bread
as the city woke up, rubbed
its eyes, returned to the sins
of their fathers, the path trudged
so any times.
His hands no longer as strong
as they once were, but he not afraid
to get them dirty.
Pumpkins and Mums
October 26, 2008
I hope he got a good deal
for this small plot of goodness
and light beside the road
from Wilmore to the outside world.
Always a smile, a kind word,
and a better price than Sam Walton,
But three years of bad harvests,
and then this, four lanes of blacktop,
a way to get there faster.
Safer, too, I suppose,
and what price can you put on that?
But Blakeman’s Farm, how many generations
digging this rocky earth,
now erased by a broad stroke of asphalt.
Another victim of progress.
So I hope that he was well compensated
for the ground his grandfather passed to him,
on which I stood,
year after year,
choosing pumpkins,
always meaning to come back
for a few chrysanthemums.
Eiderdown
26 October, 2008
And then,
at some unnoticed moment,
the down turns to pinions,
and they’re flying
almost solo, if such a phrase
means anything.
A small thing,
making us breakfast before we arose
from the effects of a too-late night.
One can almost overlook,
at least for today,
the burnt pancakes,
the puddles of batter
on the floor and stove,
and imagine them self-sufficient,
getting their own meals,
perhaps paying their own bills,
taking care of us in our
twilight years.
Then, one of them needs help
opening something,
and the other objects to some small slight
or other,
is inconsolable,
and the illusion disperses,
blows away,
in a puff of eiderdown.
Black Walnuts
13-Oct-2008
Yes, it’s a little silly,
the pleasure of seeing these blackened fingers,
these stains the closest that I,
a 21st century bit-jockey,
can come to the joy of growing something
on my own land, with the work of my own hands.
There’s a black walnut tree down by the creek.
It didn’t drop any nuts last year.
Perhaps it was waiting for me
to pay attention to it,
pull the vines off of it,
clear a little room for it to see the sky.
This year, it dropped hundreds of them.
The patter of them a little unnerving
as we sit down there in our tiny chip
of 1908 cherished amidst the noise
and bustle of 2008.
I peeled back the green skin,
and the juice ran over my hands,
staining them a deep umber
as it dripped from my knife,
revealing a black shell, hiding
some secret that I must work to discover,
even as we worked to unearth
this small clearing of paradise.
And now, I sit pecking at the keys,
back in my digital cave,
but with this stain still on my fingers
reminding me that two miles away
is our stand of black walnuts,
where we can again sit in silence,
listening to the harvest fall around us.
By Candlelight
One of these days
I’ll write my epic poem.
It will, I am certain,
span pages, generations, and continents,
be a thing to strike fear
into high school students everywhere.
For now, however,
when I have nothing to say,
it seems best to confine myself
to just a few lines
scratched out by candlelight.