Imagination

My Home

To have a little home

With someone waiting there

Who doesn't want to leave,

Not for anywhere.

A couple trees in front,

A lawn of grass in back,

Three sleepy playful kittens,

Yellow, striped and black.

No grate, no hearth, no fire -

A kitchen always clean,

The bedroom where we sleep

That's simply never seen.

A postman who is happy

And laughs at all my jokes -

Free for no one visits -

Just a couple folks.

 

What is poetry?

Quotidian reduced

To the vernacular,

What I think of what occurs.

What is poetry?

“The highwayman came riding.”

That's when it began,

And never got beyond it.

Just an urge to write.

Once I seemed to make

What I call poesy.

But god, the effort! And it was

So very long ago.

Now I let it come.

The wheel beneath my palms

Is malleable, wet

And spins. And I write songs.

4-8-13

 

What's Poetry?

But not to write about caverns,

Oceans, ghosts and sleep -

Or focus on the phantoms

That through the midnight creep -

Instead describing matters

More adequately whole -

Encompassing the body,

Intelligence and soul.

To summarize a matter

There could but isn't me -

Does Millay want drowning

In a vicious sea?

I think I know a little.

I know I don't know much.

What's in imagination

That out of it I touch.

Is there any beauty

Beyond a furtive glimpse

At angels, gods and fairies,

The forest's rustic nymphs?

 

Her Poems

A friend wrote a book of poems.

I printed it somehow.

I looked it over. She is dead.

The whole thing's useless now.

Yet in her feeble dreams

Is more imagination

Than in all my barren verse,

Devoid of all sensation.

Every poem of hers I read.

Like their author,

They are dead.

Yet when she was here,

She tried to get them published.

Death is insincere.

 

Imagination

Flat affect and a snake

Coiling round the rhythms -

Does that describe the verse?

I've been writing it for years.

Marvelous phrases and metaphors!

Craggy sensations. The poems were rough

Years ago when I wrote good verse.

The old. The new.

The early. The recent.

At the demarcation

I dropped my pants and blundered.

Buckle them up again.

Imagination – a gift of love -

Unless it goes awry.

What could be the reason

My verses abruptly changed?
In the recent there must be poems,

If one struggles through.

In the old are lots of poems.

More than just a few.

 

Imagination

Don't write about myself.

Possibly the stars.

Don't write about the hobos

Who ride in freight train cars.

Don't write about a thing

That anyone can touch.

Possibly my memories

But never very much.

Here's where Keats began,

Standing in the rain.

I did it long ago

And want it once again.

To use imagination,

Instead of just my brain.

It needn't be a picture.

It better not explain.

 

Image

Another phony poet

Thinking he is great,

Stacking up his papers,

Hoping death will wait

Until he's rich and famous.

Prince of Poetry.

Don't express a word of doubt.

Someone will agree.

9-22-13

 

An Image

A marble statue with a fissure cracked -

My mother gave me everything I lacked.

It will stand until the horseman falls,

And makes an echo down the hospice halls.

Closer, ever closer to the edge,

Above the sea, a precipice, a ledge,

And water splashes, melts the ancient fane,

And wets the tassels on the stony mane.

It wasn't what she did, though very grim.

Rather it was what I did to him.

Like an ocean or the coming dawn,

Someone, someone to depend upon.

2-21-14

 
An Image


The subtle consternation of the sea,
The constant sea that sleepily engulfs
The sodden, deep-sunk posts of wooden piers
Is heaving its involvements to the sand.
The sky is low. Already I can feel
The nearness in an image
Of the deepness of the sea.
I see the sea in human conjuration.
Up from my depth I think the depth
Of oceans.
About the sea - I wonder what there is
About the sea; a magic I can touch
About the sea.