Stars at Elbow and Foot
Stars at Elbow and Foot
(Selected Poems,1979-2009)
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Stars at Elbow and Foot
“These poems reveal an impressive tenderness and have a very great variety.
The ceaseless radiation of sublime ideas is perceptible in these poems.”
“A poetry book is a dream you hold in your hands.”
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Color and Shape
Waking up to an early morning sky
that leaves eyes and mind stained
with raspberry juice and blueberries.
Night’s vain shadows flee, leaving
behind a certain something,
a residue of resonance resounding
down half-aware corridors
unconscious of what they are seeing,
unaware of the beauty they have seen.
Misty the memories, slipping , sliding
into the oblivion of falling back to sleep
only to wake to another world,
gray scale now, a tissue of cloud and mist
and something mysterious, sensed,
but not grasped, by searching fingers.
Hard to believe it’s the same room,
the same window, the same camera,
the same day, the same scene. Clarity,
perhaps, but lost the mystery, the nature
of that wild rainbow world blessing
my waking moments, coloring my dreams,
my rapidly dissolving dreams.
KIRA DAWN 2021
I guess somethings remain the same, even when they seem to change. Dawn from the Red Room at KIRA. The dawn hasn’t changed much since I came here first in June 2017.
The rising sun, not yet visible, starts to redden the sky. The studio lights stand out in patches of green. The world is reborn as I watch.
Now the fireworks start and the sky runs red. “In blood we were born, in blood we will die,” say the Oaxacans. The only thing missing is zopilote, up there, above the earth, bringing down the fire he has stolen from the sky.
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Garden of Memories
Last year, a star as red as the warrior planet,
fell down the chimney and covered the poinsettia
with its annual story of glorious, gory leaves.
The cat and the dog stood shoulder to shoulder
to deliver new versions of their Christmas broadsides.
Ghosts danced on the snow bank, slender and bright.
This year an obsidian knife, chipped from black,
volcanic glass hacks into my mind, carving it
in two. Snowflakes invade its split personality.
I tread thin ice that burns with a glacial fire.
Incarcerated birds sing deep in my rib cage.
All my lost toys lie buried beneath fresh snow.
Tears freeze in my eyes, drip from my eyelashes.
They shoot towards earth and descend as stars.
A sunflower grows from my rag-and-bone body.
If I sit here in silence will the world, like a garden
growing wild, go on without me? I pop the question
but spring blossoms seal their lips, refuse to reply.
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Painting the School Outing
Beaver Pond, Mactaquac
The yellow of the school bus is easy, but
what colors do you give the rain of school
kids descending? And how do you portray
their energy, their noise, the tones of French
and English? What colors are their vowels,
their consonants, their high-pitched voices?
You can sketch their orderly rows as they snack
on the top-hat magic pulled out of backpacks.
But it’s not so easy to paint the pop of Pepsi cans,
the scent of chocolate bars, or the crackle of chips
released from packets and popped into mouths.
Running round after lunch, they drive the wild
birds wild with their unorganized games of tag,
their impromptu dances, their three-legged races,
their winners and losers, their joys and sorrows.
Fishing nets are produced from nowhere. Girls,
boys wander to water’s edge in search of prey:
incipient frogs, newts, tadpoles, bullheads, but
how do you paint the wet and wriggle of them?
Try painting this. Whistles sound. Kids regroup.
The bus reloads and goes. Now paint the silence.
Sketch the tranquility of woods, bird-calls back,
of the beaver pond with its lilies stretching their
green necks skywards towards a pale blue sky
where cotton clouds cluster together in celestial
flocks. A pastoral scene, this painter’s paradise.
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Still Life with Hollyhock
for
Geoff Slater
the inventor of line painting
How do you frame this beaver pond,
those paths, those woods? How do you
know what to leave, what to choose?
Where does light begin and darkness end?
Up and down: two dimensions. Easy.
But where does depth come from?
Or the tactility, the energy, water’s
flow, that rush of breathless movement
that transcends the painting’s stillness?
So many questions, so few answers.
The hollyhock that blooms in my kitchen
is not a real hollyhock. It is the painting
of a photo of a genuine flower that once
upon a time flourished in my garden.
A still life, then, a nature morte, a dead
nature, portrayed in paint and hung alive,
on display in this coffin’s wooden frame.
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Man of Glass
After El Licenciado Vidriera
(Miguel de Cervantes)
“I am made of glass,” I said.
“You can see right through me.”
But the harder you looked,
the less you saw.
You claimed
there was nothing there,
just empty air.
“Your glass is an illusion,” you said.
“It’s not half full
and it’s not half empty.”
“Glass is fragile,
I break easily.
Drop me, I shatter;
hot and cold will
make me crack.”
“Your fragility is in your mind,
not in the fact of your existence.”
“When light passes through me
I break into a million colors,”
I said.
“You are a prism,
the colors that you cast
change you and rain
rainbow lights
that change others
too.”
“That’s because,” I said,
“I’m made of glass.”
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Chaos Theory
Chaos theory:
it states that we don’t know
what we’re doing and
it wouldn’t really matter
anyway, even if we did,
because life lacks meaning,
chance rules, and Lady Luck
with her lusty locks attached
to her forehead and she,
all bald and hairless
from behind, must be caught
as she arrives, because later
is much too late, and when past,
she’s gone for good and
our good luck’s gone with her,
and we’re left for ever,
sitting there, head in hands,
bemoaning all that milk spilled
before we ever had a chance
to actually taste it.
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Rainbow Return
I opened the car door
and he ran across the parking lot
and jumped into the back seat.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
He thumped his great tail, sniffed,
and licked my hand.
As we drove home, he thrust his head
between the seats and placed his paw upon my shoulder.
Then he licked my ear and the side of my face.
I pulled into the garage and let him out of the car.
He raced to the end of the drive, surveyed the neighborhood,
and drilled an invisible pee into the snow.
I whistled, and he ran back to the door,
whimpering and scratching, impatient.
I held the door open and he bounded in.
“You’re back home now,” I told him.
He ran to the cat’s bowl and lapped some water,
scoffed her kibble, and lay down in his usual place.
At night, he lies beside me in bed,
a fluffy spoon carved into my body’s curve.
In the morning, he walks through the kitchen
and doesn’t make a sound.
The cat senses he’s there and bristles and hisses
at rainbow motes dancing in the sun.
He’s sitting beside me now,
head on my knee, as I type these words,
one-handed, because I’m scratching him
in his favorite spot just behind his ear.
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Geese
Late last night, high above the house
in the sky’s giant highway,
geese flew overhead, honking.
I pinpointed their calls
leaning back, straining my neck,
and for a moment there were no stars,
just a feathered blackness blanking
the Big Dipper as it hung in the sky.
Harbingers, bringers of spring,
those Canadian geese erased
selected stars and left me breathless,
overwhelmed by so many memories
as they carved their sky path
far above my head.
rogermoorepoet 