Spring Chickens
Beaks opening calcium doors
a furious, curious peck at a time,
mad escape hatch scurry,
helmeted with half-shells,
their hustle and bustling rush
black-streaked and golden,
their new-born footprints
fresh on the mind:
pure gold of spring,
fresh-hatched chickens
winged dandelions dancing
bright snapshots of dawn.
Spring
As the spirit moves us
a whisper of air
teasing fair locks
and doors and windows
open now
to sunshine and spring
a cardinal
an oriole
quick
catch the brightness
a black and gold song
seized between sunbeams
Bearing Witness
Pen on paper,
words falling like tears,
salt waters that erode
the hardest of stones.
This man bears witness
to thought, word, and deed.
He’s the outsider who sees
the interior world
and drags forth its spirit
for others to see,
not painted in paint,
not sculpted in stone,
not a breeze through
bound river reeds,
just words on the page
lined up in thin lines
to flower and flourish
like an army that conquers
the world of the soul,
and leaves fresh footprints
on eternal snow.
Le mot juste
Searching for what exactly?
For the exact word, le mot juste,
the word that sums it all up,
catches the essence of the thing
and holds it in the mind forever.
Le mot juste? Think color.
Think color blind. Think blind.
Think of the world we see
reduced to grey scale.
Think of the seven colors
that stripe the rainbow sky,
each with a unique name:
it seems so easy, so simple.
But the world has changed.
Think now of the computer,
its screen more accurate
than the human eye and color
coordinated by a million or more
tiny little pixels that multiply
the seven rainbow colors
by a million or two and every
color numbered beyond
the recognition point
of the human eye: le mot juste
reduced to precision of number.
Think flowers. Think scent.
Think of the limited ways
we describe the smell of things.
I look across the breakfast table
and see my wife of fifty years,
a teenager reborn, walking into
the café where we first met.
I search my memory and my mind
for the words to describe that beauty,
that surge of excitement,
but I cannot find les mots justes.
Sous-chef
“I’ll be your sous-chef,” she said,
with a twinkle in her eye,
and she was as good as her word.
She brought me all the ingredients,
laid them out in the right order,
peeled potatoes and carrots,
sliced onions under cold water
to ensure that neither of us cried.
She added crushed garlic into hot
oil, measuring spices and slicing
the chicken into chunks.
I extracted the cork so the wine
could breathe. We sipped sherry
and talked of wind and weather,
of our time together, and how
we would grieve when, early next
day life would force us to part.
Later that night, after dessert
and liqueurs, we climbed up
the stairs and she joined me
in bed, in a sur-chef adventure
that went to my head, with me
as the sous-chef, her as the head.
Comment: Very rare, raw, naughty poem. I wrote it in the garage this morning, waiting for my tires to be rotated. It was cold, I was bored, and I needed warming up. This is one of those poems that I might regret later. I certainly hope not. The rhythms aren’t quite what I wanted, so I may re-do it, and possibly sharpen up the recipe. Your comments and advice will be welcome.
Love Poem @ 70
1
We walk on tiptoe round the garden,
peeling free the sunlight cloud by cloud.
Sometimes, the heart is a sacrifice of feathers,
bound with blood to an ornate altar.
Petrus:
this rock cold against my chest.
Piedra:
centuries of stone carvings
come alive in your face.
If our arms were to meet
around these columns
of sun-warmed flesh and stone,
what would become of us?
2
Beneath my skin, the woad
flows as blue as this evening sky.
Your skin is bronzed
in the warmth of my gaze.
Yellow light bends
low in the fields below us,
each darkening pool
a warrior fallen
beneath time’s scythe.
The moon paints a delicate circle.
Its great round eye opens out
above the rooftops,
a cathedral window
opening on the sky.
Tonight it bears
the wisp of an eye lid
carved from cloud.
Your teeth are diadems of whiteness
aglow in your face.
We tie shadows to our heels
and dance in triumph
to the village music
sounding in street and square.
3
Daylight bends itself round rock
and turns into shadow.
We flourish in blocks of flickering flames.
Dreaming new selves from roots and branches,
we clasp each creation with greedy fingers.
Dark angel bodies with butterfly wings,
our shadows have eloped together.
They sit side by side holding hands
at a table in the central square.
4
Church bells gild the barrio’s rooftops.
Our fingers reach to the skies and hold back light.
We draw shadow blinds to shut out the sun.
Night fills us with stars and a sudden sadness.
We dream ourselves together in a silent movie,
closed flesh woven from cobwebs
lies open to a tongue-slash of madness.
The neighbor’s dog wakes up on the azotea.
He barks bright colors as dawn declares day
and windows and balconies welcome the sun.
Can anyone see the dew-fresh flowers
growing from our tangled limbs?
Your fingers sew a padlock on my lips:
We listen to the crackle of the rising sun.
Daffodils
Winter’s chill lingers
well into spring.
I buy daffodils
to encourage the sun
to return
and shine in the kitchen.
Tight-clenched
fists their buds,
they sit on the table
and I wait for them
to open.
Grey clouds fill the sky.
A distant sun
lights up the land
but doesn’t warm the earth
nor melt the snow.
The north wind
chills the mind,
driving dry snow
across our drive
to settle in the garden.
Our red squirrels
spark at the feeder.
The daffodils
promise warmth,
foretell the sun,
predicting
bright days to come.
Comment: Another ‘very raw’ poem, just less than a day old. We bought two bunches of daffodils in the supermarket yesterday. There were none about on Dewi Sant / St. David’s Day (March 1), so we made up for it yesterday by buying two bunches. They bring a brightness and a lightness to the house and ease the winter gray that besieges the mind when winter lingers and spring seems so far away. Here is a link to two more poems on Daffodils. There are some photos here, too. https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/05/29/daffodils/
Marshall McLuhan
Black ants drip off my pen.
They crawl across my journal
organizing themselves
into marching battalions.
It doesn’t matter what each ant
weighs or means. What counts
is the accumulated weight
of all those ants. Just twenty-
-six of them: that’s all it takes,
as they divide and multiply,
shuffle their feet, form and reform.
All this jazz about medium
and message is meaningless
when internal organs start to fight
and the body’s civil war
tears me into tiny pieces
that the ants seek out,
reshape, rebuild,
and reconstruct into
new and relevant meaning.
Blind
Warmth in a color,
with heat visible to the touch
and shocking pink a shock
to seeking fingers,
not one that you and I,
gifted with sight,
would ever understand.
Blindfolded, they wheel me
round and round the garden
in my teddy bear reality.
Gravel scrunches beneath
the wheels and I am flooded
with the inability to see, to know,
to be sure of the shadows
that are no longer there.
The ones who push me
talk and tell but cannot show.
How could they hold a rainbow
before my eyes or let me hear
the northern lights crackle the sky,
their visible Niagara a curtain
of fairy lights dancing up and down?
And those glorious organ notes
quivering the body, angel voices rising,
falling, grasping at my eye-
lashes, peeling my eye-lids apart.
Song of songs and the singer
deaf to his own sublimity,
oh dealer of cards, fingerless
pianist, bold dancer prancing
on your amputated stumps.
Comment: Raw poem, written for Gwen Martin who opened my eyes to the fact that blind people can perceive color through their finger-tips.
The 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 the hand I placed on his shadowy head.
As we drove back 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 behind the ear.
