Falling
I eat leaves
They have the gritted
Pungency of autumn
As if humus were the mired death of whales
Between the narrows, the soughing shore
Rain tastes like, an oscillating erosion
Breathe, breathe a breath
There is a leviathan
Waiting in your throat
To hail flukes
In a last flung shout
Of escape
Poems are hard
as atom bombs
e e cummings said
one day at the beach
wavelets laurels in your hair
when Lowell (et al)
decried his couth
unstrictured voice
your words are gulls and there
a whale, beached
promethean, slowly dying
watching its own death
with that naive, ancient eye
a heart so slow
it measures time
in intangibles like love songs
still, while you tear
at the monster’s side
tears like quills
hoping for the ambergris
of too studied convention
I will bend
my shoulder to a poem
in the returning tide
watch it
with an evening’s shadow grace
descend