words & pictures
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
