Poem to Poetry

Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, field--like the space
between a sleepwalker's outheld arms!

~ ~ Bill Knott

"Arcane Figure" by Bill Knott

Ossabaw Island Dream
#6

Think of yourself as an idea
Through which time is crystallized

Say you have occurred to yourself
As an idea and time as the silent

Architect of its outlines,
Say further that you fear

Its shape still conforms
To numerous things no longer here

Consider yourself contained
by a form that seems determined

by absences, to depend upon them.
You ask yourself, "What am I

doing in this abstraction as if
it were my experience

and I were just an activity
of time trying to make itself clear?"

~ ~ Paul Pines

Adrift on Blinding Light, Ikon, 2003.

Lindos, March 17, 1969, 3:15 a.m.

Artist:  Ed Baker

From my window
I can smell the lemon tree
& I can hear a ship's bell

I listen to the rain drop from
the eaves of my house

                    & what if I
                    thin-blooded as I am

                    sit out the whole man

~ ~ Ed Baker

Published in Butcher of Oxen (Doxie Press, 1970).

mistake after mistake
after mistake, adding up
to just the right thing

~ ~ Don Wentworth


Past All Traps, Six Gallery Press, 2011

                                                  pine trees or palms,

                                                       everywhere I travel,

                                                  the moon follows

                                                  ~ ~ Art Durkee

"Cloud Wisps" by Art Durkee

singing to no one in particular

there are birds that sing with two voices
blessed with a divided larynx
were they people they could hold
two conversations simultaneously
and both turn out right in the end

now i am expediently perched
for precisely such an attempt
except that there is no interlocutor
similarly gifted and the two songs
are not aimed at each other

such an animal is split in the middle
by an impenetrable plane
cutting off its left hand voice
from its right hand voice and the heart
from the heartless yet also singing side

but if we possessed two hearts
our blood would flow against itself
better stay as you are a useless warbler
whose two discourses addressed to the void
receive no response to either

~ ~ Alexei Tsvetkov

Cardinal Points Journal, Vol. 4, 2011

I was in

another place

all the way

here

      findng

      my way home -

      the lovely

      urgency

      of uncertainty



~ ~ Tom Montag

One Man's Wake

He goes around concerned more than usual
about time, life, other minor things like being,
dying without having found himself.

He was single-minded about this and on rainy days
he would go out and start asking if they had seen him
aboard some woman's eyes or somewhere along
the Brazilian coast in love with its pounding surf
or most likely at the funeral of his innocence.

He always had words or pale and miserable pieces
of love and of violent winds in reserve,
he had been about to enter death thirteen times
but came back from force of habit, he said.

Among other things he wanted
someone else to understand the world,
and this terrified loneliness itself.
Now they're holding this scary wake here
inside these walls on which his curses still come rolling off,

the rustle of his beard, still full of life, falls from his face
and no one who can smell him
will ever guess how much he wanted to enjoy the mystery of innocent love
and give water to his children.

As he returns his borrowed skin and bones to neglect,
he makes out his own figure in the distance and runs after himself,
so there's no doubt now
that it will soon begin to rain.

~ ~ Juan Gelman

Translated by Hardie St. Martin

Big Bridge, Issue #15 (Spring 2011).

Way of the Warrior

I planted my madness
in the world

watched it grow
            and fade

                                      like a wildflower
                                      on a hillside

~ ~  Paul Pines
 
Takidancing, Ikon, 2007.

where will you
take me next when
the winds
change and what i
know turns to ash?

~ ~ robert d. wilson

Wild Orchid
playing
with my mind

~ ~ Ed Baker

Wild Orchard, tel-net (2002).