Poetry 8:03 pm
Today’s meeting topic:
Payment Forgiveness,
a clever trick to trap
the unwary borrower
into forking over
an extra month’s interest
by skipping a note:
the Product team’s ecstatic.
(Paging Ezra Pound Mr. Ezra Pound:
Please pick up the beige telephone).
Another hour spent
at the counting house
in service to usury,
another pointless team meeting,
another dreamy distraction:
a poem stolen from work
one quiet word at a time
so no one will notice.
Poetry 6:35 pm
What color is “river”
on an overcast day,
when the clouds
swallow up the blue?
A soft brown muddied
with greens and yellows,
the color of soil stolen
by a thousand tributaries.
Café au lait, perhaps?
Frankly, I am stumped.
River river river:
no better word
occurs to me,
no Crayola memory or
art history crib note
comes to my rescue.
Poetry fails me:
4,000 years and still
this bit of breakfast has
no better name than: apple.
Some things just are,
as I am a hungry pair of eyes
clutching a dull pencil,
at once stumped & content.
Sometimes it is enough
to sit and eat and watch
something monumental
declare its own name.
Poetry 13, crows, Ted Hughes, Wallace Stevens 12:59 pm
After Mr. Hughes and Mr. Stevens
1.
Blacktop carrion delights
on soft August asphalt.
Death: sour, warm
& delicious.
2.
One eyed head cock,
slyly studying
the oblivious living
crossing in traffic.
3.
The savor of last terrors:
an iris frozen wide until
snapped shut in a beak.
4.
Couching frozen in
the middle of the road,
scythe backed,
watching
a car approach:
supplicant & hungry
5.
Laughing in the branches
over the murmuring radios,
black eyes flashing
red blue red,
measuring
the spreading blood.
6.
Tossing back
wrestled morsels
like blood cocktails,
beaks lifted
to the sky
in delight.
7.
The park is thick
with pigeons
and sparrows.
No one notices
the crows
crowning
the stone soldier.
8.
A dozen odd crows
watch the crowd
gathered to marvel
at the hawks
soaring over downtown.
9.
A lost crow
puzzles hungrily
in the cemetery,
death smell death smell
everywhere
& not a bit to peck.
10.
Are there no crows
out at night?
Do they simply
vanish into the black
& wait for the cats
to set the table?
11.
No sex fetish feathers,
brightly colored
& yet
they are
everywhere.
12.
Who made them black
lays out their feast &
gave their laughing caw.
13.
Black sinner that I am,
lay me out
naked as I came.
Let them feed
& I’ll fly away
laughing.
