Before I knew you…a silly phrase…
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Poetry matters. It’s the keel of our losses and our hope. It allows us to sail.
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And silly to write such a thing–midday, late summer clouds coming on. But this is the hour when I was happiest as a child–alone in the woods, light suffused, everything quiet. Somewhere far off the town had a parade. I was in my cave, green, darker than morning. The trees donned sorrow hats as the sun faded. And the birds quiet. Hint of a coming rain.
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Wild flowers
Queen Anne’s Lace
Standard butter cups
Mantle thoughts of dying
I’m in here…
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I know I’m hopelessly local
Homely, undisguised
Laughing
What else is there
High in branches?
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In his excellent memoir “Interesting Times” the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm says of the Welsh, circa 1960: “For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end.”
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Blind childhood:
Hydra I took you under my ribs, my darling who licked the words from stones.
Hydra, innocent, my speechlessness.
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He supposes he should be more ironic about fealty and Romantic sadness, but finds he cannot.
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Electric bulbs hang by threads.
Once my mother lived here—
Brockton, Massachussetts
Year of big ammunition,
WW I her father building bombs
For Uncle Sam—kids
Playing in dynamite
How it was…
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Please, for the love of God, go out today and cultivate wonder.
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You’d think I’ve a plan
But its not true
In the dark move fast
Planet of the Blind 