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Before dawn brought calm to the morning,
A fawn was born in a storm,
A forlorn brown form by the barn,
Now down by mom and her warming.
Torn by the storm to the ground,
Leaves and the bough of an oak,
A wound on the trunk where it broke,
Acorns lying around.
The storm woke wasps in a swarm,
Droning ‘round the deer beneath the eaves,
Fought above the mound of hewn leaves
For the amber in the oak tree’s arm.
Crouched, not a sound, on the lawn
By the barn, the fawn and its mom,
Drawn by the water in the pond,
Unwatched a moment were gone.
Shifting hooves the morning moves,
Softly-shaded shadows soothe;
The huddled ponies, chillied, skinny;
Honey-colored horses whinny.
With feathers left by fleeing plover,
Heather grows amidst the clover;
Its nifty hands and whispy wrists,
Lift the weather’s kissing mists.
Grays give way to midday blues,
But stay as shades in colder hues;
Shadows play at holding feet,
And wade in waves through golden wheat.
Lacy hazes chase in chains
And wet the air with lazy rains;
Clouds scatter light with wondrous choice,
And shatter bright with thunderous voice.
Tickling sprinkles trickle down,
Fickle storms horizon bound;
The sinking sun blinks late and fades,
Winking stars awake no shades.
Below the hollow,
sparrows follow fellow swallows.
In the shallows,
narrow minnows wallow.
In a furrow,
albino geckos burrow.
Cicada staccatos echo
through the yellow willows.
In consonance consonants constantly come,
In assonance resonance entrances and numbs,
With meter it matters to utter the drum;
It’s melody medleys memory hums.
In phonics phonetics sonically sound,
In paradox orthodox seems so profound,
In scansion elisions can often confound,
And rhyme so sublime ought ever abound.
Parsimonous similes simplify verse,
An orator’s metaphors mustn’t coerce,
A decadent cadence in couplets is worse;
In rhythmical harmonies poets converse.
When Zoey sighs,
Zoey’s eyes grow in size.
When Zoey cries,
Zoey’s woes show in her eyes;
But Zoey knowing lows arise,
Zoey dries Zoey’s eyes.
When Zoey’s eyes mime surprise,
No one’s eyes get Zoey’s size;
Zoey shows her shy disguise;
To know why Zoey glows inside entices.
Unknowing wise I chose the prize
Of hoeing rye and sowing spice,
Lowing cows and how’s our house,
Posey rows and cat’s caught a mouse;
I’m spliced to Zoey’s life,
And to Zoey’s eyes,
Those doey spies above Zoey’s nose twice.
Zoey so does hypnotize,
When Zoey opens Zoey’s eyes.
Together a full hour
Me and her meander
To gather a flower.
Together to gather a flower
Me and her meander a full hour.
Me and her meander a full hour together to gather a flower.
Me and her together a full hour
Meander to gather a flower.
A flower to gather
Me and her meander
A full hour together.
So solid floes show
Flowing slowly, gravity;
Growing snow upon the brow,
Boating bergs upon the sea.
Water floating, warmer clime,
Melting ice with energy;
Sunlit icebergs so sublime,
Evaporating skyward flee.
Clustered crystals clinging mates,
Flying over mountain lee;
Feather flake precipitates,
Crowning glassine glaciery.
Their cowbells tolling a dull tonk song,
Randomly clanking cows stroll along,
With occasional clamors as one shakes her head
At an impatient calf who awaits being fed,
But doesn’t belong.
A moo.
And another moo too to the dusk rising moon,
Crickets are clicking in the darkening gloom.
The cow-licked calf being groomed by its mom
Follows the herd as they amble along,
His smaller bell clatters in a tinkling tune:
The cows will be coming home soon.
Denise, the nice,
Tonight thine eyes are my demise,
Entice the highs thy knows arise;
Thy knows thine eyes disguise delight.
Denise, the nice,
Thy knows to night thine eyes so bright,
Denies dawn has the skies to light;
Thine eyes reprise sunrise tonight.
Denise, the nice,
Thy owes my eyes tonight’s surprise,
Thine eyes amuse despite replies;
Though nice invite delights unwise.
Sessile as a sea
anemone
In my bathyl biome
A niche I call home
I cannot see
an enemy.
A sea anemone’s enemy
Sees a sea anemone.
See an enemy see a sea anemone?
A sea anemone can’t see.
An enemy saw a sea anemone.
Anemone seeds
In the zooplankton stew
Disperse the diverse
Chromosome brew
So another enemy may see
Other sea
anemone.
Al has a lass, Alice.
Alice, alas, has Al, an ass,
And Al has a lack, alas.
Al is lacking all a lass like Alice has;
Al is selling Alice, alas.
Selling a lass as Al has Alice,
Allows a lass at least a look about.
Sealing a lock about a lass as Alice
(a lousy aleck Al is)
Allows Alice, a lass, at last aloose about.
Alice, all lace, owl eyes, a lusty pout;
What a doll is Alice, a lass!
What at all about laughs a lass as Alice?
Would that all whose sale is a lass, alas,
Would all lose his lass as Al has Alice.
Al has a lack, a loss, unlucky;
Alice, a lass, at last unlocked, a key.
Alone, a lass, unowned at last,
Unknown allows a laugh;
Who else? Alice, a lass.
Poetry is at the heart mnemonic.
The ears, the mouth, the brain, but something sonic
Etches certain sounds from out the din,
The patterned words are easier to say again,
And that’s what poetry has always been.
Today we wrongly call our poets those
Who excise patterns, losslessly compressing prose.
Since published books preserve their printed word,
They think mnemony’s become absurd,
And poetry is rarely heard.
In times like these, good memories are fleeing,
And here we see the stress of modern human being,
Plagued by verbal information overload
Into brutal economic data storage mode,
Deletes the unproductive poems node.
But antique patterned wordforms are the key
To claiming poem space in modern memory.
Repeated mnemes raise retentivity,
Thus it’s foolish to abandon mnemony.
We come full circle with our poetry.
A gash where someone’s axehead hit,
Across the trunk it splitting bit,
Parting bark and flinging chips;
Still weeps of sap and amber drips,
And asks the axeman why he quit.
For why, oh why, that single chop?
A tree he did not plan to drop,
Not bounding land, nor blazing trail,
Not marked for planks, nor lumber sale;
Just take a whack and stop.
Some six foot man found need to cower,
And lashed out at this branching tower;
Somehow the saying, “I was here,”
A human way of staying fear,
And exercising power.
An argument with fearful ire
That happened only in my head
Has left me in a moody fire
Again I caught myself the liar
Finding me I thought was dead
Since long ago that tender age
Angrily I’d turned that page
Another and others in a rage
Of bitter cursing left unsaid
That rots into unfathomed dread
Wrapped ‘round and ‘round with prickly briar
Rooted in the murky mire
Growing into this my cage
Following me to bed.
There’re those who say of poetry it’s dead
Completely useless since we write
Who thought no more of it alive
Than tricks to help a memory survive;
Deep tomes available now to sight
Collecting dust on shelves unread
As though this proved their thesis right
A deeper truth lies left unsaid:
The poems of these darkened ages
Deserving of their fading pages
Heard only in our drowsy bed
Before a hand cuts out the light
Returning us to fearful night
With anesthetic in our head
And just a little bit of dread,
And nervous distrust of our sages.
The cows are trained by repetition
And leave the barn first thing each day
To gather ‘round the morning hay
Pitchforked from the loft;
One by one they drift off
South into the field
As though drawn by something at the other end
Or intuition
They scatter far apart yet tend
To face all the same way
Until midday,
When suddenly each turns around
Like some great magnet’s had its poles reversed
Forcing inscrutable atoms to yield
And follow the first
Back across the field
Northbound;
So that by dusk they’ve all come back
Attracted to the evening snack
I feed them to keep their habits intact
And to sustain my superstition.
(a pat-a-cake rhyme)
O, Elder is the older word,
And older’s elder’s youngster;
Older’s younger, so I’ve heard,
And elder’s youngster’s older.
Older’s elder elder’s older
than elder’s youngster older;
And elder’s youngster older’s younger
than the youngster older’s elder elder.
Complications speak to me
In relevant hyperbole,
Preserving with synonymy
The verbalized complexity.
Intuition scatters
In sophisticated matters,
When cerebration flatters
It’s prolixity that chatters.
So when prophesizing revelations
Don’t obfuscate the complications,
Repeat sublime extemporizations
With maximum syllabifications.
We complex ripples
Big Bang’s children.
We standing waves
Surfing ergs into the vacuum.
A dance of forces and masses,
And yet we be here now
Oxidizing the chloroplasts.
We crustal rustings
Accounting the continuum.
(a pat-a-cake rhyme)
O, Elder is the older word,
And older’s elder’s youngster;
Older’s younger, so I’ve heard,
And elder’s youngster’s older.
Older’s elder elder’s older
than elder’s youngster older;
And elder’s youngster older’s younger
than the youngster older’s elder elder.