April is the coolest month

Blustery dawn breeze
Andrea's cinnamon coffee
Yellow Iris and yawning sun

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes,

I can almost grasp what it may be like to fly like a crow.

spring and all (again)

April's porous earth,
fecund, awaits the amorous probe
of sprouting root.

bkb
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俳句

inside the egg a pond;
its shell
a continuous shore.




damp rain soaked soil,
a pine-cone spits
a tree into the wind.





wearing top-hats of damp mud,
mushrooms
assemble in a solemn circle.


Truett Hilliard
used with permission

To Li Po from Tu Fu

Milord, how beautifully you write!
May I sleep with you tonight?
Till I flag, or when thou wilt,
we'll roll up, drunken in one quilt.

In our poems we forbear
to write of kleenex or long hair
or how the one may fuck the other.
We're serious artists, aren't we, brother?

In our poems, oceans heave
like our stomachs, when we leave
late at night the 14th bar,
I your meteor, you, my star.

When autumn comes, like thistledown
we'll still be floating thru the town,
wildly singing in the haze,
I, past saving, you, past praise.

Who wrote this? Carolyn Kizer?
used with no permission

The Rapture

The net is down now
that kept them one or two
to a side.
They flow between the two poles,
ragged with assurance,
and mingle
in a tattered circle:
they expect clowns and lions,
a ringmaster to entertain them.
But there are no dancing bears
and the juggling is crude.
The hoopaballoo is gone.

bkb
used with permission

Two Poems - Winter 1973

For My Wife
Her body is balloon big, huffed
and puffed and growing huge.
Taut with sharing, it protrudes
into her affairs. Awkward, she is
more lovely than the long-legged crane
whose flight she admires. Her tears
are quicker now, her laugh more solemn.
For all of that, she moves
in ways a balloon moves:
a ballet of expectation.


Pairs
She sits ragged
with new maternity,
with a child at her breast,
and those four eyes
share secrets
that a father's do not.

It is a da-da grace
of housecoat and blanket,
mouth and breast:
a total communion
that invites no congregation.

Oh, I am there,
at the table with spoon and fork,
my usual self, but fragmented
by all that hunger,
that grace,
that ragtag purpose.

bkb
used with permission

Diamondback

Down the back steps -
warned by the cadence of his tail
I retreat
then reappear
through the door
jerkily, an imperfect harbinger

I measure time down a smooth barrel

an infinity
of brotherhood between us
even after
there is nothing more
than shattered rubies
and grisled diamonds
scattered
among blades of grass.

bkb
used with permission

Stevens' Picasso

Did you learn this in school,
this blue on blue
of blindness and guitar,

or was it what you saw
bent through your eyes:
that jangled empty sky

of fancy: that blue note
of light below
the shadow of the truth,

and was it always new,
intentional,
bending the strings to fill

our dreams with things that truly are
when played upon your blue guitar?

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes, Wandering

Sometimes, wandering before dawn,
my curtains drawn against the moon,
I have bumped into you
in the long grey hall leading from my bedroom.
You stand huddled into the wall
scribbling in your yellow notebook
as though that could save you.
I wonder that you never warned us,
or was it so enormous
that I in my jerky male youthfulness never saw?
But, Love, your poetry was crude -
as your death:
you were never Sylvia Plath.
When they found you - waterlogged, nude -
that gaping hole through your head -
your parents were embarrased,
prayed loudly for your poor lost soul.
I was not so bold. Oh, I wept,
at home, at night, alone.
I slept before and after,
and only sometimes, wandering,
do I remember you at all.
Why have you not let go?
Why do you huddle and scribble
at night in my long empty hall?
Do you improve your verse?
Do they let you do that?
Sometimes, on dark mornings, I hear you in the hall -
so go to you, but you, preceptor of silence,
busy, bent to your task, ignore me.
Standing over you there in the hall,
paternal and guilty, I wonder that we never guessed
that such a fragile existence
must end abruptly.

bkb
used with permission

Wind Worder
(homage to Theodore Roethke)

Sweet Sir,
master of the minimal,
to meet upon a leaf,
make tea from dew,

talk for days - you talking,
me listening finally -
not as though you were still teaching,
but mere

ly life
upon a leaf,
beneath a white stone:
a moldy earth that holds it all,

heals it all -
I, as pilgrim,
prepared for little - or much,
circling that pale stone,

you, a part of the white air,
the wormy earth,
giving,
explaining over tea

the humdrum
necessary existence - the sufficiency -
the becoming -
life

upon a yellow leaf
beneath a white stone.

bkb
used with permission

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friend's Death

for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
Friends a thousand miles away:
Pictures and old poems in the mail,
A posthumous volume,
Bitter sweet in its delay.

Byron's Grotto, Portovenere,
An Italian Summer,
8 August 1979,
A clipped clear photograph -
You, brown dress, brown skin, demure.

A heap of broken images,
Bits and bits of desultory things:
February 19, 1981,
Your shadow in the morning,
In the evening, the rush of wings.

bkb
used with permission