On an Excess of Passion

We strummed so many strings
and sang so many songs

that I've forgotten
what we may have meant.

Rosehip tea
to an afternoon.

(Promises
of seaweed.)

We must have said
"thank-you for the tea" etc

or "you have nice eyes" etc
but I remember nothing.

No moon
to break and reshape

on the waters near the shore.
No silver swan

to sing the silence.
Only tea and seaweed:

an evening of strings
and butterfly wings.

-Bill K. Boydstun

On an Excess of Passion is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

Juan Diego Florez - La donna e mobile

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?

-Bill K. Boydstun

Stevens' Picasso is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

La Donna È Mobile Redux

poem

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friends Death
for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
our 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.

-Bill Boydstun

how i used to be

Elegy

We talked before: she knew
how to construct rainbows -
bits of bible and super-glue:
she had God by the big toe.

Her plaster mask so clean, pure -
the sun has not triumphed here:
one side in shade, the other obscure:
the moon limp as a hound's ear.

Dismiss these scattered dreams -
who can decipher the voices of trees?
such namby noises as they seem:
embrace the stinging sea.

She culled bells in her mouth,
hard vapored sounds of youth -
mockingbirds portending truth:
crystal wings whispered south.

We talked after: as cool as stone -
"It's hard. I can't come back again."
She bent, cupped the baby's chin,
smiled, and was slowly gone.

-Bill Boydstun

Elegy is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in The Sandstorm, the literary journal of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

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