Sleep
Every house settles. Every house makes odd noises. But just what are they trying to tell us?
You know those noises you hear
When lying in bed at night,
And all the world’s as still
As a glassy sea?
They can be jarring pops
Or long eerie creaks;
“Oh, that’s just the house,”
Was how it was explained to me.
Well, today, sometimes I lay
In the dark, and in my mind debate,
Just what it is the old house
Is trying to communicate.
Are those creaks the complaints
Of a weight-bearing joist,
Longing for another friend
To help out with the hoist?
Or maybe the house is finally
Shifting its position
On the merits of a slab
Versus basement foundation.
Or perhaps it’s just pleading,
For a fresh coat of paint, or
The company of a fine shade tree,
After years of bearing the brunt of the sun —
And this is how it has chosen to vent.
You can hear so much in the silence.
My bones ache.
My back, my knees, my feet, all
Throb to the imaginary beat of the
Humidifier’s hum,
As I lay here writing
In my oh-so-comfortable bed.
And then I hear you shut off
The bathroom faucet —
A sure sign that you’ll soon be
Crawling under the sheets
To fall asleep next to me.
And when that happens,
That’s when I’ll put down my pen
And grab onto your arm instead —
The one that you’ve slung
Over my oh-so-aching body.
And then carefully I will listen,
Over the humidifier’s hum,
For your soft, peaceful moan,
That tells me our day is done.
Right before sleep, my mind often wanders down a wayward track.
I still haven’t figured out why,
but the whistle of a faraway train
sounding at night greatly comforts me,
as I lay in bed fending off the
impending militia of sleep.
Maybe it’s because the passengers are out there,
grappling with bone-numbing gusts
and the Great Dark Unknown;
which reminds me that I am the opposite of that —
In here.
Safely nooked away.
Accounted for.
But does that mean that I derive pleasure
from the mental and bodily distress of others?
That my only concern is how I, alone,
am faring?
I sincerely hope not.
For that is clearly not the final thought
I want perambulating my subconscious
As sleep marches ‘round the corner
and I gently lay down my arms.
Wildlife
It was so hot, even the birds couldn’t stand the heat! I wish I could write more poems that are this succinct ... but I always seem to have more to say.
From my perch across the street,
Shaded from the stifling heat,
I watched a crow pick up his feet
For a moment of august relief.
Inspired by a true story … all the way down to the paint-splattered sneakers. This was written just as I was really starting to understand the genius of Billy Collins.
I just learned today that wild turkeys sleep in trees —
I mean way, way up in trees, like fifty to a hundred feet.
Funny, all this time I thought they slept along the ground,
Huddled together amidst the brush, finding warmth
In the closeness of each others’ plumage, and the shared heat
Of their white and dark meat.
But I was wrong. A hunter friend insists they zip up trees
And rest their succulent carcasses on protruding limbs in the sky.
(Imagine after all these years I never knew that.)
Well, tonight, after everyone is asleep, I will slip on
My hooded sweatshirt and paint-splattered sneakers,
And search for the turkey family that’s been stopping traffic
In my neighborhood, with their strutting and drumming
And brightly colored wattles.
Yes, tonight, I will tiptoe atop the hardened snow,
With my head and neck tilted back, and shine my light
Way, way up into the pine trees that surround my home,
In search of a band of roosting turkeys.
It promises to be a most curious sight.
Flight of the Monarch (Extract)
Not one of my favorites … so I’ve included only two stanzas here. I love the idea that a beautiful butterfly craves the poisonous milkweed plant — something very film noir about that. That stanza has some really nice alliteration, too.
Enriched, the monarch beams,
Orange-brown glory rich and ablaze;
Turning peasants into gentility,
Lo, weeks to seven Sundays!
Then, furtive and flitting,
Artfully, it changes speeds.
(Unabashed in its fondness for flowers,
It craves the deadly milkweed.)
Considered ugly and vile, boars, as it turns out, painstakingly build nests on the ground to give birth in comfort. Found that very noble. The title is a slang term used for boar-hunting in which “noblemen” pursue boars on horseback and kill them with spears.
Shuttled branches and bracken,
Spotted shards of bark —
A temporary mattress
In a wood hardscrabble,
Weaved by the poor-sighted boar.
Now she rests her bristled cheek;
Now she hefts her gravid teats;
And resets her mid-obese, —
Until there’s seven piglets more,
Tearing up the Old World floor.
Woodpecker vs. cactus … an age-old battle. In the last line, the reader needs to switch the accent to the last syllable on “paucity” to make the rhyme come alive. A favorite ploy of mine.
The red-belly’s bill rapid-fires amidst,
A burnt Sonoran reach, and
Into the stem of a lone cactus,
Whose thistles dint the prickly heat.
Yet although the saguaro is teethed, to
Dissuade a woodpecker’s siege,
‘Tis a careful joust that he accepts,
To tap its cache of rich insects,
In this stretch of dry paucity.
Writing
An attempt at existentialism. For some reason, “rimy ground” has always jumped out at me as being perfectly placed here.
Many times the way I start a poem
Is by thinking first of its name,
Some playful twist of words will do,
Or maybe a bold, colorful claim.
Like the way a jockey’s riding crop,
Whips him across the rimy ground,
That’s what a clever title does for me:
It sends me snorting for the Downs.
But more than that, a name may coax
People to actually read
The illuminating lines that follow —
Lines quite similar to these.
They begin as scribbled notes in the margins of a notebook. Some make it. Some don’t. This one’s for all those ideas that never saw the light.
‘Tis unfinished poetry,
That finds me on the fence,
‘Twixt razing or engaging
My marginal brilliance —
There’s the robin fallen from its nest,
Harried in homespun twine …
And gray December twenty-sixth,
When all the world’s reclined …
There’s the hand-in-hand walk,
To that little red school …
And the lone cryptic phrase,
Scratched on every spool …
There’s the soft thund’rous din,
Of a breaker’s ebbless rumble …
(And countless other germs,
From whence my pen doth stumbled.)
‘Tis unfinished poetry,
That keeps my mind askew;
Like a many-splintered love,
That sends my heart a-stew.
Inspiration often comes from some unexpected places.
A lot of times I get ideas for poems
from the pages of Arizona Highways,
or National Geographic, or the voluminous
Sunday edition of the Boston Globe.
I can’t help myself, really.
I’ll just be reading along,
when some wonderfully descriptive word
will leap off the page and bat me on my nose,
like a man might whack his hyperactive
Spaniel with the same rolled-up paper.
Words like upslope and dither, churlish and brio,
numinous, effervescent and imbue,
Smack-smack-smack-smack-smack!
Impossible to deter, they’ll continue their assault
for days, until I finally jot them down,
to remind me to use them in the future.
Then, and only then, will they relent.
But, truth be told,
it’s hard to build an entire poem around
a few words here or there —
no matter how pleasant-sounding or evocative.
(For example, how could I possibly work “serendipitous”
into a poem without it seeming forced?)
So most of these words just remain individual
lonely scribbles,
languishing naked on my clipboard,
lacking context to give them meaning.
Not exactly groundbreaking existentialism, but still fun. (I’m writing a poem about writing a poem ... then before you know it … boom! … a poem). Like a Charlie Kaufman–written movie, it kind of sneaks up on you.
Whenever I’m at a loss,
For what I want to write,
For a subject matter that invites
My brain, my heart,
My fingertips,
To orchestrate a concert with my lips,
I always recall the rule,
That so many writers hold:
Simply …
“Write what you know!”
And if ever there was a thing,
That I know beyond a doubt,
It’s the feeling that I feel
When trying to figure out …
What the hell I want to write about!
