OLD DOG; NEW TRICK

My Stupid Tree - My Stupid Poem

this is the part where I lower my eyes
and mumble a humble response 
like, well, thanks, it was nothing

but of course, it was something,
it was a poem,
and good or bad it was an effort at creation,
like the tree stump in my back yard
that I cut witih my father's day chain saw,
leaving big swoosh-like slashes 
in the tree trunk from top to bottom
which I painted theprimary clolors,
red, blue, and yellow.

those colors to match the ceramic thing Dee made, 
a mirror framed in a mosaic of red, blue, and yellow stones
that I propped up on the top of the stump
in a slot i cut with my chain saw

and I'm not done yet,
I'm thinking of little mirrors all around the tree
as soon as I figure out how to stick them on
so that they will stay

a truly atrocious thing to be stuck in the middle
of one's back yeard., but I don't care how ugy it might be,
or how unappreciated by the neighnors it might
​because I believe it is the creative instinct 
that should be always honored regardless of that
which the instinct produces which may or my not
be honored as a final creation

the human creative passion 
I invested in my stupid tree is equal
to any passion of Picasso,
just as my stupid poem is equal 
in its creative passion to any poem ever written

it is that passion that counts before all else

it is what separates us from the animals in the field
and the fish in the sea, and the birds that fly over it all

---

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Lost Jigger Of Gin

THIS OLD BED

​

I did a series of “color” poems in “Pushing Clouds Against the Wind.” Here are some of them.
 
Riot
 
Red flowers
Over yellow flowers
Among blue flowers
 
Rainbow riot
 
 
Blue
 
Blue eyes
Under clear skies
Ice
On cut crystal
 
 
Yellow
 
Lemons
Overflow a pewter bowl
Rose across the floor
Crying
Caution…caution
 
 
Lull
 
Black man
With a silver flute,
Sing us soft
A song to sleep
 
 
Fresco on the other side of sunset
 
A ridge of low clouds
Pink
As cotton candy
Against billows of virgin white
Above a Mediterranean sky
 
 
Sunset
 
Sun lies low
Behind scrub branches
 
Yellow jigsaw puzzles
At end of day
 
 
Red grill
 
Red grill on a field
Of brown leaves
 
Autumn come
And almost gone
With summer
Red grill begins
The long weait to spring
 
 
Red
 
Blood on white paper,
Bright red
Like an apple
On a bed of snow
 
Winter postcard
 
White horse
On a white field
Enclosed by a white fence
And I am blinded by the light






​

Night Life
(after Willie Nelson)

​





​This poem is by Marsha Pomerant, taken from her book The Illustrated Edge.



Tortoise Shell on a Windowsill
                                         Wellfleet, Cape Cod

The inhabitant is out, apparently
gourge. Now we can study pure s
helter. Waxy chitan, regular ridges,

brown and yellow fields pressing past
their boundaries on a hillside. Arching
horn inspired. Song ceramics and later

eueglass frames looking like
this hellmet for the heart and gut
that a laggard engineered to sumount

himself. Cobwebs and dust, spiders and
mites squat here. Spine inside, vestigial or
provisional, latered into a fragile bitten bone.

In my hand, the undershell clacks against
the hill's insides, like the cover on
the plastic cup that housed my grandmother's

teeth. Some housing intrinsic : you
secrete a home and hope for space enough
to turn in, for love to clack against your wall

so you can say, Come in. I'll just
slide my tectonic plate aside,,
quaking. Myself, I'm renting here.