February Poetry

Robinstide

A hundred in the grass

Worth three in the house

Dozens of drizzled little friends

Skipping and picking through the flowering weeds

Unmowed for months; verdant but tame

As the banana white ‘tiel on my chest

Pressing her beak to my lips—

Entreating a scratch, a pinch, a kiss

While the boy bird begs a similar touch,

As dissimilar from the outside pets 

As the sudden ruddy flash 

Of the cardinal 

Of the woodpecker

Swooping through the olivine leaves 

Or the racecar-striped blue jays

Tutting endlessly on a chase

Spurred by the mockingbird

Defending his magnolia 

From the preponderance of migrants,

His mighty efforts ignored

By the homebound trio 

Preening and primping 

For an outing they will never see

Except through the slats of the blinds

Through whatever imagination

Their walnut minds may find

One winter morning perched on my knee

___________

Roman Empire

Sonnet Twenty-Nine, 

read by two Sirs with two deliveries 

both intimate, longing, speculative, candlelit 

fictions that may yet salve a few souls like mine 

over four hundred years’ unrest

Consciousness is the emergent property 

of the cascading condensation of star stuff 

casually deliquescing 

toward the heat death of the Universe 

(as narrated by Werner Herzog)

Merry gossip frothing the warm air of the Green Dragon 

like the yeast in the freshly tapped ale 

overflowing the tankard in Samwise’s hand 

as he laughs at something Pippin just said

The angle of light absorbed, emitted, reflected makes all the difference 

what colour we perceive, 

what distance we believe, 

what blackness deceives

Small, faraway, small, faraway

Ideally, my end I would abide propped in an Eames, 

meditating to the contented scraping of my birds’ beaks, 

fading to the timeless dawning swell of Das Rheingold

Time travels in diverse paces with diverse persons, said Rosalind once

centuries before Einstein did the maths 

that triangulate our every position on Earth 

as long as we have battery enough

The supreme privilege of contemplating the impossible ribosomes 

in the ornery mosquito who doesn’t worry 

if she is evolved enough

____________

No Spoilers

The air afire with a chorus of bells

A monk cradles a boy in the mud

Whose relief pours out in weeping

Some vows are not worth keeping

Tarkovsky

Jeanne sets aside the scissors

Sits at the table in the dark

Bloodstain on her chest rises and falls

Bluish light flashing on her walls

Ackerman

Inside an empty British manse

A slide a leap a sniff a spin

A dancing Adonis smiling at stones

Drink the rich and f*** their bones

Fennell

Slipping on gazpacho

Stepping on broken glass

Tomato red dresses pop in the blue

Two friends and two ducks enjoy the view

Almodóvar

An icy blue cathedral 

At the end of the world

Underwater chants of reverence

Universal glory in evidence

Herzog

An unblinking soldier sees the boy

With the faded star upon his brow

Defiant smiles mirrored across the square

Help the tears fall without despair

Shepitko

The watery sun shines on her face

Resolution like the wrinkles on her cheeks

Won with age, with the familiar refrain

“Tomorrow let’s meet once again”

Hayakawa