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
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