This Poem

 

This poem squats in a desert place.

This poem perches upon your chamber door;

This poem sings, your face your face your face

This poem is merely this and nothing more.

This poem is a traveler from an antique land.

This poem is what you find in the windmills of your mind.

This poem is the lone and level sand. 

This poem is old anarchy to the horizon line.

This poem sees the best minds of your generation.

This poem says, let us go then, you and I.

This poem is tearful lamentations

This poem has a silent lifting mind.

I sing myself and celebrate myself

and that, dear lady, were no crime;

if life is over there--behind a shelf

there you'll find these poems--in one of mine.

________

A bit of doggerel for What's Going On? "Poetry Is..."

I have referenced:

Stephen Crane "In A Desert Place"

E.A. Poe "The Raven"

Ewan MacColl "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"

Alan and Marilyn Bergman "The Windmills of Your Mind" (English lyrics)

Sylvia Plath "The Colossus"

Allen Ginsberg "Howl" (altered)

t.s. eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Francesco Petrarch "The Triumph of Death"

John Gillespie Magee Jr. "High Flight"

Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress" (altered)

Emily Dickinson "I Cannot Live With You"

Two New Poems

 THE MERMAID'S CALLING CARD

The winter blinks its eyes coquettish

then faints as all dreams do at last--

I've saved you flower, fin, and fetish--

all you had to do was ask.

_______

PHINEAS, BACK FROM THE WAR

Phineas comes back from the war

carrying a blood-rain cloud in a folded handkerchief. 

The only things he will eat anymore

are fresh-caught birds and escargot--

one slows his speech,

the other is anesthetic. 

Phineas wears glasses with smoked lenses

and declares it dusk at all times of day.

I bring him his infant child--

he shakes its hand and turns away.

Later, his medals appear

in the crib, like ribboned toys.

Christening

 

By the lake there's a bakery that's sinking

and the lilies wear wimples all fall

they'll sell you croquettes of your bitter regrets

that can no longer hurt you at all.

When the moon sells its light to a lady

as a gift for her children to break

you'll hear their laughter for all the years after

until it dies down to an ache.

When everything dies in November,

a baby is found in the reeds

with such a fair face that you'll long to embrace

its body of riverbank weeds.

You'll declare yourself poet in a graveyard

emblazoned with roses and jade,

then you'll write a sonnet with the world scratched on it

and die in the bed that you've made. 

_________