A Passing Glimpse

To Ridgely Torrence
On last looking into His ‘Hesperides’

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren’t;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt-

Not ( Read more... )

If I could be a poet that could describe the world in phrases entered down from one another I feel I would be satisfied with sharing everything with you.

Like sand,
your hands slipped through the openings between my fingers.
I let you fall from me, grain by grain, and then rubbed my hands together
to get what was left of you off.
You fell, so slowly,
back onto the shores of the beach.
The beach, it was your home. When I met you so long ago, I scooped you up
into my yellow pail with my blue shovel ( Read more... )

A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
( Read more... )

Turn back the time, move the rivers and the valleys, and swim to you.

Turn back the time and discover the cure for cancer. I could save the ones that died.

Turn back the time. Stop the president from winning! Stop the son from enlisting!

If I could turn back the time I would cut the fingers from my hands and sew the lips of my mouth.

If time ( Read more... )

Cause and Effect
by Richard Jackson

It's because the earth continues to wobble on its axis
that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart.
It's because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim
through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of
galactic fear. For example: one moment a ( Read more... )

I can't imagine all the people that you know
And the places that you go
When the lights are turned down low
And I don't understand
All the things you've seen
But I'm slipping in between
You and your big... dreams
it's always you in my big dreams

And you tell me
That it's over
Wake up lying in a patch of four leaf clover
And you're restless
And I'm ( Read more... )

http://poems.com/feature.php?date=14349

This is a tale of light and shadow,
what we hear and the silence that follows.
Remember this as we set out
across sea and high roads, as talk turns
to gentlemen and valets, grave robbers
and tormented souls. This is a story
about ( Read more... )

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As ( Read more... )

Goal: reach 100 in each by the end of 2009.
Just lists of the following things I enjoyed of this year:

Books:
1. Size Twelve Is Not Fat - Meg Cabot
2. Avalon High - Meg Cabot
3. 1984 - George Orwell
4. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
5. The Lucky One -  Nicholas Sparks
6. The Game of Sunken Places - M.T. Anderson
7. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
( Read more... )