I.
This is no poem
Perhaps a beginning
There is no finish line
So then, this is winning
Let us pray
There will be poetry today
Let us eat
As The Wolves would say
This is no poem
Yet
There is no poem
Until the teeth are red
Let us pray
It will be bloody today
To the Salt Girl,
Her weathermen would say,
Partly cloudy with a most definite
Chance of rain
This is no poem
This is an umbrella
II.
This is a hedgerow
Where the vultures play
III.
Skeletal lines
In falling leaves
Summertime leached the bones dry
In autumn now an outline
This is no poem
This is snow falling & calling Father Time
Her mushroom can taste the words decay
Life eating death in a puddle
(Perhaps tastes and decay are wrong together on the same line
On that the editor will weigh, but know this: she takes four lumps in her coffee…now back to decay…)
No, not taste, don’t ruin the tea and cakes
Honey’s more than sweetener to the hive
The mushroom decyphers in one breath
A time-lapsed feast, a roux of sinew and grist
The wax melting on lush forest floors
The mushroom drinking in death with a straw
Sweet as tea served on a saucer
With dessert & the proper spoon
A tablecloth would be grand
This is no poem
This is a paper plate
This is us holding
While we suffocate
This is us waiting
On words to spell us a letter
This is no poem
This is a recipe
For crikey’s flying sake on a saltine,
Musie says,
A napkin & a blanket & a shade tree
& We’d have us a picnic
Lately she’s into weaving
Lately I’m studying corvids, ants, vultures & fine dining
And sketching jumping spiders
I caught one yesterday and named him Rudy
Rudy is training me
In drawing with ink from blind reference
This is no poem
This is a sketch
Of the inside of
Rudy’s finest spider trap
This is no poem
This is a key,
Silly spider,
Just jump. Jump free
IV.
This is no poem;
This is patience.
V.
There is no poem
Only a question
How many eyes should a spider see
In a mirror?
This is no poem
This is hunger and wanting to eat
Maybe the beginnings
Of avarice
Maybe the beginnings
Of a life slowly read backwards
From the seed’s perspective
What is hubris to a seed?
What is life? What is death?
In which are the beginnings?
Which is avarice to a seed?
Seeds sail and spin on the wind
Seeds get eaten and tromped
Seeds go through a lot of shit
Before they become planted
Before they begin growing
Before they become what they were meant to be
Before the beginnings of their ends
And vice versa
There’s the door
There’s the phone again both in distress
Here hold this
So you want to be a tree?
There is no escape
This is winning
Friends in need
Neighbors in dire straits
Seeds fallen on frozen ground— ouch
Stuck in the hedges— help!
We’re still standing
But everywhere at once
It’s tearing me apart
Life takes its toll
<// * (if:
Life is good
then:
That estranged coder in me
wishes for a taste of the royalties
End if ) //*>
Let royalty be my unsentencing
Let it rain
Let it snow stars & good marks
For the charts
Don’t look now the world’s on fire
Get up again & hold the pen the other way
Listen up said the stewardess
Before helping others
Strap on the emergency oxygen
Affix to your own face first and try
To remember how to breathe
When I am everywhere at once you never hear from me
Especially when tethered to the plane’s gravity
I could use someone good in the tower
To talk me down
Down
Eloquently down
I’ll take a good editor
I don’t mind crash landing
We’ve done it before, so gently
But did we survive?
Don’t you know that writing and editing and flying all at once in the same breath and in the present tense is rude and is too much for me? It’s probably illegal in most states.
I am overwhelmed and then there’s the readings, However
Do you do that aloud?
Walking talking smiling marketing maintenance
Whining First-Aid Triage Fires Noise
And the making of the actual hay
Reading surgery butterflies
Commas cuts and breaks
Tears joy pain
Scars
Chopping wood? Ha!
I planted that tree.
And if I have to answer the damn phone again
Then I don’t care if this writing is rude
When it’s like this and there’s a two-minute chance
I’m just going to take it and run, 120 seconds
Just write, they said. What about sorting it out?
We’ll meet again one day soon
This will be ugly by then
This may be beautiful
Depends on how the beholder is skewed
This is no poem
This is a runaway rocket ship with no kill switch
What day is it?
This ain’t no hippo’s hip
This is hot coffee in the chartroom
This is Ret on a Selectric
Watching Nia blow off steam
With her knife & her broom
A poetry engine boiled over
Best to leave my aerial
On the mat today
Fencing’s only fun
’Til you’ve been stuck and good
Or ’til someone loses an eye
Or a foot
My instructor’s a fierce one
VI.
T’was right there and missed it—
Sorry I wasn’t home, here I am apologizing
Again, as if I should have an excuse
Trying to save a whole crew
With only one parachute
This is no poem
This is a broom and a dragonfly net
Seat me at the helm of your ship, she said,
For I am no pilot
After that she lost me
She had me like a thread and pulled
The eye of a hurricane
The eye of a needle
The eye of time in a black hole
Darts, she said,
Forgive me if I did not save you
I wrote well that day and though
I couldn’t stop falling finished one off
Something to call done
Despite the world outside
Something I could sign with love,
Healing and a breath of fresh air
For a friend
And it felt good
Just to fall down
At home for a minute or two
And this was enough
Just one day with no drama
Five more minutes five more days five years more
Hurriedly I could sew you
A million parachutes
This is no poem
This is a spider machine spinning a waterspout
VII.
(How’s that for a vanishing comma?)
VIII.
In the beginning there was only speed
And before that there was fly tying
This is no poem
Now it will have to wait
Let us pray
There will be poetry today
I wonder how many skips
This phone would make
If thrown just so
like a flat stone into the lake
Let us pray
There will be poetry today
Sinkers work to hold the worm down
Bobbers hold them up
And are more fun to watch
Bobbing about on the waves
Just ask the dragonflies
My grandfather was a fly fisherman
I can see him mirrored in the surface now
Sniffin’ around the edges of the shadow for trout
They say the fish smell you first
But he’d swear it was the other way around
I don’t know
But I knew to keep an eye
Out for bear while he fished
I unsnapped the sheathes on my fishing knives and kept my back to the stream
His specialty was beer-batter fillets
Iron skillet on a campfire
There were bear in camp that night
I slept on a cot in a canvas tent
A bear brushing by and no one could wake me
My shift was up and I slept well
I never really took to fried fish
But come to think of it
Maybe it was the Genesee
IX.
He tied a whole box of flies for me
I have them right here
I’ll have time to write
That story some day
When I learn how & why each was tied
X.
This is no poem
Yet…