Collecte Works (40 page)

ships and plants

The take-for-granted bloom

of our roadsides

           Queen Anne's Lace

           Black Eyed Susans

                            rode the sea

“Specimens graciously passed

between warring fleets”

And when an old boat rots ashore

itself once living plant

                             it sprouts.

Otherwise

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dear friend: If the poem

is printed few

will read and fewer scan it

much less understand it

To be sure

the scanning's plain

but who will veer

from the usual stamp and pound

Other work?—I've not yet found

the oak leaves' law…

Nursery Rhyme

As I nurse my pump

The greatest plumber

      in all the town

from Montgomery Ward

rode a Cadillac carriage

          by marriage

and visited my pump

A sensitive pump

           said he

that has at times a proper

          balance

       of water, air

and poetry

Three Americans

John Adams is our man

but delicate beauty

touched the other one—

an architect

and a woman artist

walked beside Jefferson

Abigail

(Long face horse-name)

cheesemaker

chicken raiser

wrote letters that John

and TJ could savour

POEMS AT THE PORTHOLE

Blue and white

china cups

glacier-adjacent

lost

in the foothills

The soil is poor

water scarce

      the people clothed

              in wind and cold—

Bolivia

Michelangelo

If matches had been my work

instead of marble poems

            —sulphur—

     I'd suffer

less

Wallace Stevens

What you say about the early

yellow springtime is also something

worth sticking to

SUBLIMINAL

            Sleep's dream

the nerve-flash in the blood

            The sense

of what's seen

             “I took cold

on my nerves”—my mother

           tall, tormented

darkinfested

Waded, watched, warbled

learned to write on slate

with chalk from an ancient sea

If I could float my tentacles

through the deep…

pulsate an invisible glow

Illustrated night clock's

          constellations

and the booming

                         star-ticks

Soon I rise

         to give the universe

                        my flicks

Honest

          Solid

                  The lip

   of tipped

lily

A quiet flock