I opened the gate, walked into the garden
Rust flaked off in my hands
Sifting the dust
To put out the air
Squeeze my eyes shut to open to
Statues
Angel wings, a maiden
This urn
I smelled it from the garden gate Continue reading “Mordred”
Category: Poems
Poetry from Oklahoma
Arthur Before
“And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,
Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear
Came night and day, and rooted in the fields.”
From “The Coming of Arthur”
Lord Alfred Tennyson
There is no gentle wildness
In the land of wolf-like men.
There is no—
Wait, can you smell that?
Bitter as pokeberry
Tasting like mean vowels
The scent of a snarl Continue reading “Arthur Before”
Dream Arithmetic
Nobody needs it,
The loss of words, the alphabet
Of rock and sky, the dictionary
Spelling out the weight of pelican
Feathers and childbirth. Nobody
Needs the dream of images
Making no sense, the path
Of broken teeth and textbooks, Continue reading “Dream Arithmetic”
A Reckoning
What happens to pine needles?
They get wise and smell strongly
Of no place you have ever been.
Where do daffodil petals go?
They rely on the wind and spread news
To the beetles and river rats. Continue reading “A Reckoning”
Red Fern
If you don’t believe a story
Can stay with you in the background
Like a picturesque tree you pose before
For all of your life, witness this:
I loved the baking powder can
That Billy saved his money in to buy
Those two redbone coonhounds. Continue reading “Red Fern”
Merlin on the Road
On yet another February day late
in that month of unforgiving earth,
the irregular beating of junco wings,
I rest on a fallen rock, the slab electric
with the brutality of bone cold,
and the sun fights with clouds,
fights to spotlight me, and loses,
as I have been losing all of my life,
as I have been battling, element
against element with the best intentions. Continue reading “Merlin on the Road”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 