One of our museum’s exhibits is going to be devoted to marginalia. I am a sucker for an old book with some interesting written comments in the margins. I don’t care what the book is about, but if the person writing in its margins and inside covers sounds interesting, I buy it.
Tag: life
Merlin’s Last Art
The heart becomes the master after all
–Even with my first and last art
of fire—blazing or smoldering,
identity is not known.
Heart smothers the flame.
Water banishes it.
And the smoke rising
in the air and the weightless
ash that drifts into the trees
are someone else’s gifts.
I have slept through
the exchange.
–Shaun Perkins
Stubborn: Poem for the New Year
I am the blackjack oak
protecting herself
with a 2nd set of leaves.
Rod & Chester
It was a lonely life in the lists.
Sometimes he thought of the rust
He could be acquiring aging
In the weeds behind some barn.
Sometimes he thought a new coat
Of paint might be just the thing.
Christmas at Rose, Oklahoma
In old photos, you are grainy
As the chicken shed wood,
Groovy in the rotting way,
Alive to what will be,
And not decay or was,
Not the illuminated past,
But next and next and next.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 