The rain has fallen all night. And today it is spring. Today begins that season, “when the world is mudluscious” and “the goat-footed balloonman whistles far and wee.” It is spring “when my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.” Well…..as soon as the flood is over, I’ll do that dancing anyway.
Tag: nature
Before the Flood
In the kitchen, I look through the window
On the east wall and see the sun
Hazy behind the new curtain of honeysuckle
On the barbed wire fence
And through the window
On the west wall, the grey sky
And the rain creasing brown oak leaves
In the ditch where the dandelions
Are sprouting. But there is no divide Continue reading “Before the Flood”
Frost’s Forest in Your Head
On this day, March 7, in 1923, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published by the New Republic. This poem is one of the first that I set to memory. I carry it with me everywhere I go.
I carry its emptiness through my busy, busy days. The little horse shaking its harness bells is such a quiet sound in the midst of the teenage voices and car engines and noise of TV and computer that fill my days.
The “easy wind and downy flake” are suspended in my bones while I try to shut the car door against the southern Oklahoma wind and grab for my sunglasses in the stark light of the day.
I pass a slew of abandoned farmhouses on my way to work each morning but none seem as quiet, as lyrical, as lonely as the one that is not even near on that “darkest evening of the year.”
The death wish that some people say Frost’s poetry contains is always present with life. In the midst of life, we are . . . and so it goes (as Vonnegut would say). This poem about wanting to sleep in the dark and deep woods is the network of veins under our skin.
The blood is our desire to go another mile, just one more mile, before we sleep. Thank you, Robert Frost, for the gift of your forest that fills my life.
–Shaun Perkins
From the Water
Spin me into the story resting in your bones,
Whirl the stormy past into sea foam until
The moon appears inside your home.
Spin me into life where memories are made.
Put your pen to paper and your paper
To my heart. Sign the oath of salt water
Arising from my birth. Tempt the maker
Of the times that lie within your grasp. Continue reading “From the Water”
Beginning with Death
I wrote an earlier musing on poems ending with the word “life,” so I thought I would also consider poems beginning with the word “death.” The most famous of these is probably John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” which John Gunther took for the title of the biography of his son’s illness and death—a book from my childhood that I remember quite clearly (along with Robby Benson, my teenage crush, in the TV movie role). Continue reading “Beginning with Death”
Hidden
Under the bridge, the white morning glories
rest from the work that has circled them in,
that has pinched energy into rest, life
into death, bloom into shell of that bloom.
I run over that bridge, desire like wood
splintering from me and landing in vines.
I hear them whisper about me. I hear
everything whisper about me—the trees,
the grass, the wind. I am known like I never
was inside those walls. I am known unlike
a girl before people, in the hunting
moon, in the time of the wolf’s breath, my life
hidden in reeds titled by the current.
I appear when thorns etch my lines in dust.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 