Welcome to a witching
house
(we wear our robes
of disenchantment
very well)
This is an invitation – limited
Time offer
Special opportunity
For private eyes only
Red tag sale— Continue reading “Witching House”
Tag: news
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
Eating the World
The wind lifted me from the concrete,
and I bobbed safely down the hill,
my toes glancing through the green grass
as Sally Field’s hat shepherded the breeze.
If I cut through the park on my way downtown,
I passed the Indian boy’s house–Jon-Jon,
now upright in the valley like the burnt
stump of a oak felled for firewood. Continue reading “Eating the World”
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”
Wash
She used to hate laundry days, the acrid
smell of boiled water poured in rough tin pans,
the cheap soap peeling away her red skin,
and the clothes less than spic and half of span.
The washing machine, a wedding present
From a rich aunt, transformed the shade of brown
In the diapers and left them a clean scent
But couldn’t take sweat rings on John’s shirts out. Continue reading “Wash”
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”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 