Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
The debris of white paint flecks in the golden hair
Of your arms is the garbage of love and light
–garbage whose original meaning was a “handful,”
A “grasp.” So I will grasp your arm, your hand,
Your chest, your body, and decorate myself
With your leavings, with your day’s work, and
Fill the nighttime world with the rubbish of worth.
–Shaun Perkins
The place where I found to rest was thick
With chamomile. I lay my head against its spongy,
Fragile stems and closed my eyes to the ants
Intoxicated by the scent, climbing toward heaven,
Or what an ant can know of it.
Soft, soft. Come now. Leave the door ajar.
Nimue, Nimue . . . you are not swift enough
You linger, come away. Leave it.
Leave the door ajar.
The air so alive with cold
Strangling,
Suffocating,
All I could know
I drank the wine and listened.
You are too young to know but listen
Listen to each word. Then
Come away. Leave the door ajar
Learn to find the secret jolt.
Swimming across frozen water, chunks
Catching in my hair, my feet whales
Stuck again and again, my arms logs
Weighted by soot, dark and swirling
In the whirlpool my body was creating
Strangling
Suffocating
Like powder
The smell of a rich woman ready
For her lover
The chamomile woke me
My limbs were stiff with dawn
I had barely began to walk the soreness out
When I found him.
–Shaun Perkins
Some very well-meaning people are soliciting poems for a poetry anthology to sell to raise funds for Oklahoma tornado victims. Please don’t.
Say you manage to sell 100 of these books. The cost of making and shipping them will take up the biggest percentage of the money you get for the books. For a $15 book, you might make a profit of $1. Believe me—I know—I’ve done a lot of self-publishing. So, if you sell 100 books (very lofty goal), you will make $100. Continue reading “Poems for Tornado Victims”
After the painting La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Sir Frank Dicksee
But it is not me
–not me in that painting.
John Keats was ever alone and destined
To die young—he was consumed,
Consumed—I tell you—with disease
Not me.
And yet. Continue reading “Lancelot”
He rarely listened to what I taught
but that is the way. A true teacher learns
early that insisting the student listen
is the surest way to uninsure it.
I would be deep into Lao Tze’s treatise
on warfare, and he would be drawing crude
pictures of what he imagined women dreamt he
might do to them. Fart jokes besides Poetics,
impromptu themes justifying the ways of God
to amoeba in terms only amoeba would understand. Continue reading “Merlin at Lessons”
When I was a little girl,
We had houses of shade
Spaced along the road
Where the sycamores
And elms waved to us,
Their branches longer
Than time, leaves wider
Than space, our hearts
Scary with sunshine
Too explosive to contain. Continue reading “The Necessary”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 