I hired the best musicians to beautify the background
through dinner meals or as we sat at the fire,
and I played the violin, taught by a traveling magician.
I learned the songs of my people and of his also.
I had a voice the animals in the field would stop to hear.
I bathed in herbs the magician gave me and smoothed
my arms and legs with perfumed oils that came Continue reading “The Second Isolde”
Tag: romance
To Embrace Her Slippers
“Will did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her . . . it was clear that she required nothing of the sort. . .” –Middlemarch, George Eliot
Yet why not embrace her slippers?
Why not risk the possibility
Of saliva trickling upon satin
Or tapestry or whatever blessed
Shoe covering one might wear
In a 19th century novel weighing
In at 4.2 pounds, 852 pages? Continue reading “To Embrace Her Slippers”
Love Quatrains, Love Poetry & Its Opposite
I am making some cards and card booklets for Valentine’s Day for my sister’s shop. So I have been composing little love poems to put in them. It’s a bit hard to write a love poem nowadays. Everything has been said. Or has it? Continue reading “Love Quatrains, Love Poetry & Its Opposite”
Seasoning
It was in that time
Of the reddening leaf,
The dot-matrix dance of the grackle,
Sun fade and found hours,
That we met, Continue reading “Seasoning”
The First Exhibit
I have completed my first exhibit in the museum. It is called Marginalia—and it was inspired by Billy Collins’ poem of the same name and made possible by a 1928 textbook called Selections from English Literature. This textbook, which I bought in a Salvation Army in Bartlesville, around 1998, is littered with marginalia written by its owner, one Irene Chaffee. Continue reading “The First Exhibit”
Morgana’s Instructions
You don’t need to love the old man.
Just move his boots out of the way
so neither of you trip over them.
Ask the cook to send the boy out
to find the leeks he likes the best.
Move the curtain on the bed a few
inches to one side, clip it there.
Turn away when he coughs
and the sputum slips out his mouth. Continue reading “Morgana’s Instructions”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 