writing – Page 13 – Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry

Frost’s Forest in Your Head

March 7, 2012 ROMPoetry

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

Poems

Eating the World

March 4, 2012 ROMPoetry

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” →

Poems

Wash

February 26, 2012February 26, 2012 ROMPoetry

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” →

Poems

Hidden

February 23, 2012 ROMPoetry

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

Poems

Blind in the Hall

February 16, 2012 ROMPoetry

The way of this life is a tenuous one.
My son flirts with joy at a cherry popsicle
in the afternoon and that evening
must stand his ground in the backyard,
when he tells his new friend Stuart,
I am not a baby. You think I’m a baby.
The way of this life is a tenuous one. Continue reading “Blind in the Hall” →

Poems

The Return: Psyche & Eros

February 14, 2012 ROMPoetry

When I return to you, I will remember
My life before the mountain. I will soak
The western wind, the dark musky nights,
The fall, the trials, and those who played
A part all together in the river
Behind our house where I spent
Those days you were not real to me.
I will never pull them out,
Never clip them to a line to dry,
Never fold and put them away. Continue reading “The Return: Psyche & Eros” →