Any Poem is Possible





I am still upright. Bone is connected to tendon,
ligament to filament. I'm breathing,
and breath leads to song.My brain is not just flesh, it is a canvas.
As long as I'm still here, any poem is possible.
Morning: I sit with coffee and good writing.
Better to sit outdoors, let the dog take her
desultory walks around the property,
show the squirrels what's what.
They take advantage of the feeders,
using brute force, if necessary.
Dog gives them the stink-eye and they shrink
back into the branches of a poplar.
Meanwhile, I wrangle word juice
from the Oxford American, sighing at
photographs of blues musicians
with solemn lakes for eyes,
reading a poem about birds aloud 
to the audience in the trees.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Only Get One Question (first published by Anchala Studios in 2018)

Image
          I met her husband in a greasy coffee shop on the run-down side of town -- his choice. I suppose he thought the locale fit my role. I had been bedding his wife, after all. That made me trash.         He was a middle-aged tugboat carrying 300 pounds of fat on swollen ankles and too-small feet. He’d come with a bad attitude. The husbands always do. They never consider why their wives go looking elsewhere for pleasure. Or maybe they do consider, but the answer that comes back is the only one they can sit with: Some bad influence (me) is to blame for their darling Dottie or sweet little Sally-Jo going astray.         “Jesus, how old are you anyway?” he asked.         “That’s a boring question,” I said. “Of all the things you could ask at a time like this, you want a number?”       ...
Read more

A Conversation With a Ghost

Image
This must never get out in the press, for it would cause widespread panic. The priests would surround my house, not to mention the police and possibly the army. Castor Desayuno has come back from the dead! Yes, the butcher himself! You are saying to yourself right now, or possibly to your beloved who sits beside you in the morning sun with her hair down and a cup of café con leche in her sleepy grasp, 'Castor Desayuno cannot possibly be walking the earth. You must be mad!' You are protesting, ‘But we saw his head on the end of a bayonet, paraded through the streets of San Cristobal. We saw his body lowered, headless, into a grave over which no priest said the holy words.' But as surely as I stand before you at this moment, I saw Castor in the flesh, last night. He was a hungry ghost, desperate for conversation. He beckoned to me to sit beside him on the steps to the Shrine of the Eternal Madonna, the very one where he was cut down in the middle of fornicating wi...
Read more

Signs and Wonders

Image
From here, along the northern road, the oaks form a phalanx through which no pines dare grow. Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs between the posts of pastures. I find them beautiful; you would rather not look. Mornings, before the heat returns, we take coffees out to the edge of the property. Indented rocks are our armchairs, and we sit and wait for the thrushes to sing their sonatas.  I start telling you about a dream full of wonders — scientists had perfected holograms and could project works of art onto the sky for all to see — but you won't listen. Dreams are nothing, you say, cutting me off: meaningless  nothings .  The moment is spoiled, and I take my coffee back to the house where I write the dream down, longhand. I phone your sister. We laugh and insult you, calling up instances when we played games (Password and Balderdash), and you change...
Read more