A duck and a turtle share space on a rock in Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake.
San Francisco, CA/August 2016
Holding the Moment (a cento)
Little Birds are hiding,
where statues remember me youthful and blessed.
No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
So, art thou feathered, art thou flown?
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a grief that may not die.
When night comes on gently,
the larks like thunder rise and suthy round.
This entire poem uses lines from other poets. However, I did replace Yeats’ “sadness” with “grief” in L6.
L1: Little Birds (Lewis Carroll)
L2: Summer Garden (Anna Akhmatova)
L3: I Don’t Remember The Word I Wished To Say (Osip Mandelstam)
L4: The Fledgling (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
L5: Sonnet 30 (Shakespeare)
L6: The White Birds (William Butler Yeats)
L7: Dream Variations (Langston Hughes)
L8: The Autumns Birds (John Clare)
summer standing
Mad summer’s face shall quickly fall,
when autumn shows its cheek.
For now, I wear a sylvan shawl
and wait for leaves to speak.
summer eyes
In Kofu’s Sonekyuryo Park, two moths rest near a shrine.
Kofu, Japan-2016年7月22日
Flying Around My Back
A down and out vagrant, silently singing the
blues through scarlet eyes, weeps upon this
lustrous silk lap while we wait for her highness, who
sits on hands dripping with egg yolk.
Painted cheeks and impeccable hair—nothing short of
an illusion. We perform for them, for you, and for
us, but not for me.
Never for me.
The Bluest Eye
This is one of our neighborhood cats; I have named her “Myrtle”. Myrtle doesn’t seem to belong to anyone and since she is fairly scrawny, I do occasionally feed her. Now that Japan is in the rainy season, she has been sitting beneath the eaves in our back courtyard in order to keep dry.
Louisa
Sitting in the sunshine, softer than silk,
copper braids resting against her back,
she knows nothing (yet) of knuckles that
bruise scraps of skin in midnight rooms.
Curtains fly up in rosy rooms.
The day goes down with a lavender bruise.
Champagne lace sticks to that fragile back
as she offers up sweet stainless silk.
:::when I stop:::
Thirty-four before seven, but
twenty-six after six.
In a bewitching mist, bodies
are exchanged, old for young,
clean for soiled–male for female.
Half past six, but
thirty before seven.
Shoulder blades come undone.
Ankles turn into fat drippings.
Water, flushed with flesh,
absorbs bucolic knots, along
with the sweat that girdles them.
sweet smoke
On a warm June evening, peach incense wafts through the hallways of our house.
Kofu, Japan
June 10th, 2016
Excerpt from PotPP
Outside our town there was a glade
where coats of comely mallow swayed.
Their beauty made the billows weep
and caused blithe bumblebees to leap
upon those vivid violet thrones
to gather dusty yellow stones.
The wooers chose that pretty place
to slyly bask in joy’s embrace.
Each morning at the stroke of nine
they hurried past the prickly pine
to wallow in warm waiting arms
and revel in each other’s charms.
______________________________
“Plight of the Peevish Peddler” is a 2,360 word narrative poem, written in iambic tetrameter that I wrote about a year and a half ago. This excerpt is from the poem’s second section.
sundry folly 