At Last! Daily Poems again.

My revisions continue, but I've gotten back to writing new poems daily. Here are 3 from August 18th. I'll try to get the newest ones posted by tomorrow. I hope you will let me know your reactions to these, they came out of me with great energy.

Mid-August

All over the house dead flies.
Some swatted into silence. Some
that must have simply lain down
exhausted by the heat.

Most on their sides; on one wing;
like the dead of Troy,
their shields beneath them,
who were carried to the pyres.




Keeping The Habit

We carry it around inside us
like an infant or a frail elder
whose feet cannot hold it upright.
We listen to its speech and speak back.
We say, there, there; even kiss its bald head,
all the while imagining the day when the child will walk,
when the old woman’s face will melt into peace. Imagine
how we will begin anew. We
lift the emptiness
as if we know what we are doing.




In The Valley Of The Poem Of The Dead Woman

We speak of women converted into poems by their men.
And what that makes us feel about him
strapping on the memory of his dead wife like saddlebags
of tea from China; heaving her image with a graceful trope
across the gleaming rump of his poem after scattering the ashes
from the night’s fire.

We want him to not carry her all day beneath the hot sun
as he heads west across the Russian steppes. We don’t want
her to end up in some tsarist teacup in Saint Petersburg, sipped,
the long weeks of nights beside the campfire infused in her
as a perfume of smoke and starry sky and wolves pacing beyond the firelight.

We don’t want him to tramp into the nearest bar after currying his horses
to look for an ass to caress, a woman worth fighting with in bed.
We want the dead wife to refuse his poetic advances, to resist
the pathetic tremble in his wrist when he picks up her comb
and finds a single, ink black hair. We want him to stop
stop, stop this convenient traipsing through the rooms of our awareness

in his muddy, widower’s boots, clutching some memory or other
of his wife, in coitus or in the bath. We want him to look up,
look out into the world, to see her the way we see—
not some object of desire, but blessed and cursed and always alive.

We want to know her but we don’t want him saying who she was.
Then the poem reaches from behind and rests its fingers lightly
on the napes of our necks. We flinch and then stand still.
We drop our heads. We graze on the wild green grass.