Tag Archives: poetry

April 2023 in Haiku

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

4/1
Needham Street empty
even on a Saturday.
One of rain’s blessings.

4/2
Sedum clumped with leaves.
I pick them out, snap old stalks,
revealing green buds.

4/3
Mouse turds, balsam, dust.
A page from 9/11.
“I begin to cry.”

4/4
Stupid blonde Nazi
lasted only ten minutes.
I love New Yorkers!

4/5
Cars parked down the street.
The prayers have likely begun.
Gathering again.

4/6
We talk at the curb.
Three out of five in slippers.
The power’s gone out.

The power comes back
with a whoosh, click, and a hum.
Finn barks his head off.

4/7
I forgot my phone.
How can I feel this naked?
The dog doesn’t care.

4/8
Tennessee Justins —
Galvanizing, beautiful.
Their fire inspires.

4/9
Critter annoys us
storing nuts between the joists
living his best life.

4/10
Fifty-five by one.
Today the bird bath goes out.
Flapping joy to come.

4/11

Always in clumps, some
open, some closed, some pale, some
like neon butter.

4/12

Ruby maple buds
litter the ground. Strewn jewels
or kid’s cereal?

4/13
Buzzing, insistent
on the wrong side of the glass.
Hello bumblebee!

4/14
The canopy starts
to assert itself. Green fuzz,
promises of shade.

4/15
The lake holds the sky
and somehow our wishes too.
You don’t have to ask!

4/16
In my dream I sew
a go bag. Indigo lace.
Again. And for what?

4/17
Mary Oliver
lauds idleness. Someone though
was busy writing.

4/17 Bonus
Crowds out in the rain,
screaming, clapping. Obiri
pulls out for the win.

4/18
Jayland Walker ran.
Cops shot him forty-six times.
Handcuffed a dead man.

4/19
If a woman says
she has a UTI, then
she has one. The end.

4/20
To rake liatris
is to feel satisfaction.
The mop free of leaves.

4/21
No forsythia
this year. Temperatures too weird.
Will yellow return?

4/22
Twitter is trash now.
Second monied narcissist
ruining stuff. Sigh.

4/23
Too cold and rainy
for the loop. Instead we make
the figure eight. Wet!

4/24
Bluebells. Chill air. Mud.
Soon the ferns will stretch upwards
with glorious speed.

4/25
New rock wall. New deck.
Second floor ready for joists.
Changes on our route.

4/26  three today
Fresh mulch scents my block.
Animal. Woody. Have I
ever loved a horse?

Clunk and whoosh, the T
goes under the Langley bridge.
I find a penny.

New Yorkers have known.
The very day the law changed,
Carroll filed her suit.

4/27
“Share something she said.”
Years of writing together
yield jewel after jewel.

4/28
Zooey Zephyr holds
her mike high, a new symbol
of the resistance.

4/29
Who lives in that house —
the one where father then son
killed themselves. Such grief!

It’s warm enough now
for the lake project to plant.
Sweetspire! Young maples!

4/30
How many rain beads
does it take to turn tulips
into a Queen’s crown?

Shadows and poems

Muscular and assertive shadows with claims to the olden days. Wisteria.

Shadows that process.

A delicate shadow that refuses your judgment.

Shadows warmed by wood.

A shadow with secrets.

A bevy of shadows? Or perhaps a parliament. No, a convocation!

Happy Monday all! We walked out with Finn this morning, flexible in our gear. Hats on, hats off, gloves on, gloves off. Langley windy, as usual. Warmed up by the bottom of the Cypress slope, as usual. We feel spring arrive through the lens of habit and garments. Finn sleeps now. Pooped.

XGames / found poetry

When you’re five feet tall at the Aspen XGames, you might not see much!

Holding up my phone, I could capture a bit of the slopes. At one point, I felt bold and knifed through the crowd declaring, “Five-footer coming through!” But I didn’t stay up front for long. Some ditzy woman high on something waggled and hooted and flung her arms about in a way that made me fear for my safety. Gawd.

Even though I couldn’t see much, I’m glad we went. It was an experience. Maybe not an experience of viewing elite snowboarders doing astonishing things, but an experience nevertheless.

You watch these tricks (when you can at last see them watching YouTube from the couch) and wonder: how? Not only how is such a feat possible, but how does one practice it? There are precipices involved, speed, and heart-stopping defiance of gravity. You gasp. And since records keep being broken you also wonder, is there a limit? Three spins, four. Is five next?

But I’m not here to discuss sports. I’m here to appreciate vocabulary, in particular the kind of specialized vocabulary that grows around something unique and novel. It’s musical even when you haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about.

I recorded some announcer comments one evening. It’s a found poem of sorts.

My rules for found poetry (I’ve posted some here before) are: no added words and words must be in the order that they were uttered. Enjoy!

XGames 2023 Found Poem

I guess that was a drifting back rodeo?

That was the definition of air awareness!

He’s going way too big and yet somehow he’s still alive.

Sometimes you get away with it.

Total destruction.

Does a butter.

What’s he got for Run Four?

Ooh what?

Who needs a grab?

You heard that collective groan.

‘Course he’ll get another chance.

Backslide 180.

That’s the great thing about Knuckle Huck.

This is overall impression.

I like the hand touch behind the back.

That’s my favorite part, the sway.

Almost a double clutch.

We’re under the two minute warning.

The beauty.

Contest period.

Double tango from the Icelandic legend there.

Just to take a regular run on a forked bird is haunting.

Being the dude at the bottom.

I woulda rolled out of the way.

Cap off Chipotle Knuckle Huck with Marcus Cleveland.

That’s a 1440.

That was absolutely ridiculous.

If you want to gasp yourselves, YouTube has tons of footage.

** Erasure Poems are a form of found poetry that start with a source document. I used a letter from Eliza Lucas Pinckney to her father HERE to create a few variations.

And here’s a poem made from football game commentary.

Solstice poem

This is a poem I wrote two years ago.

Solstice Means Sun Standing Still

Even when lids shut, the tissue
aquiver — the scroll of light
rolling on, a form of damnation.

I want to go through my days,
my nights, like a rib cage.
Each curving spear connected
at a central pole. Sure
in form, sure in purpose,
protecting the two wind
lobes and the single beating
fist — lungs and heart safer
for the bony embrace.

Instead, a vibrato of uncertainty.

How has the non-tactile
flow of damage gained ascendancy
over sinew and nerve,
crowding out all the places
in the body that crave
silence?

One day those ribs will spear
dirt and crumble. Shouldn’t the body
being Hand Maiden to Death wake
us out of stupor now
and then?

Let me eat a cracker
with a smidge of butter.
Let me sweep the steps free of snow
and then sleep under a blanket
that whispers ‘hallelujah.’
Let the sun falling on tabletops
stir gratitude.


The Solstice is here.
Let ‘standing still’ mean something.

Personal update: the bad news is live-in caregiver up and quit. The good news is that I got to see my brother walk.

Boots, deck, and a poem

The boxes arrive like secrets
waiting to be heard. The beauty
of forgetting. Memory herded and
exploited the stuff of scholars,
but let’s not neglect the joy
of a blurred-out past. What
did I order, exactly?

The slicing of tape like
ripping cloth. One violent jerk
with a blade. Last time I jabbed
my thumb and bled all over
the fur of my new boots before
I knew of the wound. Some
injuries come like that, stealthily,
all consequence and no memory
of impact.

The time before there was
no blood, just mystery. What
did I order, exactly?

Opening, remembering
— a pre-ordered deck.
The American Renaissance
Tarot
. It winks in promise.
Remember? Remember?

It is still a stranger to me,
this collection of 78 cards
but already I thrill to
its character – American,
not Egyptian, not medieval
European. Say it again,
the breath rising, cresting,
enunciating with the power
of recognition, four syllables:

A-mer-i-can.

There’s Harriet Tubman!
Edgar Allan Poe! Oh, and
look, Moby Dick and Frederick
Douglass. One figure
teaches a young Black boy
to read, another upholds
a sacred root. Hawthorne,
Stowe, Harriet Jacobs. They’re calling
to me and they’re calling me
home.

Hello. Been writing a lot and editing even more and they somehow take away from showing up here.

We got a little snow last night. The cooler temps make it seem like December. Almost nothing else does. More on that in the next days.