BOOKS + ANTHOLOGIES
WRITING SAMPLES
IN A JUST AND MINIATURE WORLD
I watched the flames draw closer
my daughters begging the world for good sleep
in a just and miniature world.
Dropping them at the school doors
I half-listened to news as the first plane
hit the first tower fifteen hundred miles away.
I drove to my wife’s hospital room
as the second plane hit the second tower.
She signed her last will. I gave her my last kiss
in a just and miniature world.
I watched the flames draw closer
small fires on the Nebraskan horizon
as the brooding tv seemed half-alive
Above a divine pulse of soft tubes
pinned to her arms and lost veins.
After our good friends had fled
a third plane hit the hard ground.
The last plane disappeared
pentacle-cloud and ember down.
The bright angel left her body
my daughters begging the world for good sleep
in a just and miniature world.
note: pentacle/pentagon
--Charles Fort
ONE HAD LIVED IN A ROOM AND LOVED NOTHING
One had lived in a room and loved nothing.
Full of spiders and what memory remained,
one had loved and she had forgotten things.
Clock stopped and aeroplane lost in the dark,
and who was that voice on the telephone?
One had lived in a room and loved nothing.
It was a rare sleep in helter-skelter;
one awakened a half-blessed and charmed fool.
One had loved and she had forgotten things.
One had lived in a room and loved nothing
left alone in her wedding gown and throne.
Who gave her a mantis kiss as jazz played?
The faceless lover and last known address,
a writing pad and table overturned,
one had loved and she had forgotten things.
What was day or night with no hours left
and who were the two in the photograph?
One had loved and she had forgotten things.
One had lived in a room and loved nothing.
The Best American Poetry, 2016
Edward Hirsh, Editor
My interest in poetic forms, no doubt, began with my first reading of A.E. Housman’s Loveliest of Trees as a lad at our working class city’s public library in New Britain, Connecticut. Poets might read Waniek’s Owning the Masters and find how writers often borrow, tamper, and dismiss the past, present, and future too easily. When I told a colleague I was writing 300 Villanelles, he said in a soft yet desperate tone: ”No. No. No.” Reading “One had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” is to discover a range of flexibility the form allows to only a few expert technicians. In this example, and in the others I have seen, technique is secondary to impulse and import.” Fred Chappell “The poem might have been a sonnet-sequence, I've written two, a prose-poem sequence, I’ve written a trilogy, or several sestinas. Indeed, I wrote a letter to Stephen Hawking at Oxford, not to apply for the job opening to be his assistant, but to ask him if he had time to discern the unknownable origin of the sixes in the sestina. The matter has yet to be settled. My last attempt was a variant-triple-sestina full of odd and relentless repetends. “…villanelles are heart-breaking and deft. I envy his (apparent) ease with so obsessive a format, which so perfectly fits the obsessive contents.” Sydney Lea
I walked into a cafe ready to sit, read, and write. I observed what I assumed were a mother and daughter ordering their coffee. The daughter seemed distraught. They sat down, the daughter weeping and mother not recognizing the face of her own daughter, nor the place they sat and trembled with their simple cups. Over the next few days my poem emerged out of memory and imagination: One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing.
The Vagrant Hours
September
The month of sonnets:
The long distance runners roamed the hills
recited their poems in the afternoon and kissed.
The poet-professor in corduroy cuffed pants
daydreamed of the evening flask of black whiskey
his night watch over the hour glass of metaphors.
The young men were cumbersome in their stalls.
October
The month of sestinas:
The charm of lovers against the burred ivy walls
held the riddle of sixes and coaxed the student’s heart
to a blackboard of pentagrams and tarot flames in chalk.
The griot’s basket of apples, chestnuts, and maple leaves
held back the screen door of their teacher’s writing studio.
The young women were cumbersome in their shawls.
November
The month of villanelles:
The young poet nods off in the back of the classroom
and a wooden pointer curled the cowlick on his head.
He was made to stand before the assembly and sing.
With long shadows and wings of the runners on the hill
into November’s end and the town clock’s vagrant hour
he lowered his head and begged a rhyme scheme for love.
December
The month of elegies:
They held the widow’s wreath and opulent arms of death
kissed the child’s thumb that broke out of a wool mitten.
They waited under a rain of taps and six-gun salute
for the son to place his hand on his father’s cheek
for the wry minister to rise from his narrow chair
and place the widow’s glove and ring in the tomb.
January
The month of blank verse:
They say he tracked a wounded animal
drop for drop for three and a half damn weeks
broke its fat neck barehanded dead and stirred
right strong coffee until he heard noises.
The hot prairie wind howled a fancy tune.
He knew it was a way of knowing things.
February
The month of ballads and woe:
The traveler brings a small gift to her screen door
and he barely remembers the song she whispered
sixteen years before under the lilac covered bridge.
Was that her low voice rising above the top of trees
or a meteor with its own articulation of the heavens
in the arc of falling embers that filled the brown field?
March
The month of pantoums:
She stood for hours in mud
for a handsome young man
who turned into a beer slug
not a fine bottle of wine.
For a handsome young man
who turned into a beer slug
not a fine bottle of wine
she stood for hours in mud.
April
The month of odes and affliction:
This was not the cruelest nor a tepid month Mr. Eliot
until a letter arrived out of nowhere from a best friend
the best damned drinking friend twenty six years ago.
He wrote about old poems that spent his failing heart
who had very little time in the red stained hour glass
how he was on a waiting list for love and a new heart.
May
The month of heroic couplets:
Let there be thunder in his heart again
let a church bell’s echo dance in his pen!
Where he erred once let him live twice
as he lived once let him sing with light
Let his hands turn the hour glass
and the last sailboat raise its mast!
June
The month of pastorals:
The poet met Art Pierce cliff side at Ojo Caliente
his calligraphy on clay birds in mosaic and arsenic
sent by the god of letters to the underworld spring.
They lifted their chalices to the crippled and mortal
who swam the miracle waters for the unkind rebirth
who sought refuge in the ghost chamber of the earth
July
The month of stanzas:
This was the month of writer’s block.
Nothing moved his fingers on the typewriter
until rain outside his studio in the burnt sky
formed a rainbow in the watchmaker’s eyepiece.
What landed on his bad shoulder a poor white raven
found in his good hand a ruby from the baker’s oven.
August
The month of vers libre in his bare hands:
The poet learned the rules of open form
in the black ink spread across the pages
one misspelled word in the spelling bee.
He studied the burial ground of images
how love was subtle and hidden in a line
how love was metered and love was rare.
The Best American Poetry 2003
Yusef Komunyakaa
Fort writes: “The Vagrant Hours is not a mere calendar of genres or a reckless treatise on the creative process. I attempted to meld a narrative thread within variant forms, always a wheelbarrow task for any closet formalist. Form assists the intuitive journey on the precarious cliff with a flared tongue toward heaven and hell. Form is a rhetorical vessel, a velvet bag of metaphors found in the back pocket of the drowned poet, images left on the gangplank after his last great dive, shipwrecked on the landscape of the heart’s repair. I end here with the concluding lines from my unclaimed sonnet: Salieri breeds his own cross and crown/Amadeus hears the singing of the earthmen and their ruby dolls.
We Did Not Fear the Father
We did not fear the father as the barber who stood
like a general in a white jacket with a green visor cap.
For six long days he held cut-throat straight razor like a sword until his porcelain-chrome chariot became a down-home chair. The crop-eared son learned to see how a workingman’s
day job after the night shift filled the son’s small pockets
with licorice, filled the offering plate, and paid for the keeper who clipped our grape vines under his own pageant.
We did not fear the father as landlord in our three-story tenement who took charge of four apartments and the attic dwellers.
We searched each corner of the dirt cellar for a fuse box
while he broke out plasterboard upstairs with a sledgehammer. We peeled out paper from wire mesh and read the headline news a century old before he lifted us like birds into our bunk beds.
We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise for his night job, shaping molten steel into ball bearings
as we stared into the barbed grate where he stood
before the furnace sending smoke into the trees.
Fear became the eight-hour echo and glow inside his skull, the high-pitched metal scraping our ears as our provider left the factory floor with oil and sawdust inside his mouth and punched out as the fermented daylight burned his eyes. We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark.
Making Arguments About Literature, A College Textbook
Bedford/St. Martin’s Press
1, 2, 3, 4, and 5th Edition
The Best American Poetry 2001
Editor, Rita Dove
The Georgia Review
We Did Not Fear the Father
Fort writes: “We Did Not Fear the Father was completed in three years. The first year of drafts took the shape of a prose poem. The second year examined the form. There were shorter lines and stanzas in quatrains. I attempted to use the line We did not fear the father as the approximate line length of the entire work. The third year defined its metaphor, rhythm, and meter. I also used a longer line length: We did not fear the father as the barber who stood, and I found the emphasis I had originally sought in the shorter form remained. I also sustained the poem’s unity and its narrative elements by using the phrase as a refrain.
There are two key transitions in the poem. We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise.) The ashes in the furnace are lifted by love and fear. The son fears his father’s weariness. (We did not fear the father until he stooped in the dark and mortality even as his father lifts his sons and daughters like birds into the top bunk beds. The time clock was a pendulum inside his father’s heart that kept him half-alive. The father had a wife, seven children, holiday barbecues, summer garden, and a small black and white fox terrier named Frisky. The father was a workingman who toiled on the nightshift making ball bearings in New Britain, Connecticut (once called the Hardware City of the World) from 11:00 p.m. to seven a.m. for forty years. The father was a barber from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., depending on the head count, for forty years. The father was a landlord in his three-story tenement. He rented the second, third, and attic apartments. He was on call twenty-four hours a day. I wanted to capture the three jobs he held well as his fourth and fifth: he was our father and the scaremonger.”
FOR TWO DAUGHTERS
for Claire and Shelley
There is no history in their eyes
as they tap the lilac drum and birch,
roll out the silver necklace into a straight line
over the stone and open wound.
The light brown yet darker daughter
sits on the father's back porch
and reads a poem to the brown
yet whiter one under his arms.
There is no history in their eyes
only the ancestral trick light
pulling the cart out of the mud and war
with mules, peasants, and slaves.
There are one thousand metaphors,
a father's fortune in their eyes:
hollow star, broken wheel, caboose,
wild horse, wings over a blue pond.
Their father's pen replaces the hollow star
with a broken wheel and drops a whistle
on the train as wild horses graze
and stare at the wings above the blue pond.
There is no history in their eyes
only two daughters in the backyard
hidden under the cellar door.
This is their evening of metaphor.
The American Poetry Review, 1993
PROSE POEM FOR CLAIRE FORT
January 7, 1985, 3:23 a.m.
Winter brings my wife a child and your birth arrives with the morning tide like wings alive in a jar. The sunflower seeds and thorns bloom in your hands, Claire, and we walk in the mist and draw circles in the sand. I read your palms like a map and there are small islands and mountain roads rising in your summer eyes. Is my daughter the dancer, actor, artist, gifted in language or song? I search the form and proper length to write one impossible verse to place into your hand. The unspoken metaphor falls like a meteor into this simple throne of time I’ve built for you and your birth arrives with the morning tide like wings alive in a jar.
Charles Fort
The Town Clock Burning
St. Andrews Press
1985
In a Just and Miniature World
It is a fearful thing to love What Death can touch.
There were clear signals you were not well
fourteen days and fourteen nights doubled over.
The evening’s champagne was left unopened
tied in blue ribbon like death’s bright palette.
The horse drawn carriage arrived at midnight
with pouches of a used and rare blood type
as the devil’s fortune took the devil’s turn
and catheters and picks left a territory of welts
like the discarded stars falling in your eyes.
The hooded driver passed the medicine bag
to Dr. Bascom passed down by his grandfather
who bowed to the South Dakota mountains
wiped your forehead and took your rapid pulse.
This was not a part of the evening news
unequal to holy war and starvation of nations
only comfort to a husband with two daughters
left on the back porch with no crimes to unlearn
who knelt together like angels on the great plains.
There were clear signals you were not well
with two weeks of doubt until they scanned
your organs as the fog lifted over the Platte River
a smoky black mushroom like a newborn stillborn
known only as a case number left at the prom door.
There was no wind in Nebraska on New Year’s Eve
as the head nurse tapped your veins for the morphine
until your white count rose and your platelets danced
and your recovery made a good country doctor flinch
after a distant signal found the artery of remembrance.
After The Rehearsal
We gathered your choreography of Afro Psalms
our wedding vow performance on marbled floors
at the Museum of Nebraska Art MONA to Its Friends.
You practiced for hours at Harmon Park’s
rock Garden raised by WPA flophouse workers
free room and board for the farmers and artists
the shapers of Central Nebraska’s Stonehenge.
We gathered the African kalimba and rain stick
metaphors of black magic and voodoo blood
for our evening’s curtain call in the corn palace
under a shower of circumstance and disease.
Forty-five minutes before the poetry reading
your dance and the art exhibit opening
we were seated in the small doctor’s room
half-alive in thin aluminum chairs
among the scorched leaves in the hollow
and the bright wings of the angels noble
in their wild and hovering insignificance.
It was the doctor’s first and correct call:
I am sorry to have to tell you
you have lymphoma.
There was nothing to be said.
We walked into the distant world
thirty minutes until our performance.
We would not tell our daughters tonight
and we gathered our poems and music
hollow instruments that moaned in our hands.
As we arrived and hurried into the museum
to a full house of literati and wise docents
the sandhill cranes and life studies seemed alive
with the avant-garde of the central great plains.
You were stronger than the hunger of gravity
and you had not doubled over for an hour
and the strong medicine they gave you
made you more of your second self.
I saw the throttle of pain in your eyes
with ten long minutes to show time.
Our daughters Claire and Shelley
sat in the front row with large eyes
small hands and their larger hearts
knowing something was wrong with you.
They had stared into the devil’s wishing well
as you walked on stage they wished you well.
In Memoriam
For Wendy Fort
Twice they said you would not make it
and you awakened like a small bird
in its first dance outside its fallen nest.
Husband, two daughters, and friends
sat at your bedside at daybreak
into the evening until each minute
fell out of the heavens like a gold coin
into the lilac light that were your eyes.
Your chest rose and your breath fell
and the night nurse detected a slight
murmur in the parlors of your heart.
It’s going to be all right mommy,
shhh, shhh, Shelley whispered.
They held your hands for hours
as Shelley sang into your eyes
that suddenly opened and you smiled
and said to your daughters:
I love you, write it in your journal.
They wrote it in their journals
in their bedrooms in your voice
on your last day on earth
before heaven you told Claire (16) and Shelley (12)
you would speak to them in their dreams.
What am I going to do without you
without the walks to elementary school?
I did not want you to walk me.
it would be funny to my friends.
What about our little dog Mojo in the park
who leaped like a deer in the tall weeds
behind the Windy Hills Elementary school?
It’s going to be all right mommy,
shhh, shhh, Shelley whispered.
Claire screamed:
I don’t want another Mom.
She won’t she me graduate college
married or dance in the meadow
and soft shoe with Baryshnikov or Astaire.
She will be gone forever.
Claire comforted Shelley:
You will be fine.
You are beautiful.
Wendy made you beautiful.
There is nothing to fear.
Afterwards in the afterlife
you gave us the proper signals:
Claire dreamed you had left us
and the morning clock stopped.
Weeks before your photograph
that blew across the room with closed windows
and without the Nebraska wind landed face up.
Shelley wanted to play the violin for you
and they found it in the dark locker halls.
She played Cripple Creek by memory
though her music sheets were in the case.
Shelley’s last song for you to hear
the symphony string filled the hospital halls
and lifted your spirit slightly
from the hollow ground to higher ground.
After I heard your last breath, Wendy,
I awakened Shelley from the fold out bed
and she touched your hollow chest.
She knew you were gone
and asked: Where did she go?
Can you close her mouth?
The nurse closed your mouth.
We walked down the hallway
and drove out of the parking lot
as Shelley wept in the backseat.
Do not worry Mom, it will be like meditating.
I suppose it was Shelley’s young heart and age:
Shelley asked: We should have gotten a jar for her last breath.
finding something alive to trick death?
The Atlas of Eros
Wendy Fort, In Memoriam: 1953-2001. The premiere of Afro Psalms, my sonnet redoublé, was held at the Museum of Nebraska Art in Nebraska. My wife choreographed Stepping Out from the collection of poetry and art; she was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma forty minutes before...
Forthcoming
The Cimarron Review 2021
1.
The two-headed coin determined who won the war
after the storm of the century made landfall
blew out twin transformers in the train tunnel.
Above ground the live oaks split in two.
The newlyweds caught their second breath in wildfire
stranded two nautical miles from the border.
We met under two stars in the jazz-sky
tin-can wire and wild-amber in her eyes.
We spoke of Hiroshima and Bertolt Brecht
holding a crystal ball and powdered mask.
He applauded us and roamed the churchyard.
My widower’s last kiss and metronome
failed to measure time in the vagrant hour
the soft artillery-bells faraway.
2.
Love letters, unread for thirty-two years,
fell out of the moving van at my feet.
The magician held his wand like a sword.
I lifted her silver-forged hairbrush
music box, dancer, frayed rope, curtain call.
Was I seeing double, opera glasses,
pirate’s telescope, hunter’s binocular,
the rings of Saturn and the pastel stars
that fell to the floor of the proscenium
her understudy a funhouse mirror?
3.
We walked into the reception hall.
Twin plaster dolls bowed on the wedding cake.
I wore a gray second-hand tuxedo.
Her flyaway veil broke into tinsel.
After betrothal was death’s betrayal.
4.
One in a Million played on a boom box at the reception thirty years later on the sun porch These Arms of Mine.
We watched breaking stars falling into trees.
Two young daughters danced under a maypole.
My surprise renewal of vows left me a widower.
Professor/Minister. Friends. Two ring sexchanged.
She laughed at the notion of courtly love
I picked up Donald Hall at the Lincoln Airport
to visit my classes and read his poetry.
Who walked the bride and who lifted the veil?
He met my wife and two daughters
our eight-pound toy fox terrier named Mojo.
5.
We drove past Crete, Nebraska
a town much smaller than its name.
We drove the cartography of sorrow.
Donald pointed to the traffic sign:
”That is the town where the woman lives
who gave Jane a bone-marrow transplant
and I wrote letters to her in gratitude.”
Hall wore thick-cuffed corduroy pants.
After his reading we toasted
glasses of Loch Du, black whiskey
cured in charred sweet oak cask.
We wore cloaks to the wedding corridor.
Who lifted your dress and who had refused?
6.
One year later my own wife was gone.
My wife, mother of two daughters, 11 and 15,
survived nine months. We almost lost her in the spring.
I thought I caught wings alive in a jar.
The Omaha doctors tried one experimental treatment.
In the fall we prepared our belief
in bone-marrow transplant. Brother Tom, her genetic-twin
matched in blood, ancestry, and tethered to heaven
and her white count rose and her platelets danced.
My wife became too ill for a transplant of roses.
We prepared our home for hospice.
My wife was too weak to be driven home.
After you touched the lilac you were gone.
I drove our daughters home
as they wept in the back seat.
The clock stopped on September 22, 2001
at the exact hour and a photograph
blew across the floor, windows closed,
lifted by grace and the hunger of gravity.
7.
I wished for something stronger in my life
something alive in a lantern to trick death.
My youngest daughter spoke in a low voice:
We should have gotten a jar for her last breath.
8.
I lifted two objects at one time
monocle and hourglass, its spindle,
set to the estuary of my heart
in double-time march to a killing field.
I was taught how to pull even numbers
out of the failed magician’s top hat.
He had me write the definition of love on scrap paper
and burned it for holy matrimony.
I walked conjoined-twins born with extra thumbs
to the weary traveler’s wishing well.
There were two sailors’ bon voyage
who awakened with double vision, thirst,
seeing two warships on the horizon
under thunder crown and double rainbow.
9.
It was not the twenty-two tornadoes
that swept across the map from west to east.
It was the two-inch baby rattler in Oklahoma
that slid under the doorjamb I feared.
Its newborn, halved tongue, hissed into a psalm.
I learned two alphabets in second grade
slept in one room with three brothers in twin bunk beds.
I was given a Rose of the Winds by the guidance counselor
become a writer or secret agent in a double-vested suit.
I had two choices for everything in the world
a single passenger holding the Atlas of Eros
sky-diving out of a twin-engine plane
my professor’s tweed or black suit
to carry my wife’s urn into our home.
10.
Our home left room enough, three not four,
two young daughters balanced on my shoulders
broadened by the two miniature worlds. I learned early and I learned well what lived what burned
that identical twins born with brown eyes led separate lives
and two times two, times two, equaled love asunder.
There was no twin planet.
Earth’s dominion had reached the woman seated next to me.
Low on fuel I skimmed the borealis
landed in heaven and gave you a kiss.
Nothing
You taught your first class after your wife’s
memorial service as if nothing happened, nothing,
your graduate students, grieving too, alive,
for their professor and his two daughters,
nothing like the imagined, images, and phrases,
buried lines, something rare, a living thing.
No living thing and nothing in your hands
nothing in your teacup on the screened porch.
Anything on the jukebox? Rouge, death mask, last kiss?
The needle lowered to the 45, no living thing stirred,
one love song, Nothing Takes the Place of You, skipped,
played six times in a row. You made nothing of it.
Your students thought you placed a hex on things,
puzzled over a thing called sestina,
a circular descent, riddle of the sixes, water spout
that lifted her urn and dropped it. Nothing landed.
Toussaint McCall sang Nothing Takes the Place of You.
Nothing in the toy store moved on its own.
There was something they learned about the blues.
Do not touch a fallen live wire in the street,
its twelve-bar phrases and three-line stanzas,
about lost things, mutilated days ahead,
things in the second line at times repeat
moans of the first line, something half-alive.
You started writing the morning she died
about all the living things in the world.
You fell asleep in a toy store. Nothing on the shelves.
Things had been torn down with a bent crowbar
except for the first draft of your sestina, titled Nothing,
found torn into six pieces. Nothing but tape saved it.
You placed a sestina on the lectern,
held up the sestina as a living thing, everlasting
to your students who grieved with you
and young daughters who wrote poems,
a calling out, echo-light, curse, wail,
something held back inside a six-sided urn.
There was nothing sufficient in your hands,
heaven-blot, horizon, blink, hexagon,
rogue past, nothing alive, and future stalled.
The Proper Length of a Novel
I told the gentleman-writer who drank the rarest bourbon that the proper length of a novel was one page longer than War and Peace, one comma added to the opening scene of your lover standing next to a carousel with laughing wooden horses, organ music, and gold-hooped necks of swans in a pond fed by a three hundred year tunnel under the city, one semi-colon connecting one hand gesture pointing to a bluebird, to another sentence where a man lifts his cupped hands out of the pond with a minnow that floated on its side, the hyphenated phrase often used to pause a Proustian line describing the pastel-blue sky in the carousel mirror and the widower-heart, the exclamation mark placed after a duel of pension and prayer using one bullet in a long barreled, ivory handle pistol, lifted out of a music box once used for pearls and a song about yellow, pistol-smoke-duel rising into the tops of trees, the large capital letter to begin the novel, Beowulf. So. The past, present, and future appearing at the exact time on the same page showing the same character in a white shirt, rolled sleeves, carrying a basket bread and cheese, using the same accent as the stranger who boarded a ship carrying a message in his vest pocket, the fleet-footed sentences without punctuation in a dance of fireflies and the swarm of blue bumblebees above the character’s head, running for shelter in wildflower under a waterfall next to a blackbird with emerald wing, the couple during their first wedding dance, the bride wearing a veil over her amber eyes and the groom in a lover’s trance, from duel to saber, parry between chapters, the en garde prologue, corps-à-corps lovers, and the black card-epilogue thrown like the ace of spades at the gambler’s hat into his crystal absinthe glass, the one last, well-placed ellipsis, turned period. Was the question mark at the end of the novel designed to ponder the last widower-kiss before the final act of war?
The Last Song You Heard in the World Was Yellow
The last song you heard in the world was yellow, a single yellow iris you planted on one side of our house, the color of a distant planet we observed through a backyard telescope designed to separate the colors of the world, the kind of colors seen in the kaleidoscope I held under the covered bridge at nightfall, our embrace in the precious colors of the earth. I pointed at the sky to watch the embers form into burnt-umber, yellow finch, stinkbug, monarch, hexagon-sky, the six-sided tiffany wedding ring, chameleon-diamond-yellow, amber-sun, church bell, my vw bug, a tinged-rustic yellow. I played the last song you heard in the world on the car radio on our way to the hospital, I wished for the ten-sided miracle, the ten-sided halo over your head, placed by the one- winged angel who somehow landed safely inside the fountain healing garden outside your hospital window, a kaleidoscope forged by the alchemist who changed prehistoric stone and redwood into precious metals, browned faucet water into elixir, the bird’s wing into a golden thumb, frayed rope into sturdy lifeline thrown overboard into a raft, behind enemy-lines kind of yellow, hexagon-yellow, the six-sided merry-go-round, wild horses in a yellow field, starboard-yellow, my vw bug, yellow-ruin, the eyes of the child, his bloated belly full of yellow grim rice, Nebraska-yellow, lines on I-80, mirage-yellow, bovine-yellow, the sky pilot t.v. wire-rim sunglass flared-yellow, crossbow-yellow of the hunter and lover, thin arrow plunged into a yellowed birch, river-yellow, mountain range, gold wedding carriage, porcelain horse, its one gold eye, the way amber altered light in the slightest motion, the yellow husk of a rainbow, a kind of yellow inside a waterfall, dolphin- yellow, your summer dress, the breaking yellow in your eyes, silent-prayers in cathedral-yellow, the Minister of the Heart in a yellow robe, earth-yellow, the layers of river sediment, a meteor creasing the sky, indigo-yellow, the miracle I saw with you and a gold veil over your face crossing the sky, watching the kind of caboose-yellow in a faded cartoon, snow or star, the kind of yellow left on the movie screen at intermission. I wanted the yellow of the hexagon-miracle, a perfect-yellow and comfort from all sides, to fall over you, every dying thing a living thing.
*Two Prose Poems from Yaddo Residency 2019
Turtle Point Magazine FALL 2020-30th Anniversary Issue