The Poet Warns of Self-absorption

 

My mind does not remember my face.

It proceeds quite happily, unless tweaked,

by a doctor, an ache, a grey hair, mirror.

I can remain the same callow, gullible,

easily-distracted youth I always was.

And it is this person the dogs welcome home

because they haven’t aged either.

                                                      Guy

                                                                                                     

Normally I do not include comments on this page but last Wednesday

we went to the first poetry reading I have actually attended,

Billy Collins, one of my favorite poets, visited the University of Calgary

Thanks for pointing that out Helen.

Not only did he read some of my all-time favorites poems of his,

“I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version

Of "Three Blind Mice”, “Today”, “Another Reason Why I Don't Keep

A Gun In The House”. He also gave some advice, one snippet of which

I used while writing this poem. Lots of his poems including the three

 I mentioned can be found on sites like PoemHunter.com or the website for

Poetry Magazine. The Paris Review also has an interview with him.

" Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry No. 83 available on the Internet.

Corson's Inlet/Windsor

Windsor

From Corson’s Inlet A. R. Ammons

“ like an inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of the mirroring mind: “　

Days hot as a train burnished penny,
small footprints traced in asphalt.
Stop and go, hide and seek
childish shrieking until the streetlights come on.
Sitting on the porch while the day recedes
cats drowsing in the heat of a window ledge
nighthawks rising to the currents of dark
each dawn seems life foretelling death.
Day no more than a featheredge
like the inlet’s cutting edge


rolling to night’s sleepless sea.
Sparkles, fireflies, fireworks
and a fat moon face in the window.
Great search lights ever scanning
giant footsteps ever stamping
foghorns on the river, dream of the ocean.
The man at the top of the stairs; no light can dispel
rain sounds, headlights, great snakes of shadow.
Sliding slithering englobed by a nightmare sea’s devotion
there are dunes of motion,

sky great clouds and swirling curtains.
Remember a park big as the world
with all the world’s knowledge at its heart,
piled with leaves, flowers gone to seed
swarming bees, red birds, bugs in jars.
A fathers time, a childlike allegiance
evening, walking past the baseball diamond
sucking on a straw full of candied sugar.
No relentless waves of truth can unbalance
organizations of grass, white shady paths of remembrance
　

of tales told in a graveyard night
cobblestones eroding under waves of cars.
Home from church in the dark
the moon now no more than a rind.
Freighted so with emotion in today’s dawn,
thoughts of return sadly declined
as every wave propels the swimmer forward,
no tide can carry back the past’s lost child
to a nonexistent city now confined
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

Guy

Form Glosa

Carving A Bufflehead

Sitting here on a hard wooden chair in my room at the Capri Centre, It looks like the wind is rising and I see lightning in the distance,

I am restless for home.

Riffling through things I could be doing there, I remember books, errands, projects and a small wooden duck now long gone,

can I carve another?

I have done it before, so no doubt it should rise a small winged shape whirling up from the turbulent surface of my mind,

has it been there all along?

No longer than my hand, a small black blemish from the black paint of the eye staining the clean basswood of the head,

enshrined now in a coat of vanish.

Is it there, the person I was still buried in the person I became, can I reclaim that person with each stroke of the rasp on the same blond

wood that gave that other bird life,

I want, I need to summon back that small delicate migrant, to float once more a calm still shape in my mind

can it find its way back?

Carrying  on its wings the feathers and pinions of not just one me but all the selves  that loved white pelicans floating in a northern river,

drumming grouse at dawn.

What will it carry, what will I receive, the sound of marbles,  the smell of chalk brushes, snapping kites against a blue sky, frustration, longing, joy.

A lot of freight for one small bird.

In Some Far Future Autumn

In Some Far Future Autumn



Standing here with my firefly mind flitting wildly, I wonder what it was I needed in this room, which

errand has slunk silently away with more of my confidence, do animals go through this, does the

squirrel or sparrow have the luxury of confused revelry or endless trips in search of keys or the

word powerbar.



Maybe only long lived animals but its hard to believe that parrots, the bright punctuation of the world

stop lost in thought, perhaps tortoises, after all who would know if they stopped to remember whether

they were seeking food, or sex or fleeing some geologically paced natural disaster measured by

decades.



Will being a poet help, since one is always sifting through one’s mind for a shining tag to end a

metaphor, maybe not, spelling and punctuation were always problematic and remembering the words

of songs or poems, but now the words themselves threaten to disappear.



Words I do not wish to lose have migrated to some farther lobe, artifice has gone taking travail with it,

iambic pentameter has scuttled centipede like into the undergrowth, its many syllables high stepping

rhythmically amid layers of colons and semi colons.



Occluded is almost hidden from sight along with any hope of spelling kaleidoscope or kleptomaniac

without a spellcheck and pronouncing quetzal, forget it and should I meet a pangolin or a

brontotherium in the park I will be reduced to saying that’s a, that’s a followed by a lengthy,

inexplicable description.



And if this is aging, along with sleepless nights and stiff hands let’s hope I reach some equilibrium

amid  loss and gain, and when I finally go, let it not be like an aged cat calling from room to room, let

me drop like a leaf in due season, sere and quiescent, rising only to dance in the wind.



Guy

 Washing Dishes

Outside the window the wind tumbles

the sparrows, seizes the leaves in its teeth

and scours the bricks with the bodies

of summer turned autumn gold.

Later tonight I will waken, anxious

in the winter dawn, and know briefly that

death is closer than birth and that my past

cradles more years than my future.

Outside now the wind has vanquished

both sparrows and leaves, still

a jay confident in cached nuts

screams defiance at the coming cold.

                                                      

 Guy

the beer truck backs up

~ beep beep, beep

at the vet's window, a happy black cat

stripped bare,

 

 in the cold the trees let fall ~

a new beauty