Reading and Making 'Metaphor Poems' by Simile & Rhyme
Video Readings from In Vitro, Section III:
Sakonnet River at Fogland Road
Tiverton, Rhode Island. A moment of fancy. Spring.
The redwing blackbirds’ notes, their “konk-la-rees,”
“tee-errs,” and “cheks,” announce their flights between
phragmites’ reeds — all swaying in salt breeze
across the road — and our tall feeder’s scene.
They preen, display red epaulets, and feed
voraciously as though phragmites’ plumes,
while good to nest in, offered them no seed
quite sweet enough to keep home all the grooms.
Perhaps the feeder’s like a pub, a place
where grooms can strut and brag on nest and reeds —
the tallest plumes, and how they sway with grace,
a water view no other plume impedes . . . .
No doubt the brides, home hatching their third broods,
are looking for their epauletted dudes.
Planning?
I never wanted much to splurge on shoes
or shirts or trousers, ’cause, the money gone,
how would I make it up? I’d sing the blues.
(When Dad died, we felt poor. We had to pawn
his things and sell the house for milk and food.
They’d married and had fled the dust-bowl thirst
of Oklahoma and a family feud . . . .
Go “home”? Of all things, that would be the worst.)
How deeply-rooted fears persist within
a small child’s chest grown hairy and, now, gray.
What savings I’ve laid by reflects the spin
Mom put on how to keep the wolf at bay.
Can’t credit them to long term plans (financial) —
but to a childhood: random, circumstantial.
Taking Out the Wood Ashes
East Hampton, Connecticut. Winter.
I can’t just throw away, and waste, the gray
wood ashes flecked with charcoal chunks that fall
down through our Jøtul’s grate, their flame’s ballet
too cool at core to dance the night’s short haul.
When cold, I dump them in our woods. They sprawl,
volcanic cones upon a sea of snow.
(Oak-acid soil cries out, “Please sweeten — Yo!”)
I muse: These chips of charcoal . . . screen them out
for char-broiled meals? But that’s a dusty chore.
Or spread the piles, plant seeds, and watch them sprout?
But I can’t cut down trees — just to get more
sunshine on garden rows I’d soon ignore.
I like to seed, but not to weed, or reap
its yield, or watch its frozen winter’s sleep.
If not to seed, what is it draws my mind?
To what felt need? It’s more than simple ashes
to be disposed. It’s that my heart’s divined
the gifts trees bear us: gifts that each one stashes
through capillaries, roots, and leaves sun splashes.
I feel I want to give their ashes back —
not be a stove wood kleptomaniac.
Spring Light and Warmth
Spring sun has left my wood stove dark,
as cold to touch with hand as eye.
I’m done now groping logs that arc
and leap with flame, and, ashen, die.
I feel the warmth of sun, whose stove
is far away, but sniff no flames
that flicker fragrant hints of clove
like mine, capricious in their aims.
Although I’ve lost all appetite
for logs that bang up hand and knee,
still, looking past my stove for light
and warmth feels strangely odd to me.
A Smile on Nature’s Face
The songs of slated juncos — those loose-held trills,
those smacks and tickering notes — attract my eye
to a full-leaved rhododendron. Goose-bump chills.
Within, a slate-white mating flight. What? Shy?
Why shy? My own self-consciousness, awry?
Projecting — on this smile on Nature’s face —
my own? Recalling Lovers Lane’s embrace?
Of Cairns
There is a part of me that craves a dog,
a terrier — wheaten cairn — to be precise,
a warm and shaggy-whiskered pedagogue
that has no neocortical advice.
From my poor skull she’d flush the mid-brain truth
with wagging tail, wet tongue (yet nothing said).
She’d tease from me my best — that limbic sleuth —
outfoxing rocks long-squirreled inside my head.
But would I live to bury her? With due
respect? Beneath a cairn heaped up above?
Or would she feel abandonment, no clue,
if I go first, despite her terrier’s love?
Or worse, both she and I, together, grow
so old that neither, then, can come? Or go?
Staring Down a Moulin
With thanks to Paul Brown. Late Summer, 2007.
Moulins, some big as our Niagra Falls —
hundreds and hundreds of them — shocked us each.
They pierced our preconceptions like sharp awls
which drilled and milled and pithed us all of speech
and left each tongue to waver in its head,
a dried-out chip, no words within its reach . . . .
Our chopper settled on a crack-free spread
on Greenland’s Ice Cap. Tethered up, we dared
to step up close to where the glacier bled.
Blue-green in hue, a river milled and blared
its way down through a “bottomless” crevasse
to slippery rock. We peered down — and despaired.
We felt a lurch beneath our feet — this mass
of ice slipped further off its watery rock . . . .
Moulins like this expose the truth, alas,
that “global warming” is no idle talk.
When, calving, this collapses, tides will rise
twenty two feet, engulfing us in shock.
(This does not count the whispered melt’s good-byes
from glaciers on Earth’s greatest mountain slopes
nor weigh in polar ice sheets’ fast demise.)
We’re greedy lemmings, chasing growth’s false hopes.
Our coastal cities will become like New
Orleans, knocked senseless on Katrina’s ropes.
We coastal folk, turned refugees, will queue
our shrinking highlands by the millions, and
we’ll wish we’d died when that last storm swept through.
Fall Housecleaning
For G.K.J.
The recipe that I was looking for?
A three-by-five card spindled up real tight,
it “fell” behind the spice chest to the floor.
A spider got in it, quite out of sight,
and spun a fragrant nest, and laid its eggs
and left to satisfy its appetite.
Its offspring hatched. They had to stretch their legs.
Cleaning, I found their home and read the card:
“A coffee cake that leaves no crumbs, no dregs —
just serving it you’ll need a bodyguard.”
Perhaps, I thought, and set about to make
a batch, but left it in too long. It charred.
I thought there was a message in the wake
of that, and tossed the whole thing in the swill —
burned cake, old card, old pan. Give me a break!
From baking. From the endless housework drill.
From grand-kids touching, moving things ’til lost.
I love them, but — age is a bitter pill . . . .
Chops to Chops
Our three-month wheaten cairn, named Liberty,
has snared, in her locked jaw, my khakis’ cuff
with all her terrier tenacity.
She calls my bluff, the little brown-eyed tough.
I fold the news, and swat my ankle, loud.
She backs off, crouches, growls — a powder puff.
Her bark reproaches me: I’ve disavowed
her sunny present moment — threatened “guilts” . . . .
Yet I can’t long be her tall thundercloud.
My darkness dissipates in her eyes’ lilts.
I lift her, wriggling, in my arms’ embrace
where, chops to chops, this altercation wilts.
Frontiers
For G.K.J.
We used to wonder why most older folks
in restaurants talked so little during meals.
Now we’ve turned older, and we find the joke’s
on us. It’s hard to hear. The fork conceals
the shapes of lips we’d read. Can’t trade our spiels
on gravy-thickened tongues, through chomping ears . . . .
Telepathy’s among our new frontiers.
Rach 3
Aroused from deeply restful dreaming sleep
by stabs of sunlight dappling through the trees,
pinking his eyelids, he snatched up a heap
of pillow’s dark and tried to catch more zees.
He yearned to hear more of Rachmaninoff’s
Concerto for Piano Number 3 —
its joyous, furious beauty cut right off
in silence deafening as it could be . . . .
Its diatonic melody he hummed
and hummed, but he could not cajole it back.
He rose, resigned and feeling he’d succumbed
to loss. He stretched his sacroiliac . . . .
And yet today could not be too austere —
Rach 3 reverberating Inner Ear.
Friends
With thanks to our cairn terrier, Liberty.
For G.K.J.
Walking our cairn we’ve hailed new neighbors here.
We wave. They wave. And there it fades. We count
no saving friendships. Maybe it’s folks fear
our strangeness. Eight years, now. And they just mount.
When meeting folks we used to edge our way
around to, “Do you like to read? To write
a letter to the editor and weigh
in with your views?” (Heads shake. Nary a bite.)
Seventy-two, we guess we are invisible
to movers and shakers striding the town.
Looking spaced-out, dressed absurdly, we’re risible —
unless we draw a deep, impatient frown.
We do meet minds, and hearts, in books — our “friends.”
But rare’s the book, for a social soul, that mends . . . .
A Spell of Magic
Christ Church, Middle Haddam, Connecticut.
“Thank you for laughing,” said the actress Grace
(her real name) in the break between the acts
of Godspell. “Church can make a grave showcase.”
The “free-for-all” of John’s Baptism — ax
which smashed the Pharisees’ cartel on “sin” —
was free to folks at local streams, so jacks
paid neither at the Temple, nor an inn . . . .
Though I laughed lots, I held more back, ’til tears
brimmed in my eyes and flashed my cheeks and chin.
“Repent,” said John. “It’s free. Shed all your fears.”
“Love God,” said Jesus, “and your neighbor, too.
The Kingdom is within. Attend your ears . . . .”
It’s often tough to hear. We men will chew
each others’ ears, and beat our chests like apes
until we’re deaf to thunder. We’ve no clue.
Knowledge we too are gods within escapes
our grasps ’til players cast their magic spells —
unstop our ears — leave goose-bumps on our napes.
A god-life pulses in our red blood cells,
in enzymes, neurotransmitters and all:
Imminence and Transcendence — each, there, dwells.
Astral Intelligence is not A-WOL
but answers when we shine our consciousness
within and let go smoking folderol.
Indeed, how give my neighbors each a “yes”
that’s not a mask of my own needs without
Astral Intelligence’s warm largesse?
Right Work Is Play
Writing for me’s no albatross.
I like the human interest sauce,
happily dot the i’s and cross
the t’s — and clear out all the dross.
I know that you like best the selling.
You make the benefits impelling,
build customers’ desires, dispelling
objections, and close. Wow! Compelling.
Come time to inventory us,
a job most find notorious
for detail that’s laborious —
our auditors feel glorious.
Happy are folks who like their work,
who don’t get mired down in the murk
of details they despise and shirk,
but view them, each, as their job’s perk.
Dozing Off in the Cosmos
A pillow slip and bed sheets fresh from wind
and sunshine do induce a sounder sleep.
It’s not alone in that I disciplined
myself “to green” the Earth. It’s in a leap
of mindfulness — aromas sent from deep
in Solar space — as I let go my race
with time, relaxing into Inner space.
Roadside Asters at Sunrise
The Earth’s night sky is full of galaxies
too far away to see their brightest stars.
Those visible to me don’t bring me ease.
I wonder, do black holes leave great dark scars?
Our roadside shoulder’s soil — abused by salts
all winter, twelve-wheel-semis’ pulled-off vans,
spilled coolants, fuels, discarded chocolate malts —
grows asters standing tall among tin cans.
Their ray-shaped, long, blue-purple pedals touch
me more than night sky’s spectacles of light.
How so? They somehow press up through the smutch
cast off from mankind’s “culture at its height.”
Sun’s Life-force flowing in each slender ray
is bright enough to keep the dark at bay.
Cool
What was it gently somersaulted so
within his chest when he’d felt strangely drawn
to “girl friends” by an unfamiliar flow?
A cool exhilaration drew them on.
The sweetest tenderness was what he’d felt
in second grade for Esther . . . . Past grade ten,
he’d felt the same for Tish — plus she was svelte,
and warmed him up inside much like cayenne . . . .
The septuagenarian is snoring,
dreaming he’s thirty-three, is drawn to one —
has he met her? She’s svelte. She is adoring . . . .
What cool exhilaration . . . . There’s the sun . . . .
Stirring, he asks, “Whose sweetest, healing balm . . . ?
An astral visit? — my own youthful mom!”
Wood Splitter With Maul and Wedges
Wedges, a maul, and this cross-section
of tree trunk (fourteen inches high,
forty across) bring circumspection . . . .
Lay up split wood. The snow will fly.
This swirling growth now severed from
its root-sprawl — can my tools help find
its character? Will it succumb
to maul? To wedges well-aligned?
I sweep the saw-cut with my hand
to spot its tiny cracks — and spy
across the century it spanned
where strengths and weaknesses may lie.
And facing such, I have no doubt
my own will also up and out.
This concludes Section III. To continue with the videos in the next section, click here: IV Videos Section 4. Thank you.
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