Jack of All Trades

24 February 2013

I'd like to drop the sentimentality,

write something honest. I'd like to share the moment

when the baby was enjoying her bubble bath.

I was listening to Billy Joel, remembering

how it felt, years ago, to be a pianist--an amateur

as always, but a musician nonetheless.

It's very like being a carpenter,

a silversmith,

a seamstress for a moment,

though it's hard now to find a moment to decide

which point of interest to choose, where to excel.

I'm still a Jack of all the trades I encounter,

a master of none of them. Even this poem

comes haltingly, and I second guess the content,

the form,

the poet.

Harvest

28 December 2010
I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, because they seem a recipe for failure. But I need to be writing, and am going to try to write more in 2011.

There was a time when I wrote everything
in hopes that nothing would be missed,
no part of myself would remain
unseen--by you, by anybody.
I never expected the exercise would yield
such lovely fruit, and in the yielding
steal my drive to capture every moment
on a page. What once came more like gasping;
grasping for air than breathing
now becomes an exquisite discipline;
straining to hear the sweetest melody
amidst the musical swell suffusing every breath.

Protest

29 October 2009

Inspired by The Weekend Wordsmith

photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghoulmann/

I had traded my picket sign

for a picket fence, but injustice doesn’t disappear

because I am safe. There are battles to be fought,

and I, being the soldier, cannot sit idle;

let this or that chauvinist think it’s ok for him

to leave the chivalry to you.

Without Fear

17 October 2009

My eyes are open today. I see

how fruitless are the hours spent worrying

about a form and substance you adore.

These conversations never cease behind the eyes,

laughing or weeping. They never cease.

I hear the fretting accusations,

the whispers of starvation. I hear them,

but they grow quieter with time. Or perhaps

I build a wall inside my head, beyond which

their power diminishes--

I am, without fear, who I am.

Whisper

7 October 2009

There’s a perfect arc of moistened concrete

beneath the storm door today, another autumnal whisper,

“summer is gone,” I’d not heard until this morning.

From now until May, possibly June,

the air on the world-side of that door will be cooler

than the air on the home-side.

The latter will rarely be warm enough, and the former

will only shed its moisture down the door for so long

before North Wind weaves of the water

her crystalline lacework over the glass;

hides the frosted grass from view.

Fall of Night

28 September 2008, 9:06 PM

I wonder where she's been- the Poet
who used to come alive so easily.
On hiatus, leaving me to find
the words with which to paint a picture
of the cornflower sky today, and the little
girl, the little boy, competing so violently
for me, for you, for whatever patch
of territory might be claimed by one
or the other. And in the midst of chaos

does the poet crouch upon her haunches,
waiting to pounce from the darkness,
take me by surprise, remind me
poetry dwells in the most unexpected
places of the Darkness, of the Light,
of the interplay of both, and the radiant
palette of sunset ere the fall of night.