LATE WINTER
Cumulus drift over tumulus
barrow of last year's leaves
A snowmelt fog floats rose cone dolmens
Atop the elm nestled
nits in hair -- now growing after death
-- grackles crackle static:
we tune into a mystery
Tick-tack-tick sleet indeed
was condensation of long bones
in a womb we forgot;
femurs from ice crystal matrices
stump forth with green foot prints
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
This is a good match to my mood today, even though it obviously isn't late winter yet. In fact, "grackles crackle static" reminds me of the word music I was playing with this morning (not all of which made it into the Morning Porch).
ReplyDeletefemurs from ice crystal matrices
ReplyDeletestump forth with green foot prints
One thing I've loved about your poetry from the start is that your fondness for difficult vocabulary (I have to look up more words from your poems that from anyone else's I read, I think, except maybe House of Toast Paula's) you always come back to those methodic hammer-blow single-syllable-word lines. They feel so strong & deliberate.
oops, that sentence doesn't parse. I think maybe it was supposed to run "despite your fondness for..."
ReplyDelete