In the Imaging Center

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Go.




In the Imaging Center


I'm six feet back,
avoiding exposure
as my mother makes
a sky chart of the screen:
The Milky Way.
Venus. Sirius rising.
It turns and spins,
a moving universe.
In deeper space,
sonar enters
a black hole that
pulls me into the
Center of Imagining.
The steady star blinks,
and six feet back,
a satellite orbits
the dimly dying light.



*the image is a sample, not today's actual images

Breaking Out, Taking Flight

On a beat of the wind
Like the beat of a wing,
What I thought to be leaves
Blew from the trees.

On a beat of the wind,
They peppered my sight--
A murder of crows,
Breaking out, taking flight.

Whisper of the Wild

Whisper of the Wild

You bear it
in your
thick, tipped coat
and icy eyes,
howl it
in dreams
of climbs
through forests deep,
lift your head
and bay it
from your
pampered prison bed.


This is written for the Poets United prompt to write about a wolf. It is acknowledgement of the wild in even the sweetest, most domesticated of dogs.

One Life

One Life

This is your one life
I told her.
Your one life,
And you spend these days
On those old things?
There's comfort
In the familiar:
Fall back;
Crablike, crawl.
Lateral is not
Forward,
But death will find you
Sideways,
Upside down,
Or backward.
This is your one life,
I said.
I dare not say
The rest.

Poem

Poem

Full juicy,
prickly maybe,
or hard as sun-bleached bone.

Perfume in the dark.

Break one open
and, copiously, it weeps
enough to feed you.

Never More

This is a response to the Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads challenge. What a delight...an early fright.

(as an old friend says of Poe, rhyme is not a crime!)













Never More

In the thin place,
where Poe was lain,
between the naming stones,
we propped his book
for a photo opp,
beside the final tomb.
Then the rain fell hard;
its needles sharp
stitched us 'tween
there and here,
in the thin green place
where Edgar lay
beneath the sodden bier.
We could not move,
we could not run,
then came a fearsome sound,
and the lightning hit,
and the curtain ripped,
and the book fell
through the ground.
Then just as quick,
the sun was back
and all was as before,
except that bones now
trace his words
and whisper, "Nevermore."

Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time

It's Ordinary Time,
when grasses sway in the light

of a day so white,
you almost close your eyes,

when the sound of mowers
mowing hay is the only way,

besides the sweetish smell,
to read September's hue.

Green goes into yellow
and already you forget

the feel of summer blue.

It's Ordinary Time,
and drowsy noon

against the mellow light
holds you so still

that Autumn's chill remains
A distant dream away.

Bogeyman Blues

Bogeyman Blues

No prophet, I,
I'm a dresser of trees,
A pruner of blight;
A sniffer of disease.
Hide in upstairs rooms,
Shake the dust
From my shoes,
Send me forth with the word:
I'm the Bogeyman Blues.

Optics of Light (It's a Poem to Me)

Photo from flickr

Poem for my husband who questioned first











Visit Poets United (on my blogroll) for other poems about webs.


Optics of Light
(It's a Poem to Me)



What is that, he said,
In the sky over there?
It's a leaf in a web,
Floating high on the air.
What is it, she said,
What is it I see?
Just a web holding on
To a leaf from the tree.
What is it, they said,
Hanging over our heads?
It's a leaf; it's a tree.
(It's a story to me.)
It's a web that was spun
From a dream of the sun.
It's a chrysalis snug
It's a dream; it's a hug.
It's a wing; it's a swing.
It's a marvelous thing!
It's a leaf from the tree.
(It's a poem to me.)

(Random, Capricious)

(Random, Capricious)

I like to think I'd save him
If I could start again,
But there he was,
All fat body
And stringlike legs,
Scrambling up the tub,
Frantic to escape.
And there was a moment
When I could have stopped it all.

Turn the knob and gently scoop him up.

Instead, I cupped my hands,
Like that.
And poured as a libation,
So he became a heap of swirling legs.
So small. So small.
So meaningless to me.

Is God, I sometimes wonder,
In spite of all that I believe,
Like that?
Pouring down on those of us scrambling for purchase,
Unlucky enough to find ourselves
In the (random) wrong place
At exactly the (capricious) wrong time?