Posted by in Uncategorized Field Peas-A Mirrored Poem Shelling southern field peas What a porch meditation Each tight leathery jacket Only a fingernail can separate This is a spiritual ritual for me Necessary, nourishing, tending I call in my bold grandmothers Singing, tasting the atmosphere Opening a line to the ancestors Crowders-purple hulls-cowpeas- African peas Opening a line to…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized House Mouse Gary Phillips I favor every member of the Rodentia family Arboreal fossorial or semi-aquatic From whistle-pigs to capybaras and springhares Kangaroo rats, mountain beavers, porcupines the swift agouti with her pine nuts gathered Flying squirrels aloft on their patagiums Large-eared pikas practicing coprophagy With none of de Sade’s precocious rebellion Intelligent,…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized Two older boys and me, loaded with gear Came to the green river in nighttime. We trolled the river and laid out some lines And water was over my chest at times. It was a year like any other year. Our forests lost and farmland gone to seed, We caught some fish and cooked them…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized Cast by a jealous wind and I found myself in Montevideo: to realize That every city in the world Has something for me: A park where the people and the green Gather in some kind of ancient revolutionary agreement A bar I want to inhabit each rich translucent day A family I could love And have…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized Dear precious books, one of my families: Thank you for saving my life when I was a teenager, especially Ursula Leguin and Andre Norton, for offering me sweet refuge and constant inspiration, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for helping me begin a rich continual virtual life. Octavia Butler. I fall in love with you every day/Bastard Out…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized See the clever mockingbird sitting with a boat-tail on the abandoned telephone wire? Close but not too close, facing the same direction, the same sunset. A pair of house finches cleaning each other’s beaks. What a display of body-sharing! I set down the spyglass. Mergansers flying in a morning circle, light and easy…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized Late December, the Solstice 2018 Let all the people say: “Welcome the Light!” Tonight we hang in balance, still point of the dancing year. Like Mother Night we have been made pregnant by the Great Darkness and now we sit in vigil to birth the waxing year. If the sun agrees to return to us…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized Let’s Meet in Carrboro Today let’s meet in Carrboro: Paris of the Piedmont West End, Lloydtown, Venable . . . Today when phoebes nest in their wattle and daub And fireflies cross their first open meadow Let’s meet in Carrboro Across-the-tracks town for two centuries: cracker town, mill town, music town Today when knotty-heads start…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me . . . Walt Whitman In birds: the crow, the bold pigeon, a chipping sparrow on the windowsill, Common grackles or boat-tails chatting and thieving the coast and feeders, Even gulls, laughing or otherwise, who Kate Bell says are being forcibly evicted From Brighton-Ha!-as Londoners condemn…Read more »
Posted by in Uncategorized 1 I haven’t written about this before Because I had a geas against it But I have a distant cousin Who was one of the most famous mountain Dulcimer players in the world. When I was a young man The irascible Appalachian poet Don West Separated me from my companions What are doing with…Read more »
