A Color of the Sky

A Color of Sky 

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
    when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

--by Tony Hoagland

Gravity Is a Fact Everybody Knows About

The Waterfall

By Mary Oliver

For all the said,
I could not see the waterfall
until I came and saw the water falling,
its lace legs and its womanly arms sheeting down,

while something howled like thunder,
over the rocks,
all day and all night –
unspooling

like ribbons made of snow,
or god’s white hair.
At any distance
it fell without a break or seam, and slowly, a simple

 

preponderance –
a fall of flowers – and truly it seemed
surprised by the unexpected kindness of the air and
light-hearted to be

flying at last.
Gravity is a fact everybody
knows about.
It is always underfoot,

like a summons,
gravel-backed and mossy,
in every beetled basin –
and imagination –

that striver,
that third eye –
can do a lot but
hardly everything. The white, scrolled

wings of the tumbling water
I never could have
imagined. And maybe there will be,
after all,

some slack and perfectly balanced
blind and rough peace, finally,
in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that
falling?

** Starring some of Glacier's most lovely falls in Kintla, Two Medicine, Many Glacier, Stoney Indian, and the Belly River areas. Sometimes my work is too good.

April Fool

    Tis a dark and rainy morning here in the woods. No blooming flowers yet, but the bright wolf lichen burns florescent on damp fir bark. The air smells good--that freshest of ozone storm scents. Things are waking up. The gigantic snow pile outside my window is shrinking slowly, slowly. I am thinking of how schizophrenic early spring weather can be, how often it matches my own moods, caught between transitions, stretching toward a new season while one hand still lingers behind, fingers brushing against the old. And all of this, of course, makes me think of Edna St. Vincent Millay, that badass American poetess famous for her feminism, scandalous love affairs, and Pulitzer. 

Stealing Magnolias

    

    Here is what she has to say about April...

  

SPRING 

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

The Magical Mystery Kind

"What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand?
Ah, what then?" -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Stan the Man

"The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection." —Stanley Kunitz

Stanley was such a poetry god.
He also lived to be 100 years old, which is pretty impressive.
His lines often wiggle their way out of my memory, into my forebrain at unexpected times.
I have always loved this one.

Foxy Lady

Speaking of wild perfection and things to love. . .
I am in love with Rick Allen's giclees, like the one above.
Check them out at The Kenspeckle Letter Press.
If you are like me, you may start panting.

Barbara Hamby

A much-needed random poem of the day. One of my favorites...

Thus Spake the Mockingbird

The mockingbird says, Hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
      bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus-pocus passion
      flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird,
such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world
      is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies,
breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow,
      take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat,
fat banners of scent, flat platters of riot on the emerald scene.
      I am the green god of pine trees, conducting the music
of rustling needle through a harp of wind. I am the heart of men,
      the wild bird that drives their sex, forges their engines,
jimmies their shattered locks in the dark flare where midnight slinks.
      I am the careless minx in the skirts of women, the bright moon
caressing their hair, the sharp words pouring from their beautiful mouths
      in board rooms, on bar stools, in big city laundrettes. I am
Lester Young's sidewinding sax, sending that Pony Express
      message out west in the Marconi tube hidden in every torso
tied tight in the corset of do and don't, high and low, yes and no. I am
      the radio, first god of the twentieth century, broadcasting
the news, the blues, the death counts, the mothers wailing
      when everyone's gone home. I am sweeping
through the Eustachian tube of the great plains, transmitting
      through every ear of corn, shimmying down the spine
of every Bible-thumping banker and bureaucrat, relaying the anointed
      word of the shimmering world. Every dirty foot that walks
the broken streets moves on my wings. I speak from the golden
      screens. Hear the roar of my discord murdering the trees,
screaming its furious rag, the fuselage of my revival-tent brag. Open
      your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamenco
in the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wild
      throat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.