Author: Bob

How is it That

Bob, , 14 Comments

All this going on, everywhere, summed, unsummed, unavoidable, cosmic, chanced, the notes wrung every which way, cascading, blistering,

Reading, lying around, unsweetened tea, walking, daydreaming, Sunday afternoon movies, coffee, sandwiches, coming home under the streetlight cones,

The uncommitted morning, the planets in such and such orbits, like the potted flowers lining the windows, or in mischievous moments of transcendence walks right out into the sky themed with transience and beauty,

The August rain, the beans in a pot boiling for hours, the Black-eyed Susans in a mason jar on the table, Garbage by A R Ammons,

Facing the wind, in the stark posture of departing, a few lines committed to future stars and to what’s left of the rain, but mostly in the waltz of these determined steps.

Walking Thoughts

Bob, , , , 21 Comments

Afternoons kneading walking-thoughts, reeling daydreams and the blue of mid-August skies, stopping for garden-tomato sandwiches, these knapsack wanderings,

And if Saturn is a seaside holiday, and Neptune perplexed of axis, here the geese in the shade of the oak tree, and here and everywhere, time has a nervous system, and space the gravity of cause,

Life threaded with time and place, raveled and unraveled, swept up in cloud bursts of the sun peering through, squeezed at its side till it balloons and grins, and these walks as the Earth spins, and sometimes end like a felled season, and begins with feet in the green grass,

As if I hadn’t charged my blood stream with sunlight and chance, fate and opportunity, housed this expanse in the meanderings of love and dreams, wrapped up in the onset of the present,

The afternoons on bench with book, or just sitting there looking out into the mesa clouds, and for this hour, vast as the summer fields,

And the trunk and branches are what’s left of a sudden explosion (time is relative) from the seedling hatched, as the mountains are quick to ascend and descend, and puddles are forever (somehow), and the kids in the neighborhood are not quite Picasso with graffiti and first ask of their spray cans the permission of the grasshoppers in my untamed lawn, and not be outdone by the quick gallop of the yellow of the dandelion in spring, the orange-yellow-gold of the black-eyed Susans in August, the rain as if falls from the gutter-less roofs.

Poems

Bob, , 20 Comments

That trace the lung swelling light of summer stars,
That heave with the magnificence, even the banality, of a cosmic florist.
I lunge through the streetlights
Sleeves rolled up like capsized moons,
My faded tattoos say it all, a greasy tee shirt straddled to a solitary
Poetic enthusiasm,

The fevers and quests, the lost diagnosis, the tall grass, the goldenrod, the slumped impartial hot summer night, the horizon on the tip of the tongue, speaking for all that is lost and is to come,

The dusk spilled up and into the storm clouds rolling out, and now a clever part in the trees where the moon sorts its steps, and grumbles like a too-neat handwriting.

A swirling poem, up on one leg, each wing
Dipping into the dark, each swirl widening
Into the light.

Notes #1

Bob, , 20 Comments

Finally, the moon had to hear it. All this about metaphysical
Cereal bowls, and how the morning arrives on invisible wings.

The afternoon
Encourages intimation, like the rain after a dry month. And of
The stars, is how we got here. To have a go at it ourselves.

Neither the moon nor the sea deliberates, though both know
More than they are willing to say. Galaxies capped by super
Massive black holes. Spiderwebs in the corners of the front
Porch. The sound of wind chimes and the life span of the sun
Are on the same page.

Sitting on my porch. The traces of stars almost pretend to appear.
Tired legs, unsweetened tea, closed book, worn out chair, still cat.

The sky, a shell above the dark leaves and shingled rooftops, left there by a child.
Our cosmos forked, espoused of branch and bloom, bite and wing. Penniless as an imaginary metropolis.

Stroll

Bob, , , 15 Comments

The silence, the cracks in the wall, airborne spring pollen,
The thoughts of black holes, the rugged joy of life that contagiously spins one’s head and heart,
The astronomical number of beetles on the earth, the fray on this shirt,
And collar windswept by early morning walks,
The sudden threat of solar flares, the beauty of fire escapes against red brick,
Blacktop, several pots of flowers,

And though the stars aren’t broken bottles, the graffiti beneath the fire escape
Is the Last Supper, but with UFOs and aliens,

A stitch of green stem and red flower climbing in and out of the chain link fence,
The turning earth, the creased corners of a used book,

And though the stars aren’t in any way lost, I wander aimlessly.

Mixed Up and Half Erased Yet

Bob, , , 22 Comments

The tremors of silence like fingerprints

Drawn down the spine in goosebump riddles

Allocating leaves and stars and abstract poetry

Rattling the afternoons and calling out the night

Dusk is the space between my two front teeth

Death is a shadow of a shadow that has a life of its own

Molecular patterns, genomes, fractals, gravity

Tee shirts, concrete poetry, coffee stain, good shoes for walking

The tremors of silence like fingerprints

Drawing up the spine into an arabesque boom

Like fairy tales burnished with thorny truths

Unsquared by nebulous pivoting and terrifying beauty

Overwhelmed and brilliant in brevity

Yet on and on and on to visit the vast swelling of sensations

The dwindling down to the fine points of light and dark

Mixed up and half erased yet beaming with more awe

And guts and ambulatory genius and wrought

Along the rivers, through the alleys

Across the fields, let these strides wreath

The lonely, the lost, the joyful, the realized, the naïve

The untucked dusk

After a day of rain

Small Rhapsody

Bob, , , 20 Comments

The weathered moon, the shoeless dream walks,
The cold damp of subway stations, the expanding universe,
A cat sleeps, a dog barks, the anxieties, the morning coffee,
The dull etcetera of a boring job, a walk in the morning rain,

What I thought was real, it all stirs and fathoms and flashes,
What is not beautiful and untrue, how to (cosmically)

Sleep by an open window, strained, uncertain, folly,
Joy, to walk alongside a passing train, eat an apple,
By chance fall home
Along the tabby road, up and over the feral pickets.

Amateurs of the World Unite and Take Over

Bob, , 16 Comments

Briefly, and loosely, the butterfly mirrors the night. Like an angry river,

If patterns are a process, this visits language.

With painstaking naiveté, under a rotary dial dusk, this existential cowlick
Never burdens folly with precision.

I only write poems to defy paragraphs. Torn shorts and short poems,
An hour of television. In this cosmos inconsistencies are stars.

 

 

*From the archives

Short Poems

Bob, , , 12 Comments

“Nothing is more glorious than the full moon to those who ride or walk under its beams. But whoso goes out of doors expressly to see it returns disappointed.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals 1820-1842

~

Uncertainty –

As a way of generating income for poets.

Daydream-

A species of butterfly which are also suitcases for angels.

Greetings-

We wave, like photons,
Particularly, an imaginary tree in a picture book.

A Metaphysics-

Without corners
Without terms
A harrowing rescue of afternoon sky
For ideology

Listen-

An elbow at dawn.

Half the pages missing.

The immediate
Vicinity.

The Bicycle of a Poet-

The moon of empty miles, parched as the street painted lines.
All they will find is dusk amongst the thickets and x-ray trees.