Author: Bob

Dynamic Simplicity

Bob, , 11 Comments

I carry a paper bag of flowers, the petals are blue, yellow, and orange,

Early flowers, the bag is a sandwich bag, it’s dawn,

I put the flowers in a basket and bike home, the sky is blue, orange, and yellow,

My wild face, in momentum, how is the dawn somehow starry after all the stars are put away?

How is it, just for a second, this wild face among the stars, on a bike, with flowers

For the dining room table, to be with books, and pencils, and to have breakfast with,

Encourage me to open the windows, they are the better part of me, for a few days,

In which time, I’ll write what seems to be stream of consciousness poems, better yet,

I’ll put on my canvas shoes and walk till my stomach growls

For the fire and fever of tasteless stars. 

The City Limits, by A. R. Ammons

Bob, 2 Comments

The City Limits
A. R. Ammons – 1926-2001

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

 

You Will Know

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There is a shape
When nothing’s there.

Open it
Or close it.

It’s just as round.

Leave it
Or carry it with you.

You cannot spend
What it does not lack.

There is a shape
When everything is done.

And you will know that.

You will know.

What the wind uses for thread
And needle.

The Poem Is

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Like a broken guitar,

A mini golf course for
A syllogism.

Why are beginnings so important?
Why is a broken guitar a disaster?

Is the grave coming up short.

And though I think all of this is folly
I am glad of its sometimes kindness.

A poem
Is a belly flop
In handwriting

By an angel doing a handstand
While going backward in time

The Ambition of Dusk

Bob, , 7 Comments

In a simple sweater, a jawline like a lyric, is the ambition of dusk.

Against the aquarium of stars.

A simple ghost, like a pair of bashful feet in the corner.

The high wires of power lines, the moon like a spool with no thread.

Words in a notebook, coil bound, from the drugstore, do angels tattoo humans on their arms?

A jawline like a stampede, an aquarium of ghosts.

Some Kind of Employment

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The job of a fool
Is to ride the bus
Till the heart becomes a circumference
Suffices the world

The job of the poet
Is to put earnings
In burning buildings

Look look a macho moon in reverse
Parks in the eyes of city gulls

Go ahead and honk for doomsday

I’ve the summer grass
Tattooed on the shoe strings of my brain
Between the toes of my heart