Streetcorner Poems, etc.

Love Poem for Listening

2012-02-01T03:54:00.000-08:00

I haven't fallen in love a lot--the need to do so was obviated when I was relatively young. This poem reflects a style from those days, although it is in some ways as different from then as I am now. My bride, who knew me then, recognized this immediately. I'm not sure anyone else would have seen it.
I'm posting from Sydney, Australia tonight. Missing Seattle, but loving this place for the memories it holds for me and for its continuing beauty.

Love Poem for Listening

Vinedoily lungwrapper breathing goes hard

For a moment or so then collectingme

Smiling and glancing away and informally

Rigorous solesanding atmospheres lie.

Coccooningdown livingspace lookingfor

Cornertime covert unmomented timelost

And doneagain glorious day and then

Glorious day until thenagain thenagain nighe.

Longbetween thinkingthrough backpicture

Laughcapture whenagain how can you always be

Wantingme highsmiling handinmine now and then

Nowagain inhaling glorious longbreathing sigh.

Choice

2012-01-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't put much thought into the seasonal setting of the poems that go into the box, with a few exceptions. My approach to 2012 is pretty optimistic, actually, but that isn't reflected in the poem I put out last evening. This poem started as a picture and a few lines several months back, and I finished fiddling with it (for now) a few days ago.

The underlying motifs are familiar, and the themes internally contradictory, which is they way things often seem to be.

And then it was just crime scene chalk sprawl
stark against the pavement
wet and glistening with a wink
the debt paid fast and hard.
The lines unlock the final facts.
Policemen talk, low voices by the tape,
and let the gurney through
to creak regret, a rattling wheel
to mark the walk, and all before is residue
of branches, sequels, futures lost and made
an instant at a time, a frozen flash
proclaiming through a crackling echo
of the cost of choice, and now
the gift sublime.

Imps Again

2011-12-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

I have written of the imps before. They have to get through the winter.

The time for burrowing is here.

An acid stink escapes the leaves and

winnows down to dirt.

The sheaves of garden cuttings

make a bier for summer as the cold

and fear infuse the waning day.

Imps heave themselves beneath the mat,

believe damp memories will reappear,

and know each imp will cycle through,

that it will rise again as all before have done

and fall to light as though to ground,

to heat again, beneath it all, and to

the steaming pulse

the darkening beat.

Oval Racing

2011-11-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

This poem is consciously a return to familiar turf in several senses. It begins by stealing from greatness, then throwing whatever it was you might have taken from The Second Coming into a disconcerting new context. (Yeats is dead, and even if some bit of him remains this won't matter to that lingering shred.) Then I go off into the familiar turf of simple science-based images to try to gather a few peeks at something important.

I'm late with this posting because I was in Japan over Halloween, but the neighbors are pulling slips from the box at the usual pace.

Somehow

Somehow for us the center held

things coalesced around a spot a moving point

but unimpelled just tossed about

and I think not by hand but Mr. Brown

not fate behind the path we took

each turn a triumph not of will but weight

as things adhere or not

and burn or cool but seem to hang

to make another bit of us

the seed or coma who can say

a flake inclined to us

as though we need the mass to slow

and think and see what it has come to

and will be

Physics

2011-10-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

My daughter recently gave me a book called "Quantum Physics for Poets," because she knew that I have a continuing interest in both topics. It was pretty tough sledding for me, even though I have a good bit of math and science behind me. The revolutionary embrace of a reality defined by probabilities is amazing, and difficult to express with scientific accuracy. So, abandoning that hope, I borrowed some terms from science to express my joy in how chance injects itself moment-to-moment in my life.

So this poem was placed in the box Friday night.

Quantum Love Poem

Your look struck me a glancing blow
I might have missed it coming
turned away and lost it all
been burned by chance gone on
to never know but your quicksilver
undertow engulfed me ankles up
I learned to see you square your eyes
upturned alight with something new
aglow with some unsettling vaporous
bond entanglement across all space
and time a unity of place remote
from all experience but true
as morning mist my fond surrender
of all common sense

Looking Back

2011-09-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

This poem goes back to the highly structured sort of thing I usually do, visually deconstructed but tightly rhymed to an ancient format.

The poem itself goes back to the ideas of appreciating familiar things, commitment in the face of certainty and uncertainty, and how the familiar harbors the continuing possibility of great change. These are themes I've worked many times before.

This is different because this narrator is expressly not alone. I haven't been alone much in the course of my life (this is part of my good fortune) but I find that I sometimes write as if I am. Writing about shared experience has interesting challenges.

Before thePromise

Oldbluffs, the dun of smoke and chalk
risequietly beside the sea, above us
and thepath we walk, the sound of gravel, surf
and talkof little things, the day,
and we whostep around the mud,
and shewho would not
stay andwould not balk before the promise,
crystalveil of doubtless youth
thefractured view of what we were
and comingto
and so aboat below,
a sailappears and heels
to justimpale the sky
and boundinto the blue

Frigate Birds of Rio

2011-08-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

This poem is completely different from anything I have poked into the box over the past few years of its existence. Different in its lack of a starting point in rigorous structure and rhyme. I tried this time to take the moment that I was working with and let it come out with less birthing pain. So there is less layering than usual. Feels like cheating.

Above the new favelas

scattered up the hillside,

pickings better there,

they swoop and dive and gambol

in their ancient way, the feeding grounds

augmented now--discarded peels,

remains of empadinhas

plucked and gobbled

Circling round a moving point of sky

from here I see twin arcs of wing

precede a fork of tail and wonder

why the long black lines?

the luxury of mass

behind them in the air?

So what mutation then,

what turn of fate made that

a better way for them to be above the

breakers near the basalt obelisks and

turns of shore that drew the men of sail

now viral on the land

above their grounds,

now doing their work?

London

2011-07-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

Travel provides its moments when assumptions are tested and prejudices are reconsidered. I've been traveling quite a lot recently. I was in London in early June.

London 2011

So Turner's light is lost

the glow is blown and gone

a dampened memory of sky

above the smoke the million fires

the bye and bye

the huddled many most unknown

but that nor’wester came

and down it shone a sun

to scour the canvas clear the eye

of dust and desperation

waifs now die of something new

their whitening skulls and bone are bleached

erected as the arcing steel set hard

against the cold blue air

the stark white clouds so alien

so bright and fast

the golden glow dispersed for good

the peal of bells unsoftened by the murk

a lark uncaged

and unmistakable at last

Rain of Cinders

2011-06-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

This one comes from a couple of places. Early last month I saw a baseball game at the new ballpark in Washington, D.C. We lived near D.C. for many years and much happened. I had a Pentagon job in 2001 and lost some friends in September of that year. When I visit the area I feel a broad range of memories and emotions. Baseball survives.

Rain of Cinders

At the ballpark looking down the third base line
around the yellow foul pole past it
roiling black a hot cloud rose at last
well after we saw the streak and flash
the word was first I saw it forming then interred
the sharp deep hole the overture the blast
and time was lost adrift I ducked and cast
aside what was before--before I heard it change
and saw the dust the gentle rain of it the fouling
of the deepening green expanse beyond
the foot-scarred infield scene of old heroics
gloried hearts and pain now given up to ash
and fire between the fielder’s footprints
cold and dark and clean

Something Slightly Different

2011-05-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

Some may have noticed that most of the poems I have placed in the box on the corner are built around a standard sonnet form, laid out a bit differently in the final presentation to alter the look and sound to something that I think will work better for the reader, and for me. I read a couple of Petrarchan sonnets recently, and for the May poem I started with that form.

The Petrarchan sonnet has only two rhyming sounds in the first eight lines, but the closing sestet can have as many as three new rhyming sounds, and a variety of patterns. So rather than working toward a hard closing couplet rhyme, as I normally do, this form imposes more discipline on the front end and opens up the resolution, giving it more options for different sounds and a more complex closing notion.

I usually keep them to 14 lines in the version that I print and distribute on the corner, as an homage to their origins of form. I used 16 lines this time, because I thought it sounded better that way, and also because it fit better on the paper slips that I put out in the box.

So this is the poem for May 2011:

Memory of Eyes

The imps lay dormant
damp and near forgot
not lost just left pale pink gone grey
unfound beneath failed cherry blossoms
on the ground beneath the winded branches
bare the lot of them yet wanting green
the sun burns not above the round grey vault
the lowing sound beneath a layer of soil and muck
and drowned in time suspended and remembered
hot against a rhythm set
but off a beat or so and imminent
they soon will stir and color up and stretch
and disinter themselves again
like sprouts they turn and rise unreasoning
unbound again the heat tomorrow and the

memory of eyes

Spring

2011-04-04T08:36:00.000-07:00

The poem for April 2011.

Your breath against my cheek and ear
a moist caress from deep within you
past the ramparts that appear
before me as I try again to think this through
to make the case for it how better now
to let this closure come
the long embrace encompassing
my eyelids set the moment done
and done for now and made anew
a history that I can taste
if you allow again allow me in
to see you through and through
you brush my lips with yours
you find my fingertips

Coming Out of Winter

2011-03-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

The poem this month is, as usual, accessible by design. Our family suffered a great loss in November and as I considered it through the winter my thoughts have gone in many directions. This is one.

Knowing Done

Unyielding night came close
at last in one hard breath good measure
then no more no wisp of magic passed
that I could see just you again
your good soft shell still warm
and still expressionless
the moment hung a viscous drop
the silence shrill enveloping your loss
unsung by gods they’re occupied today
with those who need them
so much more your moment modest
in your way just passed a simple slip
from shore a certain knowing done
and free and left to our uncertainty

Listening, Watching, Hearing

2011-02-02T08:25:00.000-08:00

This year's birthday poem for my niece is reproduced below. She and I have just a few things in common. One of them is hearing that is non-standard. We hear differently from most folks, and a bit differently from one another. And we accommodate that difference with sight and other senses.

Gulls

I hear the gulls.
Their cries cut through the murk of sound
that’s always there, that lies upon me,
wraps around me, every day.
They reach for me, the gulls,
they know that when I hear the beach
it’s them. They are the show.
And I remember now I saw
that great white bird
there on the rail
and how it looked at me.
I heard it then I saw the beak
Snap shut.
I saw the shriek.

A Love Poem

2011-01-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

This poem is as direct as the part of life that it considers. The intersection of the physical and the emotional is a turbulent place, especially for a self-consciously rational guy like me.

Winter Love Poem

I want a kiss
direct and true my hands around your wrists
and then behind your back pulled flat
and through your eyes transparent as your skin
unblinking softened by a spark an ember
maybe brightened by the conversation
pupils dark absorbing me
before I lie again and laugh and turn away
as though I somehow didn’t see
as though this umbra were the day
as though this thing could ever be
my hand behind your head like this
look right at me
I want a kiss

Winter Memories

2010-12-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

The poems that appear in the box on the corner, and then this blog, are written in the month before they are posted. The poem below was written in the first half of November, when I was thinking back to my young adulthood at sea and in foreign ports. The poem is based on several times and places, but the most powerful memories along this particular line are of a night in Rota, Spain.

The second half of this past month was life changing and powerful. I haven't dealt with it on paper yet, but it may begin to appear in the box by early next year.

Rota

I miss flamenco violence
dark heat the nutshells underfoot
absorbing wine and spit
the musk the tang
of roasting meat
stale breath tobacco
lines of sweat
the shine of drunken laughter
alien but true
and languages reduced
to the soft cloud of intersection
shaped by hand a few old men
to drink with hard and dank
too loud too glad to drink on me
the lucky one no history
I walk on air and buy a night
before another drenching sun
a borrowed hat to wear
in case I die before I wake
before the pounding heels tattoo
my heart before the evening reels

Picking Through

2010-11-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

My life has invited catastrophe from time to time, but been marred by relatively few. This poem looks back nearly 30 years, to an event that won't fade.

Picking Through

Accelerating to the precipice you never cried.
It was so wrong to go to sleep in that cold place,
to make me miss your antiseptic end.
It’s hard to know what sat you down at last,
what long slow leak got to the wrinkling core
and put you down.
A walk through some hard landscape, raw and bleak,
the picking through of life, the lost and found of it,
discarded opportunities, the odd allure
of someone’s orphaned glove.
You sat in that bright room and if you please
just shut the door, exhaled and shot down love.
I can’t imagine it but still I see you there
stone cold but for the life of me.

The Unsettling Sign

2010-10-12T17:10:00.000-07:00

The sign has reappeared. I think it was March of 2009 when I first saw it, on the corner by my bus stop, a block from the house.

I wrote the first of the imp poems that month, before this blog was begun. I put the poem in the blog with a brief explanation of its origin and inspiration in June of last year. I knew that there were more imps poems coming. If you are interested enough to read that posting, it can be accessed with a click to the right. Meanwhile, I will provide a copy of that first Imp poem below. Including the October 2010 poem, there have been four of them on this theme, I think.

The sign is back. The imps aren't going away.

Imps

for years they burrowed

in the park among the doughboy volunteers
they ventured up in dampening dark
the barking distant
to their ears though innocent
with cunning heart a feral imp
has no relief and so some drifted east
in part to test the sourceless new belief
that there was cover to be had
from this old soul
who called them there a siren promise
driven mad they crossed 19th
and wondered where it was
their soft round eyes sweet pink slow forms
may find the swaddling wrap concealing
them within the link to that new world
that bouncing lap

Sailing Back

2010-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

This month's poem revisits a theme that I have touched on several times in the past two years. These imps. I'm still not sure what they are and why they keep intersecting with me, at home and on the road. Even at sea.

At the beginning of the month I was amazed and delighted to see some paintings by Kate Vrijmoet, a remarkable Seattle artist. A series of her paintings seem to put you underwater, looking up, looking at and through the interface of the water's surface and the sky. I used to do this as a kid, of course. The price was some water in the nose, but the payoff was that strange and wonderful view of the world.

I looked down from my seat aboard M/V Kitsap as the Sound rushed past. Just below the surface, I thought I saw something.

Imps Undead

The imps are here.
One floats below the surface quite alive
and though it makes no sense another lies
regarding me with open eyes as I scud past.
A fractured view from there, I’m shattered, cut.
And through the scattering surface
planes of light shape-shift and soften,
neon-bright but wet and languid.
Follow me in innocence and mock the sea
with your cold stare
from just below the rippling lens.
I wheel and glow before the
blinding blue behind my head.
Float by, lie there, undead.

Poem for September 2010 - Untitled

2010-09-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

Love is encountered, and chance plays such a large role that we have to hope for good luck. Recognizing and acting on it, though, is a human process, requiring reason, passion, control and release. I found love as a very young man, and I acted decisively through the fog of uncertainty that reason, my favorite tool, provided.

The turn of the season populates the streets around here with people not much younger than I was when lightning struck. I remember well how it feels. I wish them well.

I’ve had your hand in mine again
I took your left hand with my right
just now
surprised you
and your thin warm fingers
tensed within my light grip
instantaneous and done
a semaphore of who knows what
goes on who knows
what is begun or gone
your eyes go flat and but for that
exhilaration fills the space between
your cheek and mine
polite and true
my shoulder wills your hand to linger
as a sign
an ancient truth revealed
to you to us
a whiff of morning dew

Did Ashley Say Yes?

2010-08-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

The box on the corner where I place the poems each month gets an average of 5-8 visitors daily, based on the number of printed poems I put out there to keep it replenished. Late last month a regular visitor left a note asking that I leave undisturbed a proposal of marriage that he had placed in the box to be retrieved later in the evening as they came by on their walk. We left the proposal (a beautiful and appropriate e. e. cummings poem with a fine note by the hopeful proposer) and next day it was gone. My bride thought it was all wonderfully romantic, and it's hard to argue with that. I hope it went well...

An Oath

2010-08-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

My brother is an ancient, gentle and happy soul. He is dying, and it is bringing out parts of him we never knew.

An Oath

It is the dark now roiling there you rage against
that viscous night behind the patchwork glow
and air you damn it, curse it
and you fight back to this world
the bustling place we share again
before the next time that the shadow
finds your face the next time that the dark
reflects the end of time
and joy and sleep.
Your love has brought us into this, an intimacy
far too deep to reason through
too deep to miss a nuzzle
or a twinkling eye an oath again
this hard goodbye

Criticality

2010-07-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

The depth of my wonder at the power of science and reason has been a force this past month. I read a good deal of science, in books and magazines, and it gives me great joy to find these tools and languages of understanding, and to use them to appreciate the world around me. Criticality is a cousin of the boundary layer magic I mentioned last month.

Turning Point

Like two within a starling flock
across a feathered void I know you
instantly and always lock your turn to mine
I feel you flow with me as though it were
we two alone
it is! you say and soar so lightly
turning to the blue above;
the ground repeats the roar around us
ether bonding all a mass of millions
reel as one just us! just us!
alone we fall
a criticality undone an instant shared
through space and passed among
the many to the last

Boundary Layers

2010-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

From the time I was very young--elementary school age--a few things have continued to resonate for me as incompletely explored truths. Things that I could tell were so, although I wasn't sure why or how I would come to know these truths more completely.

I distinctly remember walking to Phantom Lake Elementary School while thinking that there was more going on with certain numbers than there was with others. Nothing supernatural, just something special about they interacted. Something discoverable.

Another notion from my youth: random mutation wouldn't be enough to account for evolutionary change by natural selection; some additional natural mechanisms would emerge.

A third: boundary layers are the most interesting places in the natural world. The interface between the sea and the atmosphere, the edge of a cloud, the place where the surface water of Lake Sammamish, warmed by the summer sun, transitioned abruptly to the colder water, from my knees down, as I tread water 50 yards off the beach at the park.

There are more, but the poem for June is about boundary layers.

Here Between

At the ragged intersection of the earth and heaven

peaks and sky contend

the imperfection of their interface

bespeaks the harder days ahead

I miss the fast flat line the prairie lays

the buffered blue the cotton kiss

above the breeze before it pays

unfathomably for no crime but

failure to confine the wind

an hourglass unbound by time

reversed in violence unsinned against until

the mountains fall and we are left

exposed to all

Taking Account of Changes

2010-05-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

Change can be good. My life has seen a lot of it, some dramatic, some not so. Lately, I have taken to commuting across the Sound. The business on the other side is interesting and good, the commute itself the most dramatic change. For a former sailor, and a lapsed Seattleite returned to the fold, this new morning has its comforts and challenges. The poem:

Crossing

Her lips release me to the day
I’m taken in a wave.
High-pitched metallic grinding urban morning
walking trash is shaken, lifted, tossed.
Hydraulic diesel winding turns and short,
defensive sounds, soon past a hissing layer
beneath the rumble of the viaduct
the long explosive blasts the rage of hours
pounding by above.
Then making way, the shuddering press
across the sound hard gray beneath the glass,
awake, alert to our first light blue hints of loss
a melting through the scudding haze.
I make of intersecting lines of foam a scar
between the sliding water masses, bound by
ancient paths of earth and moon, so far above
the glaciers, gravities implore my eye
as whirlpools gather up the signs that I
have been this way, the cardboard, fish and
drifting forest bits. The mind aligns
the evidence a passage and a wish.

Poem for April: Imps at Home

2010-04-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

People who have been coming by the corner to pull a poem from the box, or minding this space over the past year will recognize a couple of themes revisited in this month's offering. I've spent more of the past year than I had expected to in the home office overlooking East Aloha Street. It is an odd vantage point. The poem:

Imps at Home

I hear them stirring underfoot
unsettling to the place within my chest
where once a vision put my breath on hold
my mind on sin
but that was quite another thing
I know these imps elude me still I look away
a beating wing breathes by my ear
unhands my will to leave me shuddering
I turn my head
the window to my right Aloha Street below
the churn of tarmac, tires and wind
the light persistent now but still
above the burrowing imps at home
in love

Poem for March 2010

2010-03-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

Something put me in an optimistic frame of mind a few weeks back, when the weather wasn't as good as it is today. I wrote the poem below, then fiddled with it for a the next couple of weeks. Never did come up with a title. It was placed in the box on the corner last evening.

A brightening is near
the coughing up of light from earth
the pink so dear and given
with a fight and sigh but let to us
pastel from primary
a minus to a plus revealed
to you and me
slow-handedly but true
begin to smell our hill
delight in it
drink dew and shape it to
our will with purpose
sweat and eye turned
to a warming sky

The Sound of Waves

2010-02-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

We visited the Oregon coast in January--an annual winter vacation to a small place set right above the rocks. Spectacular surf this year, exciting to the eye and continuous to the ear. Returning to Capitol Hill, our crumbling rock surrounded by water, I thought of my life-long attraction to the sea, my damaged hearing, and the way the night feels as I age.

So this poem was written in the past couple of weeks and placed in the box last evening:

The Sound of Waves

The sound of waves can reach me here
long waves as complex as the shore they meet,
the miles of wind.
I hear the penetrating bass,
the roar expressed at such vast range,
so far to come, and coursing through
the Hill in low dark tones below.
We are alone with it each night until
the distant whistle of the train emerging
from its Belltown hole erases time to arc
across my brain and crash cold white
against the shoal of wakefulness.
I feel the beach beneath
my feet beyond my reach.

The Girl Who Could Fly

2010-01-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

My neice, Scout, turned seven last month. Each birthday brings her a poem from me, usually handwritten on a card. She lives on a houseboat in Portage Bay, so storage is dear. This year I drew an illustration for the poem, but she has the only copy of that.

The Girl Who Could Fly

She wondered how it took so long.
It hadn't seemed worthwhile to try
until she heard a silly song, raised up her arms
and learned to fly.
“It’s probably too cool to share” she thought
eyes closed and soaring high above the docks
“they think I’m there inside my room—
it’s not a lie to drift here with the clouds
and scare a gull or two who wonder why a girl is here
with windblown hair
at home with them up in the sky.”
I’ll keep this to myself she said
inside my room
inside my head.

Morning Light

2010-01-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

The poem below was inserted into the box on the corner last evening, providing a fresh amusement for local pedestrians.

The poem was written over the past month as a Christmas gift for Arla, my sister-in-law. I drew her name in the gift exchange. I gave her a scarf as well; good thing as the poem was late.

Arla is a nurse, working with newborn babies and their mothers. I don't know much about it, and haven't discussed it with her, but it must be an important part of her. And as with all things medical, it is magical and scientific at once. In the context of the times, with much being refreshed and restarted, and much more starting new, the poem for Arla came to this:

Morning Light

In that harsh light of this first day
a mother’s lowing call, unbound, unsettled,
damp the child lay--electromechanical
forest sounds behind the coo and peal.
They reach, translucent pink and tiny hands
so fractal, pure and dumb that each belies
our agency, demands a gasp--a step away
from one true thing to hold.
There isn’t much. The cleansing, harsh
light of the sun, a finger to a hand, a touch.

Infamous Date

2009-12-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Pearl Harbor brought both my parents into the war as teenagers. It faded with time and became a metaphor cheapened by it application to lesser events.

9/11 was close. I was in the Pentagon that day, responsible for a lot of people. Several of my friends were burned to death in the building that day, but my element had continuous work to do so the horror was softened by the work as the building burned. The airplane hit almost opposite where I was, but headed right at me. I was very lucky.

The poem below was written in September of 2008, using an old French form that I learned of from Ms. Kollar, who has the original poetry box up the street. (My box copies her concept but is a less attractive container with poems that I have written--she has a lovely wooden box with carefully chosen, published poems by fine poets.) I fiddled with the poetic form a bit to help gather some of my thoughts about that day.

Early Fall

It was his fervor
saved my life at last he dove into another pool
of fire oblivion and ecstasy
now past it was his fervor saved my life
at last he and others gone while I aspire it was
his fervor saved my life at last he dove
into another pool of fire it was a brutal sharp
descending blow if held a bit
it would have found me square a stomach-churning
drop a scream below it was a brutal sharp
descending blow in ignorance I sat
within my lair it was a brutal sharp descending blow
if held a bit it would have
found me square I offered nothing
to the roiling cloud the rising smoke
of agony and dreams irrelevant I worked
beneath the shroud I offered nothing
to the roiling cloud the cloth of history
so near the seams I offered nothing
to the roiling cloud the rising smoke
of agony and dreams

Over the Hill

2009-12-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

Last evening I put the poem below in the corner box. I've written about the neighborhood quite a bit, and this one continues down a path I started with a couple of others I've previously posted.

Above this street I hang and watch.
They call it Prospect, fittingly, here north
of Roy where earlier I saw a woman fall again,
her sharp hand on a little boy, the boy confounded
by the imps below, her patience thin and torn.
But two blocks up the cast is changed,
same story told, and so the Treacles stroll
below me with their pup, turn down 19th
and look for something tart.
I hover, rise and turn amazed between the spire
and the dome, a place apart but only from this
vantage clearly seen, and only incidentally
with love, reflected sharply downward
from above.

Scout's First Birthday Poem

2009-11-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

Our niece, Scout, has her birthday in December. I've written her a poem for each of her birthdays--this will be the seventh, I think. The first one is copied below. It is a sonnet in iambic trimeter, a tough form, left open to easy view. Some may have noticed that most of my poems are rhyming sonnets, though I play with the final presentation before putting them out. The untitled poem:

It may be wisdom lit
Behind your eyes which turn
From mine and softly sit
Upon my brow and burn

With infant calm and fire.
A smile will rise and fall
Within a wink--aspire
To lift my heart and all

My hopes to shape your time
On Earth with wit and love
And sense of place sublime--
A smile you rise above.

Your wisdom, then, I see
Is sweetly let to me.

Kowloon Entry

2009-11-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

This is the poem for November 2009--paper copies went into the box on the corner last evening after the trick-or-treaters dwindled to none.

I arrived in Hong Kong more than a dozen times aboard U.S. Navy ships, and by aircraft several more times. Flying in was quite an adventure before they completed the new airport--the old Kai Tak airport required a remarkable dive among the buildings to land on a surface built out into Kowloon Bay. Arriving by ship is more deliberate and variable, depending on the season and the time of day. We normally arrived late morning, coming north before turning to the east into Victoria Harbor, between Kowloon and the island. Back in the day we would moor at the British naval base, HMS Tamar, on the Hong Kong side, but history relegated us to the cruise piers on the Kowloon side late last century. I'll get back there some day soon.

Kowloon Entry

Bristling white, the towers rise to starboard
hard against the backdrop of the green hills.
The sky’s morning grey is gone and black
and white and green and blue turn to.
Bright footings soft along the shore
cut through the heavy air, the dew unset.
The bow comes round and more revealed
the discipline gives way--
the buildings surge and preen and there
to port the pleasure point we lay to.
Men with mooring lines prepare to
make us fast.
We join and hold the breath of time
of tales untold.

Taste

2009-10-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the poem for November, which will hit the box on Halloween night after the kids come by. It is another that draws on my Navy experiences.

One of our recently developed but already cherished Halloween traditions is that my sister, her husband and their daughter Scout come by in the early evening. Champagne is opened and we visit for a while before the costumed Scout is escorted around the neighborhood with her goody bag.

Looking through my files I found this one, which was the second poem to go into the box, about two years ago.

Taste

A taste of it
a sip
the bubbles in the nose that race
and rub the corners of my eyes
and call to mind the swirling round the hub
of winds informing from a squall.
The lightness is a gift and all the knowing sacrifice of mind,
the hint the tongue takes from the Fall,
with little left
and most behind that narrow path far too
unkind to my intentions
for the noose. I raise my glass
and curse the blind, embrace my will
or set it loose and drown myself
without excuse.

Avatars

2009-10-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

In late September our daughter visited from Washington, D.C. She is very much an independent adult, and although we connect on that level, she is also very different. A product of different times with different interests. There are intersections, of course.

This poem went into the box late 30 September.

Avatars

Her incarnations morph I cock my head
within my laptop flies a cartoon jet
her glassy sworded figure
live and dead and live again
the map is moving yet beneath the centered Boeing
Illinois slides right for Iowa relentlessly
the pixilated landscape will deploy itself in spins and starts
in 18C to meet her dashing slashing whim
while I imagine her along the arcing line before me
on the dull flat panel sky
another creature falls to her design
a tiny exaltation
held until the map moves right
so little time to kill

My Grandfather's Beach

2009-09-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

In mid-August Cathy and I made a day trip to Ocean Park, Washington, where my grandparents on my father's side lived in retirement when I was a child. Our family, inlcuding four to six children over the years, would visit each Easter, at least. We would clam and my Grandmother would fry up the razor clams and steam the butter clams. As kids we played in the dunes, goofed around the small "town" of Ocean Park, and ran loose.

I hadn't been back for almost 40 years, but I had been carrying memories of those times, including fairly vivid images. Upon returning last month, the images were difficult to match with what I was seeing, although the landscape and even the neighborhoods obviously hadn't changed much.

This poem is in the box for September 2009:

My Grandfather’s Beach

It could have been another place--
old pictures rendered earnestly
a civil servant sketch, a face almost familiar
if I see the beach and sand, the tufts of grass,
as memories long fugitive, gone lost.
This image too will pass and as the landscape holds
I live within another set, and draw the softening
lines of time across a shoebox square
of what I saw again.
Again.
The time, the loss congeals, wet sand
between my toes.
The surf is in
the soft foam blows.

Neighbors

2009-08-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

It’s somewhere near here, on this street I think,
perhaps on 21st or 22nd down near Prospect.
There you find a sinkhole to another world.
Life is reckoned somewhere and it can’t be here
above the flashing silver black of summer streets.
There is a wet cold hole, a drain for love
up there just blocks away where Highland
meets the cresting hill. I know of it by chance.
I saw a couple down the street stock still
for having come too near the thing.
The lance that rises from it pierced them,
drained their will, and tossed them briefly
through the leaves and air then pinned them
to the walk, just standing there.

I put this one in the box last September. I thought it was different from what the passers-by had been finding there for a while, and that it might hit people as an interesting turn. The economy was just entering the steep slide then, but I wanted to capture a broader possibility of loss and to make it intensely personal for the reader.

Twice during the month the envelope of poems was removed from the box--one of those times they were scattered about on the street. That hadn't happened before and hasn't since.

Another Walk

2009-08-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

This poem was placed in the box last year--August 2008. We walk quite a bit in August. Even now the light continues pretty late into the evening.

Another Walk

This time the lawns are dry, the cherry trees
are green, the blossoms left
to die and turn to thatch.
We’ve seen the angle
of the light relax into a soft reply
that even might just hold
the sky aloft.
The long warm peak
will fall before us soon.
We hear the faintly buzzing call.
I wave it from my ear.
We watch our feet
and hold a hand
against the cold.

Sidewalking

2009-08-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

The lines converge ahead, a hopscotch monument
lain flat and rumpled here and there by time and trees.
No cenotaph--those gone before are present
so we all repair the broken slabs, the insults of the roots;
a civic trust, a neighbor’s gift.
The season weighs the boughs with leaves and seeds,
new shoots now hang
where weeks before my face would be.
I duck and pastel hieroglyphics tell of times and games
the tiny laughs and falls that make a summer day
within a well not deep but full.
It was a time that calls to me for signs.
The aging pavement heaves and yields.
I watch for the first fall of leaves.

This poem went out into the box late last night. I had been visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C. for the past week (missing out on the weather anomalies here, though it was in the low 90s and very muggy in the capitol city). My plane landed at SeaTac around 10:30 PM, so it was nearly midnight before I got to the box.

The poem was composed earlier in the month, when walking was easier, and I worked on it last week in Jamie's apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. I felt older there than I do here.

Jamie will not be deploying to Afghanistan with her reserve unit, due to injuries from her prior active duty service. It was not her choice, but I rejoice in knowing she will be serving her country from a less physically dangerous perch.

She Turns

2009-07-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

She turns into the thin rain.
It mocks her confidence her immortality
the odd good sense that faith unlocks. The que sera
the way it happens to be assembles itself within a cloud
and rain congeals to lay a drop upon her brow.
It threatens to fall and so unleash
again the tiny universe of then and now and place
amid the others damp and chill.
A barren frozen landscape lies below
absorbing mutely endless shocks
until she turns away.
Another world and so another girl
inventing all she sees; a teardrop
at the mercy of the breeze.

This poem was distributed in January 2008, and written the month before. It was caused by my thoughts of my daughter, who at that time was serving with the Navy as part of a special forces group in the barren wilderness of Afghanistan. She isn't a SEAL, of course--there are no women SEALs. But she is among the first women to deploy with a particular, elite group of SEALs in an operational role.

She is brilliant, funny, tough and committed. And my little girl. As we were buffeted by the holidays back here in Seattle, we were able to speak with her from time to time as she was able to find a few minutes to call us by satellite phone. Her location and duties were classified, but she could describe the dreary cold of winter in the Afghan highlands, her minimal human comforts and the long hours in a remote place. Her joy in the extraordinary responsibilities she took on came through, along with the stress. We missed her and imagined her as best we could.

I will visit her in Washington, D.C. later this month. Next year she deploys again to Afghanistan, with a different group.

Brother Jon

2009-07-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

This poem was placed in the "free poems" box on the corner late last evening.

I have three brothers, the youngest is Jon. Jon has Down Syndrome and he turns 48 years old this month. We have always had a good relationship, and my return to Seattle a few years back has allowed us much more contact than when I was wandering through my Navy career. Cathy and I have lunch with Jon each Saturday, and other occasional contact by phone or in person.

Jon's view of the world has always been a curiosity to me, and despite his openness in sharing his thoughts and feelings, I don't have the power to understand it well. As he enters the accellerated decline that is part of his condition, deep understanding seems more difficult than ever, but his warmth and care for the feelings of others is undiminished.

We are of the same stuff, and in the same world. It is a fine thing to intersect.

Brother Jon

Confounding world
shape changing time and scents and sounds
made life of
then the sphere of stately sense
sublime in his tight corner
here within the chaos of the universe
dissolves
Inside it is a hive
unbound and moving
with the curse of will
the random come alive
by some small choice
of his alone and then another
May he rest beside me in one bubble
known as much by path as place
I test myself his rough dry hand
in mine is telling me that I’ll be fine

Midnight Philippine Sea

2009-06-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

The poem below was distributed in the streetcorner box in March of 2008. It is simply a memory from an evening aboard ship. It would have been in the winter of 2007 aboard USS Blue Ridge. I went up on deck, forward, to see the stars, as we were very far from land.

Midnight Philippine Sea

The deep churn of the screw below excites the deck
on a warm, calm night. She turns and plows through the soft sea—
red lights for darken ship.
The surrounding night burns with clouds of stars
behind the figurines of ancients.
A thousand suns describe my thumb at arm’s length—
a great star between the folds of night
now lost, mute, dumb.
Created breezes, gifts of making way, allow an ensign's flap
to break the spell.
The rush of water from the bow
will play its siren song and lure me to the swell again, I think.
This deepest night will be a lubber’s refuge
and my reverie.

Imps

2009-06-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

This poem was in the box this past April.

Our part of Capitol Hill is made up of homes averaging over 80 years old. They are lived in by a variety of people unified by the ability to live in such a nice neighborhood, by whatever combination of good luck, talent and hard work that brought them here. A large and growing segment of this fortunate population is fecund enough to trundling around a new generation in colossal strollers, often built to transport several infants at once. There is a scent of loss and longing that seems to surround some whose curtains are still unclimbed.

In March a sign appeared at the corner of 19th and Aloha, kitty corner from my bus stop. It was a small standing sandwich board of the sort that real estate agents put out to direct people to an open house. It had an arrow pointing east along Aloha and this simple annotation: "Impwear." The businesses on that corner seemed no different than usual in their offerings, which have never included anything to be worn by anyone or anything. And the arrow pointed down Aloha, along which there are only residential properties until the street terminates at 23rd. So I wondered what these imps might be, why they needed something to wear, and how sad it was that they might be frustrated after finally finding a clue as to how they might solve this problem.

Volunteer Park is just up the street a few blocks. If there are imps around, they would be coming from there.

The sign disappeared after a week or so.

Imps

for years they burrowed
in the park among the doughboy volunteers
they ventured up in dampening dark
the barking distant
to their ears though innocent
with cunning heart a feral imp
has no relief and so some drifted east
in part to test the sourceless new belief
that there was cover to be had
from this old soul
who called them there a siren promise
driven mad they crossed 19th
and wondered where it was
their soft round eyes sweet pink slow forms
may find the swaddling wrap concealing
them within the link to that new world
that bouncing lap

Anchored Out

2009-06-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

This poem was placed in the streetcorner box a year ago, for the month of June 2008. It draws on memories from very early in my Navy career.

This was the height of the Cold War, and I was aboard the aircraft carrier USS America, now long stricken from the active rolls of the Navy. The Egyptians were only just stepping back from their close partnership with the Soviet Union, which had garnered little in improving their ability to fight Israel, and Jimmy Carter had just engineered the Begin-Sadat meetings and agreement. So America was the first aircraft carrier to call in Egypt in many years.

We were excited, but this historic port came at the cost of a visit to Haifa, Israel, which was a fabled place for a Sailor to find himself. I had never been to Haifa, and still have not, so I had no regrets.

Alexandria presented itself as we anchored a mile offshore.

Anchored Out

The port of Alexander found my nose
before my eyes. The round sweet scent
of life and death and sweat, commingled,
beckoning to let us find this place.
A lighthouse shone from here before the end.
A lone light lost to time.
Now everything is old and new,
the children sing, the fecund memories
remade a thousand times.
A gentle shade of brown between
the blues of sky and sea,
an arc of dust to die and live again.
I’ll go ashore a king
like none who’s come before.

Streetcorner Poem for June 2009 - Monkey Tree

2009-05-31T09:42:00.000-07:00

The poem below goes into the box on the corner this evening.

Children learn from one another, and I was third of six children growing up near Seattle in the '60s. I was bracketed by brothers, very different people, but I learned from each of them. My older brother knew things that amazed me.

Now home from my wanderings, I enjoy seeing the several mature Monkey Trees in the neighborhood.

Monkey Tree

My brother whispered me the name
He shared it as a gift
To me it perfectly expressed
The fame in form
I’d someday be
Unclimbable
By any child or beast
The best among us foiled or lost
Among the branches
Wild and drooping
Firm and coiled
Absurdly thin at first
Too thick and jagged in the end
To grip my little hands
Will not stay quick nor his
They close recoil and slip
We looked up through it to the sky
The myriad of ways to try

Scout's First Sense of Spring

2009-05-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

The poem below is the first one I placed in the box at the corner of 20th and E. Aloha, back in September of 2006. I wrote it for my niece as a birthday gift. I write a poem for Scout each year on her birthday. This poem was written in late 2005 for her fourth birthday.

Although I took this one from my archives, the streetcorner poems since October of 2006 have been written in the weeks immediatly preceding their distribution. That provides me a deadline for writing at least one new poem a month.

Scout’s First Sense of Spring

A realization:
That this turn of sky is part of something larger still
Than all the pulsing bits of life
That float or fly
Across her daily field,
To soar or fall by some just now unfolding set of terms.

To know that as this time
And circumstance recurs,
and further that it will,
affirms what came before
And all ahead.

The dance of time assumes
Another rhythm,
Set to scenes and scents thought lost and left behind
But kept to resonate,
Some held,
Some let to roam the garden or the yard.

We find her prescience unnerving
But she’ll try to calm us
With her sense of by and by.

Walking

2009-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

This poem was placed in the box in April 2008. I see people take poems from the box some weekends as I mow the grass between the sidewalks and the streets around the house. Dogs are walked and early Spring sun is taken. Cathy and I never had a dog--Navy life doesn't lend itself well to animal husbandry. One couple walking along in late March had two dogs--one of them was called Angus.

Walking

The day is warm and dry.
I touch her hand—it’s dry as well,
less warm than I recall from those damp days.
The dog began to wander till she set a path.
It’s all a joy for me to step from shade
and hear her speak to bristled Angus.
Liquid eyes bore into hers and let his world appear,
complete with motive, joy and wonder, lies and truth,
a tapestry. Some flesh and fur—I see him smell the
season as I do and feel the turn of sun.
It may occur to Angus that it’s warm enough,
and to a simple mind it’s time
to turn your head and look at her
and let yourself be led.

Port of Call Vladivostok 1996

2009-05-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

The poem for May 2009 is based on one of many impressions I had when visiting Vladivostok aboard USS BLUE RIDGE in August 1996. The occasion was the Russian Navy celebrating its 200th anniversary, and our ship was among ships from Japan, South Korea and China visiting for the events associated with the celebration at the headquarters of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet. Russia was in a deep economic depression as the assets of the state were being stolen and redistributed among oligarchs and corrupt govenment officials. The Navy bicentennial was carried out gamely, on a shoestring budget, and we all sensed a desperate pride in this formerly closed city that once was the center of a great fleet.

Port of Call Vladivostok 1996

Med-moored upon a bay of lead
another finger on the hand of 202
from overhead. A strange and yet
familiar land turned horizontal,
finally, deep, hard grey. The cranes are still,
red-brown as Marx’s bones at Highgate sleep.
They wish to turn. They may.
Renown and glory’s promise lost,
the steel of service given up to haze
and history.
The drunken wheel is on its side,
it turns and lays and slows,
and lets a sigh in this cold prelude
to the synthesis.

By the way, I was an intelligence officer for the entire 28 years I served in the Navy, making the visit to Vladivostok more interesting to me as it allowed me to compare "ground truth" with the place I had monitored by various means for several decades.

Vlad 202 is the trapezoidal "ready pier" we tied up to, steps away from the Russian Pacific Fleet Headquarters building. Ships "Med moor" there--laying bow anchors in the channel and tying up the stern to the pier. I had many times seen images of Soviet ships tied up this way, and it was remarkable to be among them.

Google Earth currently provides a good view of this, reminiscent of pictures I had seen in the past.