A Suite of Creatures in Five Movements

A Suite of Creatures in Five Movements

I.  Fairest Creatures

—owed to Shakespeare Sonnet #1

They have plowed, sowed, 
And reaped their fields in peace.
Upon the riverbanks,
They cast their eye.
Yet, they have never prayed 
For quick release
From tasks that last 
Until the last goodbye.
They went about on wings,
Helped others rise.
They raised their food 
And used their useful tools.
Their little worries sparked 
With shouts and cries,
But then their product proved 
They knew the rules.

Bridges, buildings, gardens 
Grew year by year.
Their music wafted nightly 
From their strings.
Exalted words went 
Sparkling far and near:
The king would dance, 
And then the queen could sing.
They plowed the fields 
And many came to see
That rustic life 
As robust as a tree.

II.  The Fisherman

I used to write poems that left a fish smell on the page.
You had to scale them to taste them so they left too much of me out
And made me sound as if I were about to sprout 
Fins, but that was before I met the man with the net—
The man whose tackle box opened like Pandora’s.

He tried to humor me with night crawlers big a fingers,
Called me his little mermaid, which made me half happy.
We’d sit by the river, his pole in his hand ready to land a big one.

Once I asked him to let me hold it but he said
My hands were too small and being a woman
I wouldn’t give enough slack to the line.

Suddenly, he yelled, “I got one!  It’s big!  Grab the net!”
I grabbed it, handed it to him, 
Then jumped in a started swimming upstream.

As I looked back, I saw him
Pulling his hook out of a big, green, rubber boot.

I used to write poems that left a fish smell on the page,
But that was before I met the fisherman who showed me his sole.

III. Never Poke a Rough Beast from the Past

Never poke a rough beast from the past:
Likely, you will find yourself ambling
Among tombstones in the rain
Through a ramshackle garden
From which you fled
So many years ago.

Out of that moldy drizzle, you emerged.
Into healing waves, you progressed.

From a death-star specter, into the life-breathing spirit, 
You returned, grateful that the Unsensed Force
Had directed your return home,
Where poetry could spray in joy.

Never poke a rough beast from the past,
Unless you are willing to be singed
By the bile spewing through his forked tongue.
Unleashing his aggressions, he is rabid
To strangle you with his tangled verbiage,
To erase you as he covets your triumphs.

Never poke a rough beast from the past—
The present will secure your future
As you walk in Spirit.

IV.  A Colorful Flowerhorn

The incarnation began with a bright foot
Curling her toes in the dark hours—
She confessed to greater sins
In the brute waters of the river
Where she gasped as she 
Imagined she was drowning
In the muddy gloom of the dark waters.
She was without canoe or paddles
As  a colorful flowerhorn bloomed from her nose;
She sought myriad breathes
In the steel blanks of the rose rims.
The colorful flowerhorn loomed
Before her bulging eyeballs
Searching the reaches of a netherworld.
She would not sense the essence
Of some monster’s soul.
Her pink fingers become knives.
A yellow finch pecks at ears of corn.
She can no longer feel her hands.
Her head no longer moves to speak.
She snores but does not wake up yet
Until morning blasts sunlight through the window.
Staggering to the bathroom
Nearly falling over the colorful flowerhorn
She squeaks the shower tap
Starts in relief 
That she sees water and not blood—
A quick glance at the mirror, 
And the colossal flowerhorn blooms again from her nose. 
She is ready to meet the new day. 

V.  City Slacker   

Richmond, Indiana, April 1968

His preening smothered his brain.
His high school shelved him
Into the Air Force 
Which booted him for acting 
Like a loon.  He grew up 
In the north end, married
A co-ed, country girl way south
Of the south end—
Two wrong sides of all the tracks,
But he did own a set 
Of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The day the town exploded,
He took his wife for a walk
To look at the rubble.  Back
In their tiny apartment,
He returned to his
Machinations in lunacy;
She went on stumbling
Down the course 
That would blow up
Inevitably in divorce.