Kentucky Mayday
Along the Kentucky River on first May;
You strode tall, I stumbled, over roots
of old oaks that ridged across our rough path:
bright in new leafy growth,
Nature's cynics giggled, girdled, showing their ages
in deep rings and dingy bark.
Then ritual cries of Isis rose up in me
and I boldly wished to kiss you
beside a cold brook
where willow trees stuck long-fingered,
delicately-nailed branches into very springs
of rivers under granite; Oh! how hard the memory lingers
of that freezing, rushing passion
gushing out of dark caves in sheer gray rock.
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Ascetic Backwash
One Autumn in Colorado, the leaves
meleed reds and burnt oranges to such extent
that a whimsy struck me about how other states would envy
if they could see these riots; how they'd grieve
over their puny pastels and low, hazy mountains--mediocre
traveling shows, they'd feel themselves--vaudevillian has-beens ...
Our train crawled through Gelnwood,
sunlighted reds sparkling in water splashes
along a stream laughing as if it'd had a happy childhood;
Then as we left Colorado on a gasp of a cliff
and wound down to barren Eastern Utah,
with its rough plains and stark white stone pillars of Zion,
some dark, hedonistic reversal precipitated in me;
Inexplicably I felt the white passion of asceticism
in those starved landscapes and thought,
"No wonder a strange, unique religion fulled-birthed in Utah."
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Grief Leaving
A trickle of music
down the hall from my flat
floats slender fragments of sound--
Harmonis leaves glide down
out of cool, autumnal Brahms;
silver whispers touch my cheek
and I shiver; they are notes,
small and tender, tiny pulses
along my senses--
blue and burgundy percussions
against cloudy remembrances--
next sunlight I look down
into a backyard swimming pool
deserted by ballons of summer laughter;
I glance up to see green fields hazed by heat
give way to wheat now;
Dark red leaves
lie still on the pool's bottom,
sliding, fading, almost forgotten.
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