Life goes on, if you're a junco...
—Photo by Sam the Snake Man
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
Nature, utterly graceful about her knell,
in the mountains, and at times in the mere high hills
draping her doom about her silently in snow
issuing swift in gracious whiteclad drifts
or lentoing the flurry down to a down forged
of slow blue icicle-spike and bit-edge particle…
and oh the groan of noise with which we react,
tractoring, ramspiking, scraping, bludgeoning
away the pure, the deadly-as-cyanide
to the hypothermic & miles-lost drugged trudger.
Off it must come, off windshield off sheetrock
wall off burden-sagging roof; and my thoughts
haplessly snowshoe to friend K.K. in Pollock Pines
riding a Toro- or Lawnboy-sized snowplow,
rumbling against this most implacable
& whitest-capped of tides…to adapt
a phrase of Robert Hass: in February nights
do these her waking dreams not harrow
as, over and over, she enters the ice-aisle,
the ice-furrow…?
____________________
DAY JOB (for GL)
—Michael Cluff, Highland, CA
At my day job
I am forced deception
victim of the injection
to play by rules
worthless from inception.
At my day job
always constant rejection
appearance under inspection
by anals and fools
babbling with lips of correction.
At my day job
I rue my conception
workplace a bad inflection
gatherer of torturous tools
and oh, no one hears my plantive objection.
__________________
Limed in hot tunes
we gravitate towards a tower
of bike parts and donuts
rusty and rotting
in the daily shower
of mites and microbes
that make the sky into chowder
and my love into livid lemon smiles
and sneers frosted by glaze
from a demonic chaotic
pottery and shard factory
a job
Noah, Malachi, Elijah
and Job
forewent in 1923
or was it it 1936.
—Michael Cluff
___________________
SPRING
blooms invade
rush in and out
before summer heat
dreams into tomorrow
seeks then recedes
before blooming
petals fall
in a short season
flees, sees sunspot
halos form
in the backyard
your city of light
saying eternity
a reverie, come
play with me
my child.
—Ann Privateer, Davis
___________________
THE NUDE LEAF
—Ann Privateer
plump, full, in spring,
no bigger than a thumb
filled with sticky
ooze, its blood
flings out
multiple bursts
an intoxicating
web, sweet
to the eye
hiding patterns
scalloped green
crayoned bold.
____________________
Today's LittleNip:
HOW POETRY COMES TO ME
—Gary Snyder
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.
___________________
—Medusa
—Photo by Ann Privateer