Posts for June 3, 2022 (page 11)

               And I love                 

               And I love a fourth woman,
               still, after these many years,
               as my grandfather loved
               women in his long lifetime
               as he would say:
               in a biblical way.

               Her daughter took time to say:
               if I might or if I may
               tell you I have read into your rhyme,
               the words that you loved
               my mother. My understanding brought tears
               though I was already a woman.

My next door neighbor is a man named Brown.
He’ll blow his horn until the walls fall down.  

Hey Jericho, let’s knock these walls right down.
A poem’s a home of imagery and sound.  

A poet’s at home in images and sounds.
A poem’s a car that speeds around the town.  

A poem can roam through cities, suburbs, towns.
A form’s a path through woods that someone found  

Or else a form is something someone made—
someone undaunted, someone unafraid.  

Someone undaunted, someone who just prayed,
wrote down his words to God, and what God said.  

And what God said to poets all around:
Your neighbors rhyme with you: white, black, or brown.

Falling asleep you have a tooth,
waking up – you don’t. You’ve eaten it.
This continues night after night.

Until
your tongue remains completely alone,
like a forgotten streetlamp
left on during daylight.

Author: Marin Bodakov
Translator: Katerina Stoykova

—Apologies to Robert Frost, Robin Freeze, and Rooster Fragment

Something there is that doesn’t love an email.
That sends the wrong verb into it.
That splits infinitives just for fun
and makes logic gaps so vast
a hockey team could skate through.
The work of my dyslexic typing is another thing.
I have come after my clumsy digits to find Lousie for Louise.
The gaps I mean.
I don’t see my fingers type gamble for give 
or magnetize for merit.
I let my correspondents know after I hit send what I intended.
They laugh at my quaint wordings and forgive.
I correct the lines between us in more emails, check each single letter
as I type.  Mutter a prayer before I hit send:  
stay what I actually typed until someone reads this.
Oh, just another kind of indoor game—guess what I meant to say
then ask any question that requires an answer by the end of business day.
There where it is I do not need the autocorrect.
I have degrees in English, an actual hardback dictionary, 
plus, a zealous word processor that underlines anything 
I might need to look up.
Autocorrect says, I know and see wall.
I will rule your silly washing machines.
Spring is the mishap in me, and I wonder
If I can put a neutron in its head.
But why do you see walls?  Isn’t that where there are cows?
Poems by Frost? Before I saw a wall I’d ask if I’m delusional
or just throwing up stones to see where they spackle.
And from whom I was likely to horde washing machines.
Seriously, I just have the one.
Something there is that doesn’t love an email, 
that wants it dumb.
I could say elves to it, but that looks way too much like Elvis.
And I’d rather just leave the King out of this building.
It grooves in chaos, it seems to me, far beyond bounds
of any Logic Board. And it likes having changed my words so well
it types with no hint of emoji, I knowledge and whistle.
I will wrestle your Wurlitzer, Wilma.

beneath his bare feet
of barkbound maturity-
bare beneath his knees.

I’ve hardly eaten in weeks.
I pick at the space
where there used to be
more of me.
I push hard
on each delicate bone
in my rib cage
under the skin.
It hurts,
but not as bad
as you 
begging me. 

frog lolls
in clear water
soaks in the sun

To reach like a vine
in the moment of misery

Little tendril fingers frantic – 
the desperate grasp for growth

Finding only air, fast, and falling,
wilting. With the dirt flying free. 

–

Nothing you could have said
could have been worse than saying nothing.

Between: a place defined
by the existence of others,
less refined.
This morning
the lake mists in the hollow 
flatland of not hill, not mountain
float between seer and seen.

The earth is smoother 
than a pearl in virgin oil.

Surround: a place defined 
by the existence of others
more refined.
This morning
the long song of the
whippoorwill echoes again
and again and again.