recent poems:
The Academy of American Poets published “I Too Was Loved By Daphne” at their Poem-A-Day site on 28 July 2011
you can see a phone app version of the poem at Poem Flow
Two more of my contemporary eclogues “Idylls” and “The Block” are in A POETRY CONGERIES with John Hoppenthaler: July 2011
Thinking about the journals of Lewis and Clark
in AGNI 68
His Knowledge Of Having Done So
Pleased.
Please, take home this osage, osage
orange, osage apple, hedge fruit, bow wood,
horse fruit, our evening walk to the odor
that once full-corseted the Plains with hard
wood, long pinnated thorns and said: Keep out
I’m ugly, ugly – out—I’m gnarled and barbed
and hedge the livestock in. On Fieldston Road’s
stone overpass we stand, this bois d’arc,
ribbed trunk, sagittate leaves above, and see
in Hackett Park below– Delicti—
a travel bag in which an intact corpse
is folded. Though they bushwhacked on,
the police corps could discover little, noting,
as William Clark did, The Musquetors our old
companions have become very troublesome.
It took a score of years for the specimens
of Chouteau’s plants to grow at Monticello,
bear globes like maggot bags or hard sections
of brain the yellow of healthy urine.
The pollinating couple’s esprit de corps
despite their barely useful fruit was gorgeous.
Cruzatte had shot me in mistake for an Elk
as I was dressed in brown leather and he cannot
see very well; I called out to him damn
you, you have shot me, and called Cruzatte
several times as loud as I could but received
no answer, he denied intent, anxious
to conceal his knowledge of having done so.
Twenty-eight months out, again on the verge
of the river from which he sent the slips of osage,
Meriwether Lewis, weighing dust, knows
and doesn’t, Cruzatte shot him, on purpose. Yes,
the shallow, suppressed insight comes, a flash
of corposant, and clears all other deeds.
Suspicion, malice slow the slow heeling.
The woman in the bag had a name. It took
detectives days to furnish their account–
a son, a boyfriend, compression of the neck.
The rags reported what I can’t remember now.
