Tag: poetry
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Scarlet fever infected the man as a boy in Izhevskoye taking most of his hearing / He turned to books & spherical trigonometry Before too long, he had carefully worked out Tsiolkovsky’s Formula – an elegant dynamite whooosh! of math for prosecuting stelae up – Next, he penned more to calculate the…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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Blueblack of the Liar’s Sea
watercolor tapestries of ocean ghosts to breach a dream blurred the foggy mythos of blueback of the Liar’s Sea ancestors of whale-men fought the yellow tentacle devils afire in dark orange boulders a scenic vista of hell sulfuric grey vermilion cavern suddenly seems pale empty of midnight stardrifts, pink nebulas fair but one being,…
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This Lethal Practice
And here, a poet in a forgotten state. Caucasian Albania, we call it, though it was in what is now Azerbaijan. We don’t even know what they called it. And yet, there the poet. He’s brute forcing a piece as we watch. The trappings are familiar. A cat on a windowsill by candlelight. A half-eaten…
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THE INFINITE ROPE TO FOREVER
The winding straightaway flees like a comet’s tail a wedge across basin to a distant range. Down here is my marble head of many basins seeing itself from the side blinking and breathing like the wind outside, rock that’s not yet stone, just stardust, perhaps water as a mist giving slight hope against evil of…
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BACKBONE TRAIL
The trail to the park from the valley is crisscrossed with years, like a backbone Maybe the time you hit all greens home from work or maybe the loves that simply stopped, crossing up ahead with mates in hand and exploding nets of new trail. Maybe it’s a bridge over the gorge…
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WHERE LOVERS CONVERGE
The sweetness of forgetting comes down to falling in love with you each day all over again Where lovers converge there is plenty of time Time doesn’t even come up until the children are safely themselves It’s always been hard to say why we’re here if time is a map other than love…
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Darkness, World, No Flame
No ideas no sparks no advancement. No way to see the future and no way to see the past. No passion to strive for more than being content with No moving pieces that we cannot change. I say…
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Juggler of Fire
Two torches one hot as a candle minutes from being extinguished. The other hot as a fire that has no end in site, amazement. Juggling, with fire. Burns me. I have to drop one I can drop the fire that will blow out in an instance …
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Retirement Reading
I read more now than I did whileI was teaching. I’m not joking: I can pick and choose from any shelf in my study, sans guilt, sans deadline, duty free. I read three cats’ minds. And my neighbor’s lips. The first and last pages of Finnegan’s Wake. Listen, just before tea I read the tag…
