Fruit, Fig, Vegetable, Flower, Fall

I Wait Under A Fig Tree

Clothing a self in her leaves
The shame of living and the struggle to become naked again
Just myself unencumbered by the wants
Freed of the suffering, alive and able
To react to another that stands in this garden too.
I look at this fig tree, up through her
Branches into all the consciousness of mind
Through the leaves sunlight streams and brightens tender fruit
Of possibility and truth.
A fig tree cultivated the garden of knowing
It roots in the mind of the man, in my mind
Who sits here in her shade with me now?
Wearing her leaves his hungers are led
To the lush sweet fruit and a wasps busywork
I have found this in my earthly bed, in this life.
This fig attracting, bearing man's blessing and burdens.
To be seen in our piety and our complete inadequate nakedness
Be able to stand here with fig leaf and loathsome shame
To face the burden of our aching aggressive self
Within the beauty of our gentled palm
See life and death, either as blessing or scorn.
As I wait under a fig tree.




Welcome Fall

The best days were the hell raisin' football times going down College Avenue
With our Dad and getting our seats to see the Mighty Mountaineers
In a stadium that roared, leaves blew, Pitt fell, victory pulsed a heartbeat
That ran through a crowd devouring sweet the blood
Autumn who came to our lives with the color of our red maples
Sticky summer fading to the clear cool of running emerald Monongahela
Fall.

That season still fills the Appalachian man today I'm sure, though I'm away
Far away, anemic and clinging to signs of seasons as a dying hag might.
Witching nights and Indian moons call her out
Watching celluloid replays and realizing overtime defeats.
Filling up an insignificant West Virginian woman who needs to be home again
Take me there down those country roads
'Cause in this coming season your fall just makes my raw heart bleed.






Sunflower

Seeds spiral into cubist core
An Impressionistic vase holds precarious form
Harvested into the daily myth
Of the poets and artists
Looking at this rough steward of autumn
Head tall, braced on a stalk, standing
Flower of a hungry man
Anointing this day in his life.

Pumpkin Shell

And there he kept her very well.
I could live in a pumpkin shell, Peter.
Because somehow you couldn't keep her.
I'll stay home you pumpkin eater
Peter, Peter with wife so wild, seek her.


Pumpkin

Frost on the fields finds them
The baby blossoms now are lost
Little pumpkins losing the race to winter
We ran that contest many the year
To see our fruit to a size of harvest
In a land with late spring and early fall.
We lost every year to the cold snap.
Leaving pumpkins too young to be brought in
The old song a hymn to what might have been

Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in,
Ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide
For our wants to be supplied;
Come to God's own temple, come,
Raise the song of harvest home.

I Wandered By Way of The Desert

Was it Ishmael that wandered the desert?
Seeking the father, lost, bearing into his
Children the burden of rejection, his horrible deception
A lost of possibility for kindness
Born into a people. An entire people.
He a victim forever?
We learn this. We read the tale.
And yet, we doubt the truths
And go hurt some more
In our choices to hear
One over another
To hang the desert over some
Over another place a wreath of Decadence

I was watching the desert bloom in my room
Teaching yesterday
Into inquisitive looks and happy smiles
As they delighted in lunchboxables
On a trip walking to a fire station and back for a lunch
We couldn't eat at the park because violence last year
Turned into teens joyfully slapping
A 6 year old in the face as we played, marking her face.
In the desert there are thorns
And crowns that are worn
And brothers where one is "good"
And the other a lovely child on a lawn
Offering me a little tiny cookie sandwich from his box.






Centerin'

Through the kitchen window, I watched awhile
As Zeppelin proved to me once and for all they aren't a choir
He laughed and called in "Mac you ain't no devil worshiper"
Adding, "I'm glad for that."
To appease the gods that started to whirl in here.


He's trying to center a pot.
He likes to handbuild works I call dada because
They are hard to hold with eyes or arms
Sometimes, made of distortions as he speaks
Of the Golden mean, and i laugh


I'm watching him pull and push on this great
Gift from close friend, a pottery wheel, perfect present
It whirls around as he works in the mud
Happily grinding out something that may work out.
And it's a Zep album radio day, how is that possible?


There must be a lot of those playing in the
Backyards of pottery making guys, there must be a reason,
He's promising me a teapot but the form is resisting
A lava flow might be better held in this.
But he is happy and there is clay on the walkways


My husband is just outside my window
Throwing me a teapot that I think already collapsed
But it will one day appear for my collection of things we made
Together, one inside, the other outside the window
In our house we call the fortress.







Grapes

I'm looking at these lovely grapes my tummy can't eat today
Hurting again, the cancer
Trails.

But I'm thinking about depressing stuff
Chinese babies fed formula
made of some
shit.

By someone that had a great idea
And did something unthinkable
why?

I bet the answer would be sadder
Than I could hold
Hell

Dad grew grapes, Freda had her arbors too
Those had these skins you squeezed the insides in your mouth.
sweet.

They boycotted the grapes when I came out to CA
Cesar went hungry over the poison harming the babes
here

I bet the story about that spraying
Of all those workers would drown me now in deep
stupid

My tummy hurts too much to eat
and who would want to chomp on much
now.






Bridge

She said "Who reads this stuff on playing bridge?"
Speaking into the paper.

It's disconcerting to see the child you want to hold again
reading the LA Times.

She saw an article on Palin, noting her nowhere bridge lying
She said, "Why wasn't this run on the front page?"

I come out of room to hear a non sequitur
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

I wonder about this, and recall my daughter
Asking "Who plays bridge anyway?"

I tried to play with the idea of bridges
Tried to build one these last few years

She rustles her pages looking at the science views of candidates
Reason suiting up in boxing gloves

Building it's bridges over flaming rivers
Liars, dollars and piety harder and harder to cross.





Beautiful

A set of daisies are sitting on my counter
Watching us make the Chicken Parmesan
Their color is actually so clean and seasonal
Fresh and invigorating it lifts us up
Settling me down into a realization I'm here at yet another fall.





Your bowl, abalone form calls out

It is a beautiful form made and given
Holding this dismayingly ugly tomato
The edge a grace of whitened line
Someone plopped this gargantuan from the harvest
Into my little abalone bowl
I may fill that bowl with some rose petals
Or leave it for my thoughts to lay within on the morning
something to consider
As i rise and contemplate the day
And what it might bring forth for us.

Dying Bloom, Odes to Blooms, The Transient Moment Unfolded

Rose

Wrapped in the satin
Folded around a dream
Wound by the angel
You are seen
By lovers embracing
As the gift handed them in love.

A challenge to an artist
A thorny stem to cross
Petals unfold and fall silently
Into a father's garden
He's held by dutiful tending
His floral dream, her paradise.

Into the morning dew
Walking through fragrance
Admiring the striped candy
The peace found
Clipping and spraying, tending her
Removing those fallen.

Stooping to Tropicana
Holding, inspecting, admiring
Wondering
A man gave his life here
So lost in private angers, trapped in time
Raising up her beautiful blossoms.

Poets find that most complex
This thorny stricken black spotted bush
Host of aphids and beetle
Ugly, quite needing
Tending of gardener
Word smith will transforms her to dozens

Taking on this duty in her regal
Display, returning this care
He is beholder, beheld
Her beauty one day
Revealed
From his caring hand it flows.

She opens her heart, her core
Briefly unfolded
So lush and fragrant
Conceited perhaps,
In the richness of soft petal
She comes.

The robes of velvet,
A queen is found
His heart is beating, there looking
Splendor revealed to him
Receding, closing
She lets it all gently fall away

Down to the rich soil
Her day is ended
Gardener retrieves the remnants
Into calloused palm
The rose has recoiled
She is now gone.

Tulip

Look here in the garden bed

I walked by the beds this chilly morning
wrapped in mittens and scarf
Not wanting to think of school
the way there becomes discovering time's meaning
Lingering to check to see what peeks through winter's ground
daffodil or tulip, cracking the frost, it meant the world once
To me.

Something beautiful is growing

And there you are at last I found you
poking up to say a 'good morning Sarah
You will never know what that did for me those chilly mornings
going to a place where I was visually lost
And waiting to see your blooms as we sang a morning
song to you was a harmony of spirit
To me.

Bright green with a cup of red

So one day it happened that the simple
stem held up a cup to give me a kiss too.
With two lips of red and a fancy head she shook in the breezes
as I marched in rubber boots into the cloakroom
Thinking of her pretty petals and how I could
probably draw that later at home if I waited
For you.

Tulip opens to the sun.

Does his warmth see her laughing as I go by trudging
on the way to schoolish tasks a kid with bookbag and heart
That loves to wander to these tulips
as they usher in my spring
We sang a song each morning in my third grade year
about this flower standing tall
She, us.

Sunflower

Dad grew these behemoths one summer and hung them in the barn
They had been so far above my head I looked up at them as they turned
To see their god sun each day move across our field, that really moved him.
I'd wait to catch them doing it, but it was a slight of head.
Dad showed me, told me of them looking for light and it made the unhappy man laugh
Watching me catching them craning their necks
He cut them and hung them in the barn so heavy with seed
They were falling over outside in the field and rains were threatening
To bring them down to rot, but they were for all the animals to gorge.
We left some out that winter for the birds, putting the heads out on the porch
For our grosbeaks, jays, cardinals, the ones that loved them.

God I loved those sunflowers that were my Dad.
When little I looked up into his sun and moved my head to see
When he was in his fields, in his big unzipped rubber boots
An undershirted round belly moving over his plants
Doing something he loved to do
With his hands in his earth and his mind at peace.
Spiraling in the center of this raw floral beast
Were these times when rafters hung me upside down
Gargantuan beekeepers were surely autumn's mistress
Her trailing seeds fell into our farmyard those years
Raising up step children that grew as our volunteers.

Sunflowers

My sons days
Littered with the shells
Spit out in the anguish
Wrenching at bats
Or flyball to center
Spat as he pitched.

In France I went to Arles
Staying in a farmhouse
Buried in the fields
Of golden sunflowers ripening
The flies descended on us,
Biting black rampant

By the porch we grew
Sunflowers that looked up
Onto the deck through the
Redwood
Not as refined as the clematis
They too were buggy.

It's sizzling my wok
Filled with sunflower oil
And broccoli florets
Making some beef stirfry
For a daughter
Oil from this seedy flower

I taught a unit
Every year about this flower
Planting and watching
It's spiral and heliotropism.
Branded by producers
A worker's flower.

Sunflower

Standing in the sun, a bouquet is gathered in
Set upon a linen skin, in vase that's
Colored blue, slate grey and rose.
Sunflowers are waiting here, still and taken from the gloom
Settled in the drawing room
Awaiting there the one that is to come.

He mixes paint, tries to mark something of their whirling gait
That swirls before his eyes.
Vase of flowers standing still, nothing that connects to real
He pulls his brushes round the forms, inflects a contour
Of music sung, that steps out with a drawing bloom
He moves his dance, the brushes stroke, caressing what is seen

Yellow autumn splashing paint, with center filled with greens and black
The forms are painted with his mark, as if their life flew back,
Still life is representing dream
He turns his canvas to his screen
Revealing veils here never seen, the layers build to mean a whole
The artist transforms the scene, into the lover's eye.




Gladiolus

He said he'd come to dinner
My first for a man
That I ever asked or thought
I wanted

To serve dinner of course
So I made lime jello and it was
Extensive with toasted coconut,nuts and fruit
Dish after dish
Maybe steaks
Bread

And he helped me with the dishes
Standing there
As he washed, I was in love
With these giant green glads
On my table
Making eye contact impossible
It lead to a walk

To walk away all the food
and dessert which was a
White Chocolate cake
We walked to a place to see the lights
Of that town
Sitting down
I laughed at the stalks
in the table
Looking in his eyes

And he gave me a kiss
Quite a few, it was sweeter than the
Gelatin, and I was 21
Forever.
But he said he couldn't hurt me
To explain that was
Not a beginning.

It was just the dinner
I decorated with green glads
Some wine he brought me, a chianti
I set the bookshelf on fire with the candles
But that was later after he went away
That I struggled to stop
the blaze.

Lotus

On the pond in the country we went to fish blue gills
Russ Ellison was wonderful we'd go out to the ponds
Covered with lily pads, frogs, blooms, the lotus it was outstanding
to get a bamboo pole and pretend with the men that we were fishing
For blue gills in our little metal boat.
I'd get a worm and Dad would put it on the line
Or Russ would tie a fly with my brother, they were more serious
The little fish would nip and get caught but we put them back,
It always seemed to me the hook had to harm them.
But to rest in the lily pad pond on his farm
In West Virginia was an act of beauty
Comparable to the blooms I watched being circled by dragonflies.
Russ said the flowers were for Helen and Mary.
Helen was my kindergarten teacher, his daughter.
Their friendship to my family as the lotus
A symbol for awakening to the spiritual reality of life.

Everything Dies Black Rose

At some point in my days of college my hopes died
On a chilly night drug into a parking lot and made real
As real as it gets the flower of youth
Was dead and left were bones and dust.
So I drew those stiff, dry forms in 7 foot drawings of black
On my knees for them willingly
Not drug there and held by hair and smacked senseless
I drew them crouched with arms and legs smudging
Until as soot they lept off the pages bleeding from my fingers
To be forms of the grief I felt with a heart losing
A sense of touch and smell
These were the dead gifts from someone who said he cared
That I couldn't even feel
Until you came I thought it was murdered that night on my knees.

Now the ink is black little wire forms that crunch
From a keyboard like once these roses dropped their brittle pieces
Onto my paper as I looked for a way to make visual the
Damage that was done to my soul
Just like you have brought black to this moment.

A Midnight Portfolio of Poems for Huntington Gardens and Gallies, opps Galleries

Fencing With The Moon

Every image ever penned was a sword
Drawn against another
The challenge thrown upon the canvas
Sharp, its target the heart
The battle begun
Drawn into war for singular victory
A show of skill, parrying the truth
A fight of honor
My art defeats me.




Illusion

She laughed and said,
I'll be by the fanciful fountain
Wait for you there. This happy grace of youth, my kid.

I was huffing and gave a slight wave,
Because it was going to black fast
Ready to fallover

Clink, my eyes saw things shooting,
My chest a clutching collapse, inwards feeling again.
Talk wouldn't come out.

I just didn't know when or how to say,
I need your help.










Unrequited Love

Unrequited love is thirsty
On a walk in the desert
Incredible forms, foreign, intricate,
Designed by a jeweler bedazzling while
You thirst and cannot hold them
Sharp, rigid, ripping weapons
Unresponsive to your fading need
The lowering of your knee
To the ground, in collapse, deeply hungering
You drown there in this desert of this thirst.




Mr. Bumble

Buzzing up the flowers
Yellow in my tree
Was my fat fuzzy flier
Drinking happily

He's a floating in my garden
From over your fine fence
Sweetest blooms in the morning
Laps up sticky sweet conquest

Buzzing up my flowers
He wasn't stinging me
Black and furry he's a dodging
Like he really can be free.





Stumbling Into A Family Reunion

Each one looked the other
And yet his face his own
I was walking in the garden
Of some critters from the moon.

This one had a mustache
That one needed a comb
Over here a bunch of babies
Arriving from the womb.

Surprised to meet two sisters
The prickly one called Frank
Four eyes were a blossoming
In a desert gone cartoon.

Each is individual
But clearly there's a clan
Taking in the relations
I missed the family tomb.









Another Set of Rules, Lewis Carroll Might Enjoy

She said, look
I love this
Read this
Look it's the rules for the "Children's Garden"

And she read it to me rushing happily with intonation just right:
"No strollers in the Garden."
Did you hear that?" she said.
I nodded but I did not smile then.

"No standing or sitting on fountains, NO RUNNING."
Get that one?
"No barefeet, no throwing ROCKS or other objects."
Got that?
I nodded again. Grinning.

"Adults are responsible to supervise their own children."
At this she cackled, "Over others they mistake them for I suppose."
And then read me the finale,
"Please review the brochure for other guidelines."

To this my daughter said,
"Jesus if we just get RID of the KIDS this garden will be fantastic."








Sugarloaf

You couldn't know a mountain
Without the climb
Can't know this chord
With out some sweet rhyme
Don't know a cloud
Free of the rain
Ain't no road to heaven
You haven't wallowed up in blame.
It seems sugar dumplin
You sure is hard to tame.





Zero the Hero

What would a hero do
With a heroine gone to flab?
Too heavy to be hoisted on a shoulder down the balustrade.
Be heroically absent for a good reason?
Bow out gracefully,
Say the right thing and do the wrong,
Sacrifice someone?




"Just" Friends

I don't know
You seem to struggle
With friendship
As much as you
Fooled around in love.
Panicked by one
Bored by the other, compartmentalized,
Retaliatory
Oddly keeping score.

You might notice, if you take a pulse
The patient here might have died.






Not Where I Am, Where I Am Not

She called unable to be there
And be happy in that place
That I do love the most.
Family, the situation, all of it
Bad for her. It's not working.
A moment containing so
Much raw potential it was
About to burst.



Deja Vu

Indigo flashed in the reflections
Orangerie evoking Monet's foot trails
Into the rushes and dragonflies
This movement of time, light and memory
Across the palette, his oeuvre
Held here in this garden
Shadow walking into the heat of his brush stroke.




Macadamia, Right?

Anise always brought mom a box
From Hawaii and her trips.
Two nuts, I thought, munching happily.

Seeing my first tree thirty five years later
He asked me devilishly,
"What tree is this, quick, guess?"

The answer popped out from an old nut
A macadamia
Bested, he replied, "You really are nuts sometimes."





Down Garden Paths

If Eve comes at dusk
Dawn starts the day
Then Merrilee walks the
Jester that stole away today.

Dusty came this morning
And Misty brings the rain
Our Ginger strolls the afternoon
With someone she won't name.

Sweet Luna reflects the moon tonight
Sunshine streaks the blades
In the meadow Rosemary walks her thoughts
Aligning Thyme with maids.




A Gnome

It must have stood
Long enough there to know
I saw it. Great a gnome.
In the heat I was already very faint, which
Cracked him up. They are rather mean
In a way. "I'm dying here do you mind?"
I sputtered, the path was
Winding upward, it was 105 degrees,
Gnome or no I was feeling ill.
So he stood awhile like they do.
Just watching me pass. No help. No concern.
No discernible interest.
Just a gnome on the walk in the forest.





I read a sentence in a good
Story that seemed to explain "everything"
That ever was. Having the impression
I finally had the
Answers.


I'm honestly sitting
A few hours later can't
Recall anything more
Than the feeling of
Solution.




Walking the Dog

I've actually never walked beside my spouse.
Just viewed his behind, hearing the mutter
As I was left there.

Back aways wandering with my loneliness
I created thoughts that another held in
Interest, my noticing these little peach flowers

Sparkling light, so he barks,
"Come on." or some atrocious order to hurry up.
I'm to proceed at once, to heel.



Temple of Love

In love's garden one is waylaid
By the caress of beauty, a facade
Placed gently over the hard solid chest
Of a man made of cement. Made in the block factory.
Attraction, desire, pollination are tasted here.
Fertilization, the seed, a birth and death churns, no more or less
Efficient than to her purpose
She dons her make-up and charms
She sanctifies this cyclical blush.




Daisy Chains Blues

A chain of purple daisies
You wove for my neck

You hung em on me darling
Like a long hard train wreck.

We were young and dumber fools
I went home and wept
Put em on the foot of the bed
And then I slept.

Woke up this morning what did I see
My chain of purple daisies
Done died on me.





Mixed Messages or Faulty Reception?

A watched pot never boils
An unsent letter surely is dead.
You read the signals
That you want inside
That made up head.



Dichotomies

A great variety, notebooks, tablets, spools, lace
Glasses, cases, change purses, crochet hooks, yarns,
Needle threaders, scissors, emery boards,
Black tiny liquorices, these pads bound by spirals,
Arm pads for sweat under dresses,
These were all arranged at McCoys and the Woolworth's in bins.
My childhood Saturdays inspected them
Looking for lilac soaps or rose water
Something my grandmother wanted.
We'd spurge a dollar or two getting a hamburger
At the lunch counter and the bus later.

So to see this grand palace last week built
By the family of the tycoons of industry and trade of her days
Their breakfast room yellow and art filled
Or reading of how they collected the French room pieces
To see their Blue Boy, the Gainsborough's,
Looking upon the gardens feels so weird.
Grandma would have been nursing, she took
One rich woman heir back to health and survived
Nursing the influenza epidemic that took the life of her
Sweet Jewish doctor. She survived
To be the grandma taking me to town
To enjoy the pleasure of pursuing these dry goods together.






You Can't Know

These things you did
You cannot answer with some dumb words, loud silences
Or useless actions like in the past
It was different (it was me).

As the tractors loose the earth
Pulling the forest apart
Yanking the creekbed , asphalt burning the glen,
It's all gone, the deer fled to the hum of the I79
Right through the middle of our farm.
Gnashing it away
No one stood to look me in the eye
Explain why this was progress, change, better
Why I lost the illusion of childhood
Why the beauty was buried
Decided far away.

These things you did
You cannot answer with some dumb words, larger silences
Or useless actions like in the past
This was different (it was me).




Love

It seems to say catch me
Here and now, lost today.
You, it followed so easily
Lifted beyond my grasping.