Automobile Dismantle
Shattered glass
Torn metal
This has happened before
To me.
A deer
Thought it was
a good time to cross
195.
It was wrong.
I love my country
Has been said so many times
And I do.
Please don’t forget
My thankfulness
My sorrow
It is all I have.
Children should have all the rights
Given to adults
To protect them
Keep them as righteous
As we adults are.
They know better what to do with it.
Toy cars
Barbie dolls
Candy
And pleasureable exuberance.
One and Two
Three and Four
Four
Two
Pink Dahlia
Peaches and Cream Salvia
Orange Dahlia (with chives in back)
This poem is so, SO beautiful. The pacing of the opening lines is genius and perfect and it is one of those poems I wish I had written. I love her references to the world pre-world wars. The ideas and perspectives are fresh and timeless. Enjoy. I know I did and will over and over again.
Reading Novalis in Montana
by Melissa Kwasny
The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.
Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.
I would like to know what it means
if first one bird swims the channel
across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.
In the end, the modernists must have meant,
it is the human world we are weary of,
our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.
But that was before the world wars, in 1800,
when a young German poet could pick at the truth
and collect the fragments in an encyclopedia of knowledge.
There is a V, then an L, each letter
forming so slowly that the next appears before it is complete.
The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self,
Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.
They have left me behind like one of their lost,
scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?
I stand in the narrow cut of a frozen road leading into mountains,
the morning newspaper gripped under my arm.
But to give up on things precludes everything.
I am not-I, Novalis wrote. I am you.
If, as the gnostics say, the world was a mistake
created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped
in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,
why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?
Why stay while my great sails flap the ice
as if my voice were needed to call them back
in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?
Bed 1
Bed 2
Bed 3
Splice and Heel
Sing.
Sing loudly
for all the car to hear.
Reverberate your joy–
the return of feeling
and life inside the expanse
that is your large body
you have been blessed with
made for you
not to waste.
Paper pages are drugs
of euphoria.
Dripping mud
the water -mixed dirt
is the only wine
needed to be consumed by the eyes.
Living is simple, inside of
single beer bottles
on summer porches
in slightly sun-scorched lawns.
We are the weary travelers
set here to make the best of things–
the lovely, individualized gifts we have been given
inside and outside of what
one might call luck.
But instead it is a
consecrated grafting
of balanced inertia.
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