apple trees

Another poem based on my father's journal entries.













We walked past apple trees
in the old orchard behind
Jimmy’s house,a small,green
haven from the concrete
and wire world we lived in.

We climbed them when school
let out, and settled into
the thick branches, sweet bites of
the forbidden fruits we loved
melting on our parched tongues.

Jimmy told stories back then.
when he grew up, he said,
he would have a red barn
full of horses black as pitch,
and long green fields to ride in.

We dreamed of so many things,
and we didn’t know then that
it would take so little time
to grow up..the trees seemed
endless on that hot summer day.

The red barn was never built,
the black horses were exchanged
for the matt black of a gun barrel
owned by a young Guardia officer
and Jimmy lay, unhorsed, in a field of red.

But....

I can still see my friend’s hair
sparkling in the blue summer skies
as we climbed through fistfuls
of leaves,down the thick tree,
running for home, breathless.

Winter Flight

I danced to your thunder,
feared your lightning,
bathed in your rain and
flew on your wind.
You were a passing
thunderstorm
on a summer night.

when winter came
you spread your wings
and flew south,
following the sun.

Theodore Roethke

I'm not a huge fan of american poets, but theodore Roethke is one of my preferred ones. He was very popular in the 1920's and won a Pulitzer for his book in 1954

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.