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Poetry

Poetry

The Active Voice

After Camille Pissarro’s Haymaking at Éragny   Pissarro clumped, sculpted, plowed his oil paints to produce this hayfield: fertile pigments mixed, molded, together like squelching mud to cultivate such an agrarian landscape sown with greens, blues, yellows, browns; his passion raising pregnant berms with color on this canvas. Here, between trees, a breeze combs through wheat-sheaves where a woman works a pitchfork in the grasses, ordering, processing, a year’s plenty beside fellow peasants, harvesting what’s needed for unseen hungry mouths…
September 1, 2018
MagazinePoetry

Bigger than Him

It was bigger than him Smooth heart wood     called a walking stick For a three-year-old trying to be older It’s not about walking     running Being first down the trail      nor about the tangle Of want and need        in his legs And it’s not about the way we roll The pitiful scraping of the chin While the spine      backbends around The roll and skiddish landing It’s not the extended yeowl       or the interminable pause Before there is breath or comfort’s coos…
June 30, 2018
Poetry

Having the Last Word

I’m holding a thought    in my mouth I’ve got it polished and smooth, and oh it’s hard II the middle like a rock        I spotted its glint just behind you In the neighbor’s decorative gravel          a confident little sas Calling me       as they say It’s my calling now           a rather remarkable Way to be       to feel right about something I mean I’m actually kind of proud to have it Tucked away        this lozenge held in my teeth      l Like a…
June 30, 2018
Poetry

Gardensong

Hosea 2:7 “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” – Jacque Lacan “ut operaretur eum” – Voltaire’s Candide Desire is taking a picture of the moon. The trip to faraway that made you miss your bed, an apple gone soft. The way summer fades the new drapes pooling by the window-pane. How pain feels so much like suspense. And I, thumbing my past like an old brochure, a native who…
April 30, 2018
Poetry

Hosea, Single

Hosea 2:15 In January your keys keep the time, plink like antlers discarded in the foyer. House sealed tight as a covenant. I hold our truth with baby-fisted certainty, days stacked neatly as closed books on a calendar. Hours like the travel of the front porch rocker. In March, the month for war, you leave me. Reverse-alchemy. Gold, like youth, returned to dross. I start to date, trace the river after a hard rain mud-soak wash churning towards some lighted…
April 30, 2018
Poetry

Let Those Who Have Eyes See

On July 6, 2016, Officer Jeronimo Yanez killed motorist Philando Castile while Castile was belted in the seat of his car, accompanied by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter. On June 16, 2017, Yanez was found not guilty on one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm. The 12-person jury was asked to decide if the prosecution had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Yanez had been culpably negligent. In a rare…
April 30, 2018
Poetry

Almost Overhead

There was a caution in the air. A thin front of yellow yielded to heavy black layers of a disruptive sky crawling menacingly above. Thunder sounded from the hands of trauma, releasing repeated detonations. The calm surface air quickly became an unlikely opportunity for safety. Nature began to carve out its design of strength in impressive waves Roger Singer is a chiropractor practicing in upstate New York. Image: Marc Wieland on Unsplash
February 28, 2018
Poetry

Silver moon

You have my heart which is similar to the moon’s grip on this night Dark branches reach high to embrace the sky waters bulge       in the curve of an eye   She slips from behind clouds      & then slides out of sight    The chapel on the corner stands secure     stained glass glowing in moonlight   An unseen violin plays in the dark I want to love you       like its strings love to sing    like Christ loves the church      like those…
February 28, 2018
Poetry

To Martin, on His Wife, the Original “Opt-Out”

Soren Kierkegaard once said Martin Luther might as well have married a “wooden plank” Katherine, Kette, hidden in herring barrels, driven into town to hunt a husband, of all the renegade nuns, so young, eyes roving from the cloister, she refused to be “placed,” so you wed her. Doctor Hammer-in-Hand, you were never a “sexless log,” six children and a hoard of orphans clustered in the Black Cloister homestead. Nowadays, Katie’d be a keeper – queen of sustainable living, herbal…
December 30, 2017