Orange Popsicle
Not one, but two in their paper sheaf
from deep in Larry Brooks’ ice cream freezer,
two mounting their wooden depresser sticks,
and if your hands were strong
like Joan Rigby’s or Peggy Gahagan’s
you could break them neatly,
but your mitts were small like your father’s
who never strayed, so it took
a sharp whack on the corner of concrete
or back home the flat-palm push on the cleaver
to separate one chill sweet into two,
the opposite, you knew, of marriage, two becoming cold,
not that you would have put two whole popsicles
into your little mouth at once,
though you knew some girls who had big kissers,
Dale Calahan and Claire Rittenbach,
who slipped the double-loadstone
in and down, the limey green,
the grapey purple, the cherry cherry
in the back seat of cars and buses,
let it slide far back without gagging,
but for you, one was giggle enough,
one sweet, one man, one egg,
the bright slide down the throat
and then back juicing the sun.
Tu Fu
I put Tu Fu in the poem
I was writing on my neighbor’s wall.
It is spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
My critique group said,
even if he is a Chinese poet,
he sounds too much like tofu.
They were all writing poems
on their grandmothers’ lasagna.
Maybe use one of those haiku guys–
You know, the frog wallowing
in the silent pond. Glop!
I knew, splash, but I wanted more:
The sound of chopping wood echoing
Between the silent peaks.
No explaining purposiveness
without purpose to them.
Meanwhile one neighbor was
letting his cedar hedge grow
three stories high
and the other piling his trash
on my side of his shed. No beauty there.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you
An empty boat, floating adrift.
It is true, the deer invade my lawn,
what’s left of it, and gnaw
apples from my scrawling trees.
The critics have left
and you are hungry again.
Tofu or noodles?
I brood on the uselessness of art.
What the Light Sings
Not the song of equality–
for there is always a hand
that stops its passage
and leaves traces upon the road
or a government of barns
that darkens the goldenrod.
Sheep obstruct the grass,
and the crow’s wing, the beetle.
Even the clouds
with their flimsy thoughts
throw gray blankets
across village and field
so that the child
perched on the porch asks
where is the sky?
why can’t we breathe?
No, not the song of equality
which is the song of rain–
but a song that shimmers,
little coins of light
clinking through the oaks
and jingling to the road,
or wings flinging from branch to branch,
until they find a place to linger.
You see it sometimes
in orchards of pears,
the tilt of dawn
along the trunks
as if they were machines of good fortune
emptying
every quarter you’ve ever spent
back into your life,
or perhaps less random but just as lucky,
at end of day
in a copse of birch,
the spendthrift dusk.
What the Light Sings
Not the song of equality–
for there is always a hand
that stops its passage
and leaves traces upon the road
or a government of barns
that darkens the goldenrod.
Sheep obstruct the grass,
and the crow’s wing, the beetle.
Even the clouds
with their flimsy thoughts
throw gray blankets
across village and field
so that the child
perched on the porch asks
where is the sky?
why can’t we breathe?
No, not the song of equality
which is the song of rain–
but a song that shimmers,
little coins of light
clinking through the oaks
and jingling to the road,
or wings flinging from branch to branch,
until they find a place to linger.
You see it sometimes
in orchards of pears,
the tilt of dawn
along the trunks
as if they were machines of good fortune
emptying
every quarter you’ve ever spent
back into your life,
or perhaps less random but just as lucky,
at end of day
in a copse of birch,
the spendthrift dusk.
Transformation
How strangely when slips into then:
the deer downed on the road flips, brown paper
shadows of tree trunks ladder the path,
rung becomes crevice, be careful
your mother’s back, once straight
as exclamation begins its question
marking her spine, what is sense any way
except crooks in the road–
are you holding onto your pursed
lips? it won’t be long before the thief
steals your story, turns tale into trot–
wolf in sleep’s clothing.
A Little Poem
is best. No one
has time or
inclination
for voyages
or treks. Long
wars take
a life or more
and the shortest
spat becomes
a drawn-out
divorce. We’ve
been here and there
fore and aft.
So avoid story.
Avoid conflict
and all its sticky dead.
Be slick.
Be quick.
A little poem is be
sion spoiled. . . like the spontaneity.
The pencil had watched her
make a New Year’s resolution:
no more emendations, a new vocabulary word,
which she had also resolved to use.
The poor fellow did not know
what to think of the girl’s new certainty.
He had sharped up in a world
where if you didn’t get it right
you could try try again.
but now his eraser was hardening like a heart
that no longer could be used.
How I Lose Sleep
When my fat friend reappears on the back of her new book,
a sylph of her former self, I worry about the body, hers
and mine–breast, colon, lung, skin, stomach– all the starving
cells that seek sustenance apart from our lives–and about
the lives I feed on, making my little writings of dying,
turning my mother, father, friends into words as flesh diminishes.
I wonder too if I will now pick at her. I phone , I leave messages,
and when she does not reply I e-mail, Are you well? You seem
so thin. But when she finally calls back from a trek to the Outer Hebrides, and
I tell her how worried I have been, she groans,
What? I worked for this. So I cannot say that she seemed truer,
safer, when she weighed 30 or 40 pounds more, more
her own bubbly sexy self, further from those wry bones
of hers that I want and want not to chew.
Time’s Winged SUV
That car fifty feet behind
is on your tail, up your sass,
cancer in the duodenum,
colostomy ready to happen.
You take the nearest exit
and discover Route 495
a clogged artery,
the by-pass round DC choked.
Your blood warms a degree or two,
and the shore sixty years east
is at your back door begging you
to toss your cookies upon the waters.
The gentle spring breeze
wheezing through your trachea
becomes a tornado rumbling down
like a semi that’s lost its brakes.
And you can’t hide in your cellar
which was just a little damp
or in your attic shored up
with ballast from the past.
Your friend, 56, has died
of the cigarette smoke
trailing behind him
as he practiced Tai Chi,
the whole West Coast is smoldering,
and your sister-in-law
can‘t hobble across the coals
on the foot she’s lost to diabetes.
You’re forty-four and you think,
thank rod, knock on hood, you are healthy,
but objects in mirror
are closer than they appear.
Transformation
How strangely when slips into then:
the deer downed on the road flips, brown paper
shadows of tree trunks ladder the path,
rung becomes crevice, be careful
your mother’s back, once straight
as exclamation begins its question
marking her spine, what is sense any way
except crooks in the road–
are you holding onto your pursed
lips? it won’t be long before the thief
steals your story, turns tale into trot–
wolf in sleep’s clothing.
A Little Poem
is best. No one
has time or
inclination
for voyages
or treks. Long
wars take
a life or more
and the shortest
spat becomes
a drawn-out
divorce. We’ve
been here and there
fore and aft.
So avoid story.
Avoid conflict
and all its sticky dead.
Be slick.
Be quick.
A little poem is be
Not one, but two in their paper sheaf
from deep in Larry Brooks’ ice cream freezer,
two mounting their wooden depresser sticks,
and if your hands were strong
like Joan Rigby’s or Peggy Gahagan’s
you could break them neatly,
but your mitts were small like your father’s
who never strayed, so it took
a sharp whack on the corner of concrete
or back home the flat-palm push on the cleaver
to separate one chill sweet into two,
the opposite, you knew, of marriage, two becoming cold,
not that you would have put two whole popsicles
into your little mouth at once,
though you knew some girls who had big kissers,
Dale Calahan and Claire Rittenbach,
who slipped the double-loadstone
in and down, the limey green,
the grapey purple, the cherry cherry
in the back seat of cars and buses,
let it slide far back without gagging,
but for you, one was giggle enough,
one sweet, one man, one egg,
the bright slide down the throat
and then back juicing the sun.
Tu Fu
I put Tu Fu in the poem
I was writing on my neighbor’s wall.
It is spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
My critique group said,
even if he is a Chinese poet,
he sounds too much like tofu.
They were all writing poems
on their grandmothers’ lasagna.
Maybe use one of those haiku guys–
You know, the frog wallowing
in the silent pond. Glop!
I knew, splash, but I wanted more:
The sound of chopping wood echoing
Between the silent peaks.
No explaining purposiveness
without purpose to them.
Meanwhile one neighbor was
letting his cedar hedge grow
three stories high
and the other piling his trash
on my side of his shed. No beauty there.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you
An empty boat, floating adrift.
It is true, the deer invade my lawn,
what’s left of it, and gnaw
apples from my scrawling trees.
The critics have left
and you are hungry again.
Tofu or noodles?
I brood on the uselessness of art.
What the Light Sings
Not the song of equality–
for there is always a hand
that stops its passage
and leaves traces upon the road
or a government of barns
that darkens the goldenrod.
Sheep obstruct the grass,
and the crow’s wing, the beetle.
Even the clouds
with their flimsy thoughts
throw gray blankets
across village and field
so that the child
perched on the porch asks
where is the sky?
why can’t we breathe?
No, not the song of equality
which is the song of rain–
but a song that shimmers,
little coins of light
clinking through the oaks
and jingling to the road,
or wings flinging from branch to branch,
until they find a place to linger.
You see it sometimes
in orchards of pears,
the tilt of dawn
along the trunks
as if they were machines of good fortune
emptying
every quarter you’ve ever spent
back into your life,
or perhaps less random but just as lucky,
at end of day
in a copse of birch,
the spendthrift dusk.
What the Light Sings
Not the song of equality–
for there is always a hand
that stops its passage
and leaves traces upon the road
or a government of barns
that darkens the goldenrod.
Sheep obstruct the grass,
and the crow’s wing, the beetle.
Even the clouds
with their flimsy thoughts
throw gray blankets
across village and field
so that the child
perched on the porch asks
where is the sky?
why can’t we breathe?
No, not the song of equality
which is the song of rain–
but a song that shimmers,
little coins of light
clinking through the oaks
and jingling to the road,
or wings flinging from branch to branch,
until they find a place to linger.
You see it sometimes
in orchards of pears,
the tilt of dawn
along the trunks
as if they were machines of good fortune
emptying
every quarter you’ve ever spent
back into your life,
or perhaps less random but just as lucky,
at end of day
in a copse of birch,
the spendthrift dusk.
Transformation
How strangely when slips into then:
the deer downed on the road flips, brown paper
shadows of tree trunks ladder the path,
rung becomes crevice, be careful
your mother’s back, once straight
as exclamation begins its question
marking her spine, what is sense any way
except crooks in the road–
are you holding onto your pursed
lips? it won’t be long before the thief
steals your story, turns tale into trot–
wolf in sleep’s clothing.
A Little Poem
is best. No one
has time or
inclination
for voyages
or treks. Long
wars take
a life or more
and the shortest
spat becomes
a drawn-out
divorce. We’ve
been here and there
fore and aft.
So avoid story.
Avoid conflict
and all its sticky dead.
Be slick.
Be quick.
A little poem is be
sion spoiled. . . like the spontaneity.
The pencil had watched her
make a New Year’s resolution:
no more emendations, a new vocabulary word,
which she had also resolved to use.
The poor fellow did not know
what to think of the girl’s new certainty.
He had sharped up in a world
where if you didn’t get it right
you could try try again.
but now his eraser was hardening like a heart
that no longer could be used.
How I Lose Sleep
When my fat friend reappears on the back of her new book,
a sylph of her former self, I worry about the body, hers
and mine–breast, colon, lung, skin, stomach– all the starving
cells that seek sustenance apart from our lives–and about
the lives I feed on, making my little writings of dying,
turning my mother, father, friends into words as flesh diminishes.
I wonder too if I will now pick at her. I phone , I leave messages,
and when she does not reply I e-mail, Are you well? You seem
so thin. But when she finally calls back from a trek to the Outer Hebrides, and
I tell her how worried I have been, she groans,
What? I worked for this. So I cannot say that she seemed truer,
safer, when she weighed 30 or 40 pounds more, more
her own bubbly sexy self, further from those wry bones
of hers that I want and want not to chew.
Time’s Winged SUV
That car fifty feet behind
is on your tail, up your sass,
cancer in the duodenum,
colostomy ready to happen.
You take the nearest exit
and discover Route 495
a clogged artery,
the by-pass round DC choked.
Your blood warms a degree or two,
and the shore sixty years east
is at your back door begging you
to toss your cookies upon the waters.
The gentle spring breeze
wheezing through your trachea
becomes a tornado rumbling down
like a semi that’s lost its brakes.
And you can’t hide in your cellar
which was just a little damp
or in your attic shored up
with ballast from the past.
Your friend, 56, has died
of the cigarette smoke
trailing behind him
as he practiced Tai Chi,
the whole West Coast is smoldering,
and your sister-in-law
can‘t hobble across the coals
on the foot she’s lost to diabetes.
You’re forty-four and you think,
thank rod, knock on hood, you are healthy,
but objects in mirror
are closer than they appear.
Transformation
How strangely when slips into then:
the deer downed on the road flips, brown paper
shadows of tree trunks ladder the path,
rung becomes crevice, be careful
your mother’s back, once straight
as exclamation begins its question
marking her spine, what is sense any way
except crooks in the road–
are you holding onto your pursed
lips? it won’t be long before the thief
steals your story, turns tale into trot–
wolf in sleep’s clothing.
A Little Poem
is best. No one
has time or
inclination
for voyages
or treks. Long
wars take
a life or more
and the shortest
spat becomes
a drawn-out
divorce. We’ve
been here and there
fore and aft.
So avoid story.
Avoid conflict
and all its sticky dead.
Be slick.
Be quick.
A little poem is be
Award-winning poet Lois Marie
Harrod's chapbook Furniture won the
2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize Her
chapbook Firmament was published by
Finishing Line Press, 2007; her
chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out by
Concrete Wolf, 2005. She won her
third poetry fellowship from the New
Jersey Council on the Arts 2003. Her
other books include Spelling the World
Backward (Palanquin Press, University
of South Carolina Aiken, 2000); This Is
a Story You Already Know (Palanquin
Press, 1999) ; Part of the Deeper Sea
(Palanquin Press, 1997); Every Twinge
a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, 1987),
Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press, 1991)
and a chapbook Green Snake Riding
(New Spirit Press, 1994). Over 360 of
her poems have appeared in literary
journals and online magazines
including American Poetry Review,
Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The
Literary Review, Verse Daily and
Zone3. She has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize 7 times. A former high
school English teacher, she presently
supervises student teachers and
teaches Creative Writing at The
College of New Jersey.
Harrod's chapbook Furniture won the
2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize Her
chapbook Firmament was published by
Finishing Line Press, 2007; her
chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out by
Concrete Wolf, 2005. She won her
third poetry fellowship from the New
Jersey Council on the Arts 2003. Her
other books include Spelling the World
Backward (Palanquin Press, University
of South Carolina Aiken, 2000); This Is
a Story You Already Know (Palanquin
Press, 1999) ; Part of the Deeper Sea
(Palanquin Press, 1997); Every Twinge
a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, 1987),
Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press, 1991)
and a chapbook Green Snake Riding
(New Spirit Press, 1994). Over 360 of
her poems have appeared in literary
journals and online magazines
including American Poetry Review,
Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The
Literary Review, Verse Daily and
Zone3. She has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize 7 times. A former high
school English teacher, she presently
supervises student teachers and
teaches Creative Writing at The
College of New Jersey.
Lois Marie Harrod
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