poetry notebook

A native of the Balkans, Himalayas,
and Southwest China, with vast forests
even now in Kyrgyzstan, the Ancient
Greeks took the Persian walnut from Iran
and Iraq and bred it for size and improved
the quality of its fruit. From Greece,
as with all things, the Romans brought them
into Europe and north Africa.
Then the Regia turned English, and now
California produces two-thirds
of the world’s consumable walnuts.

More importantly, Carya chose the walnut
as a refuge from her Dionysian passion,
a hard wood with a rich fruit; we remembered
her as Artemis, and on the Acropolis
built her into a monument made of marble,
not wood, Caryatids keeping the porch
roof in the sky until now, a distant future.

The cherry, the plum, and the pear
have all blossomed and faded to foliage
but this walnut in the northwest corner
only has small green cones shot with brown
on the nubs of the twigs on its branches,
neither flower nor leaf, though dugouts
where the woodpeckers work and open branches
are many, from one of which a crow looks down
at me and scolds me for being such a slacker
on this warm spring Sunday afternoon.

#twitpoem #pmppd (poetry month poem per day) poem 19

All our tactics defeat nothing
     yet gain power that soon will wilt
Convoluted beliefs; vast questions
     with no likely solution, pry
Subject matter away, meanwhile
     desire rages to again be here
Masturbating through ink letters
     I smear onto the World Wide Web,
Phrases meant to ascend higher,
     though wanting to give, taking what I need.

#twitpoem #pmppd (poetry month poem per day) poem 17

Eight hundred years later
Ensnared by the bear trap
of payments and receipts,
never secure always wanting
or not wanting something

such a confusion of success
and failure any acquaintance
might think one stupid for not caring
enough about acquisition
or that you have too much

there seems to be only one
infallible solution to this paradox
of pleasure and pain. How much longer
until I wade completely in

and never return?

May I bring my guitar
so I can play some
blues now and then
or just hear
where the sound leads

and someone who would
read to me would
be lovely, with a complex voice,
not too pretty, something
with depth and timbre

someone who would
read Chomei to me
someone who would read
me Basil Bunting.
Ok. Any kind of voice.

#twitpoem #pmppd (poetry month poem per day) poem 15

Gusty winds
and crowded highways
yield
accidental
sleep.

#twitpoem #pmppd (poetry month poem per day) poem 13