Sunday, January 13, 2013

Sample Poems: Volume 23.2

A Branch Of Beach Plum
By Donald W. Baker


Most days I walk the old track under the pines
and over the dunes to the beach.
I have chosen for you the bend in the path
where a thicket of beach plum survives the backhoes,
where at noon in our season the air
used to be heavy with the smell of blossoms.
This morning I walked on the brown needles
as gently as I could so that no abrupt
gesture would temper the music of the warblers
in the spruce. Returning, I broke off
a branch of beach plum and carried it home.
Now it rises from the blue vase on the mantel,
the flowers, fragile and pink, beginning to wither,
one broken twig oozing a clear drop.
Yes, that is where I should like to meet you,
halfway between home and the shore, knowing
that back there are kitchen and books and bedroom,
a house full of lives and living,
and, not far ahead, the comforting sea.



Pulling In The Mirrors
By Jim Daniels


The sign we missed said Park Here and Walk.
Intoxicated by the tilt of that hilltop village,
we keep driving till houses squeeze
the road to a slender path we can’t squeeze
down. Can we back up? We pull in the mirrors.
I climb out and lead you back inch by inch between
the darkened stones. Fifteen years together.
How long is a long time? Too long?
Behind the wheel, you inch the van toward me
as I walk backward through the village,
your eyes full of desire to see this through.
An old woman shakes her head
from a window above us, the side of her building
scraped with other fools like us.
I signal carefully, guiding you back
as if there were any other way.
 
 
Ab irata
By Linda Warren


Don't tell me all the angles
unless you talk geometry
I want words that hold their own with truth,
Quod Erat Demonstrandum of the heart:
Euclid knew his language.

Say what you mean in Greek:
I want to be your complement
I want to be your supplement
I want to lie beside you with the sides of us
adjacent from the vertex out forever
so the missing pieces of each other
form a horizontal line
that cuts the universal plane in half.

I'm not playing with probabilities.
I don't want decimals.

I am Hypatia, with her mathematics
and I know she died for what she knew
but let me tell you
she was not stoned to death
because she was obtuse
she was stoned because she was
right

and it's true the truth can get you killed
but it also draws a long, straight line
one unassailable dimension,
ad infinitum
perfect connection
my soul to yours
and we do not get there
baby,
when you speak
oblique.

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