POETRY COLLECTION
These poems reveal the concrete and artistic expression of the poet’s various moods and thoughts in emotional and rhythmic language.
Dead Man?
Terrified sometimes of how, when I bend down to peer into the cool spring mountain stream, that a face could be looking up at me. A man fades out of his own photographs. Another goes silent in the grave. A third was just a target anyhow, from without, from within. I knew them. I watched their disintegration from up close. But what if it’s a stranger? An army vet with three missions trapped inside his brain cells. A woman battered to death by the man she married? A child who ventured too close to the edge? I’ve fished in these waters. I’ve even swum. But those were good days and I’ve had bad ones. And the worst of all would roll out of these mountains, ride the current right when I’m thinking today is going to be a great day. What if the body sheds a limb, bursts an eye, thumps against my dangling fingers? Terrified sometimes that I’ve lived this long without this one thing happening. Look up there. A shape – can’t quite make it out – it’s rolling this way. If it’s something, it’s on its way downstream. If it’s someone, it’s headed straight for me.
Tropical Escape
From a cramped motel room, I launch myself into bright seaside air. In shorts, tee-shirt and sandals, I am Summer Man, Shoreline Man. The person you thought you knew – the guy in the coffee-house, all sweatered-up for the winter, head face down in a book, is no more. At least, he’s been set aside, placed in mothballs, while his inner moth is drawn to the broad, shameless light. I cross the busy coast road, take the wooden bridge over sea-grass dunes, step onto sand that gives way as much as it supports, half-run that giddy way I did as a child with knees bent, arms flapping, as the waves and I meet half-way up the beach, and bare toes turn magically into foam. This poem is being written by the one you thought you knew – coffee house guy, head face down in a notebook while his pen and memory scribble lines. It is all about primal pleasure. Yet only Winter Man can describe it.
