What do you mean
by knife, by wind?
The bluest sky below the wash
of sunset pink, delectable
as a slice of blue fruit riding
the horizon’s blade.
Half a moon over the barn.
The field of goldenrod fuzz
gathering its sparrows, brown
into brown, poor Sam Peabody
as lamentable as ever:
a song that catches in the middle
like a shirt on a thorn.
The wind dying,
& the color in the trees
darkening like dried blood.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
I like this one very much.
great, great images. the song like the shirt snagged on a thorn and the ending: “the trees/ darkening like dried blood.” wow.
Full of good things. And interestingly, as relevant here in Wales as at Plummer’s Hollow. This poem reeks of the year going down into Winter.
oh i like this a lot. the season is fierce and gentle both and its colours glow and you’ve shown me all that…
Dave this is breath-taking – been reading it 5 times and every time another line catches my attention before it melts into a smooth and honest october feeling..wow!
Like they all said, Dave! If it’s a first draft, don’t touch it.
Thanks, all! Not only a first draft, but a dashed-off one at that. I guess sometimes the Zen saying “first thought, best thought” is true.