COMING HOME
The cat has spit up its fur ball
and gone to the fair,
where the wheel is turning
and the Kewpie dolls stare.
Magnolias are in bloom.
But the sky is blackening,
blades of the windmill racing
toward the rain, and the owl’s
ruffled in its tawny coat.
It has arrived. It’s that time,
when the cows come home.
- William Page
(featured in the poetry forum 11.21.11)
editor's note: That dark Autumn sky is looming; gotta hurry while the barn door swings. Come on, Bossie! - mh
THE UNWINDING
Hedgehogs have changed little
over the last 15 million years.
We could drink to that.
A balloon can rise
at the rate of 1,000 meters
every ten minutes if filled
with sufficient hydrogen.
That must be accurate,
considering sufficiency
is as open as air, being
nothing specific such as
the sidewinder is native
to no Northern habitat.
Some facts are wild boars found
in pine forests, others akin
to plumage of a partridge brought
down by pellets and carried
between the teeth of a spaniel
to the hunter at the edge of daylight.
- William Page
(featured in the poetry forum 08.02.11)
APPLIQUÉ
Using the spa’s machines
she firms her thighs,
feels inside a gentle brushing
of butterflies’ wings.
She hums like bees
to sweeten the honey
cones of her breasts,
speaks in a lisp
of the vulva’s lips,
sighs to feel
the masseur’s yearning,
smells the wax
on his curved mustache.
She steps into the sauna
in a monogrammed towel.
In a shower’s slow soaping
her warm fingers
touch the song of her body
as she sings
for the tenuous cleanliness of life.
- William Page
(featured in the poetry forum 05.16.11)
ALBATROSS
In some lands pregnant women work stooping
in potato or beet fields until labor has been fulfilled.
Their children grow fast and have skin
dark as dead leaves of the trees
that grow in lower elevations.
We know ourselves by nets we cast
into the sea and the catch
we bring in, or so think fishermen.
The moon controls the tide
of every ocean, but seas would have different
names for weight if water could know itself,
as a crystal of salt knows it is
not sulfur or ash of a burned linden tree.
Socrates was unaware women had the same
number of teeth as men, so how
much did he know of feminine hygiene?
It is good to know one’s limit,
to chew asparagus well before swallowing.
Looking under sea shells
for living creatures is often pointless
as a dull spear to a caveman.
There are temples and libraries full of
theories and fantasies
one could use to measure the hypotenuse
of errors in calculating a season’s birth
and demise. Accuracy may
be a wet or a dry question to the whale and sidewinder.
Ask the tar paper under a painted wall
how it learned of civility and coloring crayons.
Bring the lemurs back from the cradle,
and firebrand the isthmus of the moon’s last quadrant.
- William Page
(featured in the poetry forum 04.25.11) |
