| Issue 3:1 | Poetry | Thorpe Moeckel |
6 Poems
by
Thorpe Moeckel
At Sandy Ford
Might as
well go swimming as try to sing another river song,
might as
well roll up my jeans
as say the
mist resembles cloud wax
or steam
from the land’s boiling kettle.
I’ll do
that later. Listen
to these
ledges –
not that
they’re even or uniform or even
ledges so
much as humps & bumps, miniatures of tolerance
after a
night on the town – listen to their milky harmonics,
as if a
guitar strung with snakes;
and to the
muscadines on the trail,
their thick
skin & stench, and the way that yellow pine hangs
over the
point
on the
inside of the bend, hemlock beyond it & mist
and the
outside of another bend, so many S’s –
the needles
it puts in your neck,
the dead
limbs, the frill.
Listen.
There’s time
for a few
good words and even some bad ones
before
another swim.
Easter Note From The
Richardson’s Stoop
Sky
thongish with the exhaust of passing jets,
mockingbird in the plum tree, leaves
the color
of pulp nearest pit --
blessed the
bear hugs of summer, the ripe breath
coming soon. Blessed the vineyard’s
crooked grin
on the horizon, black snake
by the
spring house, the migrations & scarred palms –
grace’s spitball, resentment’s
sweat. I’ve never been
across the ocean,
but I bet
the air was soft, sort of clammy & low gloss
when Mary found the stone moved
aside, and that guy
she mistook for the gardener,
were his
legs crossed, did he have a guilty look,
what was in his head – sawdust,
aloes, a donkey
with lemons in its pupils
playing the
bones? Less, I think. Less than blood,
than bud & flower. Sitting here,
the farthest thing
is the furthest thing,
and getting
farther in a close kind of way – barking dogs,
dripsounds on a tin roof,
honeysuckle steering the Studebaker
into the ground.
Flush
Pebbles
& sand,
little
loaves, pizza stones,
crust.
Isoclinal
recumbent folds.
Ah,
science.
Redeyes
darting
into darker
holes,
everything
elephantine, fleshy,
cochleal.
Mist
like the
river’s double, the hemlocks’
various
shades
of shade.
Mud between
the toes.
What gospel
in the
laurel siding,
in the red
leaves
sunk to the
bottom
where the
beginning lives.
Maybe
gradient
is wisdom’s
meow, is
grief’s
worst tenant.
Something.
Seep-slap,
paste of
rain-wet,
fall-soft
leaves. Sticks
on the
bank, sticks on the bank.
To read
water
study a
burl. Tsa-tugi
is God’s
sprinkler,
they say.
Sandpiper, pileated,
husk. Old
log
stuck tip
first. Foam.
Spiderweb
in spicebush.
Fish scales
of mica.
Cinnamon ferns.
Eddy here.
Hear
the wave’s
foliage.
Osprey.
Phlox.
Mint Springs
But who
will break camp here
after
catering exuberance’s wedding;
who will
ride off on the horse
that
remorse unsaddled?
Ignore the
persimmon innard,
the tonic
& turnstile,
the
christmas fern -- elope’s a fine bride
if being
cosmic floats
your tennis
shoe. Besides,
how many
colonies
can one ear
sustain? How many times
can
deficiency & surplus
lock
tongues? It’s a zoo,
or a rip in
it, some etherzone,
things
bedded down
in order to
burst. Hard to say,
harder to
fell
the would
so it rots to will.
Say so. It’s early,
but
blossom-musk has turned before
on its
bellydance,
pierced the
nose. See the graffiti
of
sapsucker, the abdomen
that calls
greenbriar its silk – what about
(“Mint
Springs,” cont’d. – no stanza break)
the
sycamore, positioned
like a missionary
among the heathenous glow. Sure
shrubs wig
out these days,
but has
poplar put the petal to the metal,
has
aftermath cornered
some
projection with a nudge
of the
secondhand? Please,
what
mullein
were we
stalking again?
Mottlings
Bottomland
cool
&
clammy. Wrung. In the rotcoves
of
the rockheap,
trout
lilies like fillets of some calm --
lemon-redolent,
less
symmetry than nod. What opens
slowly,
opens
most.
Even here,
next
to the cold creek,
who
we are seldom encourages us.
Who
& what inhabit us
are
the seldoms
one
tries to praise. Friends,
say
the quiet is loud
with
the borders of truths silence.
Say
we each live out
the
same number of breaths,
only
some of us use them faster whisper it
among
the beech leaves,
among
the first flare ups of the cherry.
Start Here
Hard rain
for two days and already the Davidson
is falling,
high water line a foot above the leaves
that turn
like pages in Autumn’s essay, and more
as a tune
hummed by one unaware of humming
coming
down. What does Pisgah mean? It means
something
else in October. Not better. Just else.
And isn’t
that how it goes, half-burnt palettes near
the fire
ring, fu-Manchu of runoff, church group
at the
trailhead to Looking Glass. A guy who knows
the flowers
as minnows know quiver says a humdinger
is a woman
with breasts so big she can swing one
over her
shoulder and shoot milk up her ass.
He also
says it’s good to wipe yours with
certain
mosses, those with antibacterial agents.
Only one
who knows the flowers by their Latin
could fling
such crap. But maybe God knows
a dirty,
tasteless joke or two, like that ditty
that begins
this guy asked me for help...
Do you know
it? Look, there’s a kingfisher, damn.
