Short Poems

Goes on hands and knees
under sun through sweet corn snow
portaging his skis.

Small birds exit skies
Much the way smoke, or Kleenex
Up a shop-vac flies.

*

Believing each and every color
of the sky should get a name

MR. PARKER. ...If we accept the principle of acceptable risk in radiation exposure, and there is no alternative today, instead of black and white, we have only infinite gradation of gray from perhaps a black relating to significant over-exposure, grading down but never reaching white. It is beyond our wits to quantify such a scale. Yet the attempt has to be made at least to define bands of gray.

One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. " My friends, I want her to be queen! " " I want to be queen! " She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.
In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.

Multiplying in a column M by F
do we get one or two as a result?
May the body stay glued to the soul,
may the soul fear the body.
Do I ask too much? I only wish
the crucible of tenderness would melt
memories, and I would sleep, my cheek
pressed against your back, as on a motorbike ...

Sand Wars was first
published in Flanders,
but as Van Bellingen
pointed out, " eggnog. "

It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.

This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.

Am I lovely? Of course!
Breathlessly I taste
the subtle compliment
of a handmade caress.
Chop me into tiny bits,
caress and tame my soul,
that godly swallow
you love to no end.