Continue reading Station Hill at The Hyacinth Review.

We reach for the same poetry book
by a young hotshot poet
with an old man’s eye for sorrow.
I hand you the thin volume
as if I had attempted a theft
and recoiled with remorse.
It is your ninetieth summer
you tell me, and I am as tall as your husband was
who you describe with soft resignation:
a solemn, untidy, unruly man
who died climbing a mountain
of wine and whiskey bottles
during your sixty-eighth summer.

Continue reading It Is Your Ninetieth Summer, You Tell Me at The Hyacinth Review.

I

Who else’s praises could, like Grecian ink,
Drip precious on the page in metered form?
Whose lofty dreams of indolence fail to sink
Beneath the bleak insomnia of the morn?
Thou, poet, trappest not the heart in verse,
Nor leavest thou the reader in thy wake;
Emotions freest thou in rhymèd hordes,
And quenchest readers’ five-fold sensory thirst
With imagery of clouds upon daybreak,
And tapestries of woven metaphors.

Continue reading Ode on Keats’s “Ode on Indolence” at The Hyacinth Review.

Nothing I’ve done seems to matter…I wanted to do more
in this life, not the elusive prizes, but poems that astonish.
— Barbara Crooker, from “Melancholia”
 
 
Who else would have celebrated oxygen cascading
down our throats when speaking about the glories

of breath, or called on God of the ginkgo trees and God
of the red oaks to send her a heart of gratitude

for her birthday?

Continue reading Cento for the Poet at The Hyacinth Review.

Obviously the shelves are never reasonable.
Just yesterday our guests knocked an overhanging pile
to the floor. The books are regularly conspiring
they want to make everything more precarious,
desperate for attention. Schemers,
they make your heart thump to remind you
readers are thrill seekers despite what everyone else
might warn about the importance of being outside.

Books are tricky they spill bindings in your lap
like gossip, then pretend they’re inanimate.

Continue reading All The Unread Books at The Hyacinth Review.

Continue reading Book Burial at The Hyacinth Review.

This is not my home, you say.
You were in a living room
With thirteen other women,
your words nearly gone.
She was an English professor,
I tell the staff. She loved books.
Sometimes I read to you
and it calms you, even though
I don’t know if you can understand.
But they’re silly dog picture books.
not Doris Lessing, or Robin Morgan
or Audre Lorde.

Continue reading She Was an English Professor at The Hyacinth Review.

 In the desert there’s no sign
that says Thou shalt not eat stones,  
though behind every great fortune there’s crime

as Offred can confirm from the front line
in Margaret Atwood’s scarlet tomes.
In the desert there’s no sign

says To Kill a Mocking Bird is fine;
Scout comes from a lawyer’s home,
knows behind every great fortune there’s a crime.

The Sun Also Rises with so much wine
that lost generations hold their heads and groan,
ask where in the desert is the sign

with epitaphs by Gertrude Stein,
Balzac, Lamb and Sufi quotes?

Continue reading If they give you ruled paper, write the other way at The Hyacinth Review.

Charing Cross Road
booksellers woven
amid theatres
cramped sagging shelves
an out of print
Christine Evans,
slim, collected works
of those
long forgotten
never noticed
a damp chill
enfolds old leather
as the door opens
and shuts on
a late February.
Morning, my purchases
sink in the plastic bag
dancing as I walk
to the tube
at Leiscester Square
with my new gems
destined to cause
a sag
in my bookcase.

Continue reading English Bookshop at The Hyacinth Review.

still stuffed with unspilled images would
“. . . stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

Think? I tell him. Not much compensation
for dying young.

Romantic imagination, he says. Soul-making.
Acrobatic tricks of mind on earthly apparati.

You don’t quite stick the landing, I say, unimpressed.
I’d hoped for something more emphatic after all those clauses—
epiphany, apotheosis, or even bitterness would do.

Continue reading Poor Keats, When Worried He’d Die at The Hyacinth Review.