Saturday, June 30, 2012


INVENTORY OF UNUSED HAIKU AND TANKA LINES

Five-syllable lines:
Gulls on the buoy
Rain, wine-sweet evening
Halcyon day trips
Scent of linseed oil
Named rocks on the shore
Pantomime of joy.
These have seven syllables:
Ocean, lead-gray, almost flat
Concrete marked to look like brick
At two hundred bucks a night,
You’d think the plumbing would work
Canadian strawberries
Irremediable loss
Without further evidence,
He assumes they are in love.
More five-syllable:
White glow on the pond
Nineteen-fifty Ford
Refrigerator
Fading August light
A long way from Maine.
But then three:
Memory
Abandoned
Childhood dream
Their tree house.


AT THE POETRY WORKSHOP

Outside, the bay is that August blue
Of sailboat masts,
White spires beyond the shore.
The workshop leaders want us to
Write with other people’s words,
Describe something that shows
What we believe.
In this long day
We are quickened, finally sated
With new ideas, images,
The insights of strangers and friends.
A canoe, I write, hovers near the dock.
He quickly sees they are not callers
But fishermen run aground,
A casting plug caught in a small maple,
Snarl of line, leaf and hook.
Mild inconvenience yields
This fine New Hampshire morning
To something else...
I do not go on.
People have begun telling
How faith pulled them through surgery.
I cannot use borrowed words
Or say what I believe.