b1gfan

My Other Name Sometimes it is to set out forks           beside each plate,                                       or folding shirts first,                         dryer hot in the A.M.                                half-dark. Less often, thirsty from cutting trees    back away from the roof edge,                                                      gutters clean.                           Today, the dishes of breakfast clean,                                           draining, I             angle each blind against the sun, sit then in the small cool             room,                       feet flat upon the morning          

El Día de los Difuntos I could say the clouds were silent, hushed in close against the skirt of Volcán de Agua. I could say they had passed over the market stones without setting a shadow down among the candied fruits and marigolds gathered there for this day of the dead. Focusing like this – how the sky lingers uninterrupting as sweet squash and cups of chicha spill across the square, announcing the moment – I might see two men there, stripped and beaten by the crowd, listening to the mouth of a gas can sing of errors and heavy promises: never to avoid the rough battles, ever to defend land and home, always to burn,

Clarity Alone, I could have sworn I heard a guy getting lucky about half-way through a recording of Miles Davis      live from somewhere – with John Coltrane on the tenor sax and Art someone on the drums – as it spilt from KLON out of Cal State Long Beach at the witching hour Thursday night (which was, as I recall, Christmas night). This is to say that I swear I heard, without really paying much attention, a man offer in a low but clear voice an evening of his company to a young lady who, perhaps being neither, said “Yes” not over-quietly before the moment passed and they

Happy Meal Dragons Rearing back on greasy haunches into the palm of a small hand, necks bent in green spasms of rage – they don’t know that everybody’s losing things along the way – mixing spoons and lego cyclists dropped among foxtails where dragonflies sing, bent yellow shovels pushed under summer sand, and Batmobiles upturned in grass growing far from anyone’s back door – with just three good tires and no hero at the wheel, sometimes a chain of Italian gold, a phone number or battle, memories gone to wild fire – and fingers as easily as wings.

Ike is a hell of a name for a storm. Admired hero of the Normandy invasion, wife-battering scourge of Anna Mae Bullock, inducted into the rock-and-roll Hall of Fame while serving prison time for possession and more, Ike is derived from Ikern, meaning laughter, and what I wonder is – what’s so funny about the way you threaten to overrun the land with such force that a man might not know his own hometown, map in hand, if that town happened to be found in your livid temperamental path. The Internet tells me that in Nigeria the name means vehement, invested with power, and that in Hebrew it is a variation of Isaac, meani

I. Stars of jasmine – each unlike her, whatever I may think. II. Unfamiliar birds above a mower's thrum – my ear itching. III. No moon tonight. The freeway whispers – no moon. IV. Midnight: Closing the book is easier now. V. Discovering ants nesting under the carpet. How hard such work is. VI. Now that I have tomatoes, dark spots on the basil. VII. During the rain the tallest bamboo had fallen; quiet. VIII. Inside a spider vibrates – temple bell.

Exodus Pillar of Cloud (to show them the way) Towering colossus of vapor, majestic as you stand in banks not above Canaan’s path but another desert’s floor, immense astride the copper hills of a far and promising land, you are, with your face of distance, changed slightly since dawn in gradient and tone. You have remained steady in larger ways – established in unpolarized glare, by atmosphere alone you yet brace today’s remaining unfoldings against the gates of the waters above. Still, you are changed – enough so that, piqued, I will watch you and wander in the mind you manufacture, but I will not

Three steps forward a bear at the window no not a bear a tree            then four five steps – arms reaching out in front of me feeling for a door I can’t be sure is closed              then a bear at the window

What AmericanPoems.com Says of Billy Collins June 2nd 2008 Billy Collins (born March 22 1941) is an accomplished American poet who served two terms as the eleventh Poet Laureate of the United States. In his home state, he has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and selected as the New York State Poet for 200 4. He was born William Collins in a small William Carlos Williams worked as a Holy Cross College, and earned a romantic poetry at the 1971.

“What Mission, What Plans?” Well I’m not going that way; it’s much too rocky. . . . No more adventures. Strange Old Hermit Obi Wan Kenobi – I wonder if he means “Old Ben” Kenobi? too small Well I guess you’re too small to run away on me if I take this off. But Don’t Worry Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration