poems

If I wrote a letter

If I composed a letter tonight,
  What would I write?
  To whom would I write?
Who is someone, at some distant site—some far forever away—
  a suitable heir, who by the tail would catch someday
what, entailed in the entailment I have to commit
  to the fickle support of a frail branch
  on a tree without roots, like a wing all aflit,
is written while only quiet dogs are awake,
  under only a quiet mottled glowing light?
Could there be someone whom I can hope, for some sake,
  to be conscious and walking later this morning,
  who, I can pray, could make my words something more than mistake?
I can pray that there might.

Dream Image (1)

I woke up from a harder bed,
before the world started stirring,
before the argent rays of sunlight
gently pulled the curtains fully up.
Dimmed-out lamps and lanterns lined
unlit, in alcoves left and right,
up on posts, or overhead,
while fountains still in morning calm
washed the stone with watered white.
Radiant gray concrete lay beneath
my standing feet upon the blocks
beside the empty tarmac paths
beside the tranquil, shining baths.

I heard a jet plane's roaring engines,
filling up the morning air;
looking heavenward to search
the deep and unconfused blue sky
and place the sound, I saw a bird,
perched upon a brown brick wall.

Dream Image (2)

I
found thee in a foundry, dark and set for allegory,
filled with hammers, forges, catwalks, carts, and slag, piled storey after storey,
found the ever-looping dart-ridden circuit, where we—
where we were not meant to wander in,
where I found thee, and friends and kin,
fighting and fleeing some forces
for something that I can't remember,
and at the shutting down at the end of the time,
I was sitting on a rail with somebody pale and strawberry blonde,
the color of which was a match with the sky
as the sun imperceptibly dawned.
Pieces of everyone reformed and we greeted
each other and I recognized your name and didn't want to let you go but
the world is over.

Warmer waters

The plankton do not waste much effort in
a search around to find where they should go;
they just go, and wash out with the tide, and
then I sometimes long to join them, I in
 vigil in this verdant, bright lagoon.

 The stars above will still provide the plankton
 with direction, whether they should look
 above or not, or bother to consider
 any other factors floating with them
 in those cloudy blooms that stir and shake
when all the suns and moons and stars give rise,
through streaming light just shining through the waters,
to shifts and changes in the flows and systems
swirling in the deeps and in the shallows.

Is it foolish, then, to watch the stars?
And even more, could I be wasting precious time,
watching swirling flows and watching plankton
 washing in and out below the sun and moon?

The last time, we were so blushing

Do you remember the last time my feelings were so obvious?
That time it was both of us who,
in our reluctance to part our way,
made it plain how we felt,
plainer than here my words could say.
But here and now, or minutes ago, I believe it may
have been just me who wanted to stay.
We were so blushing and foolish then;
I feel so naked again today.

From a peak

I am like Moses,
who wandered in a foreign, wasted land—not forever,
but, sometimes in this blowing sand,
it seems so much another gust just blows atop another gust,
and all to ever touch the face
is frictive grit and smells of dust,
and never comes a change in light to tell the days are passing by,

until you find yourself atop the mountain and the view on high
just takes the breath and stays
             the heart
for one heavy second while the heart tries to find its
beat and both lungs heave to find the step they've lost
to the sparkling air that blew across the river
from the holy shore which, from the mountain,
seems so much another field on the same wide grounds,

and you know that it’s for someone else.

What, really, can I say?
You ask me why I look away?
Because I am like Moses,
and I cannot bear to look here anymore.

Faces pass

Faces pass, are passing by, with
features I don’t recognize as
well as I would with better-focused eyes.

What is a face but an arrangement of parts,
in a medium that seems not still to stir my heart?
Faces become nothing more to me now.

A smile there is all I see,
there a jaw or cheekbone or a wrinkled nose,
and other sundry pieces of debris.

What is a face but an arrangement of parts,
and other sundry pieces of debris,
features I don’t recognize as
people?

Faces pass, are passing by, with
there a jaw or cheekbone or a wrinkled nose.
Faces become nothing more to me now.

People?

On the beach

The older sun in evening doesn't glow for long.
What briefest moments that we might have had to warm ourselves,
awash in the beauteous dull orange glow,
or to chance to hear a solar wind if it should blow
by Earth and penetrate the atmosphere
and sing a breathy song befitting to a greater sphere—
if they were ever more than a light
and instant brush against another, stranger
phenomenon—
can only be remembered now, since now they all have gone.
Perhaps the sun is glowing elsewhere, much more bright,
at least now, if it hasn't always;
there are distant flashes reflected in the sea.
But, as the gloaming darkens, we can consider:
much as nature moves the bodies in ellipses on their planes,
it's natural that we should be
in darkness.

As the clockworker’s precision increases

Sixty point zero zero, on and on, reads this, while every other face
  reads fifty-nine point ninety-ninety-nine…
Such small differences… Whence? Beyond the limit of what I can trace.
  And yet, it's plain to see the gaps
    when decades pass and times elapse,
    and diligent machinery is drifting to decline.
While they and I tick on, the towers fall,
  or verdigris blooms on them, seen by all.
I go from noble house to noble house,
  and walk beneath a dusty sun and moon of lime.
There is still a need for someone
  who is capable of calibrating some device,
  even though, as the most aristocratic know,
    as our calibration grows more fine,
    we approach the limits of our artifice.
I am content to pass the time.

It’s hard to keep my eyes on you

I think it's time to disappear
maybe, for a little while.
The winds are blowing stronger air,
like the winds that blew a year
ago or so, a stormy day
in spring to complement the fair
  days in between.
The white light in the darkened gray
above was beckoning somehow,
shining luminance and ala-
baster, argent, veins of pink
  and silver, streaks of sheen.
It's hard to keep my eyes on you;
the trees are waving in the wind.
All the leaves and fronds and blades
are whipping like my hair, the green
and brown and flowers flying, mixing
in the air and flowing on the
concrete slabs, filling every
  gutter, every trough.
With the stormy weather I blew
in, a day like this, so it
is only fitting that a day
like this should see me blow away.
It's also somehow fitting you,
of all the people here, should be
  the one to see me off.
If a little while never
culminates in my return—
and really it most likely never
will—
     maybe we will see
  each other in another storm,
somewhere else, away from here,
  on another stormy day.

© 2007 Homer Smith. Thank you for reading! Have a wonderful day.