RipRap

Japonnaiserie (v.v.g)

The black silhouette of the apple tree
against the street lights on Church street
is the flowering plum.

Muse III

Gently, probing with her tongue, the places where his eyes had been,
she replaced them with bronze Hazels.
The world and each thing now burns in beauty. 

Muse II

She found him lost by the Hazel tree where the three rivers sprang
into the world. In one blow with her staff he fell and was imprisoned with Birch branches. She took his eyes in her mouth.

Muse

For instance, if she hadn't come to him in a dream

he wouldn't have known her at all. But she approached

with mint on her lips and he never let her go.

Horse bits

In Henrietta NY, Ms. S. Banker asked for permission to pet the Sheriff''s horse before she fell under it and was killed. She may have been drunk.

Novels In Three Lines

Luc Sante has selected the best of anarchist and art critic Felix Feneon's vignettes ... think I will try this type of brevity for a while.
As an exercise to hone my language a bit.

keys

The syncopation of the unseasonable January rain
taps the window, runs the drain, in rhythm with
Brad Mehldau's fingered keys.

Shudder

The wind danced the reed tips in the run-off ditch.

The thin wisp of Silver Birch bark

shuddered against January.

Never Lonely

Sitting out for a coffee at the edge of the canal, the sun flutters over my yellow shirt as the sumac jitterbugs in the breeze. It's more like late spring than mid-summer. The day is clear and bright, the temperature is a cool 73 degrees.

My coffee is a frozen blend of espresso, ice, milk, and a coconut syrup called Jamaican-Me-Cool.  I am pretty much alone as far as humans are concerned. A woman with two kids sits out down the way at the ice cream shop. The kids are tossing ice-cream-cone bits into the canal to feed the carp and the ducks.

    Long thin whisps
    creep over the chair edge
    Daddy-Longlegs

Later at home, I sit out back with a book and a beer. The whole world leaves me alone as the breeze swooshes the tree-tops. Blue sky, puff-pocked by clouds and deep green of the towering Black Walnut trees. I am lost in the ecstasy and the  secrecy  of the long back yards that surround me.  A pair of  squirrels spiral down a cherry tree and race across the open grass to the giant walnut and scamper up. As the breeze shifts direction a bit, I  sense friendly touch in the nostrils. Gentle and loving as an old friend the scent of the lilacs wraps around me.

From all accounts I am alone. But never lonely.

Tree Gig

We are all subject to providence. Where we fall, where we land, which way the wind blows us, or the tide. A boy meets a girl in a coffee house in the summer of eighty and life is bliss. They miss? It all goes to hell, a shed load.

A stick
In a Scottish crag
It seems an eon
An acorn is a living twig
A sprig of green in landscape gray
This day, botched gig
For a seed at bay
But in a field soaked
Karmic whorl delivers oak