May 28th, 2007
July 29th, 2006
June 7th, 2006
- From A Height High Enough
- The Quaker Terrorist
- Long-Awaited Spring
- Framing the Shot
- Domesticity
- Allure
- Warning
April 10th, 2006
What's New
Poems
05.28.07
JAWBONE OF AN ASS
Honey, you want to know
the secret, to subdue me?
Promise you’ll cut my hair,
I promise I’ll tell it truly.
Here’s the razor.
Shave my skull.
Scrape my scalp until I bleed,
then cut on me still more.
Violate me.
Unconsecrate me.
Lest of my own accord,
my head grown bald,
my eyes grown dim,
my strength grown slack,
I will at last grow old
in the service of the Lord.
I’m begging you, Delilah,
please, please,
cut my hair.
SEASONED
felled, cut in rounds, split,
sunlight of sap-risen days
flares in snow-roofed hearth
VINEYARD STARLINGS
under winter skies
blackbirds call to passing cars
loud fruit on grey vines
NEWS ITEM
red glow under oak –
do Beats hold Sputnik’s remains?
stranger haps have thinged
07.26.06
Poem:
the sky is falling
the sky is always falling
(and catching itself from falling)
for the world still turns
Another poem:
thorn gold,
bloom white,
fruit green,
red, black —
swells plump,
plucks free,
bursts sweet —
dark wine
among briar
06.07.06
From A Height High Enough
cities seen from space
embers by night, ash by day
fortune’s wheel of fire
The Quaker Terrorist
though bent space is the sun’s shadow,
out of space too bent no light can go –
from the dark, then, I call out in hopes
noises in a dream can wake the sleepers
Long-Awaited Spring
bird feeder’s empty
firewood is all burned up
springtime – just in time
Framing the Shot
scaled brown trunk of tall straight pine
leads the eye upward
toward green-needled profusion
past a white quarter moon
three-quarters up the tufted pole
west of it
in a westering sky
above tree and moon two black buzzards
circle high and east in dying blue sunlight
my bark-beetle eyes try to tunnel
deeper, toward the heartwood
a flush of clotting sweetness
pushes me back to the surface of things –
world and tree defending their mysteries
the only way they know
Domesticity
dog yelps at yanked chain
rubs mistress’s nylon flank
married man at home
Allure
half moon plies twilight heavens
slow bright stately bat
catching moth poets
Warning
Make no path by sun
Not to be traveled by moon
Nor in soul’s eclipse
04.10.06
POEM: Fragments of a Stained-Glass Meteorite
Day by stages dies into night.
Our minds make constellations in the stars,
The stars make constellations in our minds.
Threads dropped from the tall tapestry of steadier stars
turn lit fuses in falling,
each a lambent lotus-petaled spear
from a diamond bud –
blooming, flying, burning, dying.
From fragments of stained glass meteorites –
olivines and pyroxenes,
in photomicrographs all reds and greens –
let us build a telescope
to spy that mountain falling across heaven,
flashing self-consuming at the touch of air,
until in its rush we hear the children
of a generation beyond generation
singing to their parents
as birds do, to dinosaurs.
Spears of God
Howard's latest book—Spears of God—is in stores and online. Check it out today.