Carl Sharpe
The Sister Tree ☊you pulled me most of the way home
by the ear when I would not stay in line you were a safety patrol leader and had an arm band like the nazis wore and once you shut my fingers in the door when I would not let you close it but you played beethoven on the piano and you were beautiful and had more friends than I ever did and somewhere in the middle of your five children came coffees when we told each other secrets like children and laughed about sibling things when you died, we planted a tree in the yard and we watched it grow years without you and this winter the new owner trimmed it with strings of white christmas lights and as I drove by in the bark black night I tugged on my ear and wept grief, like children ☊sorrows tap-tap on the window glass
when shadows cool the autumn dusk I have closed the night. you may not come in so it is with them--persistent and gentle and used to getting their way, like a child with sad face who taps on your knee. read, look away, tell him later, later, but the rhythm and the chant say--now and you off to bed them in the darkened room and they do not sleep, and you do not sleep, for you have succumbed, let memory in and you do not sleep, and cannot sleep again why write a poem
I feel heavy when I don't light when I do
the first time I tried to write my name four letters almost right honey like that and I got it right in time not cral carl but carl carl hard as making a poem a heavy burden but short and light to carry |
Deception
They break our hearts
These dawn-crested mornings, Like the beach edge starfish And the bleached gulls With their long, cawing cries That sound a long lament. And each day's break Comes to evening blue, night, And the dog snapping sea. Embrace
I am disrobed and disarmed in your hold.
Like bare-chested fishermen in a turmoil of terns, I stand windblown and rocked, adrift, And buoyant in the passion of the sun. calliope, a.w.o.l.
there's a hole in my belly
where the need is need to write a poem the muse is a woman for sure la belle dame sans merci promises with a word or phrase like a phone prank or empty knock she does not visit instead she teases with a tap-and-run and never stays anymore that was her just now huh Juliana at Ten, Seaside
She sails rock to rock on the unsteady wall,
Barefoot and sure-winged like a butterfly. Her dark, careless hair wind-trails her In the crimson light of the evening sun. She rides unbound an infinite air Between the earth's open hearth And the yawning sea, each whispering Its siren claim on her as its own. |