ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE, SPRING
© Barbara Crooker


There is no color anywhere,
in the fields, in the woods,
only the monotony
of buff and brown,
fawn and dun,
smoke, slate, steel,
and now, coming into March,
the coldest nights of the year.
But each day, we climb
a few more inches
up the ladder of light,
and grackles and redwings
return, bringing postcards
of tropical sun.
The eye of the pond widens,
and geese scribble messages
across the grey sky:
"Hold on.  Hold on.
It's coming." 

Buckle &



© Barbara Crooker:
FINCHES, LITTLE PATS OF BUTTER ON THE WING,


hang upside down at the thistle feeder
full of shiny black seeds, not from those spiny-
thorned purple tufts we see in fields, but from nyger
plants, recently respelled to avoid racial slurs.
O praise political correctness!  Once in a while,
they get it right.
 
And now, everything bursts into bloom,
the great bouquets of trees, our largest
perennials:  double ruffled cherries, purple-
leafed plum, flowering pear.  It’s May, when
everything you planted flourishes, nothing leggy,
overgrown, or gone to seed.  Once in a while,
you get it right.  The lawn flows, a river
of green silk.  How did all this loveliness
spring from the dark?
 
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette



HOW MANY TREES HAVE DIED FOR THIS POEM?
© Barbara Crooker


Someone on my poetry list says publishing a poem 
is like dropping rose petals in the Grand Canyon.
How different, then, I ask, is writing one?
My autistic son plays a game where he writes the alphabet
in the sand, letter by letter, then lets the waves’ eraser
wipe it clean, starts over.  It’s all sea wrack and fish foam,
tide strew and shell scrawl anyway—  Does the world want
another poem?  Maybe the best place to write is on the blue
slate of the sky, where the words can linger until a front comes by
with its squall-line of clouds.  Maybe the ideal audience 
is grass and leaves, all that green knowledge.  Or the hot buzz
of cicadas, the crickets’ loud applause.  The wind riffles its pages,
the moon shuts off its flashlight under the covers of night,
and we all go to bed in the dark.

Ship of Fools



THE HOUR OF PEONIES
© Barbara Crooker


The Buddha says, “Breathing in, I know I am here in my body. 
Breathing out, I smile to my body,” and here I am, mid-span,
a full-figured woman who could have posed for Renoir.  
When I die, I want you to plant peonies for me, so each May,
my body will resurrect itself in these opulent blooms, one of les Baigneuses, 
sunlight stippling their luminous breasts, rosy nipples, full bellies,
an amplitude of flesh, luxe, calme et volupté.  And so are these flowers, 
an exuberance of cream, pink, raspberry, not a shrinking violet among them.
They splurge, they don’t hold back, they spend it all.
When Renoir was painting at the end, he was confined to a wheelchair
with paintbrushes strapped to his arthritic hands.  Still he said, “the limpidity of the flesh, one wants to caress it.”  
Even after the petals have fallen, the lawn is full of snow,
the last act in Swan Lake where the corps de ballet, in their feathered tutus, 
kneel and kiss  the ground, cover it in light.

Poetry International

VANISHED LAKE
© Ward Kelley


The lake I had loved since childhood is gone.
Down on the pier this morning, I saw it was
vanished, the lakebed a hole in my heart like
the stark foundation of a home uprooted by

a tornado. How a lake can drain away, I have no
idea, but I see the remains of lakes are sinister,
the water hiding objects I would rather not have
ever see the daylight. The swing set of my youth:

upside down, rusted, legs akimbo, violated; Pop's
Studebaker and that old washer machine with wooden
rollers on top to wring out twisted clothing . . . all is
exposed, all that was once forgotten. This lake

I loved, whose sun-rippling waters lifted me with no
effort over a darker realm, is gone. I walk off the pier
away from the grave of abandoned objects, wondering 
if what we love always hides what we choose to forget.



DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER LOVE
© Ward Kelley


Poetry is the most perverse
of beautiful women. She loves
you completely, but only in
the way she wants to love you.

Your own goals and desires 
in this love are meaningless even
though she will be coy and make
you believe she will reward 
you with what you want most.

But she loves you only in the way she wants.

When at last you despair and realize
you will never fulfill
your own desires in this love,
only then will she bestow on you
something you didn't know
was valuable then show
you how to desire it.

In the end you love her completely,
but it is different than any other love.



HAMMERS
© Ward Kelley


If all our desires were some form of hammers:
mallets, sledges, clawed or ball-pinged, and the way
to attain what we wanted required us to hammer

against a great wall in order to break through
to our waiting lusts, there on the other side where
we can hear them, but not see who or what awaits . . .

if all our desires were hammers, I sometimes imagine
us all -- all six billion of us -- lined up and assaulting
a great wall, with only a handful ever able to hammer

their way through to where they no longer feel the need
to hammer or desire any longer. The rest of us are
compelled to continue, perhaps exchanging hammers,

but continuing until someone else hammers the lid down on us.
We make a racket. And only a few saints have figured out
a way to drop all desires, then place their hammers nicely away.




WRAP MY BODY WITH HOPE
© Ward Kelley


Down at the bottom, here, there
is a certain peace, the quiet of
desolation.

Not despair, not a forlorn lack
of hope, but the desolation of
a knowledge

that nothing to which we cling
in life really matters. The dead
wrap my

body with hope, a liniment
meant to exercise the soul's
heart.



PENNY TIMBER
© Ward Kelley


I'm thinking of a certain silence, as though you are in a foreign 
Museum of Art, on the top floor, and you walk into the gallery 
at the far end of the wing . . . there, the pictures look back at you.

All these thoughts from the past, some with eyes, want to
explain to you that we are not expected to have all the answers;
this expectation is only a chore we assign ourselves. No . . .

instead, here in the silent gallery of your mind, you might come
across the idea we are expected to create pictures or visions of
how it is we are to traverse this wilderness in which we find

ourselves. It is a proper silence that will convey this message,
a silence residing deep within your soul, deep within your mind,
and there the penny timber of a certain idea sounds as a horn.




IN PRAISE OF WOMEN
© Ward Kelley


I took a woman into an empty room, then waited
to see what she would do. Women, I knew, cannot
countenance a void, for most of their conduct concerns

being filled or creating forms or words to occupy space.
Such a theory is easy to prove: take a man to an empty
room and he will raise his eyebrows at you while he waits

for you to do something. In contrast, the first thing a woman
will do is produce words to question your motives, or simply
ask what you think you're doing. Void is an affront to her.