POET ALL STARS

The odds are overwhelming

Every time we play the game
we find ourselves on a level field
with the all time all world all star team

Homer, Whitman, Rumi and Omar Khayam
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, or whoever
wrote his stuff

It’s like always batting against Nolan Ryan on
his best day
Like trying to strike out Mickey Mantle, Ted
Williams, Babe Ruth without a hangover
and Reggie Jackson in October

Great poets never tire or retire, they just die
and still play with their best stuff

Soccer players today don’t have to play Pele
every day
But with translations and free agents
we write up against Neruda, Viello and Paz

Or heads up against Leo Tolstoy and Anna
Ackmanova
with an East German judge

But we play

BEMUSED

It is never wise to be
at all ungrateful to your muse

Through the times they pick to bring their gift
are ones few of us would choose

But they do live on a mountain in Greece
while we’re scribbling in Texas at two a.m.

So they’re bright and alert and off to work
because it’s nine in the morning to them

TREE PLANTER POET

The tree planter writes a book

She is a knife
sharp as mountain morning
blade steel blue as northern lake

she swings with youthful abandon
cuts through light, shadow, and flesh

We stand white bone to white bone
and bleed into the earth and sky

Ten years later she writes another

Knife cuts dull meat and metaphor
catching only small reflections of light
through comfort of kitchen window

The reader and the blade
yearning for the grindstone
and the trail of sparks