Simply Poems, a reading (with breeze)

Metaphors (with Tania P)

Perhaps when my daughter orders me to stop using metaphors (You're not off the hook. Don't ride me. Give up the goat) she secretly likes it. I can't stop anyway, these birds of paradise tight green canoes holding decks of tufted cards in their rims fanning melon to cobalt to absurd summer popsicle pink. Or this set of chestnut black hinged halves of fallen palm trunk against the fence; wooden fins for a mahogany boy just now reaching for her hand before I can intercede.

And maybe while sitting deep and idle as a cat I feel at my fingertips a little eternity, smell in my breath clouds of steam rising from a warm cup - hear voices and listen so intently that my body, nothing more than a chiffon shawl tossed over the back of a chair, rises up to inhabit a face that emerges from the fragrant flesh of a sweet apple that has fallen into a pasture mirroring a still twilight sky brimming with a tightening circle of stars that solicit my seeing if only for the fact that the beauty of the evening is as wild as the roses are. 

All This is That (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a taxi driver and in your hurry to find one final fare you ignore your instinct to slow down and instead accelerate. In your rush you accidentally hit a shadowy figure who, looking in the wrong direction, steps in your way. The man is carrying a mirror and at the moment you hit him you see reflected back to you a clear image of your mother’s face on the day she saw your father alive for the very last time.

Maybe long ago, somewhere in her past, the sleeping mother hadn't noticed the few strands that had strayed from her careful part, nor had she felt the blue, kaleidoscope of Xerces that had escaped her slumber to gently pull the lock to one side before returning to the dream, as easily as one enters a mirror, as simple as the moon accepting light from the sun. 

Lost and Found

Perhaps it is good to stand beneath a thing that means to take words away. You may be shocked to find out that there are such things. That’s because the closer you get to them, the further away they really are. 

Maybe once you get close enough to escape within a melancholy charm, you begin to feel comfortable, and hang there free against its sides. But then, just as your breath catches up, you suddenly feel uprooted. It is as if it was there, just a moment ago, but now it is gone. 

The Guest, a reading (with hawk)