Abandoned Train Station Near Grandmother's Grave
.
for Lida Harris
Then died there the rose beside the house of tin.
The track bore no train for years.
Weeds traveled tendriled and
yellow rooted between trestles.
Broken vessels whistled through
shattered teeth of glass.
Only wind and no rusted train passed.
Though the scene bears dislocation,
though the brain remembers station and motion
of steam engine and iron wheel rotation
the places of old gone passing
bear no malice toward stillness.
All around mute remains remind the
occasional passer of former days;
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Cleaning Fish On Good Friday,1963
.
Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate
flesh.
Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.
Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Glenn Gould In Heaven Does Lament
Here the chipped ivory is only cloud.
The Instrument, too very old, is Archetype.
Strings of gold do not a music make.
A lyre presses sterilely into where once
was crotch.
Crotchless, music is useless here.
So am I. No one listens.
The only passion is the Christ's
and that's all passed.
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
How It Was I Came To Be What I Am
[from early poems,1970's, youthful attempts at voice]
For 'Spider' Bottas
They would argue over tides
Who bade me come into the world.
One said, Six o'clock.
The other, No, twelve.
I was born at the thirteenth hour
All the while mother arguing,
This is not the time but a little spell,
While father argued it was death,
You are dying and your child, too,
Is dying. You have been poisoned.
It was full moon and high tide,
The hour of birth.
All arguments yielded to the tide's.
The moon lit up the stadium
Of their gripes while I was
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
What Is Revealed, Variation
side by side
silent reading
occasional
'hear this then'
something read aloud
becomes bread
heads nod agreement
smiles and meals beneath
the witnessed reel of
glancing stars
gather their
stones at dusk
fill their pockets own
climbing World Tree at
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Surrealistic Sutures For The Acetylene Virgin
'I think that poetry should stay
awake all night drinking in dark cellars.' - Thomas Merton
Look to the body for metaphor -
Look to blood, use this word
in relation to dreams or flowers
while silver runs in veins which
are usually streets or vines.
Breasts, male and female,
are stars, have to do with
a handful or feet to span them.
Abdomen, then, is a great
Milky Way gathering,
holding, expelling comets,
caroling colons' humming.
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Nyro Poems - Majestic, Reprise
Recall floods,
florid days/nights.
Planet 'UnRequitia'
spins not,
only mulls over,
over again,
again relentless
descanting,
'red rover
red rover,
just send...'
Still, now,
remembering
feels right,
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Perservering of Palms
for Karthik, once again,
'The light foot hears you
and the brightness begins...' - Pindar
that salt adheres to the palm
proclaiming only this
that purchase requires both
sweat and the one hidden pearl
of scraped touch
much there is in the hand
bequeathed;
beneath the thigh the grit
burns smooth the groove
where you lay
your wonder - that purchase
of kisses, too, with salt,
crystalline, rimed - is hard
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Toward Erasure No Longer Effortful
.
That one day the book shall be written,
Odysseus come smiling through the door.
That I shall live forevermore free of provision,
be delivered presently into good, rich life
and unto the richer world, my Lover so long
turning turning turning in distance away from,
yet to manage a caress, a smooch which
neither dismisses nor fully embraces.
It is I that am and shall be erased into this
Love which shall then in time be erased
as well in the greater Sun and that Shining,
too, shall be erased. Then we shall all be
scattered, or I shall be only, embrace by
embrace, toward erasure no longer effortful.
I sift draft by draft rough toward world
now slowing in spite of parentheses these
provisional postulations of 'the good life'
to come. Eventually. There is only this
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Dusk At Princeton Station
man on the platform
Northward trains
waits pressed against
late summer
still-green
densities
rush as only
shadows can
sun slants/the dark slides easily in
tree clusters red, yellow
tinged, early October, top
limb silver shine leans
downhill over-catches the
man leaning on a rail face
to late sun, worker, dirty,
pants torn, catches it
in the ear (so it appears)
[...] Read more
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!