Condensed Matter and
Other States of Mind
U.S. 30
"I look on it as part of my job
to keep Caroline Herschel in mind.
Caroline went deep,
as we will tonight in our illicit escape
under a film of interstellar light
slipping down from fifty million years.
A barred owl whoo-aahs
from steep sawtooth pines
and we look back
on the milky galactic dust
caught in your silvered glass"
In Western Ohio
"Summer sundown
green oak islands rise
in the purple orange humidity
of wide cultivated fields.
In the loam between the corn rows
I threw green-white watermelon rinds
and took too much for granted
their red-hearted watery sugar.
I want to push my foot arch
up against your heel, press my nose
over your shoulder, inhale your hair,
and slide my palm over the round
hip cotton of your girlish underwear.
We hear the water-heater percolate.
The furnace flame behind its glass plate
glows blue on the hallway floor.
The cat perambulates the house,
like others hunting in the barns
along Four Mile Creek where
the corn leaves rattle like sabres
in the moon’s liquid wind"
Kyrie
"I can even feel kindness
toward the wrappers and cans
thrown down on the road
and blown off to the gravel sides.
I like the weeds on the broken asphalt
of abandoned fabrication, the rusted wrenches
and sea-wrecks of overhead cranes
listing in their steel archeology
I could love all this if only
it came to an end in some
remaining left-alone counterpoint,
some wild ground to its corroded figure.
If I could just walk out of town.
But I can’t even drive fast enough.
It’s too big and the same thing
from somewhere else meets me if I try."
Douglas A. Fowler
|
Hymn and Chorus
to the Sun’s Return
"I spilled late-night coffee
on a sky-atlas chart
near the stars in southern Pisces
near the northbound
equatorial
sun-cross
in cup rings
over right ascension’s
turning gimble wheels.
We had a rough and long season
with hard rinds of ice
blue-sheened under a cold moon
leering down
as white as teeth
on all the lies
and our own
hard exteriors grew old and hoary
-and now four stars in Corvus
south over the pines,
four stars for a carrion crow
and the Dipper is poured out
north, the handle’s upward curve
nudging open the east horizon
down toward red Arcturus,
but again
the solar arc plys north
breathing in the first rain-water air
on diminished snow
in icy scabs
fading
off
sun green
yellow grass."
Douglas Fowler
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