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Jimmy Warner's Wild Moon Transit
August 00

music: mmp SowshoBoogeh

ON HOT NIGHTS

Lying together roasted and tortured

Unable to escape one’s own heat,

Let alone each other’s, a thought,

A chilling thought comes to mind.

Rolling, a cool domestic avalanche

Off the tongue like a brand name,

Like a wild adventure package,

Though never seen on television,

Learned from a steamy Czech film.

 

The cloth… Lets do the cloth,

You say, like children, prisoners

Of a rainy day, you run for the fan,

That rattling old oscillating thing,

And a bowl of floating ice cubes,

And two personal size wash cloths,

Yes, this is mutual self expression.

 

Even on hot days there is cold

As the tantalizing ceremony begins

A tease of icy tingling, winter breeze

Sweeping the cloth in loving ways.

  

 

 From Power of the Bay

---

Water

Hours from twelve to four are well spent

by sitting on the porch enduring the heat

or seeking relief by going inside.

You must do both to work up a nap.

You'll wake to an afternoon zephyr and an appetite

for indigenous food ---

good strategy for B-type psyches.

 

But they will be prey to squealing toddlers

and terrorist tikes, psyches undetermined

who pursue their delta happiness at parent's expense.

 

As for all those A types nothing but a boat ride

quells the ancient longing to sail the high seas,

hair streaming in a breeze, skin crusted with salt

and brains buzzing with brave, new endorphins.

"Strap on skis and eat surf", they say, but can't say why

except to exclaim, "It feels so good when you stop!"

 

You can dress for dinner, go up town, but choices

still remain the same: mess hall dinning

fish wharf dinning, luncheonette dinning,

fountain stools and autographed booths

filled to capacity

by barnacle chested, beer drinking, boatmen.

 

The birth of spirit hangs

from a much later sweep of wand,

 

One stone's throw ago at the edge of the bay

where elements meet to thrash their metaphors

the face of the moon, mid broken wharf,

made sense of seaweed, froth and flotsam.

I ascertained the rank and mystical number

of a silver wave or sensed my first

ache and rush to build a poet's altar

from the rake of relics on the beach.

 

When the power of water enters unaware

the tide of emotion is simplified.

STAVES

Like a mantra I keep returning

to my sand plot, cathedral murmurs,

and to rose windows

lit by the first light to blush a crossing gull,

and to all the days of my mind,

now deeply still and tide-worn with ritual.

 

Since the wand of dawn

a light has shimmied down trunks with pink hands

to flood the forest floors with all its pink feet.

With each incoming tide and streamlined as a gull on a post

I stayed and wrote the words that fell from my gaze.

I buoyed up every idea that sailed from sight to sound

like ships that break the horizon with great whiteness

or merge again with the mist.

 

I wait between staves for my ship to come in

at a loss for life, my part of fortune,

the way Scorpio's rise with her jovian jewel

is hidden from northbound moss.

 

The longer I wait the deeper go staves in the ground,

pulling down sprays of hundred year holly as I sink.

 

The worn away human tries to bridge

from steepled woods to blobs of art

himself reborn and naked in his rage,

 

Coastal fury lets down her cloud fall

where I wait storm centered till the four geese cross,

till the back riding John boaters canter their bow

and heel about trailing red coolers,

till it whirls overhead in a great, gray mass

and it touches me with cloud.

 

Helicopters take my picture

on survey sorties.     Yes,

there is cotton stuffed in the screen door,

Band-Aids stuck on wounded porch screens,

shot by young pelleteers.

I've come in from the out going tide,

backed away smooth as glass,

back to glean deadwood for the fireplace,

free to hang crab shells on the mantle.

I am here for the final bird squabble or gull fight

that surely will come

when everyone else has sold out,

washed to sea or gone virtual,

holed up in boatels or cyber motels.

 

Amid the final clearing the poet tied to the land

will sit clod under toe, one question on his lips:

"Must the dream be over if thunder is a dream?"

 

The boy poet in his pew at riverside

his blank verse bound together into black leather volumes

walked hooded in his car coat back to his screened porch

and never ventured forth again.

 

When the porch warped and chipped

and the screens caved in, he built them up again.

He sat winded, still writing illusions till old and gray

convinced he was one with the power of the bay.

 

Jimmy's poetry table of contents        copyright   Jimmy Warner 2000