sw00022ut-02.4poems

The Undulant Trees



Guess what
I found today in an old manila folder?  
Poems of mine gathered under the title: 
Saplings.  Here are four of them.
Note: there is a mild skinny-dipping scene
in the fourth one.
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Janice,


Often,
To the bidding of my memory, I have
Turned again
To fields and certain
City streets, expecting to
Recapture
A lost intensity, a vision of
My self--
A depth, a light, a heart;
Yet, how usual, that
Arrival for renewal,
Scared by bees,
Or made to shiver in a fog.

But now,
Having floated inches
North and south by bus and train
And been
Separated
By a hundred twists,
I am happy to
return,
Happy
As falling snow,
As daffodils
Becoming.


*

Poetry


Is a magazine,
A journal
That sings
A mile
A minute
Right down
The middle
Of every page,
And swings.

I do not like
That magazine,
But I read it.


          1964 or 1965


*

To Lord Byron


I don't like the "sonnet" either, Byron,
And neither do most of my contemporaries.
I guess it offers little for us to spire on,
And so, thirstless dromedaries,
We cross that desert form with quiet ease.
We do not grunt against the meter's weight
Or the rhymes' persistent grinding and heat:
The dunes will change, and slavery's out of date.

If one could finish though what he's begun,
Letting each want of nature drive him hard;
Not be a camel (where day and night seem one)
That floats, and will not chance its jars to shard,
But balks against its fate and turns upon it;
Yet safely arrives, perhaps he'd write a sonnet.


*

What is a word,

& what
       further?
If I say "rain",
what do you think,
                   feel,
live through again?
Do you remember
standing in it,
                laughing,
or another time,
cursing,
         or
or
naked in its passing coolness
calling it
           diamonds of sunlight
as though it wasn't rain at all,
however slick it made your skin
& the wild rock
                your feet
clutched
         at the canyon swimhole?
Or do you picture mud, blood,
a casket being
               slowly lowered?
Or do you just
run inside?


          2-6-88

-
Brian A. J. Salchert