Poetry
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Advice for Beginner Poets
Conjure a faun in the middle of field.
There’s a cabin in the distance, homespun
& brown, & the thick-torso’d wild turkeys
march a few feet away, leaving dinosaur
tracks in their wake.
Don’t let any of this stop you.
Draw that circle with your fallen branch-
wand & wait.
He will grow from the ground like wheat,
slowly, but he will be so much more
than that.
He will stand before you with furred legs,
hooves, & curly hair & play a flute,
whatever songs you want.
No one else will see him.
Can you trust him? As far as you trust
yourself.
And when the field is covered in snow
& wind blows through the thin cabin
& the turkeys, fattened by summer
raspberries & sunflower seeds, roost
in bald trees, you will find faun
hoof prints everywhere, hear notes
drifting like firewood smoke
from the logs you light.
~inspired by Jacek Malczewski’s “Art in the Manor,” 1896
Asters & Irises
We think of asters as round, spiky, purple, as lovely
as their family name, asteraceae. Truth is, the eye
is queen when it comes to flowers, to everything really,
& she names them according to thought’s bloom.
So maybe asters are fan-shaped, adobe-colored, pleated.
Maybe they’re like easels, kidney-shaped, splashed
with mauve, a velvet violet, a blue older than humans,
sunset, jade, the saffron center of a bearded iris,
a hibiscus bulls-eye. Maybe each petal is a brick,
porous, sun-swallowing. Or perhaps each petal
is a pinwheel, silver-flashed on one side, scimitar-
curved, popsicle-hued on the other. Or it could be
that sun has tangled fuzzy florets, glazed blades,
then swooped flowers up into cups to be drained
of dew by human irises.
~inspired by Aristarkh Lentulov’s “Asters”
Autumn is a tiger
stalking us from all directions
with her slow sinuous alchemy—
stripes morphing from jade to citrine
to carnelian to ruby—before reclining
lusciously in the grass.
September is a cub, barely cool, hardly
banded—October is when she opens
her mouth with gusts keen as fangs
& bites skin & bark. Rain is her roar,
a baptismal rush
slicking street & highway under iron
skies. At Samhain she lashes her tail,
& branches bang into each other
& shake off leaf shards, finally
bared of finery,
& the naked season begins in earnest,
when folk reach for pine & scramble
to cover pretend trees with garlands
of sage & cinnamon, beaded stripes
that pale in comparison.
Autumn is a tiger that December lulls
to sleep, only occasionally rising
with bobsled bellies to pounce & feast
on subnivean rodents, then curl up
luxuriously in snow.
~inspired by Erte’s “Autumn”