The Cursing Poet

Practicing the Form

September 10th, 2023

Learn to let things come, learn to let them go

Sink with your breath to take root with your feet-

Even the body you wear, you borrow

Your first step drops lightly into the flow,

All movement is one, advance or retreat–

Learn to let things come, learn to let them go

Rise up on the wings of the crane to know

Where it is that earth and heaven might meet-

Even the body you wear, you borrow

In order to ascend, first reach down low;

Unspool a thread of time as you repeat-

Learn to let things come, learn to let them go

Clouds wave by with the promise of a drawn bow

A budding flower can’t be obsolete-

See that the body you wear, you borrow

When the world burns, the mind shifts to and fro

Yet despair and hope have shapes incomplete-

Learn to let things come, learn to let them go;

Even the body you wear, you borrow

Any wisdom in this villanelle was borrowed from Sifu Feng
Interlude: A Requiem

August 10th, 2023

Lahaina is burning in a sunny café

Where I sit facing the marketplace

Of a small old town in Germany,

My screen open in the foreground

With flames twisting and waving

In the wind as a woman picks up

Her espresso over there and the people walk

By outside, opening like flowers

To the sun after weeks of fall rain

In the summer-

This land where I sit was razed

And passed back and forth like a tarnished coin

In the Thirty Years’ war,

Even the church has arrow slits

Blankly waiting

Above the pleasure seekers on the square.

Most of a lifetime ago I was in Lahaina

Where one day in a shop on the ground floor

Of a wild-west building

My parents dug into their wallets

For the money to buy a surreal teeshirt

with a cat singing and playing guitar;

Looking down again at my screen I see

That same street,

That building with a second-floor balcony

That used to have a store on the bottom floor

Dancing in flames,

Gone already even as I remember it, sitting here.

Back home, I wore that shirt for years,

Until it was too holed and tattered

Even for jogging out past the browning hills

Into the country.
Interlude: A Villanelle

June 25th, 2023

For My Friends M & P, on Their Wedding Day

Complete the circle by joining your hands-

Walking up that aisle, your love renews,

Reaching for that hand, you will take your stand.

You’ve traveled long through dark and troubled lands-

Now walking together, you’ll see it through,

Complete the circle by joining your hands.

You’ve come together to these green islands,

The ocean’s garden, with love found by few,

Reaching for that hand, you will take your stand.

As you come together, your love expands

When you exchange bands, the rings meant for you,

Complete the circle by joining your hands.

Today that thief, Time, is yours to command,

Though his sands run, take that which is your due;

Reaching for that hand, you will take your stand.

As you build the ties that time can withstand,

Together you can make a world that is true-

Complete the circle by joining your hands;

Reaching for that hand, you will take your stand.
Sonnet O

June 14th, 2023

That girlfriend’s mother, only now I see

The desperation, and it’s been years,

Over thirty gone, since those silent fears

Spoke as her husband drove off in the Caddy, free

Into the hot twilight, moving on, pleas

Fenced out by his long-laid plans, all the tears

Like those desert rains which disappear

Far above the blistered land. In arrears,

She saudered mother boards, the boxes stacked

In her pantry for sale to satisfy

Her lawyer, who drove a Cadillac

Less anachronistic than the gray

El Dorado her man drove on the way

To his lover, and months after, to a heart attack.
Sonnet N

May 19th, 2023

I’m pushing Camus up this stony slope,

Nothing but shades of gray to mark the days-

You’d think we’d meet in some well-lit cafe,

But here we are, talking about no hope,

Or it’s Albert holding forth, while I cope

With his boulder shape, feet slipping in clay.

There’s really no rhyme nor reason, he’ll say

Just the task at hand, as over he rolls

Holding his knees to form a hoop, the coat

Muffling his voice, but on still he speaks,

We reach the top again (I’ve lost count) and float

Just a moment there, on our dim peak.

Improbably he’s able to light a smoke,

Then tumbles as I chase after his laughter.
Sonnet M

May 11th, 2023

The inheritance of that dark lady is absence,

Her gifts unwrapped to an empty box;

What comfort she offered her bed did mock–

Her explanation followed as silence.

That maps that she traced shaped emptiness,

The promises she whispered were balked;

The doors that she had opened remained locked–

The medicine she offered was sickness.

What is there from before that can explain?

That she stopped swimming? That she let a tide pull

Her into those dark waters, to be twain

On her return, a creature beyond law

Bound by paired desires, beauty not yet flawed,

Like some two-skinned ocean myth, to land chained?
Sonnet L

April 27th, 2023

They were not my credit cards she maxed out;

She did not lead away all that I had banked,

Nor left me in an empty house to shout

At the muted walls; she didn’t cast doubt

On the justice of my gods, whose scale sank

On another dupe of a cosmic prank,

When her solo trip turned out to be a rout–

Her flight was not from me, her vacation

Did not become my emptiness.

And you cannot say I offered temptation-

Just a shared look at her wedding, confessed,

Her life had become a resignation.
Sonnet K

April 25th, 2023

She’s a nail-scarred wire, bared and sparking

In the hollow darkness of your house wall;

Or a granite erratic, poised to fall,

Or a bolt of light even now arcing

To your ground; or an errant rig parking

High up your street unbraked, starting to roll

As you turn away from your door to stroll

Followed by that shadow unmarked, stopping

Nothing that has been set into motion–

Like a thousand-mile whorl spinning in thrall

To the cold eye of a low, arms churning

Ocean, though you notice no commotion,

Steered by nascent memories unrecalled

She’ll peel every roof, splinter every wall.
Sonnet J

April 13th, 2023

During the Loma Prieta Earthquake

I stood on a lumpen football field;

We turned south at the sound as the earth reeled

And bucked, swells of earth surged as if to break

On our grassy shore, then rolled on to shake

Down that stilted freeway, make buildings kneel

Among their ruin, bowed to gravity.

Only light poles bobbed and lifted to rake

The placid air on either side of us,

Slowing as the quake spread, leaving our world whole

By incidence of time and space; the thrust

Of earth’s lid on which we were scattered dust

Shocked us giddy, innocent of the toll

Miles on, still sure of our lives, held in trust.
Haiku Interlude

March 9th, 2023

March brings snow, then rain

Ice, then slush

Even the weather is confused now.