Up on Big Rock

Ice House

2011-11-30T12:31:00.000-06:00

Cold

“it is years from my first books

and much the colder”

the dogs’ water’s froze.

all the ice the whole house has

cracks if you just walk on my porch.

I have half a bushel basket

muddy onions in the kitchen

and the cat I keep in the house

all day it's so cold out

but he climbs in them onions and shits there.

the winter's night

like a insect’s noises

(the dry high pitch't

screaming of freezing

the snow’s sound in the forest

on the trees’ leaves left

a flake light wacking the bark

a black limb as thin as a thin black

line’s got makes

I have for

got my skin

my body a

itch to me

inside my

clothes only

my ass to

touch the cold

for days: I

strip't naked

for a scratch

watch my line

of chest drop

to my waist

my penis

bold as a

chubby boy

in the cold

4. my bath

I look at my teeth

through my breath

in the mirror

the bathswaterssteaming

the cold

a cold old Amish woman a grey

dress and sweater

her silver hair

pull'd back in a fray'd grey scarf

her children lay in her hips

the snow in the toe of her boot

the smooth skin of winter and

eyes as a blue moon’s

6. snow’s flower

one day it melts a little

and sees through to the soil a little again

and are as small as flowers in all the snow

7. love songs

This is one of those poems I must end

and bother with it until I can end

it (I have a slight fear of freezing

from lying too long in the cold

* * *

I put my hands over my ears and hop up and down

I clutch myself with both hands at the shoulders

I hop harder and watch my breath the color of snow and

I can scarcely move my mouth by now as if I was speaking

* * *

there is as warm as a sun in your eye

But can't burn forever. Can It, does it, can it?

2011-08-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

SUMMERS DRYING FLOWERS

“We sit there by the fire, it is hot, the fire’s crackling,

the days and nights pass, the crackling fire, the days and

the nights pas’t.”

I have done everything

you have demanded from me

but still the flowers are drying up

but still I will take great pain

not to mourn for the flowers that are lost.

But now you have to listen and watch the fire burning,

and as you grow more dark as hickory before fire,

before listening, notice this flame I describe

and it is so deep a eye cannot penetrate it

and a lick like a song to it (so will you

listen?) when the sun has the sound of the wind

orange in the purple clouds, and you can hear

the crack of a limb it is so quiet now,

that and the hot and hot snaps.

Liszt, his choice of notes like the names of the stars,

now why do I tell you this? it is the sound you are

hearing, like notes, like sang words clamping to meaning

Liszt, his wicked finger’d piano, to dance inside to his

this love for a song:

I have watched and the animals are dying all around me

and there are a million coons this year and they are dying,

and no one can stop it. I am finding birds who are dying,

the dogs keep killing the rabbits and the dogs are dying

and when a cow dies falls like a tree in the timber

out to pasture and the cows are dying

and no one can render all them so

there they lay, getting softer every day

in the hot sun, but keep on dying and keep on dying ...

Now last summer when this same hot snapping of the life of things

happen’d I’d stand on the porch around the corner of the house

and out of the sun to piss, always full to piss from coffee

or beer, always here, hot, and the things around me dying

and this terrible and nagging smell of my same piss off the porch

just earlier, the dead smell of me pis’t in the ground with the

blood of dogs, or had been spit. But this year not even the wind

off the fires of stars has my same smell to it: how the fire

burning at my feet all night, I watch the stars and sparks

of a million falling, and the turning milkyway turning

and in the morning in the hot fire of sun hot early.

In the shade of the cool house, besides the smell of coffee

heavy with warm cream, it’s that hickory burnt all night

in the fire, the reddish and shagged smell of it

opening to morning the way the eye reaches for sunrise

or up the porch the wild red morningglory against its vine

as sang as fire’s ever burning and

as for summer another strangely basking

hot one and as for the sound of your

listening, it is your fire burning

and drawing down the grass, you are so hot afire

where you lie, listening to it crackling away at you

every day, like the sound of a fire which cannot burn down,

for a fire for a fool afire like the sun, which is surely

burning itself up, isn’t it, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE BECAUSE IT IS

SO BRIGHT THAT IT CAN BURN FOREVER TO THE MERE EYE WHICH WE

CAN LOOK AT IT WITH OUT OF, but can’t can it, but can’t burn

forever, because it is like a flower, you are, or like

that brightest rose, o rose, from up on the windmill tower, looking

over all this land. There is that one rose I always see burning

out there every summer, so fucking bright I tell you I can’t

see past it for the sight of it, and how up there on the tower

to look at a lovely rose as far away I think like a fool

I will feel that rose in me forever, but I have never,

only remember, but there is no rose to see, like trying

for a flame to hold its shape, or to stop a fire burning,

right?

can’t can it, and can’t burn forever either, can it,

does it, can it? Because it’s like these

summer's drying flowers

and all the falling stars I seen

since once you showed me them,

falling,

can’t possibly,

they burns up to a crisp first.

Easter Poem

2011-04-11T13:34:00.000-05:00

The Resurrection

“woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?”

she, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him,
“Sir, if thou have borne him hence,
tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away”

one

(I know not how to not to have began)

the wind just fucking roaring across
my green yard silver back’t as a million
fish in the sea
the blown grass is in the yard
this Easters Sun’s Day

(end I’ll tell you
that the blue sky is white
nearest the invisible sun
end his white again at the blue horizon color’d the

faintly silverest preen
of buds
of the trees tops
of the white sky
the brown line
of them trees
red
over every
circle is horizon.

Why I’d climb’d all the way up the windmill
yesterday in a great blow of the hotter
spring,

but I was quite drunk
but at least finally I step each
step up its skinny steel leg
finally
after
over
a year
here
finally

goes up all the way

up / with

arms over my head.

But of course

I was drunk

which accounts for any story’s swaying

if walking a wall’stop or
if up a windmill’s old boney legs

it is the highest of structures
form’d on the hilltop

looks down the chimney and down into the trees scalps
and down in the yard flies a redwing’d blackbird
which is more to signify these hilltops springs than the red robin ever

and stands perch’t on a branch believing
it is a fencepost
but notices the delicious forsythia
bud as glassy as saliva
its yellow tongue
singing like a bird
and prompted

eats the bud against this sunly sun’s days and black
as the clear bloodred rose is
rises
like a flower
from the branch does black
with more light than a constellation’s stars to a sunny day
disappearing far above me

bird

from the windmill tower

singing rising over heaven ever.

two

“the arose
morning’s suns
gazes back past

springs and the
springs and all the
springs to an other”

Once I have hoisted the windchime up the windmill
and have cinch’t the brace and yoke to the leg

why I’m a fairly excited man

you see
way on up there

and have ran out of beer the night before

but but

high up as a bird’s wings
looks down the back
of the hawk
(the hawk soars over me in the breathless
wind
the)
yellow lick of the suns
in its eyes
like (a eagle’s)

O very excited about this
my hat blows off me,
my hands
like laughing
children’s eyes
the light’s
so fast for them
to catch

but grabs
for blowing wind.

O I’m singing I’m so excited
to ride a hawk’s back asoaring
on the wind the

windchime
fast to the hook holds it
the rope tied off
I works the knots tighter
half dancing
you see

there it is
blowing there

bong, bong, bong
then some

how
my magic pliers
jumps up into my fingers

and all the beers I’d had I’d had
the day before
singing bong
bong
bong.

well I notice a
wire
overhead
and I’m pretty excited by now / and there’s that rusty wire / and “well I’ll just

clean up this
old winds mill

and my magical
pliers
leads my eyes
bites on that wire
into 2.

And
jesus
christ

I didn’t
even mean to

and the block and tackle falls
and the chimes
all falls

and all my work comes up to me like dust again.

#3.
slay’d

it is a rough resurrection
says rose christ
it is tough getting up at all
to get to going again

but the wind I smell carries
all the flowers colors I

don’t know I
don’t know I

if I can keep a flower
in my fist forever

I knows I can

But can’t.
But I can

fly, I have
dream’d I can
fly

and in the morning
to the color of sun

follow trees to birdsnests
I’ve planted in the leaves
the night before

I knows I can
so I can
if I want
and so I am.

And jesus christ all in white

the color of the sky and the sun that day

waves goodbye to everyone on the world

and the farther up he sails

the harder he gets to see

until jesus christ in white goes out of sight.

I have come, and I have heard the tractors dragging
the dirt on the hills while I have composed its poetry,
and the regardless green plants, which grow, and

I have well’d in my icecool house to the trees shades

eh?

but back to a lily of a day,
back 2 or 3 weeks to Easter:

I chew on the treachery of writing it out
and then
the moon hovers
and then
I fall to dreaming.

* * *

that fast music of a poem passing as fast as most days pas’t
a memory of poem to resolve and resurrect,
everyday a color of sky, and the weight of bed,
time it is
and if I can get up why

I gets up again.

© 2008 by Tom Driscoll

Summer's Grasses, Summer Red, Summer Golden

2010-07-01T09:35:00.000-05:00

chapter the Ninth

"he saw a man which was blind from his birth" — a biblic

He have never saw a color, and he have
never saw his father

and works this clay in my fist and makes
it mix with my spit

and smears this on his eyes and pres’t
into his sockets

these my thumbs Go wash this off now
and see things.

He'd spit on his hand, I heard it, and it is a cool soil to my eyes.
And rolls my eyes in his thumbs like clay balls. Wash your eyes

he'd told me And see things: There is still the fine dust of clay to my face
and the sudden color to the sound of water and the bright suns lights on my eyes

On Iowa Avenue after the War

2010-06-21T14:34:00.000-05:00

Electrocution

yellow butter flower
our shins bug bit bad
knees abump
breaths one with
cool morning breezes
tall weeds and sweet tea
birds all asong on the porch,
when
a jolt a jangle a blast a shiver a
chatter of bird
sang zzzt love zzzzzzt
blood flowers

shhh zzzt / cannot
stop me / you
cannot zz - zzzzt stop
my heart from

gzzzzt
beating.

Muddy Bottom Creek

2009-10-24T12:52:00.005-05:00

Final Soliloquy

1.

When a voice dies
so dies its red flaming.

(Some say it is burning hair some
the awful red blood of the heart.)

The white chickens dance beside it.
The black rooster, screaming wildly,
calls for song. The chickens dance.
The dead voice cannot sing. The
wind in the ripe plum trees
whispers of the fall.

The rooster, frightened and sad, demands
angrily more song. But the voice will not
sing. The wind commands sudden winter.

The rooster, lost, pecks madly out
the fine white eyes of the chickens

(All his women blind he
flies in and out of the trees
bumping and falling. He
is lost. And the day passes.
And the night comes.)

2. is there a place in the POEM for the immediate present?

my body smelly I
practice to ignore it that
and the coffee smeared into
my sweet breath with
cigarettes

the dope I smoked yesterday
boogers up my nose holes

a straw hat on my head
keeping dirty hair back
out of my face I learn to

ignore my life completely
and knock like nails these
words

    careful not to split them (I turn
    nails over in my fingers (pound blunt
    their points, they enter (the boards
    tearing open small holes (displaced
    pieces of wood pushed down (now
    beneath the finger of steel (like my
    father I listen to my nails (sing.)

As if slowly, I watch the fast hammer
meet the head of the nail. See the nail
bend each time, moving each time deeper
into its board. Feel the nail as it pierces
and draws into itself the next board,
the foundation tightening, the nail
push’t farther in, straightening it

self in
to its
hole
ringing
to
a

deep bass
as at last
the firm
head
of
it

seals off
the hole
it’s made
the length
of
it

swollen &
hot
it
is

lock’t in its
place &
immediately
is
silent.

    (I notice my legs quaking
        (I shiver uncontrollably &
            (I cry

the) wind in from the wind
o blows my papers around
a few photographs, the
green plants like it like it
is summer,
        (outside,
the long hot drought lies dead in brown grass
the huge trees I live under taking from that grass
the last water gasp
        (my papers blow
about, the wind lifting the scent
of my flesh up into my nose)))))))))) looks I round this

room & try & think & I’m
finally going crazy

        & dying in me the voice lifts its frantic eyes

&
        spits out one last song :

father father father
            farther from me
            spins your knowledge
            of the way of life

and I will listen
to the wind
for the sound
of your voice

and the tears
on my face
drip onto
my wood chest

and with your
voice can you
say you are
not dead I
am not dead
that life is

just fucking
like the green
color that it
is the idea
of that green?

(The wind blows
the green plants
        groan the black
(nails pounded
        in my flesh hold
                ing me together
(itching down
        down inside me
                where I am bleed
(ing my arms
        and fingers fall
                off, I can on
(ly sing my
        lips fall off I
                scream my eyes
(fall from out
        of their sockets
                the earth loose
(too from its
        grip on
                the stars my
(teeth fall my
        hair my flesh
                very old now &
(smelling bad
        the house all
                around me decay
(ing and fall
        ing inside of
                itself the brown
(thin nails lay
        scattered the
                rotten wood is
(sucked into
        the ground
                and soon the
(wind speaks
        again of the
                fall and the
(fall of the
        winter and the
                winter of the
(lost and
        frozen life
                beneath its)

cold paw the door blows open and the wind fills this room with

more air
than can
be breathed.

3. how

must I speak
of my life now
to you? to tell you
of marriage, of how I
find even my
conscience
cornered by
the law or
of the children
and the women?

Am I begging to be
understood or
am I begging only
to be cradled in the
rock arms of
this earth or
am I begging
to return to
the black spaces
of my mind
from before I
was born to
where the
women I
loved then
could take
all my
body
into their
own and speak
softly to me
of warmth
of happiness of)

today I see and speak of
what is hot and of the movement
in my red brain of black & terrifying
shadows) for which I have no identifying)

actions.

They are not words to me but new motions
trapped for me in a fabric of words) & of words)

and of language as my faculty
bends I from the waist to kiss
the earth where my tears beg
for mercy and for the time for)

my mind you see) to figure out) these things).

4. brambles

I go down the road
to where there have been floods
to spread the seeds
of corn over new land

where there now
(unlike what was a miracle
the unsown corn) chokes
corn brown & hot
& begs for water
& tears &
muddybottomcreek just lies
there in its oldoldbed
driedup & crackedup &

leans I out of the Jeep.
And see how the wheels
spin and how I watch them
spin around how I watch the
crisp road pass underneath them

seeing as I stretch my head out around the
rattling windshield furry critters lying dead
at the roadside wild hedges reaching 15
& 20 feet into the sky the blue
universe leaking through their mad
mad leaves
me I come to muddybottomcreek
again can I feel choking the road the years
of little use the hedges growing
& growing yet but with
no water yet
but the thick brambles wrap themselves
tight around the Jeep, am I stopped
or overwhelmed by the plants)
                like zombies in

movies)


    they seem to go for all that lives).

Confused I am am I just as well then again there now as here?

5. the last episode of the WOMAN

(flower) as I

speak quickly for
there isn’t much more

time kiss I you and to
tell you the flower will

be for us how it has
been for all that’s past

the immediate
recollection of

wild love and a
black rose cast to

growing in broke
rocks at the ocean

side roots feeding
on stones our seeds

the red matrix
of the lovely rose

your lips like
childhood against

me I sing to you
the shapes of clouds

that pass even
as they assume

true shapes I
pour into my

hands dirt (it is
dry and I) fling

dirt into the
sun where it

stays there I
say a cloud

how shall we
call it call it

she says hmmm
call it a black

ocean she
laughs and says

no that’s stupid no
I say call it the

black ocean so
we do, so we will.

The black ocean it floats there in the sun forever (my rose)

we strangely
look for help

and but kiss
each other for

the first time for
you my flower

shall I write
haiku & sonnets

swear I I will.

6. we makes love

our lives spent walking we
talking like the streets and
the camera never zooming
in on us and we
remaining you know
among things always
always how so
chaperoned by what we
feeling to be our life.

And the trees and children talking like Mexican
bandits arrogant and proud of themselves whisking
in our faces polished knives scaring us and making
us think for long periods of time without speaking.

7. how I return with the FLOWER

whispers the Wind, pure form) pure form).

Around us in the thick air the ocean foam the salt harsh in our

eyes)

we seek shelter and we find this place : are you warm I ask you

yes I am you say.

Then, my fingers rubbing gently (I felt days pass) yours we raised

our (how I

watched you) arms toward the sky our bellies (we could no more

speak) touching

when we stood up and overhead where we stared crazy mad burn’t

the black rose

are you to me
        my hands jump
                to your stalk
I make my
        love to you
                I cry then
relax my grip
        and weep and
                try to say
I am sorry
        your eyes
                wet and vast
and you say
        you could have
                killed me like that
but I do not
        (I turn my back)
answer you then
feel you crash
        against me we
                fall to earth
wrestling my
        nose bleeding
                you hitting
me, thorn,
        over &
                again.
(When at last (red tears dripping on my face) pull you yourself to

me your
brambling arms wild still and sleep crying your name and this

dreaming I dream :

there is a flower
my fists gripping
the stem myself
alone in the cold
world the single
black rose and
my own body
growing there.

8. how the EARTH then grows

like a kiss, I took the flower into my mouth
and sucked sweet juice from it first
swallowed then spat out
at the ground a mix of
sputum and seeds

and grows there still
a giant oak tree black
bark’t it leaves deep green
as glass crack’t) and scattered
wide it’s seeds ) and saw
I how people came
to life and knew I
should plant the oak
over the earth and
great-god in heaven
leaned down to say
I’m no better than you are.

9. the SONG

looking out see into the farmyard :
the swine live diseased :
without imagination :

the song is one of their sex.

Any two of them any time (watching
them for only five minutes you will see)
the young ones screwing (she does not scream
(he does not belie her)) they wrestle and fight

the stone hooves of the half-black boy pig dig
into the leather back of the girl pig she

cannot see him she
tries eating grass
but swallows mud

the hard length of his pig penis
battles flies to find her she
stumbles forward looking

it looks like watching her in
the mud for anything living

he pokes her hard the
pain inside her now her
blood falls on mud her

unable to even begin to
understand such pain she
pulls loose from him

turns on him wildly roots
him hard in the belly her
nose build of rock and earth

like mud, she lifts him
off the ground he grinds his
penis into her face to

satisfy his sex
        : the ring in her nose
digs up boy pig flesh

she jabs again and
lifts him the blood
pouring out of him

she is mad, she roots
deeper into the boy pig’s
soft belly, blood in her eyes.

He responds crazy. The
pain, his hind legs and
stomach a fire in his

nostrils a mix of his
sex and hers he bears
down on her snout

grinding harder &
harder into her face
his wild pig dick
            in his mind, the sun burns the

rough flesh of his back

he can see through the pain the need to fulfill the urge to fuck

himself to death

like a madman provoked by a storm rams he him against her skull

drenched in his

blood his love for her, she slices open another belly wound and in

a spasm of pain

climaxes he, he, he, his legs weak, his seeds and blood and mud


        they fall
like pigs together she
rolls him onto his back
and roots into his belly
savaging his love and
opening to the sun
all his guts. Pigs.

10. the END

I find myself in the present
where I am I cannot return

there. From things grown
or built know we decay.

(Must I really say that the Word? is a construction of words.)

There is every reason on earth
to understand What is despair?

And vanish, I dead voice
choking on dead words
lost in a dream
the powder of
the black rose
on my lips will
I speak one last
time again &) again
to you : “the violation of a Thing lends proof to its Existence”.

Brown bread for Gerald

2009-03-06T08:39:00.000-06:00

OR OF A LAST POEM TO THE SO’D SUN (OR MOON SAW

(for Commander Gerald Stevenson)

“what is said now, or is ever said

as said or heard, is heard as said so”)

1. bullmoon cat

but now wait a minute

what you were saying I like and’d like’t hear said again.

across a hill a bullmoon walks he said

and he sat his grey hair in the light silver like the

flask he hit

or he belted, how do you say in Zing-leash?

he tore off drinks like chews of bread heel

good brown bread for Gerald, the seeds light brown

on the brown bread, seeds for Gerald, seeds and cigarettes

and the silver flask and the black coat of John Berryman

over him, I swear to Gerald’s gods

confuse you!

a black bow tie

he made from a straight black tie

tying it to make a black bow light at the throat,

and said he

from there

words throat’d

as if kick’t

up from

his belly

o Gerald

“the sunlight pours over the wood floor

and our dreams run

like the bald eye of the sun

on the moon

silver as a flask

the exact length of light

2 . the start of a lengthened Christ tale

The men sat on stones and watch’t the moon

thinking how the moon can help them

with what they cannot know alone

looking for a light like the sun or a fire for a night

And the women sat there, their eyes eyes like over across

the land is a cat or a moose or a bear with eyes

on stones sat,

at their feet

are long bones

they are shaping them so

they are long and smooth

and are seen so white against/as if held the sun’s blue sky

in the day are they invisible the

bones made or shape’t

or a knife

and the women pass them to the men

and the men they stab them in the earth

about as far as their grip from their legs

the bones made the women and the men on the stones

on the ground they watch the moon move over the sky

like a light far on a hill like a moon moves, bullmoose,

(and are you ever caught in it, light’d

in it; it passes

light carried by the moon

and carried in the women’s eyes

and in the men’s eyes

and the white bonelight

stab’d in the ground

3. part two

“first in a shape of thoughts

made the fire

then a disk like the earth

reflected in stone and moon

made the wheel

and like life shapes and knowledge

made the box and roof

lines get bent

and soon what cannot be seen can be made

the backside of a house

and feel good about this, and feel life safe

and comes the moon

and what cannot be known but as said or told

and starts talk, made at the pace of breath

pull’d away slow over years,

is a moondance of gravity and ocean

again and again to have

to say

the moon, or wordmaker, archvowel

of light and sound, cavity and silver

reflection,

made song made seed and

verb and light like a fire

made a shape that moves;

and thinks.

4. crossword puzzle

small word, the box of sound made to seem

understandable

a word for follow from

cauliflower

a word for sun like one or moon

“made the vowels and like clouds

consonants carry light

like sound and make shadow”

a word for sunset color’d

for to be thinking of

for treehard or oakness

for the blanks in preen drip blank

wet blank wet or drops

blank grass’t thin smelt wind

a word for breath

for music imagined

and for all children

a word for the word used

as said is heard

say again, is heard

say one more time now,

is heard is heard

shape’t box’t saw closed in lines sounds like words made like light carried on a word for a stick end lit

for scratching black lines on stone, moon,

one

many letters, many words, for like talk, all blanks

5. astrological section

“the old women and the men are waiting and dying; wait

and dying

hard to imagine it,

but seem to wait, but die”

The son christ made in winter, having been so waited for

and the planets and the stars stop’t at a second in birth, the light fix’t a second, planet over planet and star the said gravity

of them

like in the imagination in space flang,

nor fix’t but at a very second or

boarded there; made to be possible to be sawn

“I can remember that year

and having to have waited for it, so as if the son my son, but no, no child have I seen, no my son.

But the winter, and like every winter before have waited through the winter, that winter

me and the moon, no son,

but waits”

6. the earth and the Christ tale o Adonis, o Orion

your color of moon, made your difference of earth and a silver a blood red.

(your debt is for the sun)

o Prometheus o Immaculate Mary o little Christ-thought your debt is for the sun how seen in the moon the reflection of life

warm’d and kept alive

a simple blue or brown color of eyes pas’t through the children the parents like women and men

watch the moon or can want to say so!

“not that to say a vow, which binds,

but as a metaphor goes follows to make like a whole of language

to live in it like beneath a great oak are acorns or the color of

the shadow on green grass against yellow,

the sun,

not like to bind up life’s more colors color’d in the one said or told to be

but in a syntax to bind, or what holds together

made to stay, and to say so.

Fingers like words, light carriers, the dark shadows of knuckle tight like a

syntax binding, we hold hands,

and stand in cold winter moonlight our debt to be for time

or like the sun, a light pas’t, to be made, to be lit, light, are our shadows like dirt fingers or dark furrows drawn through fallow

land for the seeds,

beside’d

the dark lines drawn but darker than night

and deeper, the moon like vowel carries the light of the sun

and like behind us as we face her our shadows mingle darker than the dark night

© 2008 by Tom Driscoll

The Color of Sprang

2009-03-05T09:52:00.000-06:00

Rhapsody for Flowers

to My Too Little Girls

See this particular invisible bird

swinging in the alley,

but it may have been

two birds too,

but urgent,

so to

screech,

trilling,

a feathered

throated

SOS

“the crocus is coming,”

o a colored bird asangin’,

“the crocus has gone.”

Old moon’s white’s can be

it can be,

can be it,

if a iris is

would never

have wilt

was

if a red rose petal’s blew,

loose as all the blood’s

drips is

the flowers has

was gives

said

sad

song

sang

sweet.

sweets
S

Greening again again

2009-03-04T10:07:00.000-06:00

Amish Woman

Driving long’n mold truck.

Come over the rusty English River bridge,

round that last turn north to Kalona on the back gravel.

Here’s a-Amish woman drest in light blue,

bonnet and skirt, white apron and shirt,

her high button black boots, thick black rim glasses

and white-white work gloves, aburnin the right away.

She shooed the fire along with her rake.

Sall green again there now but was

black stubble for a month a month back.

Not a speck on her neither,

just west wind

blew north to Kalona.

And on up the road aways why

it hit me, she must

do that every spring

and or like the fiddle

of clockwork, is she a seasonal motion,

a sniff of the wind

ablue.

O there she is

again raking that red fire

ninety feet

up the ditch

for forty or more years each march.

Just itches, in a good north wind,

Stand in back of the smoke

in front of her,

clean as a cat whisker,

givin it a good scratch with her rake up the ditch.

Adagio

2009-03-02T11:48:00.000-06:00

Daughters of Dandelion

“these acts of loving and

the loving young woman’s breast”

(with the air as thick as chicory is blue

and the butterflowers where the rain was

they undress in the dandelion field named for him.)

* * *

old Dandelion awakens

down the hill tumbling

under him the drunken

nights agone, his yellowing skin

brittle to another summer

sun, his frightening

brown straw for hair

curls closed his ears

or where his eyes blue

once were, and crusted

closed, and caking snot

from his nose and the

rusty stain of slobber

between his breasts.

Where the light touches the water

where he lies between the hills

and when all he can imagine he can see

when he watches where his reflection

would be if he could see again

is the light he imagines is his daughters,

their yellow hair even yellower for the sun.

They have the round bellies of children

and the wet grass stuck to their ankles

and the mud of their birthing

still between their toes

smiles of pure bone, spines

after the breasts of straw songbirds

and when old Dandelion imagines

their sweet eyes cries out him

the intensest circles where the last moon was

that last

morning

I saw, the

life caught

the

instant between the black sky

and the dawn

in the wild eyes of angry children.

* * *

Adagio

(after Khachaturian):

the young Dandelion

has embraced his daughters.

To them he is a bird

as fleet with strength

as flying.

He throws them into the sky

two blue stones and

catches them upon his hands

just where their feet touch the grass.

But they are young and hop like squirrels running;

but he is young, young Dandelion,

unaware of even the time taken him,

the wind thick with his seeds,

and the time taking him, a blackening wind

till if the poor wind were vision

is poor Dandelion blind.

* * *

The black mudwasps house

upon Dandelion, the ponding water

between hills inhaling from him

more wasp and more and more yellowing weed.

The daughters of Dandelion

dance where his mind was

and all there is was this green hill

in spring suddenly yellow once one day

with Dandelion, the young girls

with fists of dandelion and the

dandelion chains that hang upon their breasts.

Rites of Winter

2009-01-20T10:07:00.003-06:00

COLD

“it is years from my first books
and much the colder”

1.

the dogs’ water’s froze.

all the ice the whole house has
cracks if you just walk on my porch.

I have half a bushel basket
muddy onions in the kitchen

and the cat I keep in the house
all day it's so cold out

but he climbs in them onions and shits there.

2.

the winter's night
like a insect’s noises

(the dry high pitch't
screaming of freezing

the snow’s sound in the forest
on the trees’ leaves left

a flake light wacking the bark
a black limb as thin as a thin black

line’s got makes

3.

I have for
got my skin

my body a
itch to me

inside my
clothes only

my ass to
touch the cold

for days: I
strip't naked

for a scratch
watch my line

of chest drop
to my waist

my penis
bold as a

chubby boy
in the cold

is

4. my bath

I look at my teeth
through my breath
in the mirror

the bathswaterssteaming
the cold

5.

a cold old Amish woman a grey
dress and sweater

her silver hair
pull'd back in a fray'd grey scarf

her children lay in her hips
the snow in the toe of her boot

the smooth skin of winter and
eyes as a blue moon’s

6. snow’s flower

one day it melts a little
and sees through to the soil a little again

and are as small as flowers in all the snow

7. love songs

This is one of those poems I must end
and bother with it until I can end

it (I have a slight fear of freezing
from lying too long in the cold

* * *

I put my hands over my ears and hop up and down
I clutch myself with both hands at the shoulders

I hop harder and watch my breath the color of snow and
I can scarcely move my mouth by now as if I was speaking

* * *

there is as warm as a sun in your eye

Copyright 2009 Tom Driscoll

Clatters of Gun

2008-10-15T09:45:00.007-05:00

October’s Moons

for Lew Welch

"there is a story out here
I think he says
and to sniff after it
walks off in the timber
as purple’d as sky is
like a black whiteface’t cow does"

1 .

the way that a tree stands before trees
and all the bones of tree the wind has
scatters

2 .

on the weekends
in the mornings
I hear the hunters
a thick wind
and a gunshot
like a smash’t window

3.

it is a cold night and the dogs start to bark
I stumble from my bed through the dark house
the knifed edge of the moon hangs a instant like a gunshot does
in the black window

4.

the dogs howl at moon
or that the coon hunters are out in it
the moonlight on a dog makes the dog crazy
you can’ t hear the coon hunters,
the coons can’t even
and the crazy coon dogs, you can hear them sniff
the school’d dogs and their sound like the wind
like the cold moonslight (the west clouds gather the sun
and all the colors of earth fall up into the sky
and the three dogs I have howls, and the silent coondogs sniffs

5. the babel of wasp

I’ve a wasp caught by the cold
too late in the fall of wasp to live much longer, and can never fly again,
and the wasp colors are wore away and polish’d dull from the wind wings
make beating, the wasp wing a black wedge, thin as a sliver of slate,
heavy to have to carry, the song of wasp is gone, but the echo
the drone and the hum and the dry groans of winters
and saves one sting like a drug
and drags the wasp up a book
and collapses at the top
on the white pages of it
and embraces the stinger
and instantly is dead
and the slight sound of a stinger
and the smack of a bone is in flesh has

6 . the leather strap

two of the dogs have a leather strap and wrestle it
they throw it how Wheat had threw a very small rabbit
I thought it was a chipmunk it was so small and was alive still.
Wheat walked over to it, and carried it over to me, and sank down
and opened her mouth, and it was then I saw it was a rabbit.
I’m mad to think of throwing more bones out of the yard,
wet sacks of them. The rabbit winked and twitched, and Wheat
whined slowly wild the song the wet fur in the teeth and the smell
of blood. The rabbit jumped an inch from her teeth and waited
for Wheat to eat again. But Wheat roll’d over on her back
her eyes a songsmoaning for to hold a body by the mouth,
why when then the wet rabbit runs quickly away.

7.
a clatter of gun in the wind
and the hunters and their dogs
wind like briar through the timber
and the rose thorn.
and my dogs run off after the sound of guns, barking,
and the dogs goes crazy and kills hunters and drags
many of their bones in the yard like a squirrel’s body,
or a crow they’d caught once somehow, like a black bone
in the mouth, hunter’s bone, the dogs’ll eat’m once they’ve kill’m.

The Early Wither

2008-09-22T10:34:00.004-05:00

The First Meditation of Tai Valley

for Leo in late Leo

1 .

There is a frog whitebelly up on the blacktop
north towards Sugar Bottom. You will follow that road
until you turn uphill into the dense timber, thick
with the ends of summer. There is no direction
within the timber but outwards or inwards.
You will clear your path more and more inwards
towards Tai Valley there.

2 .

The sun is south
from every position,
and more to south
every day. The green
soybean fields along
Newport Road yellow
and dry. All of the bugs
are sumptuous, busy,
preoccupied with instinct,
and juicy.
The tall green
corn turns golder
and the fireweed’s
spiral veins twine
up the thin ironwood
trees, black’tred,
like a wink from deep
in the forest, or a blash
of dark fire ember.
The colors take the place of the stars.
Read the con-stellation of the million
hues massing for the fall and move
in any direction you choose

3.

The first consequence of movement is change,
and change is no paradoxing self‑paradox, or nor no
tail swallowing snake swallowing tail. The trail
in the timber is our path you step. The low limb
which sounds swished behind you snaps
back into position when you pass. The last
step that you take is where you are; adjunct
of squirrel claw, up a tree straight up’t
snake skin an empty sack on the timber’s
floor, heels in soil, a million eating mosquitoes
dance on your neck and arms; the eyes
of a coon you cannot see can see you
and knows you are there, but no racoon,
too big to be a squirrel, the smell of old skin.

4. Tai Valley

The steep willowy hill descends
into stone and aspen field.
At the flat rocks step upon the water.
The hills walk away slowly upwards
until the trees are one tree,
until the grasses are one mat,
color is everything
but for the sound of the invisible wind
or the sizzle in the humid valley
of the billion wings of bugs, frantic
at the angle of the sun so south,
working up a sweat or a haze or a buzz
over which the hilltops reach.
Let the water cool your ankles
from the red scratch of wildrose
and gooseberry briar. With your elbows
dangling over your head, why reach.

5.

The valley opens like a spoken word.
In the distracting quiet of leaf and wing
what is that great vowel where the valley widens?
Perhaps it is water drawn from the sky
the life drawn from the water? the high
pitch at the fringe of screams and laughter
That skeleton you see carved of the rock
upon the rocks, is the rock
like fishes or insects frozen,
but is a man’s, flattened by frost and hot sun
onto squatting stone.
Put your ear fearfully to the bone,
you can hear it ringing
the clang is of a stone
upon a plate of still water, intoning
ring after ring, until shrill,
widening infinitely past eyesight or hearing,
meditated for by Leo alone in stone now
upon his rock
forever at the end of Tai Valley,
singing the one note,
the one everlasting vowel,
and the smooth black stones which were his eyes
are the color blue
the sky makes
where the rings
were ripples.

6. The Hexagram

It is too late to leave Leo, Leo of stone,
but can return like an echo. Love, the
color of flower, the lips of the valley
pronouncing the vowel of rhythm forever.
0 the tone, the second stone clatters upon still water,
and the ring which sings from the dead center forever.

Never Let Go

2008-08-27T10:19:00.008-05:00

THE BULLRIDER

The first bull they've got me by my arms
and are got me by my ass by my belt,
then I'm a'takin that thick rope and wraps my hand
to that bull's shoulder. He is a broad-shoulderer beast
to tell the facts, coarse brown hide. He has
dirty brown teeth colored horns and they lowers me
real slow over that dang bull's back. And when once my spurs
rolls down his ribs, with a switch of his hips he flips me
hoping I might stick on his horns, but the cowboys yanks me
back by my ankles and that dang bull hooks the gate,
rips it off'n the post and runs into the bull ring kicking
like crazy to shake that ticklish itch down his ribs,

totes that splintered gate against his forehead. He is pist

and I have never saw no such thing ever before.
The cowboys don't guess I want to ride a bull no more,
but I do want to. The crowd has a hot breath,
hot as the faded blue jean sky, and dusty, thirsty,
screaming sun. In the next chute I leans down for the
rope (I whispers Man-I-Hope-This-Bull's-Better) but
the goddang bull wracks his head and gooses that gate good
and rips it clean off the hinges too. Damn.
When I climbs
up the side of the next chute I sees this black Spanish bull.
He's got one broke horn and blood's smeared dry and rusty
all over his nose. Muddy and black and just more-and-more
meanly snorting and kicks out a bottom board and
the people are cheering their asses off and I ain't so much
as even rode no bull. The excitement was mounting. So the
cowboys lowers me down again. One old fella says You-Ain't-
Gotta-Do-This-Son. I say O-Yah-I-Do and well they drops
me on that muddy, bloody bull's back and I barely really gets
set when that goddang Spanish torro with the busted horn
about rips off my arm and we're out the chute in the ring
and I'm buckin and bouncin all of a sudden and feelin good-n-
kickt around. I hangs on there. I don't let go neither, never.

The beat up old black bull you see limping between
my legs? Why that's the same kicking-fucking bull
I are dropt on my ass on all those years agone.

And I'll never let go nor fall off ever, not now that I'm finally
really on there, a rough-n-tough real-live bull rider.

Like a board wacks you that bull
bolts from the chute

no time to change your mind.

One handed on the back of a Spanish bull rides I
like a dang gate does after it's tore off the fence.

The bull's broken horn will pierce my soft flesh forever
if I don't let go, like a splintered wood,

right where the horn gores you, and the crowd cheers and cheers.

After the Flood

2008-08-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

Smell Morning Fog in the Afternoon?

Cracked straw and cow manure? Withering bluff and prairie reveals horse-worn trails and deer tracks wandering again through weeds and wild flowers, briar fat with blackberries, lazy grasses bearded red, purple and flax. Still green goldenrod and thick burdock stems sticky with rosbuds ring windswept soybean lakes. Waves of brown-tipped corn and oats wash across contoured hillsides. Round bales, square bales, rakerows of pungent, cut alfalfa lie where clover grows plump as strawberries. Black-and-white cattle traipse dusty hardpan trails out to brown ponds bluer than the sky on an unseasonably cool August afternoon. Smell it? Might could use little rain.

Cucumber Rattler

2008-07-14T14:49:00.001-05:00

The Smell of Snake

"did you smell cucumbers?" she axed

No. The forest is wet and pungent with pine rust, oak and walnut musk, spice of rotten mandrake, and ginseng, and wild garlic ramps, parsnip, carrot

deer shat dogs's damp fur full of sticky cocoon burr bark and clayey sand my sweat,
and snakes smell

Airs Wave

2008-07-14T14:45:00.001-05:00

The Room She Dies In

has red palm trees.

She’s in the other

room / mother

her closet full of hanging

radios.

She’s quiet as a sleeping

dog is.

All the new houses

Outside, a park / singing

yellow birds.

Had Me O River

2008-06-30T09:12:00.004-05:00

Black Flies

Writing sometimes, making shit up instead, you know, confessing my ass off – carving-in-stone fiction so speak, instead casting off demons – why, take that whole paragraph sometimes, or half-page even, sometimes whole-page, flip't sidewise visualize landscapes or great metropolis made up out lines ending way they do there white sky edge the page.
Like poem does. Or list.
Blueprint. Pencil sketch. Not true.
Nothing true piece of paper. Nothing.
Not false though either. Because it’s thoughts. Innermost feelings. True ideas.
Only fictitious because’s really words on page your mind.
Crossed-out bunch wrong words hatched into whole city empty houses foundations built out rotten logs, truth like black flies; semicolon-people. All in your head, all those lives on page. All those rottin’ stories.
Nobody calls writers, actors liars. Or architects, painters. You believe’s truth, a bridge a building.
Because power the mind exist in parallel universes. One’s Truth. Other’s Not-Truth.
Take line like dumb-fuck doinks. Flip’t over once twice. Add squiggles, some Xes. Pretty soon, got goddamn blockbuster movie about smartass motherfucker, like my buddy Spider was. Gets shot up in fictional war-is-Hell movie some made-up place edge the page. Don’t die though. Comes home, so-called-home, so-called-fucking-home. Spends next year in-&-out the hospital thanking everybody for caring being so nice fixing his ass for coming home when they ought be took out fucking shot. Right the fucking face. Don’t need reason. Look them the fuck right the fucking eye say Thanks. KABLAM. Fucking liars. Black flies. True story.

Had Me O River © 2008 by Tom Driscoll

Winters Dogs

2008-03-18T07:55:00.002-05:00

WRITING

I put out the dogs
in the sun like they

are my children : too noisy inside.
They make more fresh tracks in snow

pretending that I'm watching them
out the backdoor until they look up, breathing

wetly from their rose noses, and see that I am gone
again, sitting alone with my feet in the oven, writing.

© 2008 by Tom Driscoll

Behind the tree

2008-03-17T13:35:00.003-05:00

Big Rock in Winter