Fragment Friday - Five Poems for May

Spring and green grass to roll in!

The Fox Bead in May

By Hannah Sanghee Park

The kiss is, strictly speaking, a passing

of of   twice: a bead from her mouth to his,

then back, ad nauseam, and the boys who lived

and died for it. The lovely girl amassing

ninety-nine spirits, and in high spirits

for consuming her highest amount. Once

the hundredth boy arrived she starts her hunt

in her haunt, a hill’s field filled with fitting

Artemisia absinthium.

And every day they kissed to swap the bead

and for a month he waned and wans

and when he learned the truth about her tongue,

he downed the bead: her true form a nine-tailed

fox who could have turned human, had he kissed on.

The Logic of Spring

By Alexandria Peary

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring,

        a mechanical drawing of a tree 

that I've passed a 100 times

         on my way to a different problem. 

I glance backwards, and the stack of the day

multiplies, glancing backwards several times, 

the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning

        and the logic of spring. 

Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots

        that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree

with words in gold italic latin)

        from the fog pumped in by the machine

set on my lawn. First thing in the morning,

(page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink)

         I part the buttery curtains

to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the

         hibiscus twig 

that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray

         smudges and still intact line breaks

with flashing pink splashes— 

outside my house while I slept.

Seems unbearably cruel until

I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions. 

Are you so easily distracted

         by pieces of a poem 

attached to a tree?

         in which as the situation changes

you catch glimpses of yourself 

         a series of emoticons.

May

By Karen Volkman

In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning

the old saw wind repeats a colder thing.

 

Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen.

Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might.

 

Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex.

What do you think you’re grabbing

 

with those gray hands? What do you think

you’re hunting, cat-mouth creeling

 

in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat

in the butcher’s tender grip, white as

 

the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on.

In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings

 

you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes,

you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone

 

and hum scald need where the body says I am

and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying

 

in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.

 

Karen Volkman, “May” from Spar. Copyright © 2002 by Karen Volkman. Reprinted by permission of University of Iowa Press. Source: Spar (University of Iowa Press, 2002)

Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen

By Lew Welch

All these years I overlooked them in the

racket of the rest, this

symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding

on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air —

tiny acid-factories dissolving

salt from living rocks and

eating them.

 

Here they are, blooming!

Trail rock, talus and scree, all dusted with it:

rust, ivory, brilliant yellow-green, and 

cliffs like murals!

Huge panels streaked and patched, quietly

with shooting-stars and lupine at the base.

 

Closer, with the glass, a city of cups!

Clumps of mushrooms and where do the

plants begin? Why are they doing this?

In this big sky and all around me peaks &

the melting glaciers, why am I made to

kneel and peer at Tiny?

 

These are the stamps of the final envelope.

 

How can the poisons reach them?

In such thin air, how can they care for the

loss of a million breaths?

What, possibly, could make their ground more bare?

 

Let it all die.

 

The hushed globe will wait and wait for

what is now so small and slow to

open it again.

 

As now, indeed, it opens it again, this

scentless velvet,

crumbler-of-the-rocks,

 

this Lichen!

 

Lew Welch, “[I Saw Myself]” from Ring of Bone: Collected Poems of Lew Welch. Copyright © 2012 by Lew Welch. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

Source: Ring of Bone: Collected Poems of Lew Welch (City Lights Books, 2012)

The Burning Kite

By Ouyang Jianghe 

Translated by Austin Woerner

 

 

What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.

But to rise on air does not make you a bird.

I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.

It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke.

The things we puke: flights of stairs,

a skyscraper soaring from the gut,

the bills blow by on the April breeze

followed by flurries of razor blades in May.

It’s true, a free life is made of words.

You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,

or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining

a permanent address in the sky.

The postman hands you your flight of birds

persisting in the original shape of wind.

Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V

or printed and plastered on every wall

or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire

or sentenced to death by fire

you are, first

and always, ash.

Broken wire, a hurricane at each end.

Fire trucks scream across the earth.

But this blaze is a thing of the air.

Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away.

Few know this kind of dizzy glee:

an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.