Category: Waxing Poetic

Lent

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

Sometimes this picture confuses,

like syrup on a cigarette,

oil on the windshield.

The un-formed flock of geese

flying north against

a summer wind.

__

Sometimes this picture is untrue,

the slice of 3.15 pi,

the lace motorcycle chain,

pedophile laughter.

When whiskey is a

throat’s single yearning.

__

Sometimes this picture is out of tune,

like salt on apples,

the executioner bathing

before work,

a fork for the soup.

The glass breaks before

it’s blown, shattered before

it’s shaped.

__

Sometimes this picture is blinding,

the symphony to the deaf,

sunlight to the blind,

a lover’s touch to the dead.

The ground spitting back

her saints, so deeply planted.

__

Sometimes this picture is.

When the choir is one of many in one,

and the gathering day actually

believes another will follow.

There is a louder sunset to come,

a brighter song held lightly under

the tongue of an eager morning,

when there is no smell where

death should be.

When runs the time

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

For my wife on Valentine’s Day (insert goofy emoticon here_______).

 

 

 

 

 

Something indefinite defines you whenever the sun shivers. 

It speaks in whispers, whittling down uptown talk to you and me.

Leave the world alone I say, with its backdraft of naysayers,

too pale to know they are shadows.

Sometimes it’s okay to let the clock shrug off its own anxieties –

it disarms the passing minutes while the sky changes.

 The breeze pins hair to cheek and, with collars turned up,

we become convinced of our own slow presence.

Let’s just lisp whatever poetry stumbles out of our footsteps,

finding their rhythm on this uneven road.

Love is like

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Like a head, severed and featureless,

are those times too far from your scent.

 

Like limbs reattached, sutured to the blood,

is your silhouette in the doorway.

 

Like the dream after the waking,

is the smile of your skin.

 

Like the hours of insistence, drenched in purple,

is the declaration of your place.

 

Like a fish, drowning and drunk on its own world,

is the yes at the end of your fingers.

 

Like a poor man’s breakfast, waiting and ravished

is the moistness of your remembrance.

 

Like secrets in a barrel, floating high up to grasp,

is the welcome in your eyes.

 

Like turns in the park, the yielded path unknowing,

is the sound of our falling steps, together, sighing. 

For Rae, my wife of nearly 27 years.

Good from regret

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

There was always enough time to dodge and weave among the silences where words hid themselves under innuendo  It was a metaphor for communion drank from empty cups with stale bread crumbs  Teeth never chatter in the heat of tall clear days except when one hasnt looked up yet to notice  A thirteen year olds wishbone summer is no match for the real world It chants and whirls itself into rock star memories where pretend gets truer in the telling   I guess one could say she should have known better  All the signs said the same thing with different words  So many taps on the shoulder whispers in the ear the kind you feel the need to silence with voices louder still   But once water gets poured into the brown earth the satiated ground is loathe to give it up  That is until heat and time force it back out bringing with it the green goodness of even better stories

Become

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

BecomeIn those moments most resigned

to their own solemnity, another’s lips

sip the freeing drafts of good, and are

once again wetted with a taste of new days.

I won’t just topple from this

tower of precarious teetering

when someone else is waiting

to drink what remains of

cold and distant promises.

Instead, you scope out my limits

and find them insufficient

to hold all that has yet to come. Trickle

becomes flow

becomes gush.

And I become.

 

From the poet’s ready pen

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always words2 Comments

poet's pen

From the poet’s ready pen comes the

yawning stillness, leaking out

from linen thoughts, stretched

tight upon the hungry loom.

How dear these words come, dear soul,

trading green for our grey. 

Like the pastiche of a late morning sigh,

our tough and torrid skin oft forbids

your trim veracity, always enough

to root it all in the insufferable lightness of song.

 

Tease out the rising tides,

their turning waves run amok.

Oh ready writer, graft our branch to seed,

your root to leaf and banish

all the rotted soil to its brown eternity.

 

Winnow out from worn whimsy,

with your willow-throated pen, our

long-faded hope. You set about

your task, anonymous to none but 

the unseeing ears of deaf brutes.

 

Letters, cast adrift to their watercolor

harbors, dive down, down,

down from brushes, pinched

tight in fingers that point

with precision to everything that eludes.

Paint wide the foraging colors of

dimpling fragments of forest, new.

Tease out our trembling days, and release 

what hides itself in the obvious.

 

Advent

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

SONY DSC

The day before the days

before winter’s satin gloss,

driftwood glimpses neatly hide away in

a gathering pageantry.

 

Tightly tucked in folds

of ancient wind with pockets out-

turned, falls the Fall,

fallen…and begins a new tale.

 

Heaven’s sudden smile, casts

a long and shattering light

on the darkening days –

bringing the iron-gilded hope

 

of dawn’s new Dawn.

_________________________

Picture found here

Enough?

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Bequeathed to me are quill and quine,

a thousand hillsides’ worth.

No greater gesture could, for mine,

elicit thanks, henceforth.

 

So stiff the hand to wrench and grab

so stunted, feet, to trudge;

the weary eye’d think all life drab,

one’s paradisal grudge.

 

When hope is stirred, not wit or whim,

a fire, too, is stirred.

‘Tis then the soul her nurture finds,

ahunger’d less for food than word.

For Emily Dickinson

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

 search

 

 

“Hope is the thing,” she said,

that one thing most real for one who looks.

Her lips, so full in Heaven’s unmeasured smile,

speak outward still to a land more rich for the kiss.

 

“He ate and drank the precious words,” she intones –

a wiser breath slicing through the caustic

din of monoxidic madness. Someone sees

what, in its dim appearing, shows itself bright.

 

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,” we hear

her moan, the pained and paining alike her cast.

Though hell would be her suitor, more suited

to Heaven the language of this child.

 

Let us then lean into the dawning day, delight

our closest friend and, as she might urge us,

look East where all is birthing and good is free.

For “none can avoid this purple.”

 

Image found here