Submission to Autumn Sky Poetry

The following poems have been submitted to a neat online journal, "Autumn Sky Poetry"; They contain minor revisions for those interested.


Your English Background

You, the land.
Razed and plowed,
deep furrows running through
where forest once stood.

And now, again,
second growth,
in scattered poles,
bracken, peat and bog,
high winds of highlands.

You bear the heft
of Sarsen,
dragged across the windy plain,
land shaped like blue stone,
bit by bit
until

having chipped away,
the edges no longer sharp
but shorn by patient hands,
you give witness,
watchman like,
ghastly Cerberus,
Avon, Lethe or Styx,
no matter:

You,
this foreign land.

Shaped by man,
reclaimed at last,
sprung
from your forever womb.

The Gift

I am everything

inside this box,

felt lined,

blood red.

Lacquered mahogany,

fancifully etched

by some careful hand

with images of swirling demons

beneath

a veil of mist.

You have the key,

but you dare not open the box.

You the disease,

You the cure.

Pandora,

I am what's inside.

But you can not look;

only cherish this box:

intricately carved,

polished, finished to a high gloss

that blood red hinting

at depths and depths.

You have the key;

you have the box.

I am inside--

patience.

You, the disease.

You, the cure.

Hope

is what's left behind.

Sylvia

Sylvia Plath,
I went in for Ariel,

but the copy in stock was hardcover, glossy,
and there next to it were your collected works,
1956-1963,
poems you’d written right up until that final cold February,
just days before my birthday,

that you stuck your head in the oven.

You were thirty. 
You had two children.
Your husband left you for another woman
because you couldn't fix yourself
and when she couldn't fix herself 
he didn't leave

but she went out
in a similar manner.

I try to calculate how may poems you wrote
between twenty six and thirty one
and how many I've written up to now,
and how they’d stack up.

I wonder at the backhanded compliments I’ve received over the years:
from Devon, “Chris could cook circles around you,
but he’s unreliable. I need someone I can count on.”

Ted Hughes said Sylvia never scrapped a poem once written.
She approached her writing with an artisan dedication--
if she couldn't make a table, she’d settle for a chair,
an ottoman, an end table. Sylvia Plath?

What does that leave me?
Poems like whittled spoons for stirring beans over camp fires?
Bent brass door handles fitted over the steel drum body of a bullet smoker?
Glued together mugs full of pencils and wooden beads,
an old triumph badge and bent safety pins?

I might as well stick my head in an oven at that rate.
Just to see, of course--they’re all electric anyway.

It’s my vanity that keeps me from the full go--
is there any dignified way?
Chicken legs at obscene angles, half in half out the oven door?
The crushing splay of rushing pavement and the gawking crowds?
The liquid evacuation following the kicked out chair?
The choking blue, the foaming mouth, the aspiration of vomit?

No, no, 
I won’t be convinced--
just stick to silly love poems,
free form literalism 
and call it a hobby.

Nevermind.
A drop in the ocean
with no room for more.

Sundries

The orchid on the table is dying;

shriveled leaves curling back into itself.

Someone could have changed the water,

but there were other things to attend to:

the dishes in the sink, for instance.

The hairball in the middle of the bedroom.

Visiting friends in the country,

and wondering at the lack of clutter in their homes:

"They have more space," I said.

and I meant it then, but now wonder.

We could have that space, if we wanted it.

but there is a pushing against,

and the space between

can not be filled.

Things are crowded out,

little things--

the pile of clothes at the foot of our bed,

the flower, curled and dry on the table.

Longing to be filled,

we push towards each other,

only to be repelled

by the space between.

The orchid on the table is dying.

who will take care of it this time?