Poems by Gene Frumkin
    
         

The Perfection of Summer Thundershowers

Every afternoon around 4 o’clock the leaves discover a wind
behind the wind a thunderhead emerges from its hiding-place
The rain pellets the heat’s thick plate
                                                                      Afterward, an hour at most
                                         a few puddles have grown
                                         blue green gold and red
                                                    in a few rutty beds
                                                    in alleys       on the streets
                                                              in craters of grass
                The heat surrounds the puddles
     they form concentric cycles                           
                                                
          

                                                           You as a man within your shelter
watched the preparation for the rain then the rain itself
For a brief time
                             while it rained
                                                               you were happy
The world you live in had changed for the better
                                                                                        You, a critical man
                                                             had been the rain
                                            as you had been the heat

                               The rain was perfect and you had lived perfectly
since nothing could have been preferred
                                                                              to the rain
                                           As a critical man
                                                                    at the height of the downpour

(though still a nameless well-concealed lodger)
                                                                                       a flaw
had already found a warm spot in your heart

                                                 Not that the rain would stop
                                    but that it was perfect

The Moth

As Your hand holds the feverish moth
          what glow of energy compels its wings to strike
                       with all their strength
          out of their darkness

The Amazon          a drop of sweat on Your brow
                         oceans trickle through
                                                 Your fingers as You refresh Yourself
                         in the morning of every millennium    

           
                         Our planet is a blue apple
                in Your orchard        The zephyrs roam through space
                                       gently shaking the stars
                                               that are all plums and apricots 
             

                              Your hand releases its captive
the moth flies freely toward its own enlightenment
                                                                     and its own good night

These words are my first to love Your absence Goed
and I shall never diminish You with praise again
                                                               You Who are perfect
                                                         Who have opened Your hand
                                        and allowed all the power there is
                                                                                               to lose itself
                                                         among Earth’s creatures
                     we who still           foolishly
                                                          cluster about its radiance

               
           
         

Dawn Vision: Hot & Cool
        

                                                                         A few bones
                                                             a few stones
                   Rio Grande dry again
            avenue of mud through the middle of Albuquerque
                                 sky immured
                                                           in its rented cradle
An Indian has opened his Mexican eyes            it is morning
                                                                               a green vehicle drifts
              in the distance        in dilatory passage via a frontage road
                    Burnt-out wind
                                                           a few bones
                                                   a few stones
The mind is an anvil the blows are heavy    
                                                               Black Indian bronze Jew
                                                                                   no others will do
Four years rocking to and fro across the dead duke’s city
                                                          and still the deep maroon chiles
                                         dangling in clusters by doorways
               are creatures of a song
                                                         whose seeds are bitter
                                                                                                  are strong
               Slag-black earth
                                             the orchards are few
               The mind is a fragment of desert
where all detritus is baked anew
                            Always the Jew’s Mosaic daydream in a clay or stone
                                  the blue-skinned messenger is on his way

(from The Old Man Who Swam Away and Left Only
His Wet Feet, by Gene Frumkin, La Alameda Press, 1998)

Prose Poems by Charles Goodrich

Seven Sorties on the Garden

1.  Calico

     Sixteen years old and crippled with arthritis, her cloudy eyes leaked fluid.  She couldn’t have weighed more than a half gallon of milk.  We talked about putting her down, but if you scratched her behind the ear, she would purr until she couldn’t catch a breath.  And she’d still hobble over to the dish for her kibbles.

     This morning, I found her on her pillow, cold and empty, lighter than a bird.  My wife wrapped her in a scrap of wool tartan, and I went to dig a grave between the lilacs.  My first shovel of earth came up full of new potatoes, the size of eggs.

     I know nothing about the transmigration of souls, but I made potato salad for supper; and we talked about what kind of bird a cat might become.
      

2.  Drip

     The nurse swabs antiseptic on my knee.  It smells like spinach with lime.  My stomach rumbles.  “Hungry are we?” she asks.  I can’t see her mouth behind the mask, so I stare right into her eyes, and she stares back.

     The first time they reamed out this knee, I watched it live on the video screen.  The bone was whiter than teeth.  There was hardly any blood.  The surgeon told us his favorite marinade for grilled snapper–lemon, paprika, and ginger–while his tiny pneumatic scissors trimmed my meniscus.

     Now the anesthesiologist slides an IV needle into my arm.  “What’ll it be this time–the epidural or the full monte?”  Suddenly I remember–I left the drip irrigation running in the garden.  Shit.  Too late to call home.  If the potatoes get scab, I’ll kick myself.
                 

3.  Crow

     Still thinking about that crow I saw flying over the park this morning.  He kept stalling in mid-flight and falling a couple of feet before he’d flap his wings and fly again.  And he was crying out, over and over, in a wretched, faltering voice.

     You know those crow calls–the grouchy command, the simpering whine, the gargle, the shout?  Well, this was different, full of heartbreak or woe.  If he were my friend, I’d be worried about him.
             

4.  Ground Zero

     After a friend phones to tell me–Two planes, she says, right into the Towers–I go straight to the garden.  Harvest, I tell myself.  Harvest, and clean up, and sow a cover crop.  In the corn patch only a few sad ears remain.  I yank them off, then chop the stalks and dump them in the compost bins.  Where the lemon cucumbers have sprawled between the corn rows, I find overgrown fruits, hard and dark.  I lob them toward the bins, feeling a twinge of satisfaction when I hear one hit a post and burst open.

     I tug too hard at the carrot-tops and they tear off, so I dig the carrots out with the spading fork.  Carrots sprawl in the dirt like startled fish.  I pull up two rows of bush beans and knock the earth from their roots.  Dry seeds rattle in the overgrown pods.  I strip one open with my thumb, and stuff a few black seeds in my pocket.

     The lettuce plants have all bolted.  I rip off a leaf of romaine and the stem oozes milky fluid.  I take a bite–it’s terribly bitter.  I eat it, then another.  Suddenly weary, I wash the tools and put them away, brush the leaf-mold from the my jeans.  I’ve skinned a knuckle somehow.  As I suck at the dirt and blood, a squadron of crows–seven or eight of them–drop into the garden to scavenge what’s left.
             

5.  Truck Garden

     My first wife and I rented a little bungalow in the center of town.  We were young.  Our furniture was nothing but apple crates.

     The backyard butted up to a Ford dealer.  There was a wall of new pickup trucks at the end of our garden.  We planted everything we could dream of, even rutabagas.  She had sweet peas climbing the downspouts; I grew peanuts in buckets on the back porch.  She brought home two kittens, Basil and Sage, but they both died and we buried them under the juniper.

     Before anything was ripe, the Ford guy bought the place, evicted us, bulldozed the house, and paved the yard.  Thirty years later, I still think of those cats buried under that asphalt. And who knows what else.
         

6.  Small Engines

     They have carried my neighbor’s tilt-up bed into the living room so he can watch the outside world go by.  A couple of the grandkids have planted a pressure-treated 4 x 4 in the front yard, mounted a new birdfeeder, and filled it with sunflower seeds and millet.

     Twenty years we’ve lived next door to one another.  Have we ever once talked about birds?  Only the weather, or sometimes the inner workings of small engines.

     The hospice lady has just left.  Chickadees flock to the new feeder.  I can see my old friend gazing out his window.  I’ve known him so little, hardly at all.  How very strange to be here now, in our separate lives, watching the same birds.
                

7.  Wild Geese

     I’m picking beans when the geese fly over, Blue Lake pole beans I figure to blanch and freeze.  Maybe pickle some dilly beans.  And there will be more beans to give to the neighbors, forcibly if necessary.

     The geese come over so low I can hear their wings creak.  I can see their tail feathers making fine adjustments.  They slip-stream along so gracefully, riding on each other’s wind, surfing the sky.  Maybe after the harvest I’ll head south.  Somebody told me Puerto Vallarta is nice. I’d be happy with a cheap room.  Rice and beans for every meal.  Swim a little, lay on the beach.

     Who are you kidding, Charles?  You don’t like to leave home in the winter.  Spring, fall, or summer either.  True.  but I do love to watch those wild geese fly over, feel those impertinent desires glide through me.  Then get back to work.

(from Northwest Review, permission of Charles Goodrich, 2007)