Archive for the ‘Prose Poems’ Category
Poems by Frumkin and Prose Poems by Goodrich
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
Kalamaras, Smith, Bly, Orr, Sheffield, and Raphael
Online Prose Poem – Robert Bly
The Dead Seal
1
Walking north along the point, I find a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh: My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.
His head is arched back, the small eyes closed; the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at its edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal’s skin looks like an old over coat, scratched here and there — by sharp mussel shells maybe.
I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries: Awaark! Awaark! Awaark! — like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me, I am terrified and leap back, though I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like and old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.
McLagan, Sheffield, Howell, Bly, and Faulkner
Poems by Elizabeth McLagan
A Feather Falls from the Wing
of Light
Today, someone has left like a letter
addressed to a white forest which goes on
trailing its blue sleepless shadows. Snow
lips, snow eyes, snow pillows. Like ripples
on an overcast ocean, belts of fog
above a blue core. What is it to lie down
in sleep and lie down again into the sleep
of death? Is there a dream to usher
the spirit across – a white hand stretched out?
Once, I lay down in snow, flakes striking
the tent like sparks or hard rain, except
it was lightest powder falling all night
into the bowl of the lake. Was your death
such a night, warm and unmeasured?
A snowshoe hare passed by, ghost moons
drifted into the lungs of trees. Like needles
falling, like scratches on a glass plate. The light
went ashy. The ink glittered before it dried.
(from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2,
Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award Winner 2006)
