Purpose

This melds a quiet version of forward-looking science with an equally low-key mysticism. I am a staunch Scientist, with a capital S. A friend of mine in Kentucky who owned a crystal shop once set a configuration of stones in the waters of a stream. The idea was that their effect would reach me months later, when I planned a vacation, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. Everything else is plain.

For the ballgame

William Carlos Williams' poem about the baseball game got under my skin, and I wrote this rejoiner. It seemed that Williams was being slightly hypocritical in criticizing baseball, and I tried to point that out with his own poetic images. Both Eberhart and Jarrell fought in WWII, but wouldn't have shot each other. I am not glorifying war, just taking Williams' own criticism to the extreme.

Eohippus

The images are from Earth First! but who the victim is is deliberately ambiguous. The name, meaning "early horse", was chosen for its connotations with old Earth (Eos) and fossils and decay, and the Trojan horse image--what is good and what is bad is difficult to discern until events of the future have played out, even in minor events with minor characters.

True Science

A marvelous theory can temporarily blind oneself so that the true majesty of ideas is hidden from view.

On my child burning herself

Turning from horrible anguish to contemplate the teleology of the Universe, we take solace in assigning reason, purpose. The "survival of the odds" is a flip version of Stephen Jay Gould's version of natural selection, where survival is not of the fittest but of the species that were in the right place at the right time. Whatever that means.

One Key

This blasphemy mixes strong parental love with a discussion of abortion, then makes it clear that the "child" is an idea. The "one key" is the delete key on a computer, but only represents the ease with which modern ideas are developed and dismissed. Dispense with a book, without thinking? Sure!

For shun

This was supposed to be chaos, madness, despair, in a box. The question is, does the box cause despair, or is chaos so ordered, outside looking in?

untitled

That was fun. This joined pieces of various conversations that I had overheard over the years.

Pre lude

Yikes. A T.S.Eliot parody from within a drug haze.

The Tree of Life

This is a sonnet, extolling "my disdain for the machinations and basic misanthropy of all government." Also, that "nations or political structures are innately suicidal." Damn puns. Here: "FUCK YOU YOUR HARDBOUND SOCIETY, forgive me my paperback collected works of, but that's the wastebas-cold-kut person that I am."

Cadence in Victory Writing

Some things have to be repeated.

time moves too fast

I've rewritten this a hundred times, and it always comes out the same.

fellow honky

This is not guilt. This is, maybe, decency.

Pococurantheism

Huh?

20 years

Our anniversary of our first kiss, a day late. We ate at Il Palio, salmon and filet and tiramisu. We listened to a soft lecture on estrogen replacement—my thoughts were of my mother's fears, my brother's cancer, my father's bridge. And my own mortality. What am I doing on the Internet? I am learning to not make mistakes. Is that possible? Regardless, it is imperative. The only way to present my case is blameless. That basic ambiguity is the basis of this poem. Everything in it, every thought, even every pronunciation or stress, is ambiguous. Life is like that. S. was so confident tonight, and I was relaxed to be with her. This is not the old shoe stage of love, not yet, definitely, but sometimes one needs a bit of solace.

In Wyoming

I woke up yesterday with this. It's a traditional rhyme scheme, but offset some. "Loose" in other words. I lied about the age, but I'd been considering my grandfather, and the sights he'd seen over his lifetime. There are many gruesome things, if we bid them. There is the ethereal skydive, followed by the hard landing in some other time and place.

fifty

This started with one line, thinking that we've been married a long time. But it evolved into a poem for Ben's birthday. It reflected on the current age's lack of conflict, in this country. Ironically, it was almost exactly one year before 9/11. I tried to make a case that we sometimes manufactured our enemies--but I was speaking of the "this is war" posturing by those who were opposing Japan economically.

On Orion

I woke up, thinking about John Jaeger, and wrote half of it in my head. I originally called it just On Jaeger, but I changed it to On Orion for the obvious link to astronomy (and, to astrology, for his wife Donna) and that Orion is the Hunter, and Jaeger is hunter, in German.

Knowing Otherwise

I wrote this in the car, mostly, on the way to pick up Shan and Ally, trying to express my feeling of contentment. I hope Felix Dennis--the owner of Maxim who has been barnstorming the world trying to "save" poetry--reads it someday. It has rhyme without being direct, and alliteration. Structure, too. And, of course, 14 lines.

A Twinkie's Credo

This was from the BABB, one of milli's poems. Twinkie is the Bad Astronomer's word, for the brightly gullible and starcrossed.

gloria mundi

A cat poem, inspired by the Bever's Gloriosa Rosa, animamorphizing Truth and my Tongue.

©1996-2004 Deneb Curiosa