The Seventeenth Day of May

Grow maples in me this grow-maple day;
I lie in the long chair and wait your coming.
Spin from branches heavy with fruit of leaves
My sudden seeds, my one-wings, turning, turning!

Leap in the wind that understands the life:
Land on on my leg and do not slide;
Catch in the ready furrows of my hair—I say
I have no pride.

For in me all the broad and murmuring branches
Wait but to hear it spoken.
The porch, the chair, the gutter will not take you.
But I am open.

Heads of life, stretched to the shape of flight,
Plunge to my upturned palm, and with good reason:
My earth, my rain, my sun, my shade will grow you.
Let your season bring me into season.

Margaret Rockwell Finch

May

Alley-ooped with snowmelt and spring,
you toss wet kindled wood aside.
Sweet twigs steam in the cool north
noon, as layered as the still, ice-thatched
ground. Now I see you, now I don't.
Moving through the trees, you heap
debris wild for dry summer
fires. Master of the sudden sprint-trick

and turn, sleek mime of stick-thrown-feints --
they're off! Both dogs suckered again.
Joy-gesturing-juggler, how I love
your arm's suspension as the dogs
thrash through thistle and cow parsnip
in pursuit of prey only they can sense.
Doug fir posts brace the deck's wide
recessed soffits. The sun hoists you.

Christianne Balk

It is deep autumn: My neigbour-
How does he live, I wonder?

Basho

Simply trust;
Do not the petals flutter down,
Just like this?

Issa

pausing
halfway up the stair--
white chrysanthemums

Elizabeth Searle Lamb

first light
everything in this room
was already here

Christopher Herold

High mountain night wind
Keeps me awake watching as
It tends our camp fire.

Don Salper

The taste
of rain
--Why kneel?

Jack Kerouac

moonlight--
through thin clothes
to naked skin

Hisajo Sugita

drawing light
from another world--
the Milky Way

Yatsuka Ishihara

a white lotus
the monk decides
to cut it!

Buson

old posts and old wire
holding wild grape vines holding
old posts and old wire

Robert Spiess

I brush
my mother's hair
the sparks

Peggy Willis Lyles

in the dark
where you undress
a blooming iris

Nobuko Katsura

the inner tide--
what moon does it follow?
I wait for a poem

Diane Di Prima

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood

***********************************
Dear Mom,

It is a pinecone
falling from a tree
on Mother's Day
for luck.

The pinecone travels in a river.

Love,
Micah

Souvenir

Though we vacationed in a castle, though I
rode you hard one morning to the hum
of bees that buggered lavender, and later
we shared gelato by a spotlit dome
where pigeons looped like coins from a parade--
we weren’t transported back to newlyweds.
We only had a week, between new jobs,
we both were pinched with guilt at leaving Claire.
When, in our most expensive, most romantic meal,
you laid your sunburned hand upon your heart,
it was just to check the phone was on.

When the trip was good as over--when the train
would take us overnight to Rome, the flight
would take us home--I had the unimportant
moment I keep having. I wonder if
we choose what we recall?
The train
was unromantic, smoky. We found a free
compartment, claimed the two bench seats, and eyed
the door. Italians who peered in and saw
your shoes, my auburn hair, our Let’s Go: Rome,
soon found another car. And we were glad.
But then, reluctantly, two couples entered,
settled suitcases on laddered racks,
exchanged some cautious greetings, chose their spots.
Then each one turned to snacks and magazines.
The miles scrolled by like film into its shell.
Night fell. Each took a toothbrush down the hall.
Returned. Murmured to the one he knew.
The man beside the window pulled the shade.
We each snapped off our light, slunk down until
our kneecaps almost brushed. And shut our eyes.

Entwined I found us, waking in the dark.
Our dozen interwoven knees, when jostled,
swayed, corrected, swayed the other way.
Knuckles of praying hands were what they seemed.
Or trees in old growth forests, familiarly
enmeshed, one mass beneath the night wind’s breath.
Or death, if we are good, flesh among flesh,
without self consciousness, for once.
Husband,
five years husband, you slept, our fellow travelers
slept, scuttling through black time and blacker space.
As we neared the lighted station, I closed my eyes.
Had I been caught awake, I would have moved.

Beth Ann Fennelly