The Witch Series

Witch’s Prayer

To wear a hat made of rain

to float like a little skiff

into the enveloping mist.

To be naked and fogbound,

to be cloud caressed

and chilled to the marrow.

To be invisible, wild

as a neutrino bouncing

across the emptiness,

blissfully small, to be

a blip, a phoneme,

O no, no O, O no name .

To see nothing, to take

nothing in for a change,

to move through

the blessing of blankness

all your cells drunk

on the smell of earth,

water, and air.

To feel yourself dissolving

into something vast

and sentient. Smoke

from a slow burning fire.

To let go of the world, this life,

for a few free moments,

face the clean white page,

and begin the story anew

So mote it, for me

so mote it be.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Summer 2008

  Sunflowers

Vincent understood them: the way they yield

their darkling faces to the sun,

aflame for its arcing shimmer dance

across the day’s mysterious expanse,

how big they are, how weighty, over grown,

the way they lean together in the fields,

conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan

as their heads reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.

He gathered them in vases, painted
their petaled fall from grace,

bunched together, shy, askew
and awkward, out of place,

caught their surprise at being indoors,
the droop and shrug of leaves,

the way they suddenly dropped,
losing all of their color.

Too painful to paint them
riotous at the roadside in full bloom:

signs of what we were before
the crows moved in to feed.

Tuesday Poem: previously appeared in The Syracuse Record in 2003

Ode to the Moon Snail

Unlikely predator!

In that gleaming whorled shell,

its spiraled white 

setting tide pools alight,

agleam. O dance.

O trance of hungry 

chalky nebula!

O languorous taster,

with full and flexible 
tongue extended 
in a sensual 

narrowing gyre.

O unsuspecting quahog

stuck in sea bed mire!

What salty tide is this 

that turns seduction fierce 

enough to mount and pierce 

such horny shell ?

How does such glistening 

undulant meat

harden into drill bit ?

Purity of clammy 
darkness, suddenly 
inhabited by two.

What's a clam to do?

Ravished by the moon itself.

O secret wooings!

Delicious liquefaction!