BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW
More Poems Previously Published
Encounters in the Forest
by Marvin R. Hiemstra (San Francisco)
1.
Strolling through the bristle-cone pines,
I am delighted to find a boulder:
size of a haystack gently lowered
from a wandering glacier to play
the role off a miniature mountain.
Even I can scramble to the boulder top
and stretch out in the sun. That boulder's
my brother: we were born under
the same star. I adore him. Brother
boulder thinks I'm something else.
2.
"Mushrooms like to hide, but they
can't run!" advises a mushroom hunter.
I like mushrooms in situ. If you say
"Good Morning," a mushroom will
charm you with a song so ancient
only your eyebrows will applaud.
If you sneak up on a mushroom,
what you hear you'll never forget,
never tell another, never write
down on the bones of a poem.
Brown Turkeys"Brown Turkeys," a type of fig suited to California's Mediterranean climate.
by Val Morehouse (Concord)
A harvest of pickers has come and gone.
Caramel, burnt sugar and leaf crush scent the breeze
calling in prospectors to pan each leaf for the
last nuggets of summer.
Onyx figs hang like castanets from the trees.
Beneath, the sunlit grove is strung with bell-like bodies,
and bird feet rattle silence like tambourines.
Wild turkey hens circle in veils of grass and leaves,
stamping ground, necks bending and thrusting, wings thrumming,
black-clad flamenco dancers seeking their own silhouettes,
like the spring flowers tucked under each violet skin
rough yet tender as a first kiss.
With feathers black and purple bleeding stems of green,
their dark King fans his iridescent tail to flash the last amber
eye of summer and theirs. But they ignore him.
Relentless, they unearth the jewel beneath the chocolate,
shatter each garnet pulp to the sweet strum of
insects and the whisper of green leafy hands,
singing with unexpected poetry.
Only then is the harvest complete.
The Spanish Mastersby Scott Caputo (Santa Clara)
The Spanish masters knew light,
the way it drapes over the exposed torso
sagging with wrinkles.
The raised hand is illuminated in a copper air
washing over the face pulled into itself
as a hermit deep in a cave of muddy orange.
Even in death, the body of Jesus
radiates white
snatching the gaze of the man
hoping to remain unobserved in shadows.
The last thoughts of martyrs are held still
as the sheep grazing the dark edges
around the rays of heavenly visions.
That place we once knew is lit again
with a disturbing bronze
that speaks of the absence
of other figures to share in this warmth
that permeates even the heaviest blacks.
The last painting seen
is the last candle before sleep,
every figure brushed with hues of forgetting:
the eyes of the beggar,
the yearning of the woman at the river--
all is hidden again
inside the tolling bell towers of the mind.
White Bean Soup
by Jan Dederick (El Cerrito)
One pound small white navy beans
Like the ones mom would bake up
With a hambone celery onions carrots
A dash of molasses in heavy brown crock
For 4 hours before 4th of July picnic
All signs of whiteness a rumor by then,
No sign of sailors at all by then
One pound small white navy beans
approximately
eleven hundred seventy seven
giggle as they tumble into pressure cooker.
Not that they like Rumi's chickpeas
aspire to enlightenment by boiling,
but because they'd snuck by the quality-control
people
one lone kidney bean
who brings to our winter soup
the slightest blush of pink
Languid for Bees
by Jane Green (Mill Valley)
a rumor buzzes bees are gone,
or at least diminished
in numbers.
they swarm daily in and out
bottle brush, cannas
and oleanders.
fears too soon
made known
trammel.
enduring blooms
go about
numb on their own.
i shelter mine
as best i can.
even get stung.
