John Cole: Poems

Poems

Numbers

(for Wendy)

Today a stranger sent me a video

of nine hundred grunge guitarists pogo jumping

to Smells Like Teen Spirit, and three hundred drones

dropped pigs’ feet and rice to students who will eat alone

in Shenzhen. Did you know that there are only

seven fluent speakers of Heiltsuk on the B.C. coast,

and thirty million yen worth of magnetic eyeliner

sold in Tokyo this year? Joshua counted three,

not four bees in the garden the other day and reminded me

there were over one hundred seventeen kids

that did worse than him on the math exam.

Tesla tumbled fifteen percent shedding twelve point five billion,

and nine hundred and thirty Chinstrap penguins

on Heard Island will soon feel the heat of Trump’s tariffs.

Jeremy says he has only six socks left

and according to this graph, if I live to eighty-five

I have seven hundred fifty-seven million, three hundred

eighty-two thousand, four hundred seconds to live

(using leap year average) of which I have devoted

five thousand thirty-two to write this poem

Pages

Silent for the most part

holding their breath between turns

then clearing their throats in soft

coughs, usually alone but sometimes

sounding with others, each turn

the same left-hand gesture: thumb scraping

curled edge, index finger pushing down

the page, a double sound

I didn’t notice until

I started attending to this paper music,

this delicate symphony of friction

whispering through the library.

This is not an arabesque

Not a song to someone.

Not a gift, a gargoyle or a gallant romp

in regal finery through Flanders Fields.

Not that single malt to be sipped and savored.

Nor a tonic, a tease, or my raison d’être.

Nor a bet

with the Devil, a bone for the dog, a prayer

for peace, or my Für Elise.

Not something to send in a bottle in the vain hope

that over the space of its journey through the ocean of oblivion

it might just manage to catch the eye

of the girl with the flaxen hair

who will roll it out under the soft light of her desk lamp

to savor this hymn to hush the night.

No.

It’s just a poem.

Tips For Budding Poets: No. 7

Don’t expect your readers to reach out to you.

Offer your poems as gifts to the world.

Release them to the wind or sea

Tie them to the legs of storks, greasy barstools

or vintage clawfoot lamps.

Wedge them under moss-wrapped boulders

in Japanese gardens, or let the tides

slide your syntax over seaweed and sun-kissed sand.

Try singing them softly to sympathetic birds

who will spread your message to distant lands.

Affix them to cold white walls in corporate

boardrooms or to ceilings of cemetery columbaria.

Hang your tropes and strophes from disco balls

and chandeliers in has-been hotel halls.

If you can slide a sestina through the eye of a needle

or into the hands of the poor, you are up to gifting

a ghazal to lodging home carpet cleaning staff.

Softly, without pushing, offer your chapbook

to taxi drivers, clowns and radiologists.

Pass a parody to a prima donna, and if pressed,

drop your dithyrambs into her well as quietly

as possible until you tire. If you are feeling sneaky

slip a sonnet into the back pocket of a tourist

you have tailed in a treasure hunt.

If all else fails, squeeze your haikus into balls

and throw them over the edge.

Bones

Your boyish skin

has finally given in

to your restless bones’ demands.

Even the knuckles are on the attack

whining for a little slack.

Bones are stubborn,

will not bend.

They spread about the body, distend

without consulting the soft bits

which puts proportions

out of whack.

Clack, crack, clack, your gangly stilts

can barely bear your height.

Balance is off

and your upper half

has yet to catch up to the legs

that just don’t step

right.

Obstinate, crafty bones!

You’ve been crawling under his skin

for weeks.

He just can’t keep

still

The bones are bulging at the knee

How odd his frame’s

topography.

My little boy

who’s leaving me.

Omoshi

You will find it dozing on the third shelf

of the rust ridden dilapidated shed

under a clot of oily rags.

Wrench it loose.

Feel its heft in your hand.

Nothing you have held of equal size

is as heavy as this timeworn clump of iron.

Wrench your boys from the weightless world

of the screens to share

a moment in the rain drenched garden air.

Toss it to them

and see if they do not catch it with

a flash of joy in their eyes.

(An Omoshi is a Japanese weight, usually stone or iron, that was used to hold down lids over fermented foods)

Something

Something in the way you break my eggs

and lock your little jam jars.

You burn and scrape my toast like no other lover.

Something in the way you run your fingers

down the length of my tie.

Something in the hiss of your iron,

the snap of fresh sheets,

the borax bite,

the choo-choo scrub of the ring in the tub.

Something in the way you wear your garden gloves

and the tinkle of the trowels that hang from your hips

and the way you purse your lips

when you spray the daffodils.

No woman can gargle like you

or sniff and clear their throat with such panache.

Something in the way you move

the rugs

and rub the corner of your eye

before you go to sleep.

I Want This Poem to Sound Like Andy Warhol's Shoes

Cute as a pie crust.

Lazy as these pens I can’t throw away.

As light as this day

hiding from night

Quick as a bell.

Shy as a hallmark hug.

As supple and smug as this earlobe I tug.

I want this poem to sound like Andy’s Warhol’s shoes.

Soft as a star.

Quiet as a buttonhole.

Gay as her pink cloud of candy floss fluttering

in the breeze.

Burial

Thirty-six swipes

to turn off the alerts.

Thirteen minutes to delete the apps.

Forty-seven stabs at the ground

to dig the hole.

Twenty-three hefts and stomps

to pack and tamp the soil.

Five hours of battery life.

Three hundred and twenty-three

unanswered calls.

Tadpoles

Approach them gently

for they can sense your presence

and hear your silent movements

through their skin.

Sneak the tin below them.

Don’t rush.

Your sister will teach you the trick –

how to pull the net through

the rice stalks

without breaking the surface

or stirring the silt.

If you are lucky you can coax one

into the hollow of your cupped hands

and feel it brush against your palm.

Ode to My Post-its

There must be over ten thousand of them now

jutting from the backs of my books,

each colored flag vying for reinspection.

The one hundred and four that adorn the fore-edge

of The Essential Neruda are performing magic today

like Seuret’s dots morphing into wisps of cloud cover

at Port-en-Bessin. I run my fingers over the prickly

plastic tufts to test their tenacity, each still stuck

to those words I have yet to revisit.

Left to the whims of others after my death

I worry you will wither and fall from your leaves,

your glue turned to dust, your colors faded.

Oh, that my grandchildren tasked with the job

of pulling you out might pause to ponder my obsessions,

perhaps even work together to lick the riddle

of the color coding – red for a slant rhyme, green

for spondees, yellow for anaphora, blue

for amphibrachs.

How Odd That Daring Dash

Seven of them floating in a five-line poem.

A little bit fanatical,

being ungrammatical.

By such audacity you engage

our curiosity.

Some called it a substitute for the devil –

Why the period had to die

is a riddle we can’t solve.

Nor need we bother. For we do sense

that cessation serves to

arouse our pleasure and imagination

drawing attention to the life

you lived through; your caesura,

retained for posterity in lead,

traced on paper, the weight

of your hand revealing such intimacy.

One has to wonder what is lost

in print, dash lengths analyzed

by the scholars who standardized

those mysterious marks.

How odd that the daring dance of your dashes

through its cryptic will, moves us still

teetering and tottering

robbing time its ebb, and through its flow –

we hear your spirit sing.

Tears

Tears are time’s troubles

set in liquid salt.

Hold them in the eye

or let them burst the dykes

and die.

Scavengers

Fellow scavenger with the soggy fry

dangling from your beak;

You are luckier than me today.

All I have to show

for an hour of rummaging

through the thesaurus is entreat,

a listless simile

I cannot eat.

A Norman Rockwell Morning

Waved with a smile to the postman

Even got a nod from the brittle woman walking that yappy dog

My little garden bugs basking in sun of bird blue sky, satiated

Reclining on lacy half-eaten leaves, soft breeze caressing

Tiny legs and eggs of littler ones to come

My legs limber too, stretched and warm

Lungs alert champing at bit for early morning mountain air

Happily shared with all in this wondrous world in fall

Trailblaziing

I slowly traced the great network of interlacing trails

You made with your hands through the sand

On your knees in the park

Your last kingdom

This raw play of imagination

Moving your body through endless space

Now that the screens have claimed your attention

I miss cleaning the dirt from your knees

Smelling the fresh grass stains

And wonder what is lost in this forging of new trails

Through vast electronic fields

With you, immobile, staring into flat space

I've heard the cyber prophets say

Bodily play is falling away

With ever more to explore far from where we are

I’ll remember your face, utterly absorbed

Fulfilling innate earthly desire

Trailblazing

My garden creatures

hobble

tipsy towards heat ripened fruit

to copulate.

Their limber legged couplings

at dusk

dazzle the children

who arrogate

dominion over this compost kingdom

like little Roman emperors,

decreeing to each and every bug

its pleasure,

its fate.

Butterfly

I catch a glimpse of you at dusk

joggling the bamboo fronds

bumping bravely

into things that are not there

reminding me of the fate

of the poor words in my poems

netted, pressed and pinned

in end rhyme for display,

hoodwinked by the rules

I forced them to obey.

Love letter to my youth

To the sandbox by the curly slide

Pogo, Pooh and Madeline

To deviled eggs and Ovaltine

To life before the cash machine

To late-night swings and all the things

I wasn’t meant to see

To weepy Hummel figurines

Christmas tarts and tangerines

And the tang of snowflakes on our tongues

To the thrill of opening the flaps

Of the chocolate Santa calendars

And the soft swish of our snowshoes

Breaking the silence of the brittle air

To lava lamps and Lego blocks

Gerbil tubes and German clocks

With twirling maidens milkin’

To mini golf and science kits

8-track tapes and K-tell hits

And the boats and planes you built for us

That sank and fell to the sea

To the rise and fall of my shark in the pool

And the three words of French I remembered from school

To that strange old lady who knocked on our door

To pass on the pamphlets with cheery children

Petting lions and bears in the Garden of Eden

To the girl from Sweden

Who flicked her flaxen hair for me

To Ironside and MTV

Colombo, Starsky & Hutch

To Marshall stacks and IMAX screens

Joints and bongs and bell bottom jeans

To rolling the top of the tin of the spam

To waterbeds, Slinkys, Green Eggs and Ham

To the Grateful dead and that Playboy spread

That I passed on to Bobby

…or Bill

Watching Them Wander

Today I’ll write

for the pleasure of gazing

at the jagged shoreline

of my words

zigzag wanderings.

Just today I’ll silence the censor

and let them race through my stanzas

pulling their flimsy kites

of meaning.

Some will saunter round my commas.

Some will soften my full stops.

One might call a colon to task

or pull from her pocket

a Dickinson dash.

Today I’ll let my lovely adjectives

rouge their cheeks

and spot their breasts with L’Eau Sézane

to snag my stolid nouns.

Home

How nice of you to come today, anyways

You must be busy with the kids

Just put it over there

Next to the flowers from Jenny

You must be busy with the kids

Yes, I think I still have some

Next to the flowers from Jenny

No, I’ve no need of that anymore

Yes, I think I still have some

Oh look! you can see the little bird from here

No, I’ve no need of that anymore

Did the kids pass their exams?

Oh look! you can see the little bird from here

They raise the blinds at 8:00

Did the kids pass their exams?

It’s Jen and David, right?

They raise the blinds at 8:00

I can see the children playing in the park

It’s Dave and Jenny, right?

When can I go home?

I can see the children playing in the park

Cindy here takes good care of me