"Improv on 4 lines of Frost" - poem

IMPROV ON FOUR LINES OF FROST

It would take me forever to recite
all that’s not new in where we find ourselves,
to live once more on family’s old home place
now that my mother, your great-granny’s gone.
The house is mine, as eldest, to maintain,
and ours, my grandson, since you’re mine to rear.
Let’s walk around the grounds where I once played:
the chinaberry here, persimmon there.
Mulberry leaves outside my bedroom swayed
in wind, threw ghostly shadows on the wall.
That yard, which neighbors keep immaculate,
grew our potatoes, limas, purple hulls.
When I was six like you, this grassy patch
played host to jimpsonweed and cockle burr.
Back there, the woods, which some years Grandpa set
on fire by accident, sit tamed in streets
like suburbs. Muscadines, blackberry vines,
plum thickets, black-eyed Susans—all are gone.
I’m going to put you in your bed, if first
I have to make you build it. Come, the light.

c 2017,  Pat Laster dba as lovepat press

published in:
Lucidity Poetry Journal II, 2012
Grist (MSPS Anthology), 2013
Hiding Myself into Safety: Short Stories & Long Poems, 2016

WINTER POEMS -- Fletcher, Frost, Williams, Hardy

THE SKATERS
by John Gould Fletcher

To A. D. R.

Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the
     surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.
#

BLIZZARD
by William Carlos Williams

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down--
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes--
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there--
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.
#
--from IMAGIST POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY
edited by Bob Blaisdell, Dover Thrift Editions
1999
~ ~ ~ ~
A PATCH OF OLD SNOW
by Robert Frost

There's a patch of old snow in a corner,
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of the day I've forgotten--
If I ever read it.
#

from SNOW IN THE SUBURBS
by Thomas Hardy

A sparrow enters the tree
Whereupon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes.
And overturns him,
And near inturns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
#

--from WINTER POEMS selected by Barbara Rogasky,
Scholastic, 1995
~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~

telephone pole fence at Couchwood - PL

 

I'M WITH THE NEIGHBOR

 

I'm on the neighbor's side in "Mending Wall."

He needs to show the bound'ries of his place

to let the other know how soon a pall

can fall when acreage lines are breached. A case

 

in point--from my perspective: privet grew

on my place undeterred. The neighbor pled

with me to let her cut the brush. I knew

that Queen Ann's Lace live there and shook my head.

 

Her partner didn't get the word and cleared

my hedge and vegetation fence. Was I

enraged! I promptly stomped net door and leered.

I yelled, "That barrier of hedge was my

 

attempt to stop encroachments. From now on ..."

But back to Frost. The older neighbor stacked

his rocks and listened, unimpressed. A yawn

perhaps, a step, then his reply, which lacked

 

a change of heart. "Good fences make good neigh ..."

Our poet shows the man still strong enough

to lift two stones at once. Unswayed, we'd say,

by logic of the orchard man, he rubbed

 

rough, calloused hands together, knowing well

his father's reasons for a wall. His plan:

no change. Not now. Not ever. He can't tell

the man to keep his distance. Fences can.

~~

[PL, Honorable Mention, Lucidity Retreat, 2012,

published in April in the Ozarks, 2012]