I take umbrage to Aeolus’ fan
When the ensuing clouds disrupt my tan.
Another simple play on words.
um·brage
[uhm-brij]
I take umbrage to Aeolus’ fan
When the ensuing clouds disrupt my tan.
Another simple play on words.
[uhm-brij]
Are you quixotic, squirrel?
What urgent quest compels you
To keep blurring my photos
When I try to pin you down?
Is it for love or adventure?
Is it for justice or fame
Or to battle armed windmills,
My heroic Don Squirrel?
Oh.
It was just for food.
You’ve ruined my poem.
A silly poem I wrote for a Berkeley squirrel that was bounding around my bench while I was contemplating the word quixotic.
[kwik-sot-ik]
) resembling or befitting Don Quixote.Berkeley on the First Sunday of Spring Break
Locked doors and darkened window panes
Remind me that I’m out of place
On grounds of learning, where, again,
Sagacious stones refuse my wandering ways.
Only the wooded paths embrace
Me on a log-cum-bench: the bait
To bring my ears into this space
Where nature’s bards all play.
A crow calls singing to her mate
And with the chatting creek I strain
To hear his soft reply, then wait
And watch and wonder why she stays.
Over the last few days, I was lucky enough to spend some time around the lovely, albeit abandoned, UC Berkeley campus, but now I am headed back up the California coast en route to Canada. The poems for the next few days are scheduled, so anything about the trip home won’t appear until next week (at which point my daily poem project – meant to jumpstart my own production on this website – will likely have ceased).
In dreams I wander through the realms
Of convex mirrors, breaking glass
To find the shattered remnants pull
Together forming a flaneur
Like me who only wants to write
His name in water. Hand and hand
That feel like glass, they smear their sweat
And trace the letters of their self—
But one of them writes it backwards.
Read John Ashbery’s poetic ekphrasis of the painting above here.
\flah-NUR\ , noun;
I saw red gerberas, and as always
I suffered from recidivism; slid
Down, down a snake of board games on the lawn
And kisses in the creek and freezing nights
On an old cot beneath the twisting stars.
[ri-sid–uh-viz-uh
m]