spring semester poems

Balm of Night

A eulogy, after Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Youth should burn and rave, not fade away;
rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though at the last you must have known that night
was wrong, you could not peel the clinging dark away—
you leapt into that soft dark balm of night.

Once, you caught and sang the sun in flight.
You loved a girl who could draw any face
but still you leapt into that balm of night.

I did not know you well, but you could fight—
it was your signature. With words, with grace—
swift kicks, hands blurring in the evening light.

Your words suggested a firm grip on life.
You spoke to us of cosmos, Dao, the Way,
quietly insisting what was right.

Your music spoke as if from some great height.
Dark, vital chords, but you were miles away—
flamenco strains against the bonds of life.

You had to know someone would find your shell
turning slowly, dangling from that height,
would fall on to their knees and start to pray
for the first time in their remembered life.

Youth should rave and fight, not fade away.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
when you leapt into that balm of night.


In-Between Waking and Sleeping

The edge of my exhaustion like the edge
of a storm cloud about to break. A spell
of warm fog and floating thoughts upwelling
on tides of emotion, raw ropes barely

Holding, about to fray. Enfolding
rational facts with dream colors, blunt thoughts
that have no words attached. My will: an old
boat, or mere raft—planks creaking like she

wants to go to sea. Between the slats
phosphorescence beckons: synapses flashing
neon signs: wish fulfillment—dreams are free.
Flashing like my mind is sending up flares—

because no one dares to live what they dream.
Whatever the cause, I cast off those taut
ropes, drift on the loping waves, raft lapped by
salt water, intimate in warm rain.


Leaving Season

Early summer leaving season
and the air sticks to me like wet cloth.
It wants to hold on to passing things.
Colors assault my eyes: fuchsia spikes, falling wisteria.

The air sticks to me like love lost.
I walk to the grocery store down crumbling southern roads--
colors assault my mind, sprawling violet across remaining time.
Buttercups Jackson Pollacked across the rugby field.

The sweet decay of crumbling southern roads,
the smooth grooves of same paths traveled many times.
Buttercups studding fields and the drinkable sky.
The light wind intimate and sweat everywhere my body folds.

The smooth groves of beech trees climbed many times.
I'm not searching, just letting sights fall into my eyes.
In windless air my body swims in sweat, my eyes in light.
On roads and fields, kind ghosts walk in the heat of day.

Sinking in honey, I fall into these sights.
I hold on to passing things with humid hands.
Ghost heat-mirages with friends' faces
walk off into summer, rippling.


That poem about mermaids

I don’t have a title for this one. It’s a sestina—a very strange form where the last words of each line repeat throughout the poem, in the different verses. Hence some very short lines and some very long ones. Also, I’m not sure how I feel about how prose-like it is. I mean, I like it. But I’m not sure if it’s a poem. Thoughts?

Also, a style thing: the lines that look like they're not supposed to wrap to the next line aren't supposed to. They're just too long to fit so I guess you just have to imagine them being on the line above. There might be a way to change the layout so they fit but I haven't found it yet.


Mermaids are at home in the rain.
Does rain rust dragon scales?
Every beautiful and strange thing, on sea
or land, is born with the gut-
feeling that, in time,
they’ll have to bear

a burden they can barely
carry. I used to love superheroes, who reigned
over us mortals with their timeless
stories. They scaled
impossible obstacles, gutted
countless villains (all to plant the seed

of peace in the world.) But I’ve never seen
such aggression, passion, or splashing water as when bears
attack during the salmon spawn. When I first gutted
a fish—took the insides out, threw the outsides away—it was rainy,
bittersweet: an intimate experience with reality. I took off its scales,
cut it open, seasoned it with thyme.

But my experience doesn’t compare to the time
salmon spend muscling their way from the sea
to spawning grounds hundreds of miles upstream. That’s scaling
obstacles, with a vengeance. They lay their salmon-colored eggs till the bears
descend in a brown frenzy. Then there’s nothing but red water and the sound of rain.
They came, they saw, they gave their children life. Died like a guttering

pink fire. It’s not an elegant word, gut,
but we all have one, even if we can’t sacrifice like salmon in fall, the time
of year when everything is dying. (Gut-feeling gives Irish songs from rainy
moors that yearning sound. Struggle bleeds through music, relentless as the sea’s
pull. They way major and minor are overlaid is sometimes unbearably
beautiful: I try not to cry at the last notes of the scale.)

Where there are mermaids, they have scales
the sheen of spilled-oil rainbows. They’d play violins with catgut
strings, protest ocean pollution—their singing and their bare
skin would change anyone’s mind. Time
and again, I envy people who know their path. I sit by the sea
and listen to it’s constant struggle; I love the continuous motion of the rain.

I try to scale the slippery fish of passing time.
I’m no mermaid; I don’tknow what I’d swim upstream for—but the sea pulls like my gut-
feeling: there’s passion in the motion of salmon, bear, and falling rain.