Found-Poem: new flowers (Normasource)

Norma has had the flu! But she got out today and inspected her garden. She sent photos from her phone and a message --a message typical of a directness I can seldom approach in poetry. I reproduce it intact:

"new flowers:

I raked leaves over the bulbs, then the bulbs came up and look how they pushed the leaves up with them."

Gate

Bright jasmine on
Old palings, a
Treeline echoed
In clouds: things
Solid and things
Bleached in light,
In wonder, unreached
Heights, attention--
Unnoticed dances.
Things sing loud
In nature to
The mind and yet
We just don't
Get it all.
Left behind?
Not far, not wrong.
Grown in chances,
Survival is cyclic,
That's all, a song.

Lisa's Dragon

From chrysalid oak imagined
In the stuff of stars, swirling
Eddies, dreamers swimming
In enchanted channels,
Lisa's dragon emerged --
Underway amid wind-whipped
Towers in the sea, and
Higher among cosmic hours.
It beckons above waves--
Waves to you, waves to me. 

L'Homme Au Gant

                                                [1977 Kate Painting of Geo.]

[1975 Geo. Poem about Kate]
So I told her, "Kate, whenever you see me today
Please just smile and say 'It's all right.'"
So I stepped off the el and looked round
For a circus, laid my face to the colors
And grabbed the trapeze as it swung by.

The crowd was disappointed.
I'd let them down --half up the
Ladder, I could go no higher.
"Listen folks, I can't do the
Triple flip into the flying forest
Fire because I got a train to catch!"

Then WHAM! 
Halfway down the ladder, skinny
Me in sequined tights, caught
A WHOLE TRAIN! Kate 
Punched my ticket and said,
"They're applauding the guy who
Threw it, but it's all right. 

In Mind Is Time

In mind is time bisected,
Order imposed upon 
Imploding past--
Starts asleep in uncertain
Night, stars turn into
Thought, moon into 
Memory, edges light--
And night, heavy under
Dreams of things to be, 
Shambles into the sea.

Persian Wheel

Sat, Mar 25, 2006, #2:

Bit of rust speaks:
Is it? Is it?
Is it important
How we feel
At this journal
Of the Persian wheel?
A squeak:
Observer rimmed
In buckets, undershot,
Climbs round to
The observed,
Like a noria lifting
Water from a stream,
Is it? It is.

Uncle Joey

Tue, Mar 28, 2006, #7:

Carving by spinthariscope
A monument on the head
Of a pin to my great uncle
Joey --b. 1864, small and bald.
Got smaller, balder til last
Detected a century later.
A good likeness: Little,
Down to brittle bones
In blue-veined wax between
Enormous ears. When
Ninety years old he began
Visiting my childhood and
Always had a big happy
Whore with him.
Under the lens a scintilla
Drifts from pinpoint
To fluoresce in time.
Oh! Laughter? Joey?


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I should mention you can read the introduction, what Willie calls "the genesis of this blog", by clicking on the date over this poem and the one just before it. My current project here is to illustrate some of the original pieces with doodles and tabletop installations.

I guess I should also clarify that when I was a little boy and got to know Great Uncle Joey --the oldest man I'd ever seen-- my grandparents and parents simply said he was "in the hotel business". When I grew up I learned Joey's hotel was a whorehouse in Clarksburg. I also learned that, in 1915 through 1917, a flu hit the delta and killed many many people. Joey addressed his staff and said if they wanted to help do for the sick, cook for children of sick mothers, bring in crops, care for livestock and generally keep the riverfront economy going until people got well, he would keep them on the hotel payroll. The community was so glad to get this staff of nurses and it helped so much, that law enforcement looked the other way. Other whorehouses followed suit and, despite devastating mortality rates in those years, farms did not fail and families clung to their dreams. So when I'd ask who one nice lady or another was when Joey visited, I'd be told, "She's a nurse, Geo."