christine poreba

English Teacher, Sunday Morning

This is my audience. Maybe they’re awake by now,

fashioning more things like sentences, each word

a direct hit into my softening sense of what

passes for language. You have to agree with her to get an A

they aver because clearly if they have made

All this Effort, Worked So Hard—

I am in a cold room away from the radio, wanting

to write. The great words shrink and turn their backs.

Below my husband seals the skylights to keep out weather,

exchanging light for comfort. A fair trade? I wonder

and there it is again, the dull bird with its two-note call

crude distinctions dark/light pass/fail

I hear them hammering, splattering odd comas

in crimes against paper. However   Due to  Is because 

In factIn a few years they learn the tricks

and launch specious arguments like tight ships

to breast the currents of The Hudson Sea she wrote

because she liked the sound.

Wild Carrot

Here again, though last summer I shelved you

in simile’s warehouse (white rose window,

fireworks, super nova).

I diced you and rhymed you, blended you

into ideas of order, wisdom, nature

and alluded to records

of courtiers who decked your ferny fronds

in their hair. Now you are back,

simply yourself.

The mind throws up its hands and admits

you are not beckoning; you have escaped

language’s closet.

Rampant along roads, phenomenon

of sun, dirt, seed, rain,

self contained,

thickest in the ditches, swaying

to torrents of traffic, complacent

as if waltzing.

Irreducible something slipped away

from well-phrased praises, from

history or fabrication,

still your perplexing beauty persists

like a signal from a benign

imagination.

john rauschenberg

katrinka moore