Contours For Gazing
He's the look of one who cuts his own hair.
The scar between his ears, broad,
stretches contours for gazing.
Something happened.
One cannot think ill of him who now
eschews any man with blade or shears,
his face is proof enough not to trust.
Still, he walks upon the world, a gash in air
which does not care for looks of any sort.
Frightened children do not cry out though
their play is stopped. Bullies cross the street,
heads low in leather, trying to be invisible.
Dogs suddenly silence remembering to
quickly go where their tucked tails point
- away.
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Pasturale Lullabies - Fragments Of Nocturnal Song From A Child's Abandoned Grave
Lullaby One
Remembered gait of young ponies toward
the spring's sweet water
Remembered laughter of the frail daughter there
beside the fields sweet grasses
The daughter, as the water, passes into silence
Lullaby Two
Distant crows sound the morning field beyond pasture
Dew murmurs names upon passing grasses
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Our Mutual Confession Invisibly Drawn - Pentecostal Church Ruins
Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal,
what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.
A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
once sentinel house long remote to men and
as present as God, my own presence is bound
to his who stands confounded now as three,
one above grave, one within it, and me
in between, one eye upon him, the other
upon sagging dirt where bones and a
ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
for us all in un-storied astonishment.
Here horseflies feast.
Upon weathered stones are
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poem by Warren Falcon
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A Grief Earned - An Ode Beginning & Ending With Lines From Shelley
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
I have been taken up into grief, the strange
relief of clouds. Soon departed, I shall be
once again returned to disquieted prayer,
the proud monk to his rites rejoined such
are covers for disjointedness.
Adroit is the spoiled self touching only
late that of Other, of Beauty, Adonais
'dead then' when Mr. Shelley, once young,
now always, has clung 'moderne, 'as much
as, as soon as he can deny, spurn, return
a Vision 'toward the vital air.'
He has the advantage of an Eastern detachment.
I, meanwhile, to walls stick, to
sheets, this cup, full, cannot release.
I step, my foot remains to boards
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Abandoned Train Station Near Grandmother's Grave
.
for Lida Harris
Then died there the rose beside the house of tin.
The track bore no train for years.
Weeds traveled tendriled and
yellow rooted between trestles.
Broken vessels whistled through
shattered teeth of glass.
Only wind and no rusted train passed.
Though the scene bears dislocation,
though the brain remembers station and motion
of steam engine and iron wheel rotation
the places of old gone passing
bear no malice toward stillness.
All around mute remains remind the
occasional passer of former days;
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Cleaning Fish On Good Friday,1963
.
Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand
hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.
His knife scores firm flesh yielding
beneath freshly limp gills - there is an
instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers
for catfish skin - he grips and tears,
uses his weight down-stripping smoothly
bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate
flesh.
Only the overly large head, the ugly face
whiskered within gilded monstrance,
remain pure to form, thin-lipped and
mocking, restrained by depth pressures,
sustained on surface trash, dead things
that sink down it's treasures.
Tenderly sing, then, to a nail,
to a boy's blood catechism -
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Glenn Gould In Heaven Does Lament
Here the chipped ivory is only cloud.
The Instrument, too very old, is Archetype.
Strings of gold do not a music make.
A lyre presses sterilely into where once
was crotch.
Crotchless, music is useless here.
So am I. No one listens.
The only passion is the Christ's
and that's all passed.
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poem by Warren Falcon
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How It Was I Came To Be What I Am
[from early poems,1970's, youthful attempts at voice]
For 'Spider' Bottas
They would argue over tides
Who bade me come into the world.
One said, Six o'clock.
The other, No, twelve.
I was born at the thirteenth hour
All the while mother arguing,
This is not the time but a little spell,
While father argued it was death,
You are dying and your child, too,
Is dying. You have been poisoned.
It was full moon and high tide,
The hour of birth.
All arguments yielded to the tide's.
The moon lit up the stadium
Of their gripes while I was
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poem by Warren Falcon
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What Is Revealed, Variation
side by side
silent reading
occasional
'hear this then'
something read aloud
becomes bread
heads nod agreement
smiles and meals beneath
the witnessed reel of
glancing stars
gather their
stones at dusk
fill their pockets own
climbing World Tree at
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Surrealistic Sutures For The Acetylene Virgin
'I think that poetry should stay
awake all night drinking in dark cellars.' - Thomas Merton
Look to the body for metaphor -
Look to blood, use this word
in relation to dreams or flowers
while silver runs in veins which
are usually streets or vines.
Breasts, male and female,
are stars, have to do with
a handful or feet to span them.
Abdomen, then, is a great
Milky Way gathering,
holding, expelling comets,
caroling colons' humming.
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poem by Warren Falcon
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