Llyn Clague – 6 poems

SUSAN’S FALLS

Out of the chute
the white sheet leaps,
shivering and shaking,
juking and jiving,
descending and standing,
falling in unending
wrap-around thunder.

Inside the thunder –
pounding, surrounding, standing thunder –
I stare at the torrent,
always different
and constant, magnetic
and slowly dazing,
with insistent, periodic
variation and regularity:
this never-ending torrent
of wonder.

In beads of mist
gold hair glistens,
dappling, rippling,
and gleams across
the bossed surface
of the biggest desk of my career
before I was fired
in a re-org eerily
similar to one earlier
that got me it
and her as my P.A.

Amateur actress,
unattached, actually
named Susan (else
would the falls thunder?),
daily from under
the wonder of her hair
she beguiled me
with the particulars
of her steady campaign
to seduce the yoyo
impersonating her hero:
as, in a dark bar,
under his black jacket stroking
his back till he succumbed
and took her –
hell, I don’t remember,
his place or hers,
ending, no doubt,
in wraparound thunder
and slumber.

Four years later,
not yet forty,
Susan succumbed
in a distant sanatorium
to a filthy leukemia,
in a dreamy peace
and a love of God –
so she wrote –
I had never seen
across my empty desk.

I stand within
the half-deafening column
of sound and stare down
the tunnel of memory
with sadness for a woman
lonely and too early gone:
stand in beads of mist
and wrap-around, never-ending
wonder.

COMPOST

God, but my gut gloms onto the wishy-washies –
banalities, insipidities, clichés –
“great,” “deep,” “eternal,” “fresh,” “original….”

Make a pile (“huge”)
out behind the garage,
ring it with chicken wire,
cover ‘em all with persiflage,
and hope, in a year,
they’ll molder, disintegrate, disappear,
and arise – if (“richly”) aromatic –
unaxiomatic!

Fresh!  Original!…
Did I say that?

GAUZE SKY

Early morning sky like gauze,
woodpecker tak-tak-taking
somewhere behind the line of the woods,
each tak
in the quiet
like a blue speck
in the intricate mesh of the clouds.

With its long, mournful cry
from somewhere north, near the sanctuary,
a loon counters,
celebrating –
morning?
living? –
the arc reverberating like a rainbow.

Both stop; silence teems;
the white thickens
ahead of the promised
thunder.

INTO MY DAY

Limbs of an old oak,
black as a crucifixion,
streak against an eider sky,
frozen lightning, nailed nightmares.

The streetlight clicks and flips.
Crossing the street, walking
through the bomb-proof glass door,
I step into my day
and leave the inside outside.

SUN AND THUNDER

Labor Day Sunday
powerboats pound
down past the island
and back around

Kids in the wakes
on tubes and skis
squeal to the skies
gleam in the breeze

Waves from the wakes
walking like robots
slurp and slap
at shore ramparts

End of summer sun
and outboard thunder
going going gone
yonder

THE FROTHER

For Alice

With a miniscule battery,
a self-contained gizmo
that makes of milk and coffee –
ta-da!  capuccino!

But, really, why bother
with yet another
frivolous contraption
when, really, you’d rather
simplify at least one fraction
of your lathered life?

Flight of a moth,
poetry of math,
smoke of a myth –
coffee, with froth!

Llyn Clague’s poems have been published widely in journals such as Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, Main Street Rag, The Avalon Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, Hiram Poetry Review, and other print and online magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com