Nature Can Be a Cruel Mistress

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Four Saints In Three Acts

But, who's counting?

Past is prologue.
Virgil Thomson. Gertrude Stein.
It is very easy to love alone.

Who's on First?
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we Going?

What became of the early me?
asked a certain Howard whass-his-name
who wrote and questioned
at indiantown Gap
in the summer of 1964.

Time-lapse photography.
Head shot. Money shot.
Bang-bang, shoot-shoot. Shoot,
if you must, this old gray head...
Barbara Fritchie said that.

Shot Red Marilyn.

Young Elvis. Old Elvis?
We are large, we contain multitudes
thought Walt Whitman [by the power
of paraphasia] or somethin' very akin to that.

Soon you'll be telling me What's on second base!

Hey, I'll letcha be in my dream if I can be in yours.
Who makes whose be his. I do.
I said that. I did.

I said would some power the giftie gie us/ to see ourselves
as others see us. Well, sure, Bobby Burns said that.

Who makes whose be his. I do.


 
 


 
 

D'où venons nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?
Les pieds, ne me laissez pas tomber maintenant!

Marty Esworthy does York Poetry Festival Beat Bash and it sounds like this...

She is Praying Too

.
..

..
.

the Farmer Prays for Rain and


its atoms, its spheres/ come negligible specks,
sparks in proportion to/ a façade wavy as
sine curves, as... kestrels circling the Yonghegong.

As kitchen utensils or sharp blades of wheat
suspended in a shadowless clarity of
metaphysical illumination. As only

sparks from trails of radiant
birds soaring through ornamental planets...
immersed in light so absolute that its satellites

are now reduced to thin lines resembling a soft shoe,
its laces/ unruly as the moon is true. And its blue,
its azure heart, its actual pulsating blue, becomes

laced with minor flecks of vast shards of rain.
not white rain, or green-like-Prell-rain-- no.
Soft rains will come/ & letters from god, dropt. Still.

Ain't nothin' shakin' but the leaves on the trees.


--Marty Esworthy, 2010