the coming hunt - by Joe Lofgren

as winter    

thickens

so do

 

the wolves

 

silent

cedar dome

spy

 

ripe

toughened

rump

 

forest's edge

and

 

the coming hunt

The Custodian by Joe Lofgren

The custodian looks
as if he will fall dead tomorrow,
as his methamphetic body
pushes garbage
floor to floor.

This is the frail heaving man
as he leans to the sideways stumble,
half aware gander
through the longest halls
of his life.
I wonder as he passes
those who gawk

misunderstood

if he doesn't wonder
about the mores of custodial arts,
like the fine dexterity
in waxing previously
puked on floors,
or the recognition 
in something that
never gets dirty.

Does he clean 
around thoughts of sole order
or is there some hidden, shrunken, 
wrinkled reason,
for his peaceful radiance?

On the Edge of Christian - by Joe Lofgren

The guy sitting next to me
looks like Christ.

Dark brown, oil-clumped
hair in Picasso daubing; auburn

beard wrapped like a moss-grown
sermon--condensed upon

the utterance of his breath--
Jesus, I wonder if he is. 

My Blood

My home--drifting
pastures mottled hazy
in a Minnesota sun. Stipple

lake-sweat secretes
on a rock-coat skin.
In the wind, geese

skeins ride over
blue water cerulean
in the clouds above

sneaker-top bluffs,
crag-cliff palisades
climb spring filled

bath tubs of iron brown
tea and birch black
boles in hillock-duff.

Mt.Etna

Mt. Etna sat cold, lonely,

calling, one by one, 

the mortal-fleshed to traverse

her peaks, 

“In going up, you

must go down,” she said, 

wily in her charm,

the final desire tempting

those who possess

chivalry, prowess 

to sing the victors tune.

The Order

Implications of the implicate, 

folding, unfolding,

the layers of the rose.

Not in the garden,

(this is reality),

in the moment

just passed by.

And it is here again. 

Standing alone, a ghostly

apparition in its timeless

grace. And the folding,

unfolding swallows it,

spits it out in front of me

like when you think 

of a person and they appear.

Gone

and so I saw my heart flying

in the sky today

before a background 

matching the moment

gloomy grey

it sailed over hilltops and houses

over train tracks and trees

so many gnarls and vines 

to play with its whim 

about this day

so awkward

and perfectly right

in a glimpse

at a glance

it is gone

to the eye of the next waning and sensual

groveling heart

Diagnosing Patience

Patience and people— 

a difficult combination. 

Judgments: a lifetime 

of pressed forget-

me-nots against the grass,

a marginal path along 

the trail. Good 

people wander  

and know I am here, watching,

creating disregard—

not much to say—we know,

it's situational, intelligence

knows it best, it’s a virtue

so treat it like that,

on a table in a lab where

methods treat the thumb

like a thorned flower

stem—empirical, everlasting

in our findings of just 

how patient people can be.

Zero Hour

Jackdaws perch 

in gambrel roofs—

Ice forms

window-pane

broken-sheets

on pebbled shores.

Tree veins

grow creeper.

Five minutes 

to midnight

flashes white

and Christ is lost.

Ospreys (Sonnet)

    Ospreys circle round and round in never

ending spiral curls. Their watchful eye-gaze

pierces threads of contrail clouds, forever

thick and wild. Above the cedar hills, maze

    of trees will shoot the sky in early spring,

to root and rise for primrose light or bloom

and seek the shady night 'till morning bing

of colors bright, washes rocks in costume

    shades of red and livid blue, that remake

the trip below, in crust and mantle

born in hue of magma melt, quake

of plates in shift erupt—then settle,

    on earth we walk with fine-made creatures,

    born white-stars of cycled natures.

Spring Blood

The crying sky froze to crystalline 

shapes of falling dust, 

accumulated on the hemlock 

firs and side-view mirrors of cars.

I paced back and forth in the parking lot,

wondered when you'd trace

my steps so worn, muddy, and find

my draining heart, 

bleeding, bloody 

hot steam upon the fresh snow.

Hermes

Crumpled with my latest work

in a heap among the cluster and

mottled among the clouds

was a cold Hermes soul.

The sheets of rain were

not so far away then

and I could make out

the tenuous shapes

floating by in the countenance

of the cloudy wind.

My birth body loosely

clinging to the shallow roots,

making sordid simple steps

in the grassy under soil

where my own reflection

is of the dark brown earth.

So it is when a rain storm

strikes a stark and naked head,

these were the winds 

of my change—

crossing and following,

tangent; irreconcilable lines,

shades and gradations of one another

casting and reeling in a tumult.

From the Casement

A classic dialogue on a concept,
a balance between paradoxical
antinomies; the disintegration
of order into chaos,

connecting together the paradox of life,
representing time and the imagination,
weathered and broken, crumbling rock.

Objects from the past are still present
in the future because they represent
generations of people.

The blade was a gift forged.
An object unspotted by the centuries.
An emblem of innocence
despite hundreds of years.

Semi-mystical; the varying ways
in which time has existed.

The Tower commands us to set our mind
upon the stairs to heaven, gaze upon the stars,
immerse in commanding the body
where thought is done, this quarter

for contemplation; leave behind
pleasures and desires
encompassing representation
as if a conversation with the self
is whispering pestilent commands.

The blade derides past its prime,
obsessed with symbols
of the crime of death and birth.

It is of a phallus;
the purity and metaphor,
oxymoronic.

An apathetic conclusion emphasizes
resolution and solution; uniting
the rhetoric simply alludes
to something worthwhile.

Rhetoric of a more positive nature,
or decisively ambivalent, to be content to.
Nature being grounded in the world
between the poet and his goal
by inverting the narration of the mind;
the phallic blade image.

The quarter implicates the metaphor
pervading and infecting
despite the intangibility of its existence.

Creator and consciousness;
desire, emotion and sexual prowess
negate existence, hindering
a self-created barrier between immersion in,
and immersion in the world of things.

The separation is merely dialectical;
a self-reflective mood adopts a tone
like that of a meditative, forgiving narrator.
By way of language, marriage through language.

Hibernation

In one season, it all changes.
All that I know comes to bloom,
and comes to die with the flick
of a wintry wrist.

In September, I will make my bed
once more, I will feel the warm rush
of blood beneath my face, once more
before I sleep.

And in April, if I have survived,
please let the blooming flowers
know of my return,

so they are not too startled
when I spread my big fat toes
among their bristling stalks.

Writing for Weed

At this time of year
it's hard to tell which came first,
grass blades or dandelion stems?

Dandelions, I said, smell sweet
and look pretty.

They're kind of juicy
inside—and we recite
a naughty nursery rhyme.

"Mama had a baby
and it's head popped off."

We both laugh as I promise
to the knoll, and tiny
grass blades we made

into trumpets: I will write
one poem for the dandelion—
no matter it's just a weed.

Ash Wednesday

It is Ash Wednesday.
I know it because of the ashen cross
bruised across his forehead;

I could see his pilgrimage to church,
the leaning, kneeling,
reverence for mortality.

“Dust thou art,
and unto dust
shalt thou return.”

This man not being me,
I can approve from afar.
Honor of being with death;

a loved one or the love
that lives on, changes,
becomes mortality.

Writing on a Pool of Water

I write about the real itself.
To take the idea; reinvent it
through some fanciful tactic
is pretty, nice and pleasing.

They were all in it for truth
anyhow, or at least, proclaiming
the absence in a pool of water
for an instant, dry;

'glimpses' they'd say.
Glimpses. It’s true. Glimpses
shocking, personal, difficult;
an instant.

Sunray's, wobbly tables
or thirsty drinkers, these
things surrounded, truth itself.
There is too much crossover

from what is a physical body
and a wandering mind that I feel
at once this must
encompass two things—

never taken from physicality
as the poet of modern day's did:
the mind must be a helmsman
of the most uncertain ship,

all the cracks and creaks,
inherited wound. Then when I
picture this: winds, all directions,
nature's fury above my head,

upon imagined ocean, I wonder
whose wind, whose current,
and why so many rocky shores.