Wood Smoke
The geese above the pond
already call out winter
and wood smoke comes
from all the houses
in the town.
We’ll move together then
and share the year’s last
warmness
swallowing the rain like brandy.
- “If You Love Somebody, Tell Them”
Calendar, 1969
Hill Poem
Too long
we’ve looked
for men to match
our mountains,
another way perhaps
of keeping our eyes
always on the core
and not the apple.
Now that men
of seeming sensibility
have all but pulled down
every worthwhile hill
our priorities should be
turned around.
Think how it would be,
in California
let alone the world
to find enough new,
or even reconstructed
mountains
to match those many men
who level knolls
and pull down ridges
on unsettled stomachs
or one whim
by signing just their names
in triplicate.
-from “The 1976 Rod
McKuen/Animal Concern Calendar”
Other People's
Music
I stay awake by choice
pretending to a pillow,
my arms wrapped `round it,
that the music coming through the walls
is being sent to me.
Then conversation kills the radio.
The pillow falls
and lullabies give way
to distant laughter
imagined movement
forced memory
and semi-perfect sleep.
-from "Fields of Wonder",
1971 |
