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At midnight it began -
A faint susurrus,
Round nouns slipping down,
Silvery adjectives cascading
Adverbially, fluid verbs
Dripping from eaves
Into soft subjunctive
Moods, a sprinkle of phrases
Assembling into paragraphs
Of sibilant whisperings.
Dawn brought silence
And a strict grammarian,
A stern Will Strunkian sun
Glaring down, austerely
Professorial, appalled
At all the pools
Of senseless syllables
And swollen streams of
sentences.
I worked all morning
Mopping up mixed metaphors,
Puddled parentheticals,
conjunctions,
Wiping away dangling
participles,
Until, cleansed of muddy
ambiguity,
By noon, the poem was precise,
A simple statement, concisely
clear,
As hard and dry
As truth.
1st prize, NFSPA contest sponsored by New York Poetry Forum, 2004
The house has been surrounded,
Attacked by giant rhododendrons.
Their bulging arms
With crimson biceps rippling
Besiege the porch
And hammer at the windows,
Threatening to scale the eaves
And barricade the door.
Inside, midst faded chintz
And bowls of scarlet peonies,
She pours a cup of rose hip tea
And, sip by sip, surrenders
Willingly to pink oblivion
While in the shed out back
The pruning shears grow dull with dust
And slowly add another year of rust.
Like a wire strung
Between poles
Set too far apart,
Our conversation sags.
It isn't that I have nothing
To say to you,
I have too much.
The words catch
In my throat
And lie disheartened
On my tongue, knowing
One touch
Could say it all.
(Note: 1st place in a State Contest about 1994,
but I don't have that record with me at the moment. ...Jean)
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