The Jack-o-lantern

An outline is cut with a thin sharp knife

by an aching wrist of an old farm wife

Orange and bright, sweet and thick

the flesh is hard and doesn’t slice quick

The top with its stem will make a good lid

so she sets it aside like an impatient kid

Out of the dark scrapes slimy seeds—

pearls for snacking as salty beads

Pierces two eyes, filets a nose

carves a mouth to scoff at foes

Leaves three teeth to fend off ghouls

and the Banshee’s requiem in keens and mewls

Digs out a hole for a candle stub

carries to the porch like a laundry tub

Looks at her head with its bone-white light

windowed and shining toward winter’s night

It’s a charm she casts at this borderland

between light that’s been and the dark at hand

The Doe's Sanctuary

While I pass in my car

she emerges to remind me.

Feeling my vibration she safely tiptoes

backward from the road into

the cathedral of oaks—russet, and wound

in wild grapes. A glimpse of leaves

stained in memory.

What if I left the speed of my car

and followed her quietly in,

covered my head and lit a fragile flame?

Would she show me when to kneel

in the nave and when to shuffle

through the cloisters? I was not raised

in a church like this. I feel lost.

But this is an old church in an even

older world. I start to see

its roots in the shapes of my toes.

I’m sure I can remember the liturgy.

The Passionate Transitory, a poetry magazine

My friend Robert has walked hundreds, maybe thousands of miles across England and France. He writes delicious Fermoresque (Patrick Leigh Fermor) prose about those adventures and juicy poems that wander through countryside both physical and spiritual. He may be The Solitary Walker, but he has nicely gathered fine poets from hither and yon to begin a new poetry community. I am excited to be in on the ground floor of The Passionate Transitory partly because Robert is so widely read that he makes a far finer editor of such a magazine than almost anyone I know. The other reason is that the poems are quite wonderful, and I am honored to read the work of new-to-me poets and be included in this issue with them.

Check out Robert's walking adventures at The Solitary Walker.

Read the current (first) issue of The Passionate Transitory, including Robert's delightful editorial.

Read my quick interview, including who I write for here.

And here are the three poems of mine Robert included in this issue. You may have seen them before.

If you are a poet, please do submit your work to Robert for the winter issue here! Here are Robert's own words:

The scope of this journal will be broad, just as the concerns of poetry are as diverse as life itself. However, we are particularly interested in poetry as discovery, revelation, epiphany and praise; poetry as a magical conduit to the unconscious; poetry as a creative, meaningful and subtle process of marking stages in the real and metaphorical journeys we are all embarked upon — whether these be pilgrimages of the mind, the body or the soul. But before we lose ourselves in the abstract, let's remember the words of William Carlos Williams: no ideas but in things. It's the tangible things of the world that are the true stuff of poems, poems which are imaginary gardens with real toads in them as Marianne Moore so famously put it.

The only downside to Robert editing this journal is that out of proper protocol, his own poems do not appear.

At the altar

Between his dimpled fingers poke supple stems and points of maple leaves—gold, wine, russet. We sit on the floor close to the deck door screen on a warm autumn day, me Indian style, he nestled between my torso and legs. It is a day when wind dips the trees the way I dipped him earlier when we danced and he laughed. My hair blows against his cheek, and he sedately rakes fingers through it. It is a day when it doesn’t matter if you sweep or rake; the plentiful leaves that remain on trees across these farms keep being blown off and must be abandoned. They blow against windows and doors and catch in the five inches of space between the glass and screen when someone goes in or out. So now we sit at the screen as at an altar with a row of moist leaves within reach before us. He plucks two and squeezes them in each baby fist, then turns and rotates them elegantly like Martha Graham as if to remind them that they were once attached to trees. He swipes ruffles of leaves puckering out from his fingers across his mouth, which is open just enough for his tongue-tip to form a soft bud with his lips. I pick up and show him another leaf; he takes it after releasing one from his fist. The earth has given them to us and said Take, eat, this is my body broken for you. We thank her in the ceremony of the leaves.