Poems
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Thirty-Five Degrees
Thirty-Five Degrees Not quite rain yet not quite snow it drips from naked branches like the tears of winter’s grief below. The slumbering soil’s sense is heightened, soaked and silent in the weeks before the voice beneath it speaks. ~ S.K. Orr
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On Turning Ten
On Turning Ten by Billy Collins The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light– a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible…
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Slumbering Oaks
Slumbering Oaks and the Outworking of Probate When did it happen, you ask? Look, It’s easier for me to walk outside These days, to walk out either door and stay For an hour, and I’m working on it, Working on extending my time. I’ve come Out into controlled sunlight, down to this patch Of yard, my pocket clicking with acorns and my Hand clanking with a bouquet of soup cans And the bladed pressure of the trowel Against my hip. In a while, I’ll kneel And put my grip to the stubby maple Handle and feed the cans with granulated Planet, topping them off and then thumbing Small graves down…
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In These Tiny Mounds
We are the flowers, now particles of fragrant dust, The stems and stamens and structures in between, The upright ones he picked along all those Morning fences and brought to you, oblations From his silent yearning to present To you entire the chaste and rooted reality Of his love. We gave ourselves with gladness, And we rest now in these tiny mounds Beneath the needles and blades around your house, Watchful and anticipating the wraithing Of your youthful voices yet again. ~ S.K. Orr
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Weeding Waltz
Weeding Waltz Before the sun could turn its engine over I worked my blade between the rows of plants My shoulders pulling, slicing weeds and clover The rhythm of my motions like a dance; The earth my partner as we spun and dipped And music, green between us, urged us on Until I balked, surprised the hour had slipped Away, renewed and blinking sweat at dawn. ~ S.K. Orr [inspired in part by Francis Berger’s musings on manual labor]
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Ten Haiku
I thought I would share — or inflict — some of my original poetry. These haiku were written over a period of a little more than three years. It’s interesting for me to re-read them and see the similarity in theme and tone, almost as if they were all written together at a single sitting. ~ S.K. Orr Ten Haiku I. Message from above Martin on telephone wire Communicating. II. Red dog in green grass One will brown, one will whiten Frozen now in spring. III. Purple martin sings Flinging notes of mercury Droplets on the air. IV. Regiment of weeds Fence marches across meadow The battle is lost.…
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Uncovering A Marble
Double-dug, fifteen feet square, my kitchen garden plot was ready to receive the roots and stalks of nightshade, shoots, pods, grasses, legumes — all prepared to settle in the divots of Appalachian soil and send their roots far down to find the lurking nutrients and bring them back to where the nearby star can work its wonders, spreading supper on the ground before us. But as I hoed the clods into a finer loam, my blade produced a clink and then laid bare a clear sphere streaked through with green, the green of sage or sea-foam swirls. I brushed it clean and held it to the growing light, feeling like…
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Blackberry Winter
This morning was the final one, The last day that I warm the engine Then depart the farm and drive Between the knolls where birds have not Yet perched on posts because their eyes, Like mine, are too devout upon Milky wraiths in the valley Pockets and the diamonds in the Grass. After today, the sun Will mount again in power and Rout the rime of shorter days And let the growing season loose. ~ S. K. Orr
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Topiary Mendacity
When I left her months ago in a halo of October fire, I extracted a promise from myself that before the first daffodil intruded into the warming yard that I’d prune her back, shape her limbs into a sphere before her buds began to be about their jostling business, to dress her stage so that her entrance would command both eye and sigh. But I have yet again confessed my status as a liar, and I see her branches ready to unwrap and stun the living air — I’ve tarried much too long and now if shears and loppers sculpt her sides, the rawness of her beauty will drop down…
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Green Hedgehogs
The day tricked me into a belief that it was spring, but the sixties and the yellow lamp above us were as false as a workplace confidant. What soggy ground, and I picked my way among moss-coated rocks, massed like a platoon of Saint Patrick’s own hedgehogs, and a woodpecker high up yonder let it slip that he knew Morse code — I caught him making fun of my gait with his dots and dashes, in a tree that will soon be ashes. One bee, one wasp, and what have they to light upon? One hour, one quarter until sunset, and who will make apologies to tomorrow? ~ S.K. Orr