"sailboats
built from a corral, some corrugated tin"
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Pleine-Aire, in a Palette of Eclipse
The shadow
at noon, we feel the whir of owls, nighthawks
still wheels its low lamped clouds, coastal
where Gauguin, Monet, easels and umbrellas, their
sit with us. A gray beach. Some random
chips into layers: A laminate of mist, then smoke
holds our shape, two stones
on a crumbling fence of weather, canvas
pressed to a sea-blown table, wind
hissing in the trees. A white-gas lantern
trowels its plaster over splintered wood. Even
ghosting through a spent barn, smell hay
molding in the winter rafters. Draw
tufts of wool, last year's shearing, from
wire splayed around us. Yet the sky
scenes of Holland: a landscape
made for sheep and children, sailboats
built from a corral, some corrugated tin, the
rolling drums of horses running, water
falling over Brittany—
women wrapped in cloth-like wings
spots you might call color. Brush-strokes hardly
different from the off-shore breeze
of dampened fires, distant cattle, churning
the relentless surf, dragging
ketches up the gravel. The paint
that haunt its own opacity. No piano. No
guitar. Only the rain our daughter blows,
birds across a bottle of fog.
_______________________________________________________________ Bringing in the Name
Now the graces gather _______________________________________________________________ The Puzzle
A sweetness, she says, strange now
shapes that form the room. Like sugar
of sticky pink and then the ocean, gray
of boxes, the black and then the white, each
one that goes across—
Her table, with its lozenge tray, sea-green
never will be emptied. She drops her pencil
_______________________________________________________________
in the meadows near Petaca
above the Mesa Vista down
a crossroad's swollen
river where the hot springs
steam. My cousins
are in vapor with the youngest
here expecting
and the fluming shrub-oak
around Cornelia turn. Her
lips bright red so full
they lift each sister's shadow you
can hear our bluetick Aldo twenty
coyotes barking
as all dogs will do. When
a woman threads her water let
us sing into her belly every
cattail bursting
silky luff that floods the hayfields
with the tractor still in fescue
for a last September pick-up
on this golden freshness morning just-
dropped bales so
green and fragrant that I
call them out in buckgloves hay-
hooks Hanna's new-brewed coffee just
like children Sara! Juan! Elena! I
lift each one to God.
how the air tastes, in these wharf-
into water, for the spinning birds, a kind
again, they alternate. Like boxes—waves
one lisping Give a color, just a sound, the
pills. A silent glass of water, that
in my hand. Canoe, she says, eleven letters—
canoe, maroon canoe…