Copley Plaza, lunch:
wind flaps the ropes of flagpoles
sun opens our coats
March 7 Haiku: Rising Sap, First Warm Day of Spring
hug the trees awake
feel the sap rising within
outside, no jacket
March Haiu: Ares Winds
march like a song, sad sigh
sun beats from the cloudless sky
dry sinus, cold hands
February 16 Haiku: Garden Corridor Near Copley at Dartmouth Street
clouds obscure the sun
al fresco lunch in winter
dirty snow, green grass
Two February Haiku: Sunlight, Startled Deer
afternoon sun slants
shows the marsh in a new light
witch hazel, hemlock
three deer in the trees
bound away with startled tails
tiny wild island
January 25 Haiku: Thin Snow, Alone at Last, Black Crow
blessed solitude
first set of tracks on the trail
corbins cry above
January Haiku: Woods Under Snow
deep snow on the trail
spreads the ground under dark bark
winter. silence. here.
Tight-Drawn and Fragile
PL5 written on the wrapped-green house,
half-built, half-lot,
down from the street from Boston’s last
working
farm
“Please,” utters the spirit, tight-drawn and fragile
as you motor from one encounter to the next.
January looms in the blue-and-white sky,
chills your fingers as you dig gloves from pockets
Unaccustomed to their new location,
all your possessions cry for mercy, comfort,
gratitude
time a gratuity
and your check so small,
it won’t cover the bills
January 6 Haiku
boardwalk through the marsh
our feet disturb the thin snow
moss and lichen bloom
Chaucer’s Virtue, Dr. White’s Bathwater
“of switch vertu engender’d is the fleur” is one of the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Even though I haven’t read Chaucer in years, I hold his work — and the Canterbury Tales in particular — very close to my heart, in part because it was probably some of the first college-level literature I ever read. In high school, AP English was famous for a few reasons. For an aspiring writer like me, it
represented the apex of academic achievement in high school. But it was also notorious because of the woman who taught it: Dr. White. No one got to be head of my high school’s English department without earning a PhD, and the head of the English Department was usually the only Doctor in the building. Dr. White was a towering inferno of a woman, lumpy, swarthy, with a mass of greying black hair spilling down over her bona fide hunchback.
My brother and his friends told stories about her, imitating her screeching voice and her derisive comments. I was entranced. I wanted to be her — I wanted to have a doctorate in English, head up the
English department of a fairly well funded public high school, and I wanted to teach other people about Chaucer. I wanted to bathe in poetry all day.
Perhaps it’s for the best that I didn’t get my wish. It might be sour grapes, but looking back over the course of my life and talking with other poets has helped me realize something I didn’t get when I was 17: that poetry is a rare, intense, sweet thing, like chocolate. And like chocolate, I find it best served in moderation.
Garden of Words 