The Quantumverse
“The birds are a chorus…clearly relatives of Mozart”
– Jim Harrison (Day Nineteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Bird, box, grave –
Mozart gave a funeral
For his starling*.
I may want more
For my Requiem,
But my Day of Judgment seems
Here, now, along this road,
Dies irea of dirt and sand.
A flock of birds
Unsung across the wires,
Wary of my approach
As any St. Peter.
And startled, rise as one
When across the moor
A nail gun taps out Kyrie
To closing wood.
“We were born to be moving water not ice”
– Jim Harrison (Day Eighteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Nanook says we must
Chop ice, carry water –
Zen of the igloo
“Saw a poem float by just beneath the surface”
– Jim Harrison (Day Seventeen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Poems like water wings
Flotation devices
Strapped around our arms
Our chests our necks
Their gallows promise of not drowning
Holding on at/above/just under
The surface coughing out love
Hoping to breathe like the air itself
Our hearts sharked and slippery
Then slipping over onto our backs
Floating forever
Gulls floating forever
Overhead like forever
Sunburned onto our faces
Drunken and dunked in our
Breathtakingly cool skin and
Hoping we will
Live forever.
“We walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky”
– Jim Harrison (Day Sixteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Light’s flash up and down
Waterfall tumbles rainbows
Dizzy, flustered fish
“Art often isn’t [nice] though it scrubs the soul fresh”
– Jim Harrison (Day Fifteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
The scour of carbolic
Is the most China smell I know –
The granite stripping scrub
Of every lobby, bathroom, terminal,
Mall, subway, and hall without end.
As if under Communism
There is only one factory
For Janitor in a Drum.
It is the smell of Forward!
And Upward!
A poem of the Revolution
Written with mops
For brushes.
“The moon is to blame. I am innocent”
– Jim Harrison (Day Fourteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
Moon uninvited
Rambunctious deer are stymied
Clouds hide boozy light
Also sending to Ronovan Writes Party/Enjoy
“Only the water is safe”
– Jim Harrison (Day Thirteen – 28 Days of Unreason)
A piece of jade so beautiful
It took prisoner of your eyes –
Prized their tempest for itself
To become the color of the sea,
A stone that secrets rain
In its deepest stony heart.
“The beauty of the rattlesnake is in its threat”
– Jim Harrison (Day Twelve – 28 Days of Unreason)
Sap in Autumn trees,
Leaves uncoil red and gold,
Slow from sunlight’s bite.
*Also linking back to Carpe Diem Haiku Kai – “Waiting for Autumn”
“I’m unsure if all of me returned”
– Jim Harrison (Day Eleven – 28 Days of Unreason)
Like a broken clock
Even a poet can be right
Twice a day.
Once at the hour of felony,
When our eyes are hunted
And our sins sharp.
Once at the instant when vertigo
Pitches over the horizon
And we are too dizzy to pray.
Don’t look down or you will see
All the words lost along the way,
Strewn like shavings on the floor.
We jiggle truth
To shake some loose,
So take what you can carry.
“Much that you see isn’t with your eyes”
– Jim Harrison (Day Ten – 28 Days of Unreason)
Grey toad sits in ash
Memory of dimming coals
Unseen forest burns
qbit 