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Other poems by Edgar Carlson
Versailles Of Eye
Three polka dots
Inside a sea
Of green kiwi
A Northeaster
Blue ribbon bloom
Made a prairie
Restoration
Of Island Trees
Three kids kayak
On toboggans
Without a voice
Ivory coast
Reconstuction
A blue lagoon
Of undertow
In bootleg snow
Leaky snowflakes
The first blossoms
Opened borders
Three grandchildren
Extend the view
Edgar Carlson/ A still life for Jessica on 3/28/05
A Wishbone Admiring A Pomegranate
When astronomy came down the timberline
The hatchling thoughts of Homo ergaster
Stood upright to teethe on the heavens
Sirius, Luna, and Mars walked among our ancestors
Picking up ticks and burrs and names
A cro-magnon woman
The Moroccan Eve
The Mother of Mitochondria
Red mouth chomping up a red heaven
Squats against a rock
Laughs at stars unloosened from her bowels
The hide cut with splintered stone
Carcass butchered, the meat set aside
The bones cooked and cracked
Mouh full of sticky marrow
A shaman is speaking to silver fish
A chip of in the red pulp on his tongue
The Comet of Altamira in the firmament
He invokes these signs to flesh his valley
And coerce the earth to contraction
In the ultra-modern era
It is vogue to think
Beauty is what will be intact
Or better yet restored
When the stars have no name again
As if nature were just a skin
Not the juicy fruit revealed
Not the delicacy of our tasting it
Beauty is not a quirk
In the genes of the beholder
Nor sanctity of the Thing-In-Itself
Nature intact and unmolested
Without human impact
A log fallen in a forest
Without human ear to tine
The hollow of its heartwood
It is the offspring of our closeness
A knee jerk in our egg mass
A loose angel we lunge at in a wishing well
A loose angel in the keel of our grip
A loose angel we release back into the mainstream
No longer belonging to nothing
Edgar Carlson/after reading Franz Wright's From A Discarded Image
Saffron Sonnet
in knossos a blue monkey gathering spice
on lesbos three girls above violet-crowned mytilene
a rocky hillside a mauve meadow
three girls pinching orange stigmas from plums of autumn crocus
three girls on a hillside with hymenopterous hands dyed in manly flavor
a rocky hillside a blue aegean of chicory
a smell of red honey on short white tunics
the tenth muse on a red reef of clover.
sappho, a furnace of bloom a sweatshop of body parts your bones are water
sappho, in imitation of success i now send out my poems in fragments
on a hillside in bethpage state park the supertendents's two bedroom house
in the dooryard a redhead both parents working
sappho, aeolian eyes heavy with cargo your violet locks streaked with saffron
charlene, april a cruel month of assassination and both your parents gone
More Leaves Of Grass
Grant this
Visit my grave
Come late in early May
Pale shoots outreach my horizons
White fingers ungloved of soil
White leaves to garland Klondike hair
My wealth grown underground
Vaults at your feet
Grass crown
Arundo donax 'Variegata'---Variegted Giant Reed
orange sonnet
orange lobster in a brown tide
orange transatlantic flags on the hempstead plains
orange windmills of brittle stars
a sea robin with orange wings and violet vermeer eyes
orange roots of celastrus along the long island expressway
orange agate inside a black geode
in amagansett orange goldfish in a bay window
in andalusia orange bees on white blossoms.
a red-wing blackbird returning, its song calls a truce to a winter
of vice
because hydrogen is at the subatomic core of every ism we are
always open for more
because a red newt appears at the edge of an old pond all faults
are forgiven
because she is born in levittown a redhead is in recovery
because cretaceous clay is exposed in glen cove a shell in red
mudstone spirals into eternity
easiest to catch at dusk
the tobacco barn lights up
with fireflies
A Blue Boudoir Of Bees
your eyes are blue stones in an estuary of red sunflowers
in the white abdomen of your eyes blue morning glory of body art
a blue boudoir of bees in white ripple of sunlight
blue plum blue cherry a blue lobster added to a silver pot
your eyes are whiteflies they love the color yellow
they are bluejays in white pines, bohemian brethren beyond the reach
of reason
in the blue guillotine of your eyes a red revolution
in the blue guillotine of your eyes my heart falls to my knees.
charlene, all my lies have eight legs
my lies are full of binomial nomenclature
my lies have read descrates my lies are galileo's eyes
my eyes are a pyramid my eyes walk in the garden of versailles
my eye is a finger with a pheasant's ring
my eye is a hand on my grandchild's swing
Edgar Carlson/for David Mejias
On Charlene's Eyes
A leftover cloud
Last night's thirty second hurricane
Faded into the northeast on silkworm wings
A perfect beach day
I left early
The Parkway was a carpet ride
Then a helicopter appeared due south
A second audible in the north
The ocean traffic stopped
I turned inland
To the Hempstead Plains Restoration
Goldenrod
Switchgrass
Broomsedge
Spikelets of small yellow flowers
On the turkey claw racemes
Of big bluestem
On the linear leaves
Of endangered sandplain gerardia
A chrome raindrop
In its white walls a blue skyscraper
Blue granite
Bedrock
Andropogon gerardi/Big Bluestem/Turkey Foot
the spice counter
i detour across swamp
walk back up toward dave
pinch a seven inch spear of wild garlic
chew it
yellow tulip tree leaves
i brush them aside
the periwinkle that binds them
reveal a ball of allspice rabbit dung
then other pellets
rosemary cinnamon sage
orange bits
peppermint
savory
camomile weightless and friable
8:15 am mid-november
My mother no longer goes to Florida overwinter
"Everyone I know is gone"
Instead she is raking leaves in a panic of resolve
To get her side of the road clean before
The Farmingdale leaf removal truck turns around
A few golden leaves blew in overnight
Though he owns no golden trees
Her trees are oaks
The worst offender a pin oak its
Fibrous petioles and vascular bundles refuse
To break easily at the abscission line
The leaves come down in their own time
Some hang up there into the second month of spring
My mother examines one of last night's immigrants her
Blue eyes caterpillar greenly around its gold edge
She gives the whole leaf a study before
She throws it away into a pail
Used for junk mail and yard work
No name no forwarding address
Acer platinoides--Norway Maple
Edgar Carlson for my mother on her 84th Birthday
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