The Gasoline Pump Mart.

A young woman
whose bare midriff and pert ass I’ve never
touched before though others

have
met today
at a gas pump mart

not planned
but by chance my movie star beard
outshone the SUV’s

we eyeball
each other’s forms
with me alert to

what was she might be feeling
emotions so stirred
heedless of her overflowing tank.


© Sherman K. Poultney 11 May 2006


Note: After hearing William Carlos Williams’ “The Cocktail Party”.

Falling Leaves.

Autumn had begun inauspiciously slow, but
this morning early in November, the leaves
reached their peak of yellow and flame.
A cool blustery wind brought an azure sky and
triggered showers of leaves tumbling
slowly down like large snowflakes.
It tugged strongly at my coat collar
as it carpeted the lawns in gold.
It sent hickory nuts zinging off my car roof
like sniper bullets in a roadside ambush

As I drive eastward along country roads
lined with tall trees, the sun backlights
the translucent leaves and filters
yellow onto the side lanes.
Banks of still colorful leaves
stretch up to granite stone walls.
The glorious day reminds me of that day
when we buried my father. He passed the
same day in mid-October as he came in.
Might I expire on such a day as this one
before the bright leaves shrivel to dust.

Returning westward in late afternoon, I notice
all the leaves have been knocked down
like the youth slaughtered at their peak
these last two years in our current war.
The now black arms and hands of
trees reached skyward against
the sunset of a too early darkness.


© Sherman K. Poultney 7 November 2005

Reverie at the Poetry Lecture.

The clever remark of the lecturer
caused me to envisage in vain,
while he talked on and on,
that bump on a birch to hear
how silent it could remain.

I imagined instead curly-haired
yellow and river birch, smooth broad-backed
black, white stripped-trunks
of canoe, inverted black triangles
of ubiquitous gray.

All seated there raptly around me,
but nary a birch bump, silent or not.
Drained from my daydream,
I heard him conclude with his view of
how two roads would and did often diverge.



© Sherman K. Poultney 1 April 2006

“or you may remain as silent
as a bump on a birch”
B. Van Vechten

Frost in the Ground

Frost in the ground makes it hard as iron bound,
How could I be such a deceiving knave?
Death is harder than frost in the ground.

Where is a refuge from my guilt to be found?
My wronged love, how should I now behave?
Frost in the ground makes it hard as iron bound,

Memories do not cease me to surround.
How long will thoughts of my misdeeds enslave?
Death is harder than frost in the ground.

I am shaken by every familiar sound.
Would have my confession to you your life save?
Frost in the ground makes it hard as iron bound,

Grief emerges every day me to confound.
I pray that you before death my betrayal forgave.
Death is harder than frost in the ground.

My perfidy to vows still does me astound.
A thaw has finally come so I can dig your grave.
Frost in the ground makes it hard as iron bound,
Death is harder than frost in the ground.



© Sherman K. Poultney 4 Dec 2005

Notes:
1. A Villanelle
2. Based partly on two sentences in an essay in “The Rural Life” by V. Klinkenborg, p. 205

My Solitary Track

The snow swiftly fills my solitary track
as I stride across the windblown field.
It’s doubtful I’ll find my own way back.

I glide down hills past yellowed tamarack
across the blowing drifts to which I’ll never yield.
The snow swiftly fills my solitary track.

I left the resinous pine of youthful bivouac
to pursue a dream yet to be revealed.
It’s doubtful I’ll find my own way back.

The howling winds bend birches low to crack.
I’d not hear a wildwood bell even if it pealed.
The snow swiftly fills my solitary track.

For a compass at dusk, I look upward for the zodiac,
but it too by vaporous clouds remains concealed.
It’s doubtful I’ll find my own way back.

Any sense of direction I find I lack,
I taste the fear my fate is prematurely sealed.
The snow swiftly fills my solitary track,
it’s doubtful I’ll find my own way back.


© Sherman K. Poultney 3 January 2006

Notes:
villanelle http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/villanelle.html

V. Klinkenborg, “The Rural Life”, p. 199.
“The snow fills in our tracks so swiftly that its doubtful we’ll ever find our way back to school……”

Grandmother’s Cookies.

Grandfather could never steal
Grandmother’s cookies without getting
caught. His fascination with them caused him
to try at every available opportunity. But
he’d close the cookie jar wrong, he’d
drop crumbs in obvious places, he’d
forget that chocolate chip cookies
leave an odor on his breath or a
stain on his teeth, that the jar would
eventually get empty. One time, when
grandchildren were visiting, he reached for
a cookie tin placed by Grandma high up
in the pantry and knocked over
an entire shelf with all its boxes and crocks.
Despite the continual practice, he
never got better at his cookie snatching and
Grandmother never stopped baking
nor hiding them.

© Sherman K Poultney 31 October 2005

The Woodchuck Who Dared Too Much

The long row of young kale had been cleanly
decapitated, most leaves of the giant broccoli
stripped. Curiously the broccoli florets had
not been touched. As if the creature knew the leaves were
more nutritious than the florets. I had fenced the
raised-bed garden high enough for deer and
fine mesh enough for rabbits, but had
not dug the fence in deep enough against
woodchucks. It had to be a woodchuck.
I was outraged at the nerve of it what with the
vast greenery all around the two-acre yard.

In ten years not one chuck had worked its way
to the front yard, never mind into the garden.
This chuck must be especially adventurous to
roam up from the back yard and especially curious to
choose this small fenced area
over all the surrounding flower beds.
To add insult to injury, the chuck had dug the
start of a burrow right in the middle of one raised bed
My examination of the fence perimeter revealed
several gaps at its bottom where the chuck could have
squeezed through. Each day I successively blocked
each gap to make the chuck reveal his favorite. That one
I blocked with a slate that he easily
pushed aside to enter. I had not yet seen him,
but I now knew this groundhog’s fatal weakness.

Chucks are dumb, real dumb such as walking
right into a trap without looking.
I rented a big Hav-a-Hart trap and
placed it inside the garden with its
only entrance right at his favored entry gap.
Experts say use a trap with both
an entrance and an exit, but I had to
settle for a one-entrance trap.
I baited it with remaining leaves
from the kale and left for my office certain
I’d have the culprit when I got home.

Unfortunately, on my way to my car out back I
flushed the chuck from a flower bed.
He gave a whistle and scurried
swiftly to the old stone wall nearby.
A loud whistle like I had heard
the marmots give high up in the Rockies.
This wuchak was a short squat critter with a
shiny brown fur coat. At the safety of the wall, he
sat upright like those you’ve seen at the highway edge
as they chew a mouthful. He looked at me with his
squirrel-like faces. Did I catch a hint of scorn?
I feared I had upset his daily rounds and
would not catch him that day, at least.

When I arrived home later, I could
immediately see the trap had been sprung.
Was it the chuck or just a pesky squirrel?
As I approached, I heard teeth chatter. A growl.
Flattened on the trap floor was the
now-terrified chuck. And I had to
figure out what to do with him.
I preferred to release him, but he would just
raid and raid again. He had already dared too much.
Release him far away? Transport and release was probably
illegal. Then there would be the stench of his
urine in my car. Poison him via the kale?
No, poison was too dangerous to other life.
Let him out so I could bash
his head in with a hoe as he ran?
No, what if he ran fast enough to escape or had
rabies and turned to bite.

I decided decisively on his dispatch.
I retrieved a rebar bar and hammer from the garage
along with my leather gloves.
Through the wire of the trap, I pinned the
base of his skull to the cage floor. He squealed and hissed until
one solid rap of my hammer.
No pain, no twitch, no struggle.
I left his corpse there for a whole day
in case he revived. Then put him out for the
turkey vultures and maggots.
His skeleton would later serve as
a deterrent to other over-reachers.


© Sherman K. Poultney 29 Sept 2005
After “the Fish” of E. Bishop study at Library

Auto-de-fe

For weeks the mouse scurried across
above his office ceiling late at night
as he tried to compose his satirical witticisms.
He cursed it and repeatedly warned it
to reform its ways or else.
Poison or just the better mousetrap
was too good for it.

It and its brethren must be taught a lesson.
Instead he trapped the mouse alive and
withheld food to extract an abjuration.
The torture not succeeding,
he kept it until Sunday morning
when he would burn
the pile of branches next to the house
from the tree taken down by the
fierce windstorm of the prior week.

Once the pyre began to burn ferociously,
he squirted the mouse with the accelerant
and threw it into the hottest spot.
The mouse, now thoroughly ignited,
darted across the nearby patio and
sought its nest in the ceiling
right above the man’s desk.


© Sherman K. Poultney 25 January 2006


Auto-de-fe. An auto de fe is literally a “judicial sentence or act of faith,” usually ending with the public burning of heretics. In June of 1680, the largest auto de fe of the Spanish Inquisition took place.

written after the Billy Collins reading at New Canaan Library 24 Jan 2006

Emily Disses Billy

There was a shy lass from Amherst
who never was known to have cursed.
When comes Collins to flirt
with his eyes on her skirt,
she says - by the Dews- you will not be the first.

© Sherman K. Poultney 4/21/06


Notes:
Emily is Emily Dickinson.
Billy is Billy Collins, author of the poem “Taking Off
Emily Dickinson’s Clothes”.