sewn paper
e-mail the Poet
Poetry
February 2002
128 pages
ISBN 0-88984-230-2
$14.95
`One of the handsomest
books of poetry I have seen.'
- Michael Schmidt, Director
of The Writing School at
Manchester Metropolitan
University
Photo by Mary Harman
Girls and
Handsome Dogs
Norm Sibum
The Inspiration
Redhead with big brown eyes It just now hits me how you have Shall we make it official then and I put to work Oh just be my muse, my coach, my guide,
I Went Out West
The woods in Massachusetts might thaw in the Spring * * *
I left behind some stockade. - Solitude was the god. The god, one day,
And a certain sex appeal,
Nobody's fool, everyone's pal, popular here,
a waitress,
Insinuated your loneliness,
Your desperation and bravado
into my material.
A breezy, amatory measure, some equivalent of
Ovid's rising six, falling five,
And get thee in a garter belt
and me from out of my straitjacket?
And I'll reserve a page, maybe two
Such a deal!
Of your cavernous dimple
In this my book of genius.
And robins hop over the ground,
And girls and boys link arms and sing
And the old suspect gladness in the first flowers.
The sun, bearing down on Rome, might make her
Too warm and evil, inhospitable to virtue.
It might blister the wastes of old Persia and
Bake to imperishable hardness
Poems from time out of mind,
But men, muttering anywhere, shine -
Inside their bowl of sky -
The dull gleam of the propitiation
Of well-being. Even so, I shivered
As my prayers settled on my bones.
I burdened animals, followed rivers.
The winters snapped at soul and limb.
Men stamped their feet next to the campfires
Far from their fathers' realms
On account of the brutal cold.
How did I keep going?
To whom did I pray?
We penetrated deeper.
Spring once more and the blooms again
Began to article the clouds for spirit
And flesh and manageable truth.
Would come like a pleasant evening
To bless many a civil scene,
Many a stoop and veranda.
Or, ghost-ship, it would drift
On the seas of the ever-changing.
It'd be a strange land, this,
Always fair for the dead.